Author’s Word: Silenced Stories
“Shouldn’t we write about them? About the returning women?” asked my spouse on the sauna benches of our cottage cottage on a weekend in February many years ago.
Our conversation had drifted from one event of the Lapland War to another: how there were at its peak about 200,000 soldiers of the Nazi army in Northern Finland, and how only two houses were spared from the destruction of the war in the centre of my native village of Kuusamo. I had just read a book by Marianne Junila , a researcher at the University of Oulu, which dealt with the coexistence of Finnish civilians and the German military, and we pondered what kind of reasons had driven Finnish women to apply for Nazi service. When Germany surrendered, all the women who left for Norway were first transported to Oslo and from there shipped to a remand camp in Hanko, but in my childhood I had also heard of those who walked home across burnt Lapland. In secondary school, my history teacher Helena Palosaari had also told me how tired, quiet women had returned home after the war. All of this led to the question: “Shouldn’t we write about them?”
In the sauna, images began to come to my mind of a silent group of women wandering through burnt Lapland towards Rovaniemi. Some of my thoughts were clearer: one of the walkers has stayed on the bank of a ditch and follows the receding backs of the others, and some were inaccurate, sensory perceptions: the smell of soot from burnt houses, the taste of barley flatbread. The stubble feeling of shaved hair in the palm of my hand.
Later at home, I dared to send an email to Marianne Junila and quizzed her about the treatment of women who had returned. I went to the archives to read the interrogation protocols and obtained a doctoral dissertation on women who had travelled to Germany, but there was no information about these walkers. I couldn’t find a single interviewee, because even the youngest of them would have to be over a hundred years old. My mother mentioned that my grandmother’s mother, a midwife from Kuusamo, would have been a young girl who had walked home from Norway for a while.
I contacted my history teacher and asked if the memory had been recorded. She said that she had once tried to interview those who had allegedly returned, but that she had only met women who remained silent. I wondered what it would be like to hide my own experiences for more than fifty years. There is still a tradition association for men who fought with the German army to honour the memory, but after the war, women who worked in the same army were labelled as either loose moral or little girls intoxicated by uniforms. Men’s actions were justified by chains of command, but women have to bear responsibility as individuals.
It was interesting to write about the journey alone. In my previous books, people tend to stay still, build houses and live in them, but this time the characters would just walk. There would be only bare and palsa bogs around, the flowing streams of the north and the forest waking up to summer. I also think it is important to tell about the Lapland War, because the people of Southern Finland seem to know exactly the battles of the Second World War that took place on the Isthmus and Ladoga Karelia, but the events in the north are unclear to many.
Although the events are fictional, I received a lot of contacts from readers after the book was published. One said that her mother had mentioned how the hair of women who had returned was shaved in Muurola. Another said that when peace came, women who had collaborated with the Germans had marched along the Kuopio market square. Such events cannot be found in the history books, and they cannot be verified. Still, I can’t help but think about how much history there is in Finland that has been kept silent. How many of them are women’s stories? How many different minorities?
It is important to stop and think about whose stories are being told. War depictions have often focused on the battles of brave men and the difficult decisions of presidents and generals. The roles of women are fewer, as they are portrayed through men, either as tenacious evacuee hostesses, hard-working Lottas or sorrowful mothers of fallen soldiers. If someone’s war experience has differed from these, they should not talk about it, because no statues were erected or flag days were named for those who did not belong to the roles. Their fate was shame.
But now the stories in the book are directed to the events on the stage! I’m amazed at whether the wandering novel lends itself to the language of theatre. I laughed at the director, how lucky it is that the venue is the Helsinki City Theatre, which, as I understand it, has the largest revolving stage in the Nordic countries: that’s a good thing to walk in this performance, which is 618 kilometres long! But really, I’m glad that these women, who have quieted down after returning home, finally get a voice.
Author Tommi Kinnunen