Innocent Witnesses by Marilyn Yalom

Author:Marilyn Yalom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Stina Katchadourian and her mother, Runa “Nunni” Lindfors, in Helsinki, 1945.

Ten days after our arrival at Aunt Biggi’s, another wave of airplanes with even more bombs hit Helsinki. The air defense proved effective: of 3,500 bombs, only 130 hit the city and casualties were light. And then, on February 26, came the final, most devastating attack. For twelve hours, wave after wave of planes hit the city. With its buildings destroyed and hundreds of civilians killed and wounded, Helsinki looked like a doomed city. Out in the country during the bombings, my mother and my aunt were beginning to wonder if we had moved far enough away from Helsinki.

It was shortly after that I overheard my Uncle Bert scolding my cousins in white fury. I had never heard him raise his voice before. But this time, he was screaming at them, and Aunt Biggs was staring down at her knitting looking frightened.

“This is simply the most idiotic thing I have heard of! You go straight back and apologize, do you hear? Apologize, and tell them you’ll never do anything like this again. I am ashamed of you!”

What had caused all this fury was that, down the road from us, there lived a family who was Jewish. They were acquainted with Uncle Bert and his family and had a son who was the age of the youngest of my cousins. My cousins and two of their friends decided to play a joke on them. They marched down to the front of their house and started belting out the Horst Wessel song, the official anthem of the Nazi party. Someone inside had peeked through the window, recognized my cousins, and called Uncle Bert.

During the spring of 1944, the Soviets and the Finns made some efforts to end the war. But the Finns would not agree to the Soviet demands of unconditional surrender. Finland had hundreds of thousands of soldiers deep in eastern Karelia and on the Karelian Isthmus, and if needed, the country was still capable of raising more troops. Trying to reach a separate peace with the Soviet Union was fraught with risk: how would the Germans react? Finland needed their weapons and their help, and Germany had several divisions of troops on Finnish soil. In addition, the food situation in the country had grown even more severe, and Finland was relying heavily on provisions imported from Germany.

Three days after the Allied landings in Normandy, on June 9, 1944, the Soviet Army staged a massive attack on the Karelian Isthmus. Approximately 450,000 Soviet troops with 1,000 heavy tanks and 10,000 cannon pressed the desperate Finns back toward the west. A thousand Soviet airplanes blasted Finnish positions. This time of year, there was no darkness to hide in, nor any snow or cold to slow the Soviet advance.

In the face of the near collapse of the Finnish defenses, and with the certainly of a renewed attack, there were two alternatives for Finland: fight on, with dwindling resources, or sue for peace before the country was forced to capitulate.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.