The story of Bernhard Lehova, grandma’s younger brother, always had an unreal quality to it. In dad’s telling, his uncle returned to the farm at Marinu one day to find Soviet soldiers assaulting and violating the women. A marksman and skilled hunter, he put an end to that. So began extremely tough times, first by joining the Forest Brothers’ resistance to Soviet occupation.
We camped a night in the forest near the Soomaa bogland, and friends showed us oval depressions among the spruce trees, a few metres deep and several metres wide. The metsavennad lived in such places, covered with branches and forest floor moss and leaf litter. It would have been brutal in winter, relying on villagers’ help to survive. At other times of the year there might have been limited appeal, surviving on berries and mushrooms, the odd deer or grouse, and relief from months of snow on the ground and bitter cold.
Bernhard did not stay long with the metsavennad who lived mostly in hiding, emerging occasionally to pot the enemy and hopefully avoid being potted in turn. Bernhard was chafing for action, crossed the Gulf of Finland on skis in a cold winter, a white sheet over his head to evade detection from Soviet fighter aircraft. There he joined the Finnish resistance where hard fighting was done, and where he was eventually caught.
Most died in the cattle wagons, frozen to the sides, as prisoner trains headed east, into Siberia. Bernhard arrived at a gulag where - again in dad’s telling - he was put to work, mining for gold. There, he survived in conditions where lifespans were measured in days, weeks or months.
We know little of how he lived, from later correspondence with dad, and from his brother Robert’s letters, which our family only recently discovered.
When prisoners were freed from the gulags after Stalin’s death in 1953 Bernhard was among those who did not return home. He remained, to shoot deer in the taiga for a living to feed the miners, and did so for several years. Johanna eventually tracked him down and fetched him home to Marinu. Besides her, only Helmi remained at the farm, raising Erik and Rein, the latter disabled with polio.
Bernhard and Johanna Lehova 1967
Of the other Lehova siblings, Karl had fled to Sweden, leaving a wife and son, Ilmar, who married Viivi (whom we met at Iisaku, cheery and vibrant, and I hope to meet her again). Artu, the youngest, had died years earlier in tragic circumstances. Grandma and dad had arrived in Wellington in 1949.
It fell to Johanna to trace her exiled sister, we imagine through the UN refugee organisation. Her letter was addressed to Erika Napp, New Zealand, and it found her. Johanna pitied Erika, that she would never again hear the song of the nightingale in spring.
Dad corresponded with Bernhard, a lefthander forced at school to write with his other hand. His letters were carefully and evenly written. I saw some as a child, unable to read them. I could now, but cannot locate them among dad’s papers.
It would have been a bitter time for Bernhard, labouring on a collective farm as he grew older, a little too fond of the bottle, a common fate. If Siberia didn’t kill people, alcohol eventually did.
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