Remembering WWII, 1941

[Old Eagle]

I love memoirs.

However, Poles, Balts, Finns, western Europeans and others will remember 1939 as the first year of the war. 1941 was the first year of the war on your soil.

[jmm99]

Nice personal vignette. I've also read your full autobiography; and also quite a bit of your other materials re: Stalin and the gulags. E.g., your Links to OpenEdNews Website, with several dozen brief articles; and another book (monograph), Introduction: Stalin's Hell on Earth.

BTW: Kowalski happens to be an ethnic Pole, whose parents moved to Russia to participate in Uncle Joe's "proletarian dictatorship". Many Finnish-Americans made the same choice, ended up in Karelia and were either shot or gulaged for their troubles. Those events continue to be a big deal in our Finnish-American community. E.g., a set of webpages on Karelian Fever:

What is Karelian Fever?

Karelian fever was the recruitment of members of North American Finnish communities to go to the Karelian region of the Soviet Union. Recruitment took place in the period 1931-1934. Those recruited, approximately 10,000 men, women, and children, were to settle in Karelia, bordering on Finland, and contribute to the building of communism.

Why is Karelian Fever important? Karelian fever is a significant but little known phenomenon in the history of

American communism
American radicalism
The Depression era in the U.S. and Canada
The Soviet Union
Soviet-American relations
The Finnish-American experience.

It also serves as a cautionary tale. The idealism and political enthusiasm that motivated so many North American Finns to go to Karelia made them vulnerable to circumstances which they could neither control nor evade. In the end a foreign culture and a political system very different from the one under which they had hoped to live betrayed their ideals.

Stalin's slaughter is briefly recounted in Lawrence Helm's Blog, Tuesday, December 23, 2008, Stalinist massacre of Finnish Americans at Karelia:

From page 115-118 of In Denial, Historians, Communism & Espionage by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr:

“In the 1920s and early 1930s the USSR sought to strengthen its Karelian republic, which bordered on Finland . . . The USSR was . . . anxious to exploit Karelia’s extensive timber resources.” The USSR promoted the emigration of American and Canadian Finnish radicals to Karelia. . . Eager for the opportunity to build a Finnish Communist society, thousands of radical North American Finns volunteered for the venture.”

How did these American and Canadian Finnish radicals fare in their Socialist paradise? Not as well as they hoped. Through no fault of their own they were raised in bourgeois societies in America and Canada. So how could the KGB not be suspicious of them?

“In 1997 a Russian organization dedicated to exposing Stalin-era crimes, Memorial, located a KGB burial site near Sandarmokh, one of four it has found in Karelia. The site contains more than nine thousand bodies in approximately three hundred separate burial trenches. The position of the skeletons and other remains suggested that the prisoners had been stripped to their underwear, lined up next to a trench with hands and feet tied, and shot in the back of the head with a pistol. Documents in a regional KGB archive identify about four thousand of the victims as Gulag prison laborers used to build the Belomar canal connecting the Baltic to the White sea, one thousand of the prisoners from the Gulag camp at Solovetskiye, and about three thousand as victims of the Karelian purge. More than six thousand of the dead are listed by name.

“Among the victims named are 141 Finnish Americans and 127 Finnish Canadians. They include the two chief organizers of the emigration, Oscar Corgan and Matti Tenhunen. But the list also includes ordinary American works such as Eino Bjorn, born in Minnesota and shot on February 10, 1938, at age twenty-six; Walter Maki, another Minnesota native who was shot on May 15, 1928; John Siren, born in Duluth, Minnesota, shot on February 11, 1938; Mathew Kaartinen, born in Ironwood, Michigan . . . .” The list goes on and on. Quite a lot is known about who died there.

Regards

Mike

[kowalskil]

I love memoirs.

However, Poles, Balts, Finns, western Europeans and others will remember 1939 as the first year of the war. 1941 was the first year of the war on your soil.

Polish people experienced two invasions in 1939--the one which counts as the beginning of WWII and another nearly three weeks later, when the Red Army invaded from the East, as prearranged with Hitler.

Ludwik
.

[Dayuhan]

Polish people experienced two invasions in 1939--the one which counts as the beginning of WWII and another nearly three weeks later, when the Red Army invaded from the East, as prearranged with Hitler.

A close friend of mine is half Polish, half Filipino. His father left Poland on a bicycle in 1936, found a ship to Argentina, and made his way to Asia from there. I once asked him why he embarked on that odyssey. His reply:

"I looked to one side and I saw Hitler. I looked to the other side and saw Stalin. And I said to myself: it is time to leave Poland."