“So, A War Happened”

By Rebecca Kiil, 2019

In this piece, my maternal grandmother, Aino Tuul Kaevats, at 101 years of age, talks about events that occurred in her homeland of Estonia at the beginning of World War II. Throughout the war, Germany and the Soviet Union alternately occupied the small nation. But in June 1941, while Estonia was under the Soviet occupation, more than 10,000 Estonians were secretly arrested and deported to Siberia as part of the mass deportations that happened simultaneously across the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. My grandmother was 23 years old at that time of these events, and this was just the beginning of her story of loss. The other voice in the piece belongs to my daughter, Sofia (age 11). Sofia tells the story, as she knows it, of her grandmother (who she calls “Ema”) and her great-grandmother, Aino (who she calls “Memme”).