LIFE HISTORIES

127 128 HENRIETTE KÄRSNA-ISRAEL

Filiae Patriae Sorority Born in Tartu in 1913, died in 2004 Education: Tartu University, Economics Deported in 1941 Returned to Estonia in 1956

As far as I know, I am the fi rst person in my family to have received a college education. Father was born in 1870 and attended school for two years in Tartu. He was completely fl uent in all three local languages – Estonian, German and Russian. But in math, father only knew to add and subtract. When I started school, he couldn’t help me with multiplication and division. He relied on addition and subtraction to multiply and divide. That was probably the reason he stayed at the lowest level of Tartu’s middle class. My mother was a prototypical country girl. Her parents didn’t own their own farm. Her father worked as a woodcutter on an estate. They had their own little house in Karksi-Nuia but this house didn’t have a chimney. Years later a Viljandi schoolteacher brought his class to see this chimney-less house where smoke came out through the door. A large pot hung from the ceiling, and that’s where food was cooked. There were two rooms, one with a wood fl oor where the family’s oldest member, a grandmother lived. The other room had a clay fl oor and a tiny window that barely let in light. There was a table under the window with a large bowl in the center, and that’s where soup or curdled milk was poured so everyone at the table could eat from it with their wooden spoons. I was very little, but I remember the only time mother took me to visit the home where she’d been born. I think I was a daddy’s girl when I was young, because I was very mischievous, and I imagine father as also having been mischievous. He had been apprenticed to a cobbler, but because he didn’t like repairing shoes, he had run away and found work as a smith’s apprentice at the Müta estate near Tartu. The work of a smith was much more to his liking. His parents waited for him to come home and searched for him without success. They had him declared lost in church the following Sunday, and for the second time the Sunday after that. Finally after having been declared lost on the third Sunday, he was considered lost. Some time much later he suddenly appeared at home, wearing nice clothes, with money in his pockets and declared that he wouldn’t become a cobbler, because he liked

129 to work as a smith. At the Müta estate he met other young men who all talked about moving to St. Petersburg. And that’s what they did. As far as I know father worked at many different technical jobs there. He married a German woman named Schmidt, and lived with her for many years in St. Petersburg, until she died. When he was visiting Tartu just before the First World War he apparently became very fond of my mother. In other words, they made a baby, and I was that baby. Father liquidated his home in St. Petersburg and moved his household to Tartu. They bought a little house for some lottery tickets he held. It was on Kalevi street which at the time was on the outskirts of the city, with no houses beyond it. My start in school is an interesting story. My parents hadn’t planned on enrolling me in school that year, but their friends, the Linnas family, had a daughter a year older than me. Mr. Linnas asked my father, “Mr. Israel,” (they always referred to each other formally, using “Mister,” never “you”), do you think your wife could enroll my daughter in school? She is due to start school this year, but my wife is at the maternity home delivering our baby.” That’s how it was that my mother went to the school, holding me by one hand and Lisette with the other. I was still very short, almost a head shorter than Lisette. At the school I watched as they fussed with Lisette to enroll her, but no one paid me any attention. And then, despite the fact that I was only 6 at the time, I felt this very

One-year old Henriette with her father, mother and uncle.

130 feminine urge to act up and I started to cry. My nose hardly reached the table’s edge. I started demanding that they enroll me too. If Lisette could be enrolled, then I should be as well. And so the offi ce clerk enrolled me. I didn’t know any letters or numbers at the time. Some of the girls in that fi rst class were three to four years older than me and they knew quite a lot. I don’t know how that poor teacher managed, because there were very few others who were as ignorant as I. In the fourth year we had to start learning German as our fi rst foreign language. They used all sorts of little verses to teach us German. It was hard! The teacher wasn’t very happy with me because I was a poor student and had such a hard time keeping up. The others were older and did better. The fi fth year I had to repeat the grade. That changed everything. I didn’t want to study at all any more and school became distasteful. That’s how it continued until the tenth year when I had 5 D’s on my report card. Four D’s were in actual subjects, but the fi fth was for behavior. It still amazes me! Had they assigned a D for behavior earlier, I might have started to apply myself earlier. That D really hurt. I walked home along the length of Kastani street with tears running down my cheeks, all because I had been given a D for behavior. Well, they didn’t have much choice since I was a D student. It had such an effect on me, that by spring there was only one subject in which I hadn’t managed to improve my grade. Behavior wasn’t a D any more, and three subjects were improved. By the time I graduated, I was on par with my classmates and allowed to graduate in the spring. All the subjects were either B’s or C’s, and I had completed the entire curriculum. In those days there was a great deal of unemployment and most women stayed at home. Once I had completed high school I started looking for a job. I was hoping to become a civil servant because their jobs seemed to have the most security. But when I went to look for a job, they laughed at me, and told me that women belonged in the home. I could have found work on a farm, or become the mistress of a farm, had a farmer married me. Lisette went on to the university. Of course, I had to follow her. I wanted to study physical education but that department only accepted applicants every other year. Who knows how much need there was for physical education teachers. In those days there was no interest in sports trainers. Sports weren’t as important as they are today. I fi gured that business was something I might be good at. There was no business school at the time; business was taught in the law school. Now of course it’s different, business is even more prominent than law. I had become active in sports already in my third year of high school. I liked to dance and be active. At fi rst an elderly gentleman taught us old fashioned dances like the padespan, but he was followed by Oskar Luts’ brother who later became an Estonian fi lm producer. He worked with us for a year or six months

131 and taught us modern dances like the tango. He was followed by his wife, Aksella Luts, and she would use me to demonstrate dance steps to the others. I liked that. I immediately gained self-confi dence. At some point during my high school years an ad in the newspaper announced that track and fi eld training was being offered to high-school students. That really stirred my interest. I wanted to know what track and fi eld was all about. We were taught to run, to long jump and high jump, and boys were taught pole vaulting as well. I became acquainted with Ira Kõiv and she convinced me to enroll in the Academic Athletic Club. Enrollment took place in the rooms above the University Café, and high school students were eligible. It was through sports that I met my future husband. Once, at the end of the long jump and high jump competitions, this boy hung around, raking the ground. He offered to walk me home, and naturally I had no objections. That boy was Aarne Kärsna whom I later married. His great friend was Karl Sule, and the two of them started visiting me. We three met during my junior year of high-school and started going together. During my university years I had other beaus, including Nikolai Kütis, a Narva boy who held the Estonian record in the triple jump. He too started visiting me. But Aarne Kärsna had a very sensitive nose. As soon as he sensed that some other boy was visiting me, he’d come over as well. He trailed me for six years, and by that time he had “liquidated” all his competitors. In the end, he proposed and father accepted his proposal and asked, “Can you support her?” I was terribly embarrassed. But the words were out, and father thought he’d said the right thing. Aarne was already working as an assistant at the university by then. We were married in 1936. The wedding party was held at the Raimla Student Society where Aarne belonged. During my fi rst years at the university I didn’t join a sorority. I studied and passed exams. Actually, I never applied to join the Filiae Patriae Sorority. They invited me. For me sorority life was simple and fun. I participated by being on call at the sorority house and delivering letters to the alumni. I remember one funny incident involving a member who was fond of wieners. We bet that she couldn’t eat a meter of wieners. We thought we’d be smart and put the wieners side by side, not end to end. She was such a big wiener eater that she took half a day to eat and won the bet. After I joined the sorority I also joined the fourth unit of the Defense League which was manned by fraternity and sorority members. It was through the Defense League that I started teaching folk dancing to Tartu youths. I had never watched a folkdance group perform, nor danced in one, but I studied Anna Raudkats’s book from end to end and started teaching. After that my involvement with the Defense League really went crazy. I was recruited to be

132 Henriette and Aarne Kärsna on their wedding day, accompanied by bridesmaids and groomsmen. their sports instructor, on a volunteer basis of course. We had been taught gymnastics at school and I had been quite good. So, I ended up training women in military drills on the Defense League courtyard, and teaching folk dancing as well. Our folk dancing group performed on the open-air song festival stages in both Tartu and Tallinn, and also at the 1938 Estonian Games. As a member of the Academic Athletic Club I competed twice at the university students’ sports meets, in Kaunas and in Helsinki. At that time, Kaunas was the capital of Lithuania. I brought home a bronze medal from Kaunas. The third SELL games were held in Helsinki. SELL (Suomi, Eesti, Latvija, Lietuva) was the athletic union of the Finnish, Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian university students. We left for Helsinki in the morning and arrived there in the evening. En route I wanted to establish whether what I had heard was true, that the ninth wave was the biggest, so I went to the aft of the ship, stood there and started counting waves. The ninth wave was indeed very strong. Some midshipmen lost their caps and some fraternity men lost theirs as well. My husband was also on that excursion, but he “fed fi sh” throughout the trip. When I stepped ashore in Helsinki I felt as though I was drunk. That’s how much the sea had tossed us around. I didn’t place in my races in Helsinki. I competed at least twice in my sorority’s volleyball matches in Latvia. One time I was hosted by a professor Snikers’s family. He had two daughters and a

133 son. One of his daughters had studied abroad and during the royal coronation ceremony in England, had been selected as the Latvian student to present the Queen with a bouquet of fl owers on behalf of all Latvians. When it was the Latvians turn to visit us, I was in a dither because I came from a simple home. In Latvia they had had oriental rugs and beautiful furniture, but Estonians simply weren’t as well off. Politically things were starting to go wrong by then. Hitler had become active. The Berlin Olympics had been held in 1936 and Palusalu1 had brought home his medals. And babies were being made as well. But my husband felt the times were too uncertain. He told me, “I’m not afraid. I have an advanced degree and can always fi nd work as a rural teacher. But I don’t want you to end up in the middle of a war with a baby. Let’s wait six months.” And so we waited, waited until in the end it was clear that bringing a child into the world at that time would have been wrong. We married in September 1936 and I can’t remember whether it was in October or November that he got his Ph.D. I withdrew from the university, because in those days it was impossible to hire anyone to help. As the wife I stayed at home and helped him with his calculations and graphs. Everything had to be done by hand in those days. Recently I looked at his dissertation in the university library and a math professor asked me whether I had really done all the graphics. In those days many wives worked at home as laboratory assistants, doing calculations. Aarne had 11 scientifi c publications up to 1941. They’re still available. That’s how we lived until ... There was horrible banging on our front door when they came to get us. A truck was waiting under the window and there were four men, in military uniforms, as well as in civilian clothes. They started speaking in Russian, which I didn’t understand. My husband understood a little. He had attended elementary school during Tsarist times. And then he fainted and fell to the fl oor in front of the sideboard. I had never seen anyone faint, and I started screaming. I became very bold and accused them of trying to kill us. The Estonian tried to calm me explaining that Aarne’s fainting wasn’t serious. We were ordered to get dressed, but I needed to go pee fi rst. We only had an outhouse, and a Russian soldier came to escort me. He may have been a Russian general for all I knew. What did I know about his medals! I was furious. I sat in that outhouse and opened the door wide, I wanted to tell him that if he hadn’t seen a woman sit on the pot before, now was his chance. I was so angry. I guess he must have been afraid that I would run away.

1 Kristjan Palusalu (1908-1987) At the Berlin Olympics Palusalu won two gold medals in wrestling and as a result became a national hero.

134 Later we sat in the car with the four of them. They told us we’d be taken somewhere else to live. And somehow I imagined that that’s how it would be, because Aarne was a meteorologist, a profession that would certainly be useful to the Soviets. Even our professor Kirde had been replaced by a Russian. I don’t know what my husband thought. They drove us toward the railway station and suddenly my husband said, “Oh Lord, something terrible is happening!” There was a large crowd waiting. We were brought there around six in the morning, but others had been brought already around midnight. Everybody was outside with their bundles and packages, all kinds of people. A man received us. I remember that he was very good looking. I was rebellious. I told him he must be very unfortunate to have such a job. But I didn’t really know what was happening. We were put into separate wagons. I never saw my husband again after that. At fi rst when we were being driven along Riia street on our way to the station, I had thought that Aarne was going to be assigned to a meteorology station somewhere in Russia. He had a Ph.D. after all. But that did not happen. He was assigned somewhere else, and that’s where he died. A woman by the name of Rita Arens was in my wagon. She was there with her three children, one was three and the other two were twins. Then there was the wife of a business man form Mustvee, with her daughter. There was a country girl who had worked as a servant on a farm and came with a sack of grain she had been given. There was a pregnant woman and I thought that Aarne had been very right, for what could I have done with a baby! I think we started moving on a Sunday evening. I had a hard time keeping back tears as the train traveled along the tracks towards Petseri. It moved slowly past places where I had spent my youth. We threw out scraps of paper through the wagon’s tiny window. We wrote messages to let them know we were there, being taken somewhere, we didn’t know where. That’s how we traveled to Petseri. The train traveled during the day and women who were closer to the window said that trains that passed us going in the opposite direction were only carrying men, in open wagons. They had made the sign of the cross as they passed our train, as if to indicate that we were doomed. We were only fed once a day. Millet soup, or millet porridge. I had never eaten millet before. The taste was foreign and I didn’t really feel like eating. The fi rst day it all went down the toilet. That at least made the toilet smell of soup which was better than that other smell. After all people still had to defecate. One couldn’t only pee. When we reached the Urals, I think it was in Sverdlovsk, we saw posters with news that the war had started. At least we heard about that. We kept going

135 on and on beyond Sverdlovsk. When we had ridden for a month, the train stopped and we were ordered to disembark. I recognized a few familiar faces. Among them was professor Saral with his wife and two children. Those boys were still very young and had a sense of humor. Another thing that happened there was that a Mrs. Sildak took a porcelain soup tureen from her baggage and used it to let her daughter pee. She didn’t have a pot. And we all watched. My God, we thought, now she’s pissing in a soup tureen, and that has to be used to serve food! Then we were ordered back on the train and rattled toward the east some more. And now they rattled us quite boldly. We reached the town of Novosibirsk and were let out once more. That’s where I saw my two of my sorority sisters, a woman named Pedel and Aino Lepik. Pedel died from starvation later, but Aino came back. We boarded a huge ship. I remember that’s where I saw cockroaches for the fi rst time. They were crawling on the ceiling. I tried to sleep on a bunk, but the cockroaches were too close. We were taken northward on this ship. I can’t remember whether we made two or three stops on the way along the Ob river, but when we reached the Kargasok raion we had to disembark. That was a very terrible experience because the place was a marsh. Some logs or planks had been thrown on the ground for us to walk along. There was water everywhere, squishing whenever you took a step even though it was July. Many of us were put ashore there while the ship continued northward. We were loaded on a different ship which took us further inland until it ran aground. The water was so shallow that it got stuck in the mud. After we had disembarked, the ship rose enough to fl oat and be able to make its way back. We were divided among families, because that was the only place to put us. Russian huts are just one-room structures. Naturally the people there didn’t want to take us in, but in the end they agreed because they were interested in the things we had in our suitcases. This made it worthwhile for them. Just as we now admire American goods, they admired our stuff. I didn’t speak a word of Russian at the time. I stuck close to an older lady who with her 18 year old son was from Tartu. I was familiar with her husband’s little boat rental business by the Stone Bridge on our side of the Ema river. Her name was Reeder. She claimed I was her relative and that we wanted to be in the same house. That’s how we ended up under the same roof for quite some time. Every month we had to go to sign in and every month we’d be told that we had been brought there forever, until we died, that we’d never get out of that place. There was nowhere to escape to because there were no roads, only the river. They didn’t think we could get far on the river or through the forest.

136 A Latvian had gone with a sleigh and no one knew whether or not he reached the Urals. If you look at a map, the area surrounding the Ob river is depicted in green. This means it’s low marshy wetland. Had they taken us further, had there been solid ground to step on, then there wouldn’t have been as many insects and perhaps it would have been possible to escape. But as it was, there was no way out of that place. In 1942 an ordinance was announced which mandated that state lands and forests were to be demarcated from privately owned lands. In other words, the kolkhoz land had to be separated from the state land. A land surveyor named Gross was sent out from Kargasok. He was a former German, at least his ancestors had been Germans who had been deported to Siberia and opted to stay there. By now he was Russian. Because I was slightly better educated than the other young people, I was selected to become his assistant. I was slightly familiar with the theodolite and so I went with him to help survey the area. He spoke Russian and I didn’t understand much of what he was saying. Two Russian boys also came along. Our day’s work consisted of establishing boundaries, digging holes on the boundary, felling trees, stripping them of bark and posting trees into the holes. The marsh was full of insects, primarily mosquitoes. On the very fi rst day I was told the story about a boy who had disappeared during the 1930’s. He had been the child of Ukrainians who had been deported and he remained lost when darkness fell. The following morning they had found him dead by the river, covered with mosquitoes. The mosquitoes had bled him to death. Surveyor Gross taught me Russian. He would point at a tree and say, “sasna,” a fi r tree. About another plant he would say “Eto krapivo,” this is a nettle. In the evening we would take as much “krapivo” along as we could and then Mrs. Reeder and I would make soup. We three would eat a whole bucket of soup. A whole bucket of spinach soup cooked from nettles. Nettles contain a lot of iron but that was all we’d have to eat. I worked with that land surveyor the entire summer. I have to admit that it wasn’t easy working with three men in the woods. That land surveyor let his hands wander whenever he could. But nothing terrible happened. Another thing which was good for me was that he had a gun and sometimes he’d shoot grouse or hen, and occasionally he’d give me some of his bread as well. Apparently he felt sorry for me. He knew I was totally underfed. In the fall the land surveyor left. They said he’d received orders from Kargasok. I had an Estonian-Russian dictionary, the one by Pravdini. For some reason I had brought that little pocket dictionary along from home. On the back of this little book he wrote some notes for me, as a souvenir – a whole page of notes. He said it was a waltz. Anyway, he must have been a good musician to

137 have been able to write notes. I had never heard that waltz before. I gave him my gold watch as thanks for all his help. After he left, my life changed. It wasn’t the life of an educated person any more. I became a simple domestic servant. That was the only means for my survival. I had to bake bread for the entire village. I had never done anything like this before. Now a whole new period started in my life when everything I did was something I had never done before. I had to peel an entire bucket of potatoes every day in order to bake bread. The potatoes had to be boiled, mashed and then mixed with fl our. That’s what the village people ate. My mistress was the sales person in the store. She lived with her four children and an old man who was the father of her husband, who had been drafted. There were three rooms in her house. One room had one or two fl ower pots and a painted fl oor. The mistress dusted that room herself, because she didn’t trust me to do it. I wouldn’t have had the strength to do everything anyway. Then there was a middle room where the mistress, loose woman like she was, would receive male visitors. That’s where she’d eat meat dishes with her visitors. But we, the four children, the grandfather and I, had the large room with a Russian oven that one could sleep on top of and we ate cabbage soup every day. In the fall potatoes had to be picked and all four hundred square meters of the potato fi eld dug up. That was in addition to my other work. When it was time for threshing grain, the kolkhoz didn’t count my work as a domestic servant, and the chairman ordered me to help thresh even if I had to work nights. Once on my way home from threshing, I didn’t know what happened, but suddenly I was aware of daylight and the sun shining! Some Russian girls were standing around me, laughing. I had been so tired that I had fallen asleep by the side of the road. I hadn’t had the strength to come all the way home. I was afraid I was catching sleeping sickness. Then a businessman came to our village. Apparently he owned many stores, and came to inspect ours, so he naturally visited that middle room and was fed and entertained by my mistress. We ate by ourselves, but as he was leaving he remarked to me, and by then I understood enough Russian, that because I worked so hard there, he’d take me with him. A month or two later he returned with a militiaman. The two came together and told me to get my things, because they would leave that evening and would take me on their wagon. Oh Lord, that made my mistress angry! She became terribly upset. She pleaded with the men not to take me, but that evening they took me to the next village and then went back to the kolkhoz to get my back pay, eight rubles for the entire summer. Before I left, the old grandfather gave some leather shoes with canvas leggings and my former mistress gave me a used pink cotton skirt. I felt rich.

138 The businessman told me they had to leave me behind, but that a mail boat was on its way south, and when it reached the village, I was to board it and follow them. I didn’t protest. The mail boat came, but the mailman wasn’t interested in taking me. Only when I insisted did he allow me to board. When we were half way across the Vasyugan river he told me that as a young man he had tried all sorts of women, but never an Estonian, and started assaulting me in the middle of the river. But I knew how to swim, and I wasn’t afraid. He chased me on the water until he got bored and was ready to take off with his boat. My pink skirt was torn from top to bottom, but I wasn’t ready to conceive his child. I climbed back in the boat without saying a word and he was quiet too. We rode peacefully across the river and he deposited me on the other side and puttered away. I had no idea how far I still had to go, but I was glad to be rid of him. When I tried to go on, I was blocked by a stream. I hoped some trees might have fallen across it, so that I could get across, but that place was so full of uderbrush, I couldn’t get further. I gave up and tried to go through the forest, but there were too many horse fl ies and mosquitoes. I went back to the shore and thought I knew these Russians well enough to count on someone coming there to fi sh early the next morning. I gathered a big pile of hay, lay down bedside it and pulled the hay over me to protect me from the bugs and mosquitoes. Somehow I survived that night. And all the while I kept my ears open. In the morning I heard the sound of oars. I thought my plan had succeeded, a boat was approaching from the village side. I started pleading with the man, “Uncle, take me to the village.” He refused, and told me to go through the forest. He claimed that was possible. I started to press forward, pushing branches and hay aside with my feet. At last I sighted some wagon wheel tracks and followed these through the woods until I came to a village. My skirt was torn from the previous day so I looked for a house where people weren’t away at work. I found some Volga-Germans, terribly poor people. Nothing about them was reminiscent of Germans any more. They were worse than Russians, even sloppier. But when I asked for a needle and thread, they gave me these. The thread, however, was made of cotton-wool! It broke right away. But that was all they had. They too had been deported. I explained where I wanted to go, and the man informed me that I had run into good luck. “Repair your skirt, girl, and go to the shore. There’s a ship standing there,” is what he said. A small ship was really anchored there. Midship men were working, loading it with blocks of wood. I went to one who seemed idle and asked whether he was the captain. “Daa! Kapitan! [Yes! Captain!]” he replied. I pleaded with him to take me aboard, offered to pay him eight rubles, which is all I had, and said that if he agreed, I could work alongside the midshipmen. He looked me over

139 from top to bottom, and bottom to top, then turned and left. It was all very mystifying. One day they want to rape you, the next, they look you over and ignore you! I didn’t understand men. I sat on the shore and waited. Suddenly I noticed that they were getting ready to take off. No one paid me any attention, neither the midshipmen nor the fat captain. I felt insulted. I jumped up and was the second last to get on board. The ship started moving, but still nobody paid me any attention. I couldn’t understand what was going on. Toward the back of the ship there was a door leading to a cabin. Horse fl ies were starting to bother me so I peeked inside. There was a bunk for lying down. I went in, lay down and fell asleep. When I awoke, the ship had stopped and barrels of tar were lined up on the shore. The midshipmen were rolling these barrels onto a barge behind the ship. Soon I became bored observing them and I went and laid down some more. When I awoke, we were moving. I came out from my hiding place, stood there and gaped: My “rapist” was on the barge along with his mail boat! We two continued to travel like this on our way to Tsirapka: I was on the rather spacious back end of the ship and my “rapist” on the barge. I thought he was much less comfortable on the barge than I on the ship. When we arrived I asked the captain how much I owed him. He patted me on the shoulder and said, “Idi s bogum [Go and God be with you]!” I had escaped from my rapist to the shelter of a truly good man who had given me a free ride. The Tsirapka village had a Kommandant and other important functionaries. I found the man who had invited me. He had been looking for a domestic servant, had seen how I worked for my former mistress and found me suitable. His wife was a great beauty. She wore a wreath of

Henriette with Linda Ilp, Tsirapka, 1952. Linda’s release gave Henriette the courage to submit her own application for release.

140 heavy braids around her head. I was awestruck. And he too was a very good- looking swarthy man. Of course my life there was much easier than it had been. There wasn’t much work. I had learned to milk cows earlier, and their little boy was easy to care for. There was only one bad incident. It wasn’t really my problem, but it started when the man came home with gonorrhea. He traveled all over inspecting his stores. His wife reacted very correctly and refused to let him in the house. He tried to kill himself, but didn’t. Eventually he came back home and started getting treatment. I lived with them for a long time, until both were cured. It wasn’t hard there. I was entrusted with dusting and washing fl oors but after about a year I suggested that I would fi nd another Estonian to replace me. I was interested in doing different work, work that paid a salary. Of course they gave me permission. There was an orphanage in Tsirapka and my fi rst salaried job was as the washerwoman for the orphanage. The supervisor of the laundry was a Latvian. She did the ironing. I and a Russian girl did the washing. The children had been collected from many different places during the war. All children whose names were unknown were simply given the name Naidyonov. That’s how it went there. I don’t remember how long I worked in the laundry, but eventually I was promoted to the job of a “nyanya” in the orphanage. “Nyanya” means babysitter, but I wasn’t a babysitter. I washed fl oors and acted as night monitor. I managed. Then I became a health worker in the sick children’s ward. There were fewer fl oors to wash there, only one big room. On one beautiful day I felt cold. I took my temperature and found it was between 38 and 39. After a short time, it rose, and eventually reached 40.2 degrees Centigrade. I had developed pneumonia. A girl there had meningitis and the two of us were put on a sleigh and taken to the hospital. That village even had a hospital! How did they treat me? They gave me sulfa drugs, but I couldn’t keep them down. They made me vomit and after that I hid the drugs under my pillow. Another treatment was cupping, which I didn’t mind. That was the entire treatment. A young Estonian farm woman from Tartu province was there at the same time as I. She died, but I survived. When I got out several months later, I was terribly weak. I had to go behind the house to defecate, because that’s what was done there. I crouched and did my thing, but I didn’t have the strength to get up. I can remember how I wept: if only I could stand up! Well I must eventually have found the strength, because I didn’t freeze to death, and I went back into the warmth inside. In the end I was well enough to resume my work in the isolation ward. I was there for a long time. One night I was visited by a new “friend,” the director of the orphanage. He had never done it with an Estonian either. Russians were

141 June 1, 1956. At the start of the homeward journey, with Susanne Kodres.

keen on that. But if you’re not willing, then you don’t fall prey. I was not willing, and nothing happened because I found an easy escape. The children and I slept in the same room and I just slipped into bed with one of them. He didn’t dare follow me there. He left a few months later and supposedly told the new director that all the girls in the institute were available, except that Kärsna. “You can’t get her.” After that I was left alone. He was the last “rapist” to bother me. Eventually I became the bookkeeper for the orphanage, later a group leader. That work was entirely different. I taught children gymnastics and they won fi rst place in Tomsk. They didn’t offi cially recognize my work there, but I still got a great deal of personal satisfaction, a real feeling of pride. The kids were great. We also put on an exhibit. We took ordinary white cotton sheets, pulled out every fourth or fi fth thread and then started embroidering. I found some photos and drew pictures of Lenin and Stalin on the fabric. This got a fi rst prize as well. Only they kept the prize for a month. Stalin had died and had been made a people’s enemy in the interim. But we had done so much work! The children, even the boys, had all sat in a circle, sewing. The orphanage was the last place I worked. In the fi nal years of my forced resettlement I shared a room with a young Estonian woman who applied to Moscow for an amnesty. I think Malenkov, or some such person was the head of the Soviet Union at the time. She submitted an application and was given

142 her freedom. That was in 1954. That gave me courage to try as well. In my time the most important person in Moscow was Voroshilov, an old general, and they replied that my letter had been forwarded to Estonia. The news from Estonia came in October of 1955, but there was no way out from Tsirapka that time of year. Maybe one could have gotten out by airplane, but none fl ew there. I had to wait till 1956. I was on the fi rst ship that left Tsirapka that spring. Mrs. Abel, the wife of a well known clothing store owner in Tartu, asked to come with me, and we traveled together. She had a former classmate in Moscow who had an apartment on Leningrad Prospekt where she told me we both were welcome to stay. However, Mrs. Abel couldn’t return directly to Estonia from Moscow, she wanted to see the Moscow Circus. So we both went and found it pretty exciting. I sent my mother a telegram from Moscow. She, her cousin and my sister- in-law all met my train. At home the water had been heated so I could wash, and a great meal prepared. One evening when mother and I were sitting at the kitchen table, mother said, “I don’t know whether or not I’ll ever manage to make you human again.” I don’t know why she said that. Perhaps I spoke Estonian with

The fi rst fall back home. Pictured with her mother and Jaak Leisi, a fellow former deportee.

143 an accent. But right now I must admit, I’m having a hard time remembering Russian. I had to be registered. We went to the apartment manager so mother could register me as a co-resident in her apartment. This involved fi lling out an elaborate application. The police was very unfriendly from the start and immediately informed us that it wouldn’t be easy. It was by no means a given that I’d get permission to live in Tartu. I told them I had returned independently, not on the basis of an amnesty. Had I returned in 1955 this problem wouldn’t have arisen, but by 1956 so many people had returned on an amnesty basis that they were no longer allowing returnees to live within the city. I warned mother that we may have to separate if she lived in Tartu, and I would be forced to live beyond the city limits. But a month later we were called back and told that I had the right to live in the city, because my return was not based on an amnesty. Next I had to fi nd work. Mother would even have agreed to my going to work as the cleaning lady in a store. I didn’t really object, but I thought it would be a little strange. Even after having been in Siberia I didn’t fi nd it quite suitable. I had the right to stay at home without working for four months, because I had been deported to the far north raion. In September I went to the reunion of my former all girls high school and there I met a former classmate, Ljuba Mitt. While we were sitting there she asked whether I‘d found work. I told her, no. I had been to the candy factory where the personnel manager had told me that she would gladly take me because they were looking for workers, but she knew that I would leave at the fi rst opportunity. She didn’t think the work would suit me because I was better educated than their work force. They didn’t take me. Ljuba mentioned that possibly they could fi nd something for me at the place she worked, in the Animal Husbandry Institute.

Henriette’s 90th birthday, 2003.

144 She had never been deported. She had stayed put all this time, working and living beside her Anatoli. Anatoli was considered a prominent communist. People easily took them both for communists because both had Russian names, Ljuba and Anatoli. A day or two later a woman came to see me. She was the treasurer at the Animal Husbandry Institute. Ljuba had sent a letter informing me that they needed a laboratory technician. I went to have a look. I remember my mother and mother-in-law were both at home when I returned exclaiming, “Oh Lord, it’s so beautiful there!” The Animal Husbandry Institute was on Vanemuise street. When I entered the corridor I had been awestruck, to me it had seemed so grand! A young woman had run down the stairs wearing a white lab coat, her hair combed back, so beautiful! They welcomed me with open arms. At fi rst I worked on chicken breeding, later in the economics department and fi nally in the library.

145