Cousin Inga pulled out two letters dated 1949 she had discovered 3 weeks prior to our arrival. Hidden in the back of our great-aunt Johanna’s Bible. From her brother Robert, ex Mariinsk, Siberia, onset of winter. We were in the room where we’d slept and had made up the sofas. Everyone gathered: Inga to translate Robert’s Russian into Estonian, and Liisi, into English. Until the letters, we all knew Robert died in battle in 1941. It says so on the Pirita war memorial in Tallinn.
The first, dated 13 November 1949: “Dear sister, I have not had any letters from you for a long time. Are you sick? Last post I received in September. You promised me to write a letter. Now I am waiting for this letter, and I cannot wait. Write to me about you and the kids. Erik can speak very well, and he had time to write to me about his life and how he is going with study.”
We imagine Johanna did write, and her letters never arrived. Handwritten; no copies. Mariinsk was a gulag, the concentration camp invented by Lenin and perfected by Stalin, documented by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.
Robert asks after his and grandma’s brother, Bernhard Lehova, after whom I am named, through our father. “When he separated from me he was totally healthy. The operation he had went well, and does not disturb him. Don’t worry about his health; he is still young. I am much older [48].”
We did not know the two were together in Mariinsk.
Robert Lehova, 1925, Estonian air force fighter pilot
Robert continues: “I ask you to send me some pairs of woollen socks, strong trousers for a tall man, a mirror, pencils, a notebook, a quill pen. Send dried bread; this is what I dream about.”
“I was sick for a very long time. I am getting old, but I want to soften it. I want to be young and keep good health. Please send pictures of you and the kids. It’s so many years since I last saw you. I don’t remember well how you are looking.”
And more on these lines, including asking after his wife, Helmi, who had since remarried we think, and about a son we did not know about.
This is the story of some 30,000 Estonians sent to the gulag after WWII, and of countless others. A museum in Tallinn is dedicated to this story. Lest we forget.
I went with family and friends to a beautiful summer evening of Balkan and gypsy / Roma music in the Botanical Gardens in Wellington. Dad always liked this music, and whenever I hear it, I am reminded of the hardships our family suffered, and that we were fortunate to escape from this, as refugees to New Zealand. I am listening to this music now, as I write.
Robert penned another letter, dated 24 November 1949. The tone is pleading, of despair. He says Bernhard was taken away from Mariinsk in June; he knew not whither. Robert asks again for clothing as winter bites. He says he is often ill, now grey and bent over. He still has the warm boots Johanna sent him in 1947, but the felt inners are now falling apart.
Robert was a national hero who piloted a British-supplied fighter plane in the 1920s, a young man, standing 2 metres tall.
Inga remembers spending a month on the farm at Marinu when she was 16; she learned to milk cows by hand. Bernhard suffered a stroke. He died in 1980, in the autumn, buried in the Kunda cemetery, no plaque to record his passing.
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