Roots of Silence: How Retracing My Family’s WWII Escape Routes and Bearing Witness to Their Breaking of Long-Held Silences Unexpectedly Led Me to Compassion, an Open Heart, and My Voice

Rebecca Kiil

I’ve spent much of my life as a detective, researching the sources of painful patterns I observed in myself or family members – depression, anxiety, nightmares, divorce. During World War II, my parents’ families fled from their homeland of Estonia when my parents were small children. I grew up immersed in their stories of escape, but didn’t realize that my maternal grandmother did not reveal much about her own experiences until she was in her 90s, when she and I began working together to fully document her escape from Stalin’s brutal regime. As I listened to my grandmother share her stories for the first time, those stories and our conversations started to reveal patterns that I always assumed were uniquely mine but that were, in fact, markers – little clues left scattered for me to follow. I started wondering if these patterns were the result of the trauma my family experienced.

For almost a decade, Rebecca has been working to document the life histories of family and community members who fled their homeland of Estonia, one of the Baltic States bordering Russia, during World War II to escape the brutal Soviet and Nazi regimes. After fleeing they lived in various displaced persons (DP) and refugee camps in Germany and Sweden for several years before resettling in the U.S. Before her grandmother passed away in 2020 at the age of 102, Rebecca spent seven years filming, researching, and helping document her grandmother’s story, which her grandmother hadn’t been ready to talk about previously. In her oral history work, Rebecca explores themes such as intergenerational trauma, women and war, ethical loneliness, memory studies, as well as forced migration and displacement and the refugee regime. Most recently, she has been contemplating her obligation, both as human and oral historian, to individuals who have been forcibly disappeared or otherwise silenced and how the practice of oral history can be applied to capture their stories.