Karelian evacuees featured in Berlin exhibition

Karelians shown alongside Armenians and Jews

print this

The 20th Century was a time when millions of people were forced to leave their homes in mass deportations and other transfers of population linked with wars and major conflicts.
      Examples include the mass deportation and genocide of Armenians by Turkey in 1915-1916, leading to the death of an estimated 1.5 million people. In the 1920s Greece and Turkey "exchanged" population: a total of 2.6 million had to leave their homes, and as many as 700,000 are believed to have lost their lives.
      The most extreme example was naturally the industrial-scale genocide of millions of Jews by Nazi Germany.
     
The horrors of displacement are on display at an exhibition that opened in Berlin recently, called Erzwungene Wege - Flucht und Vertreibung in Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts ("Coerced Paths - Escape and Expulsion in Europe in the 20th Century").
      One of the stories detailed in the exhibition is exceptional.
      The fate of Finland's Karelians in the Second World War was more humane, and their escape route was no death-march. Nevertheless, more than 400,000 Karelians had to leave their homes during the war years, and in 1944 the displacement became permanent, when the territories were annexed to the Soviet Union. The tragedy directly affected more than ten per cent of the Finnish population.
     
"The fate of the Karelians is interesting in many respects", says Dr. Doris Müller-Toovey, who is responsible for the Karelian section in the exhibition.
      "The people left of their own free will. What is also exceptional is that it all happened not once but twice."
      When studying the events, which were quite new to her, Dr. Müller-Toovey was also impressed at how successful Finland was at settling the Karelian population in other parts of Finland.
      The exhibition places the Karelian displacement story within a European framework in a completely new way. It is also exceptional that any interest is shown in the Karelian issue in Central Europe.
      "It is not known that anything like this would have happened previously in exhibition activities", says Mervi Piipponen, cultural secretary of the Karelian Association.
      Similar thoughts were expressed at the South Karelia Museum, the Carelicum Travel and Cultural Centre in Joensuu, and the Äijälä Cultural Centre in Kangasala, all of which lent objects for the exhibition.
     
The exhibition has sparked heavy controversy in Germany. The reason for the political dispute is that the exhibition highlights the expulsions of more than 14 million Germans from territory that is now part of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, which took place in the late stages of the Second World War and immediately after the fighting ended.


Links:
  Deutsche Welle website 11.8.2006: Berlin Exhibition on Postwar Expulsions Opens Amid Protests
  Karelia (Wikipedia)

Helsingin Sanomat