Stockholm Förkortad Version[1]

For a conference in Stockholm, August 2016 Not knowing as a consequence of early separation An interview study with Finnish war children who did not return to Finland after the Second World War Barbara Mattsson Today I will discuss the results of a qualitative study based on interviews with Finnish war children who were evacuated to Sweden during World War II and who did not return to Finland after the war. In this presentation I will focus on the consequences of not knowing about one´s early life and of losing one´s mother tongue. Sverre Varvin (2014) has pointed out: To be in exile is to be rootless, to lose something and to flee, to come to a situation where nothing fits together. The basic notions that the exiled person has had for sorting his/her impressions in order to create continuity in his/her existence have disappeared. Losing one’s sense of belonging in one’s environment and culture is to lose the basis for one’s entire existence. During wartime, 1939–1944, Finnish children were evacuated to Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Of the 70 000 to 80 000 Finnish children who were evacuated abroad, mainly to Sweden, approximately one-third were between two to five years of age at the time of their departure. The transports were carried out for the most part by boat or train and the journey could take between two to six days. The groups were large, around 600 children per transport. There was usually one attendant per 30 children (Kaven 2010). Upon arrival the children were required to spend a certain period of time in quarantine. After the war, 5000 to 7000 of these children did not return to Finland permanently. In Finland there was a long period of time during which no one talked about the fate of the war children or about other groups in society and that suffered from the war, such as war veterans, war invalids, and fatherless children and so on. Perhaps it is for this reason that there has been very little research on war children, until recent years. The studies that have come to the fore recently are survey studies and register studies on those who returned to Finland. Findings show that they as adults have a tendency to suffer psychiatric disorders, especially depression (Pesonen et.al.2007, Santarvirta et. al. 2015 ). To my knowledge there are no studies apart from ours with a psychodynamic approach. So, again, my subject here concerns the Finnish war children who remained in Sweden after the war and who were interviewed by my colleague Sinikka Maliniemi and me in 2007. I am going to give a summary of our results. A question today is whether we can see any trace of the child’s earlier life. A Finnish mother has of course been present, even though she does not directly step forth in the war children's narratives. We may not be able to see what the early childhood meant for the individual child but we do know that a disruption occurred and we can see the defence. The Finnish mother can be seen as a foundation that the interviewees did not talk about explicitly. Bollas says, “Our internal word is transformed by the mother´s unconscious desire into a primary theme of being with her that will affect all future ways of being with the other (Bollas, 1987, p.3). This is the shadow of the object as it falls on the ego, leaving some trace of its existence in the adult.” (Bollas 1987, p. 35). On the other hand Laub & Auerhahn assert that “a trauma can break up family relationships by undoing basic trust and creating barriers against intimacy... trauma disrupts the link between the self and the empathic other.” (Laub & Auerhahn, 1993 p. 283). Kaplan in turn speaks of generational destruction when family ties are broken (Kaplan, 2009). Background for the research Members of the Stockholm branch of the Finnish War Child Association participated in a questionnaire survey about their war child experiences. From those who expressed an interest in participating in our interview study, we selected ten people who were relatively young when they were evacuated. When the evacuation took place, nine of the interviewees were between two to five years of age and one was seven years old. Only the oldest child had clear memories from her Finnish home. We asked the war children to tell us about their lives. The interviews took an average of two hours. They were taped and transcribed with great care. When we started planning our research, we thought of course that the youngest children would be the most affected by their displacement. We had decided on Grounded Theory (Glaser 1992, 1994) as our research method – and thus we had no readymade hypotheses. All our results have surprised us even though we, as psychologists, obviously anticipated that the war children would be marked by their separation experience.We also listened to our countertransference feelings, which became an important source for our understanding. Common features in the interviews The interviewees’ narratives were often fragmented, showing disrupted thinking. Memory lapses could be observed and they had various somatic reactions such as recurrent coughing and throat-clearing, stuttering, crying or laughing. They spoke of feelings of emptiness, rootlessness and black holes. Sometimes it seemed that the interviewee was not making a distinction between the present and the past. The use of the present tense would indicate that no time had passed and that no changes had been made. Various early defences such as projection and denial as well as expressions of shame and degradation also occurred. What we noticed first and foremost was the manner in which the interviewees presented their narratives. Here we picked up signs that indicated traumatization. The interviewees might switch to the present tense in the middle of telling something from the past and their narrative was chaotic. We see this as one of the principal trauma indicators in our materia. It was traumatic reactions in the present. The interviewees did not express feelings of disappointment or come with accusations toward their Finnish parents whereas they might well express feeling betrayed by their native land. Another thing they did not express, what was missing entirely, were thoughts about the significance of their Finnish mother and father. To be sure, the father had been a more distant person since he had been away from home, at the front. The fathers encountered after the war were changed; they were injured by the war in various ways. A common reason that some of the children remained in Sweden was the divorce of their parents. The move to Sweden was common to all of them but most of them remembered nothing at all from the evacuation itself or the quarantine that followed. We see the absence of a containing adult during this process as a contributing factor to our finding that many had difficulties in thinking about or reflecting on the significance of this crucial event in their lives. Who is speaking? A distinguishing feature of our interviewees was that all of them as adults had done well in life and had stable relationships. However, it is tempting to speak of a kind of "normopathy” (Bollas, 1987) since their emotional life as adults was cut off from childhood experiences and they often described their adult life as problem-free. Their narratives included few descriptions of their partners or their own children. They did not have an emotional connection to their early experiences and the problematic feelings that belonged to them. They had different ways of trying to overcome their insecurity. In effect, all of the interviewees had different "selves" that came forward: the traumatized child and then the adult, the normal, so to speak. In our material many different voices were heard. Most strikingly, there was a clear difference between the voices in the narratives of childhood versus those of adult life. It is conceivable that the early emerging experience of a self that had been developed in Finland was difficult to maintain when the child came to a new environment, to a new language and to people who did not know the child from previously. The child's experience of him/herself changed from what had been taken for granted and as a matter of course in the Finnish environment to an existence without roots in the past. Since they all changed language from Finnish to Swedish, the language is also intimately tied to the change. 1. Not to have control Kirsti had her fourth birthday when she came to Sweden. She had a very good memory and a good power of observation and provided us with details about her life. In contrast to many of the other interviewees, she also had some vivid memory images from her Finnish home. After reading her narrative several times, however, we could see upon closer examination that she sometimes gave a vivid description of different events in her childhood that she could not possibly have known about when she was a child. Kirsti tended to disregard the interviewer's comments and presented herself as the one who knew while the interviewer was constantly wrong. This led the interviewer to be cautious. Kirsti, however, did not remember how it was when she was separated from her Finnish mother. From the crossing to Sweden she remembered the fabric in a little girl's skirt and from the quarantine, she remembered nothing but the step stones in the house where she had been. Beyond these isolated and empty memory images there are the things that were impossible to think about, fragments, as an autistic response to the unbearable.

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