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AESL General News VIC

Baltic Deportation Commemoration – we will remember you, brothers and sisters

On Sunday, 16th of June 2024, the representatives from the Melbourne Baltic communities and Ukraine gathered to commemorate those affected by mass deportations. A beautiful ceremony with memorable speeches was held at the Latvian Evangelical Lutheran Church in Melbourne.

The inspirational words of the speakers from each of the four countries were accentuated by the nostalgic melodies sung by the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian choirs. Their voices were left softly lingering through the small but cosy church full of people. Sirje Rivers, the Vice President of the Council of the Estonian Societies in Australia, represented the Estonian community and held a memorable speech reproduced for you here, so that you can get a sense of what this event was about and the sentiments of the speakers.

This was the speech by Sirje Rivers, the Vice President of the Council of Estonian Societies in Australia (AESL).

“Dear friends,
We have gathered on this sad occasion once again, as we do year after year. Thank you to the Latvian community for organising the commemoration in your beautiful church – it is especially meaningful today. It is almost that we are hoping for a miracle, and we join in prayer.

When I started to write this speech for the commemoration, I looked back at my speeches from the earlier years, and my heart sank. The previous speeches covered the deportations of the Estonian President Konstantin Päts and the Chief Commander Johan Laidoner. What started as a planned repression and extermination of the prominent people, was followed by a displacement of large groups with the intention to destroy the Estonian society.

Approximately 23% of the Estonian population belonged to the categories declared to be the enemies of the state. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Estonia lost approximately 17.5% of its population. 10% of the entire adult Baltic population was deported to various labour camps.

It is not a numbers game only. We all carry our personal stories. One of the past speeches covered my grandfather’s life: how he escaped deportation and ended up in Sweden, never seeing me, his family, or free Estonia again.

We are often not skilled or equipped enough to describe the horrors. Sometimes the various art forms can express these in more colour.

Another one of my past speeches talked about film scenarios that reflected what was behind the facts – a human squashed between two big players in history, the limited choices that people had, and made. From watching some of these films, we can get a glimpse of the real suffering and the humiliation that happened behind the Iron Curtain.

Families were broken up by the deportations, living next door to people who gave them up, betrayed them, to save themselves. And how it was to live with the knowledge that – because of your actions – the neighbour, friend, even a family member was deported, tortured, killed…

The deportations had many layers of horrors enforced by the invaders. This was a crime against humanity and human dignity. The subject matter is complicated; it has also been silenced to a degree, as it is a collective trauma. The pain suffered continues for generations.

Pain that is not healed helps us commemorate and remember, but the open wound still hurts.

We get together once a year, we share thoughts and stories, but there is also a silenced pain that continues living within. Pain that is not healed helps us commemorate and remember, but the open wound still hurts.

Estonia collects its stories of deportation in a dark mecca at the heart of Tallinn – the Museum Vabamu.
The Estonian Institute of Historical Memory initiates candles lit on the floor all over the Tallinn Freedom Square.
The Memorial Place in Maarjamäe gets a crown of flowers, as the Ministry of Defence commemorates.

Every town in Estonia has its own sacred memorial where people gather. This place is usually just a rock. A chosen symbolic rock that connects us to the ancient past, where we gather our strength from the Stone of Remembrance.

We will always remember you, our uprooted brothers and sisters, whose homelands were violently taken in 1941.

We will always remember you, our uprooted brothers and sisters, whose homelands were violently taken in 1941. But history is not just something that we learn to know by heart. We should also ask and answer questions within.

We ask the question – WHY? What IS Deportation, what was its real purpose? Without answering the question, are we equipped for the future? The aim of the communist terror was to suppress any resistance for times to come. To insert great fear in people, not only for now, not only for the regime, but also for each other – to kill ANY seeds for organised resistance.

Deportations were part of the overall violence directed against the territories occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939-1940. Note the files show that the Soviet security authorities started to collect data on persons to be repressed, ten years prior – in the early 1930s. The Ukrainian and Belarusian territories were the first to be affected by deportations back then. Is history repeating itself?

‘When something is not processed thoroughly, it has a tendency to repeat.’ This sentence was in my deportation speech back in 2021.

On 10th of November 2021, the Council of Estonian Societies in Australia wrote to the Australian Government: ‘Dear Senator, Estonians in Australia are deeply concerned about the developments at the European Union border. We strongly support the recent joint statement of the parliaments of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, where they condemn and oppose the triggering and escalation of a crisis organised by Vladimir Putin’s regime.’

Dear neighbours, dear friends, partners in fate.

Today in 2024, we commemorate deportation in a different context. It is not a distant memory that pains us from the past, a story to preserve and remember; this is not a collection at a museum or some old films, it is not anymore at the level of alerting letters to the government.

How many broken dreams and how many broken lives… and all of a sudden, it is not a distant past that we commemorate, but it is happening all over again.

All changed on 24th of February 2022, on the Estonia’s Independence Day, when Russia escalated what had already started in 2014, and the invasion happened once again. Right in the middle of Europe. We have millions of refugees fleeing Ukraine and more millions are displaced within the destroyed country.

We answered the question earlier – deportations, why? To insert fear. Not only for the regime, that would be too easy, but also fear for one another. This kind of fear that destabilises and shakes the ground, to the core.

This is what is different today. The spell of fear has ended. Ukraine has said NO TO FEAR.

All the democratic countries were astounded at Ukraine’s powerful NO to fear. This is the inner battle that Ukraine has won already. This is why all the democratic powers support Ukraine, to turn the tide, to stop the aggressor.

Whatever will happen, we are in this together. We are united by our shared history.

Whatever will happen, we are in this together. We are united by our shared history.

What can we do, being far from Europe? It is our responsibility to show our presence, support, to speak up, as community organisations. This is why today’s event carries double importance: we commemorate the past terrors but also stand strong for the future.

Our visibility proves that we support our background countries, and shows to Australia, that we are its loyal citizens who need their country to show democratic values are protected. Ukraine has received so much support from all over the democratic world, but we are not there yet. This is a historic moment in time. It really affects all the countries in the world. Evil spreads in various ways. It is breaking our hearts that we are at a crossroads once again.

We cannot see what the next step will be yet. But our every step counts.

It is important to remember that a miracle has already happened. We have already proven that we can rise like phoenixes from the ashes.

We are here to remind you that an escalation on a much bigger scale is a possibility. Or this may go on for a long time. The players on the world stage may change. It can feel almost like wishing for a miracle at this stage. It is important to remember that a miracle has already happened. We have already proven that we can rise like phoenixes from the ashes.”

Sirje Rivers
Vice President
The Council of Estonian Societies in Australia

16th of June 2024