Gallery: Candles lit as Estonia remembers March 1949 deportation victims
Wednesday marked 77 years since the Soviet March deportation, part of Operation Priboi, with candles lit and memorials held nationwide to honor the victims.
On March 25–28, 1949, a total of more than 90,000 people from throughout Soviet-occupied Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were forced from their homes and deported east in the meticulously organized Operation Priboi ("Coastal Surf"),
Known in Estonia as the March deportation (märtsiküüditamine), over 70 percent of those deported in the operation were women and children under the age of 16.
More than 22,000 victims were deported from Estonia alone. Of those that survived, the first of the deportees were allowed to return in 1958; the last were freed only in 1965. Thousands, however, never made it back.
In Tallinn, people gathered at Freedom Square to light candles in memory of the victims. Similar gestures took place across the country.
In Pärnu, a memorial was held at Leinapark, the site of the former Papiniidu railway station where more than 2,000 victims were loaded into railcars in 1949.
'Only mothers and children' left to deport
Evi Kolla, deported from the Mulgimaa region in Viljandi County as a child, said her family was sent away after the men in their area had already been imprisoned in 1945.
"All the men from every farm in our area had been taken to prison already, so only mothers and children were deported to Siberia then," Kolla recalled.
She said her family had four children, ages 2–12, noting large families were typical in rural Estonia at the time.
"The first children died on the way," Kolla said, adding that their bodies were removed from the railcars. "Where they were taken, of course, we don't know."
Her own family's transport ended in Khakassia, where she said even the indigenous locals were living in extreme poverty. Remarkably, she added, her family was the only one from their railcar to survive and eventually return to Estonia in full.
Eha Martinson, deported from Valga County at age 12, said her younger sister and 73-year-old grandmother were sent with her; their mother had died two years earlier.
"Our father was away at the mill at the time," she said. "He didn't make it home, but he was taken later too and sent elsewhere."
Martinson said the family was separated, as she, her sister and their grandmother were deported to Novosibirsk Oblast and her father to Irkutsk Oblast, but they all eventually made it back to Estonia too — including their grandmother.
The European Court of Human Rights has recognized the March Deportation as constituting a crime against humanity.
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Editor: Mari Peegel, Aili Vahtla
