Estonian Displaced Persons:
Coping with displacement through preserving Estonian culture
For a small country such as Estonia, with only a little over a million citizens, culture is an incredibly important part of people’s identity. So when the Nazis and Soviets occupied Estonia and forced the already small population to either endure the horrors of imprisonment, concentration camps and hard labor, or to scatter and flee, one of the only things that the people of Estonia could take with them was the shreds of the culture that stuck with them. One of the greatest coping methods for Estonian Displaced Persons was to keep their rich culture alive and to pass it down, as they had for centuries to the next generation. The Noukas family, comprised …show more content…
In the camps, Malle recalls the Estonians, especially the parents as very worried about what would happen to them, and where they would end up. At the end of the day however, their entire section of the camp would turn out en masse for dances, plays, choirs, folk songs, and other cultural activities that they brought with them from their homeland. Children and parents alike reveled in the brief reprieve that these fun times brought them and the small reminder of home that came with them, and used it as an opportunity to breathe new life into the traditions that they had to leave behind when they fled their country. The schools in the camps, set up by the Estonian parents, although understaffed and undersupplied, strove to preserve the Estonian culture as well. According to Malle: “I learned Etonian literature. We had no Estonian books, or any books really, but the teachers still found a way to teach us”. According to Silvia Salvatici’s article, in 1946 UNRRA Team 146 in Oldenburg even helped the Estonian’s to celebrate the anniversary of the Estonian Republic, which according to a report from Team 146 was “shared by adults and children alike in a spirit of enthusiastic cooperation between
Coping with displacement through preserving Estonian culture
For a small country such as Estonia, with only a little over a million citizens, culture is an incredibly important part of people’s identity. So when the Nazis and Soviets occupied Estonia and forced the already small population to either endure the horrors of imprisonment, concentration camps and hard labor, or to scatter and flee, one of the only things that the people of Estonia could take with them was the shreds of the culture that stuck with them. One of the greatest coping methods for Estonian Displaced Persons was to keep their rich culture alive and to pass it down, as they had for centuries to the next generation. The Noukas family, comprised …show more content…
In the camps, Malle recalls the Estonians, especially the parents as very worried about what would happen to them, and where they would end up. At the end of the day however, their entire section of the camp would turn out en masse for dances, plays, choirs, folk songs, and other cultural activities that they brought with them from their homeland. Children and parents alike reveled in the brief reprieve that these fun times brought them and the small reminder of home that came with them, and used it as an opportunity to breathe new life into the traditions that they had to leave behind when they fled their country. The schools in the camps, set up by the Estonian parents, although understaffed and undersupplied, strove to preserve the Estonian culture as well. According to Malle: “I learned Etonian literature. We had no Estonian books, or any books really, but the teachers still found a way to teach us”. According to Silvia Salvatici’s article, in 1946 UNRRA Team 146 in Oldenburg even helped the Estonian’s to celebrate the anniversary of the Estonian Republic, which according to a report from Team 146 was “shared by adults and children alike in a spirit of enthusiastic cooperation between