My Dear Hard Drive

This Christmas I will be away from home. In 1999 I was planning to spend the Christmas with my then boyfriend, but on the morning of Christmas eve I decided I couldn’t do it, so I packed my bag and jumped into a train that was loaded full of people going home for Christmas. I didn’t get a seat during the 5 hour train ride, but that was alright, I was going home.

It may have been easier had there not been snow that year. Snow always makes me feel christmasy, it’s the most important element of Christmas to me. NOTHING says Christmas like snow. I was told there’s snow in Finland this year, just like it was a real Christmas that hadn’t heard of climate change or global warming. Snow in time. Christmas in time.

This year, I will be basking in the hot Australian Sun, not wearing a big red cardigan or anything, but shorts and a top. How depressing. I feel like it was Juhannus, the mid summer festival in Finland. If I ignore the fact that it is Christmas and concentrate on the thought that it could be Juhannus, I actually feel quite fine. But as soon as I think about snow back home, mom’s fantastic decorations inside the house, that are not the slightest bit tacky or untasteful, I want to cry. I have never seen a home that would have been decorated for Christmas with taste, other than my mothers, and oh I wish I could show you. Even the photos of a real Christmas have been destroyed when one of my dearest hard drives suddenly crashed and took most of my photos with it.

So this Christmas… All I want is a room I can crawl into to listen to Sylvia’s Christmas Song and have a good old cry. :p (If you follow the link and read the English lyrics, I think there’s been an error in translation:

“And quiet are now all the prisoners’ groans,
But oh, who pays heed to a prisoner’s moans?”

Should read something like

And quiet are now all the prisoners’ groans,
But oh, who pays heed to the singer’s moans?

And then, after having that cry and a bit of crumble and public display of disapproval of snowless Christmas, go to a beach and pretend it’s the best Juhannus ever.

Spurred by the comment I received to the Obama-post, I started thinking about what a war is like to most nations apart from USA. Most nations, when they say their soldiers protect their nation, actually do mean that. USA has had what… One attack on their own soil, and that was hardly a military attack. They are STILL terrified of it. American civilians, thank God, have no idea what a war is like. I can say much the same for myself, thank God, but I can’t say the same for my family members, of whom some are old enough to have fought or lived through our two latest wars, the Winter War, which was fought at the same time as the World War II, and/or the Continuation War. By “us” I mean the Finns.

Finns do not have a hired army, apart from some staff members that stay on duty the whole time. If there should be a war, it would affect every family in Finland. Virtually every male, between ages 18 to 60 will be sent off to protect our borders. That excludes those who are incapacitated and includes men who refuse to carry a gun but will serve in other duties, and some women who serve in arms on voluntary basis. That guarantees, that there will not be wars that are of selfish reasons by the government leaders, as they will be sending their own sons to the slaughter just as they send those of the common citizen. Nations like that usually fight only when it is absolutely necessary, and not because some reason made up by the government to justify spending tons of money on an army.

This was the case when the Soviet Union led by Joseph Stalin attacked Finland on November 30, 1939. The reason was, that Soviet Union (now Russia) wanted to protect their capital of the time, Leningrad from Germans, as it situated too close to the Finnish border. They were worried, that Finland, despite it’s neutral position to WW2 would still allow Germans to attack through it, or could not stop them from doing it. Finland refused the request to use the land for military purposes, so SU attacked.

Now imagine. You sit peacefully in your home, listening to the news on the radio, and you hear that your country is being attacked by a country of a massive size, with an army 4 times the size of yours, and that is only counting their strength in soldiers sent your way. (If it was USA, it would probably mean something like the combined forces of all European countries, Russia, and probably South-America as well, and I don’t think it would still create terror similar to that of Finns.) You know that Sweden, on the west side of your country, has agreed not to join the war on your behalf in exchange of a promise by Russians that they won’t cross their border when they get there. WHEN they get there, they say. They are planning to walk all over your country in two weeks, and there is nothing stopping them, but an army of 250 000 men shooting pea guns. An army including your husband, your sons, your father and your brothers, and not only them, but every man you’ve ever known, unless they are over or under that age limit of 60 or 18. You thought they went to military rehearsal, but now you know they were sent to the border in case there is a war.

If you would live in Helsinki, the capital, you would know to expect bombing. You would know exactly where the bomb shelters are, and how many seconds it takes for you to collect your kids and run to the shelter. You would sleep with your clothes on, so you wouldn’t have to run to the streets in your nightie. The city would be sitting in a total darkness at nights, and what long nights they are in the winter, so that the army can misguide the Soviet bombers to bomb an inhabited island before the actual city by lighting little fires in there. Other towns were not as well protected as Helsinki was, and I used to live in a house that was one storey shorter than it started out with, the Russian bombers had shortened it a bit. At least it was still standing. The attic, where I dried my laundry, once was the top floor, now blown to pieces. Someone had lived there. I hope they heard the warning sirens in time and ran to bomb shelters before that happened.

You would eventually decide that it would be better for your children to live somewhere safe and you ship them off to Sweden to be raised by people you have never met, and to be treated like second class citizens all through their childhood and young adult life. You, and many of your friends would never see the children again, and some of them would never learn to speak your language. You would no longer work at what ever you did before, but you would be making clothes for the army, or filling shells of bullets with gun powder. You would go to the store hoping they had something to sell today, as you ran out of food a week ago. My grand mother once told me how she spent her last money on a bowl of pea soup at the bus station knowing that the next time she would get paid was a week from that, and she would not have a thing to eat until then. And that was after the war.

Should you live close to the Russian border, you would have left in a big hurry after the news… A little before possibly. You would pack everything you can on a horse carriage and take that last look at your home knowing that it might not be standing the next time you see it. You might not ever see it again, because your home village would be overtaken by Russians and you could never return. If you decided to stay regardless, like some people did, you wouldn’t know what would happen to you. There are no rules on a war path.

It was an impossible war, but the Soviet Union never made it to the Swedish border. Now look at the statistics here and understand why it was a miracle that Finland survived.

We received help from USA in the form of clothing and food, which we paid back before scheduled. (How ever did my grand parents and their generation ever managed that I don’t have an idea off.)

(Click on Read more to find some videos of the war, in English aired in USA.) (more…)