One of the great things about the disruption in publishing technology is that we get a flood of personal memoirs, recollections that are an important part of history but which would never have become known, had it not been so easy to publish them through print-on-demand. That is not to say they are all perfect, nor all relevant, but they are important nevertheless. Sometimes, little simple things, like the price of something can set a historian's heart a flutter.
What we have here is less of a view of the war (in that, his family was very fortunate), but more the experience of displaced persons following the war. (Here, again, they were very lucky in being sponsored by a man in Texas who set them up on a small farm. That didn't last long, as the man, who must have had grandiose plans for the arrangement, gave up on it barely a year later. Happy to escape the tornadoes, snakes and scorpions, they made contact with some other Estonians in Wisconsin where they moved and settled permanently.
Born in Estonia, Taagen was also very fortunate in having grandparents who lived on a farm where he could spend summers and be watched over by loving grandparents. His father was often in hiding from the Russians who at first controlled Estonia, and wanted every adult male in the army, followed by the Nazis, and then again the Russians. But Taagen was really barely touched by the war other than to have what he thought was lightning in the east explained by his grandmother to be "the front." There is little evidence that what that meant ever sunk into the eight-year-old.
A little research revealed that after WW II there were approximately 11 million displaced persons, mostly eastern europeans and refugees and those lucky enough to msurvive German concentration camps. The new UN was charged with dealing with the enormous number of DPs. Some were moved back to their country of origin, but often the political boundaries had changed or they feared political retribution. They were first categorized and sorted. The British and Americans would no longer accept any DPs after mid-1947 and anyone left had to fend for themselves. DP camps were set up to provide shelter, food, and health care. There was also a need for reuniting families wherever possible and dealing with the psychological trauma many faced. Over one million could not be repatriated and a significant number of those were from eastern bloc countries who feared living under the Soviets. In the Yalta agreement, Stalin had insisted that Soviet citizens, i.e. anyone who after the war lived under Soviet control, be returned to Soviet control. The western allies reluctantly complied except for Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians arguing that those had never been Soviet countries.
Jews were in a real bind and many fled to Palestine where the British discovered a new war. European countries set up programs to admit DPs followed by Australia and Canada. The United States was reluctant to admit DPs from slavic countries, especially intellectuals and Jews. Eventually, we did, but only following public outcry and the process was notoriously bureaucratic. The Displaced persons Act permitted 200,000 DPs to enter the country over a period of two years. That was extended for another two years. Eventually 900,000 entered but each had to have a relative or a sponsor to get a visa and they had to come from an internment camp like the one described in this book.
I know that memoirs can be tricky, but I was disappointed by the lack of detail in the boy's experiences. I lived in a foreign country between the ages of 8 and 10, about his age and I would have been able to supply a great deal more detail. He also seemed obsessed with school and algebra which, given the circumstances, seemed trivial to me. I was a bit put off by the present tense, but after a while, it ceased to be annoying. There were a couple of unsolved mysteries that remained unexplained: the contents of the ubiquitous briefcase his father never let out of his sight, and the picture of an Australian entry permit for the family. I don't remember reading anything about the possibility of emmigrating to Australia as an alternative to the United States, so that is a puzzle.
Ultimately, they were very lucky, being wealthy -- his father was a banker in Estonia -- they were able to survive on the Russian gold coins, his mother smuggled with her everywhere and helped buy food, and having grand-parents who lived on a farm away from most of the fighting that dominated the urban areas. It certainly didn't hurt that they were very Aryan looking and not Jewish.
It's an interesting story told from a child's perspective.
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