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Ants har kontakt med en estniska, Mai Maddisson, bosatt i Australien, som har gett ut en bok om Geislingenbarnen; de barn som bodde i ett läger i Tyskland efter 1944 för att sedan få hjälp att hitta något nytt boställe i världen.

Nu har hon gett ut en ny bok om dem, men det kommer jag till senare. Hon bad i alla fall Ants att jag skulle skriva om hur det var att vara gift med en est. Så det gjorde jag. Här kommer en kortversion. Den är på engelska eftersom böckerna ges ut på det språket.

 

 

I am married to an ant. No! Sorry! I am married to Ants. We met in midsummer 1963 in the Swedish archipelago. First he did not tell me he was born in Estonia. But I felt he was not like the other boys I had met. And I liked it.  We met and became a pair.

I met his mother, stepfather and sisters in the autumn. They all talked Estonian at home. I knew they spoked Swedish very well, but understood it was important for them to use their native language at home. I listened, trying to understand. Where is the start of a sentence? Can I hear a word that is similar to the Swedish language? It was difficult. But I kept trying.

But life goes on and everyday life with children, housework and other work took over my day. The big change came when I, and my family,made my life's most important trip. It was in 1978 when we traveled to Tallinn. Ant's stepfather warned us. "Even if they pull out the nails on your fingers without anesthesia, I will go there." He worked for Estonia’s liberation and was hated by the Soviet Union. Yes, we understood, but we did go. Now people asks us: "How did you dare? With the children!" I do not know the answer. We just had to go. Dot.

I will always remember when Ants' grandmother and her sister sat in front of me at the coffee table and in Russian talked about me. I understood when they looked at me, that they debated whether I was good enough for Ants. And I was! I just found it nice of them, the two old ladies. They were not Russian, they were Orthodox. Earlier in Estonia, during the tsar time, young men who wanted to study had to ask someone for money to do so. If they asked the church, they had to also embrace the Russian Orthodox culture. Therefore they lived with much Russian customs and traditions. Their children had Russian names, and they spoked Estonian and Russian as well. And I learnt more and more about the little forgotten country. That country, whose capital was our nearest capital city before the war.

What we saw and what we experienced was something we then carried with us. Everything was gray. Gray. Gray. Even the people we saw in town was gray.  It was when we visited the Russian Orthodox church, Alexander Nevski Cathedral, where we saw colors again. The Cathedral hadn't been damaged during the Russian bomb attack in March 1944. The Cathedral was built during the tsar-time, and it ment a lot for the Russian speaking people, but not for the Estonians.

/../

Such stories I heard a lot. Mostly it was Ants' aunt, Tanja, who told us. It gave me a different truth than many Swedes had. I learned a lot about suffering and struggles in Estonia, what so few Swedes knew about at that time. When I tried to tell them about it, they didn´t listen.  Many of my peers were so influenced by the Soviet propaganda, where it was told that life in the Soviet Union was good. I do not like to write that. But it was truth.

It was difficulties for us to socialize with them; we were so strange.

 

It was 1991 we returned to Estonia. Now they were free people. They had to learn the new way of living. And we were there to study how they did it. Soviet culture differs in many ways from the European. A person who has grown up in a culture where one must live by the rules full of corruption and where it was an inferior human being, he has much to relearn. The strange thing is, that we in the West, as quickly were fooled to think that Estonians discriminated against the Russian-speaking population.ns in the free country. No one, absolutely no one, had mentioned earlier how the Russian people had behaved towards the Estonians during the last fifty years.

You see. I just love Estonia and the Estonians on their way in working forward. Working for change without being stopped by malicious rumors and Russian propaganda. I see a small country with courage and confidence, as well know all the difficulties they had during the first twenty years as a free state, who do not want to make the mistakes that were made then, but working for a good life for existing residents. And I admire them.

 

But... Who am I?

I am born in Sweden by swedish parents. I learnt to read, write and count when I was 5 to 6 years old, and started reading newspaper and books so much, so I spoiled my eyes. I was nearsighted when I started school at the age of 7.

I read newspaper from the first side to the last and I read all kind of books when I had started school. I remember books about girls in England during the war; about Jewish girls in concentration camps and many other books. I was very aware of the war and how it had been for many people.

I think I understood at least a little bit of how a young man who fled his country could have had it. Ants told mee some of it. He told me about the camp in Geislingen an der Steige, how it was to come to Sweden but most of all he told me about the summer camp on the island of Gotland, where he spent some summers with other estonian children. I understood it was great fun, and that he acted up quite a lot.

 

Of course Ants is marked by war. His parents divorced and Ants and mother went to Sweden,  and his father moved in early 1950's to New York. Ants would go to New York in the summer holidays in 1955, but his father had a heart attack in the winter, so the trip was not to be. We often say, in our family, that if he had not died, then had Ants certainly stayed in New York with her father and his stepmother there, and then we had not met!

 

"No worries", usually Ants say to our children. "Then I had come to the Stockholm Archipelago with my great sailing yacht and I had found your mother anyway."

 Perhaps. One can never know for sure. But the truth is that I am very glad that I met him that midsummer 1963.

 

Ants became a teacher and the summer holidays we all spent in our sailing boat in the Archipelago. We were together and our children had a father and a mother all the time. That was important for us. Ants wanted to give them parents all the time, and his children should never miss some of them.

 

After Estonia's new freedom 1991, we have traveled widely in the country. We have traveled with and without groups. And it has taught me so much. We have met so many estonians, some people who absolutely would never join the party, and others who felt compelled to do it to get a decent life. We have visited the atomic bases, been in a forest brother's bunker. We have been to museums, churches, theaters, markets, and various cultural events. I have known the importance of culture. How important the common language is. "It is the culture and language that makes us a distinct people", some Estonian man said. And it is true. Have you been forced to live in a culture totally different from your own, then you know how important culture is for us humans.

 I have learnt so much. I have studied so much about Estonia and Russia. You have to know much about Russia too, if you want to understand Estonia. And I'm so glad for everything I learnt. "In order to really understand what is happening in the world, it is a great advantage to know two different cultures," I usually say. And I do so because I married Ants. He gave my life a lot more content.