Over 70,000 children sent to Sweden to avoid war sixty years ago

10,000 – 15,000 Finnish children never returned from Sweden

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By Marjut Lindberg
     
      Sixty years ago, in 1944, nearly 30,000 children were sent from Finland to Sweden during the course of one year. During the entire Second World War, at least 70,000 children spent a shorter or longer period of time in Sweden.
      Around 4,000 children were transferred to Denmark to avoid the war. Only several hundred children were sent off to Norway before being hastily returned to Finland after Germany attacked Norway in 1940.
      The war evacuation scheme has been chronicled quite poorly in history books. No one knows for sure exactly how many children left Finland, and how many of them wound up staying in their foster homes.
     
Pertti Kaven, who has researched the transfers of the so-called "war children", has calculated that at least 10,000 children never returned to Finland.
      "That raises Finland’s losses in the war to some 93,000 people", Kaven observes.
      The idea of transferring children to Sweden to flee the war originated among Swedish women. Hannah Rydh, the head of the Fredrika Bremer Association, was concerned about the fate of Finns, and particularly about Finnish children. She assembled a gathering of women’s organisations, whose representatives ended up founding a special organ for helping Finland during the war.
      At the outset, Finns rejected the proposal of sending their children to Sweden, and asked that the Swedes deliver their aid to children in Finland.
     
The Swedes persevered and came to visit Finland, convincing the Finns within a couple of weeks that their idea was reasonable. The first children set off for Sweden in mid-December 1940.
      When the transfers of children to Sweden accelerated in late 1941, Finns began to worry that the children might remain in Sweden. Some Members of Parliament also joined in on the criticism.
      Censorship ended the complaints in January 1942. Negative articles on the transfers of the children could no longer be published. It was also ordered in February 1942 that all critical remarks concerning the transfers be removed from the speeches of MPs.
      The record year for the evacuations was 1944, when Karelia was emptied for a second time. Over 5,000 children made the journey to Sweden for a second time during that year.
     
The Finnish children helped fill the population gap that had been created in Sweden when the birth rate dropped in the 1930s. Over the years, many children forgot their Finnish roots and biological parents, and their relationships with their Swedish foster parents grew warmer. Especially those children who were separated from their mothers for long periods of time while under the age of three forgot all about their biological parents.
      Parting with the foster parents and returning to Finland was a more devastating experience than the departure from Finland for many of the children. The children returned to a family where new siblings may have been born, and the father may have been killed or wounded. Also, the children lacked language skills, as they had forgotten Finnish and learned to speak fluent Swedish.
      Many homes were in a state of shambles after the war. Those who returned from wealthy foster families across the water faced poverty and deprivation.
     
Studies have indicated that war children fared more poorly in school than those children who had remained in Finland for the duration of the war. The reason may be in the language difficulties that the evacuees faced upon their return.
      The health of war children was more or less the same as that of their friends who grew up in Finland, but they have suffered from more psychosomatic symptoms.
      The majority of the war children recall their time in Sweden as a positive experience. Many of them returned to Sweden in the emigration wave of the 1960s once they had grown up. One study found that one in six of the Finns who settled in the Gothenburg region in the 1960s were former war children.
     
The evacuations were a sore spot in the minds of many Finns for a long time. There were attempts to found the first organisation to represent the war children in the 1970s, but the subject met with little interest.
      The first such organisation was eventually founded in Kemi in 1991, and thereafter, 15 more have emerged. The excitement has mounted as the children have reached retirement age - and the mothers that carried the guilt have passed away.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 31.10.2004
     

More on this subject:
 A second home left behind in Skåne

Previously in HS International Edition:
  Sixty years ago: Parliament within range of Soviet guns (5.10.2004)

MARJUT LINDBERG / Helsingin Sanomat
marjut.lindberg@hs.fi