I want to thank the IHRC and the Global REM series
for giving me this opportunity to
discuss my PhD dissertation work.
I'm going to begin with a short story
and the scene here is a snow storm
at the end of December 1945.
The story is about a ship called Erma.
The Erma was a 37 foot fluyt; it had started out
across the Atlantic Ocean, across the North Sea, all the way in Stockholm, Sweden.
And it had made its way through the Gota Canal,
across Sweden, made its way through the North Sea,
through the Irish Sea, across the Atlantic,
stopped off along the way in Norway for repairs.
It's hull was rotting and it had to be replaced
with copper plates; dodged mines in the North Sea;
evaded Soviet patrol boats working out of Bornholm
in the Baltic; stopped off in Ireland for awhile because
of these very fierce storms which apparently forced
the Queen Elizabeth back into port; stopped off at
the Madeira Islands where the stow mates were not let ashore
for the first few days because local authorities thought they
were Russian communists out on a spying mission.
Eventually they make it almost in sight of the United States
but there are these fierce autumn gales that began to drive
them out to sea several times.
They've run out of fuel, they're running out of food and water
and they face the real possibility of simply dying out
there in the Atlantic.
But they're rescued somewhat at the last minute by a passing US
war ship who gives them some precious diesel fuel so they
don't have to rely on the wind to get into a landfall in the
US.
It also gives them all kinds of things like cigarettes and
alcohol and American magazines - all the necessities of life.
Eventually they make it to the US Army mine base in Little
Falls, Virginia.
Now aboard this vessel, this tiny ship,
are 16 people, all Estonians.
The journey in total took 128 days.
So they were there at sea for a considerable amount of time.
And these folks arrive here in the United States and certainly
they don't have a visa; they haven't been invited.
Some of them don't have a passport.
About the only identification that they have are Swedish alien
identity papers.
And that's about it because that's all they got when they
were refugees in Sweden.
So they show up and here they are,
amongst the first probably post-war illegal aliens as we
might term them today although I haven't found them called that
at the time, in 1945.
And certainly amongst the first post-war boat people.
They had decided kind of spontaneously on their own in
1945 in Sweden to pack up and take their chances coming across
the Atlantic and hoping for the best here in the United States;
hoping that the United States would accept them.
The term boat people that is attached to them - and actually
I'm hesitant to take credit for that.
I kind of thought of it and then as I was doing more research I
stumbled across an article by Vancouver Swedish Press
published in 1991 where the author was thinking about what's
going to happen once the Soviet Union finally collapses.
There are these tiny Baltic States right across the sea from us.
There'd been a wave of refugees in 1945,
there's going to be another wave in 1991 once the Soviet Union
goes under.
And so the author of the article was thinking you know,
really the first wave of post-war boat people occurred
already in 1944 and 1945 and they were these Baltic refugees
fleeing the Soviet occupation of their homeland.
So that's the initial one of these boat people.
I'll talk more about them in just a second;
I just want to say a few words about the origin of this project
and how I got into this.
I'm Estonian-American, been researching Estonian-American
history.
There's not a lot written on the Estonian-American community.
A lot has been done on Canada, in Sweden,
Australia; not that much on the US.
About the closest I've come to it is this little chronology and
fact book and if you've ever done kind of basic research in
immigration history, especially as an undergrad,
you've run across them.
But they provide this little kind of year by year
chronological history.
And that's kind of the closest thing to a narrative history of
Estonian-Americans as we have.
And buried in there, around the year 1945,
1956, there are a couple paragraphs about the Erma and a
whole bunch of other boats that came over after the war.
And I remember the first time I read that and I said,
wow, I've never heard of that before.
And there were a whole bunch of them.
And I thought, this is a really interesting and forgotten aspect
of certainly Estonian-American history but I think of US
history in general.
So I became much more interested in that and thought that this
might be something that if I can track it down there might be a
good story here for me.
Ultimately there might be the nub of a dissertation here as
well.
I also thought you know I had grown up in the 70s and 80s.
I had grown up with a certain image of who constituted boat
people.
Starting off of course with refugees from Southeast Asia and
then moving on to the Cuban boat people,
the Haitian boat people.
So to kind of see this term applied to essentially my own
community was, I think, it provoked a lot of introspection
on my part.
I kind of wanted to think about what kind of connections can I
make here between refugees in 1945 and refugees today because
as it turns out this is an ongoing problem in the world
community.
Refugees - there were millions of them in World War II.
The refugee problem hasn't went away.
As I mentioned the Erma was the first but it wasn't the last,
there were a whole bunch more.
And I've been trying to track them down.
Here's kind of what I've got so far for the United States.
The historians who do talk about this,
one is Jann Pennar in this chronology and fact book and he
says that there were 34 Viking boat voyages to the New World;
so North and South America; 1945 and 1951.
Another historian working out of Canada,
Carl Ahn has said that there were 46 between 1946 and 1949.
So there's these wide discrepancies between the
different numbers and I've been trying to track down and confirm
independently as many as I can.
And I've tried to take a look at Pennar's numbers and Ahn's
numbers.
Ahn says there were about 17 that came west 1946 to 1949.
And so if we include the Erma then we're probably missing from
here at least 9 boats.
If the Erma isn't included then I'm missing 10.
So this is an incomplete list.
And usually the way I find them out is from different newspaper
articles.
They'll mention in newspaper or magazine articles that there was
another boat at this time or in this place and I can begin to
fill it in and track down those boats in particular places at
particular times.
I'd love to get a hold of a complete list and I think I know
where Ahn got his numbers.
Unfortunately right now I think I have to travel to Canada to
get my hands on it and I haven't had a chance to do that.
I hope to do that someday.
For the moment I'm kind of stuck doing this.
So here we have about 7 or 8 and you can kind of get a sense of
they're coming in different waves.
The Erma's the first one in December 1945,
very late in the season.
The sailing season's really in the late summer,
early fall.
So you'll see a wave her in '46, just a few months after the
Erma.
You'll see another wave here in the following year in September,
October, in fall.
There's another wave in '48.
Haven't found any in 1949.
From what I can tell some are coming I just don't know exactly
where and when.
Found a couple in 1950.
Apparently they were still coming in 1951;
I haven't found out which one yet.
You'll note the ethnic groups starting off primarily as
Estonians and moving to Estonians and Latvians.
Ultimately by the end we're really getting a mixed set of
passengers; some Poles, Lithuanians,
Russians.
Hard to tell whether these are Polish by ethnicity or polish by
nationality depending on how Americans chose to classify
these passengers.
Most of them are starting from Sweden.
Sweden, as it turned out, was the first step for many of these
Baltic refugees; one of the closest places for them to flee
from the advances of the Red Army.
Depending upon who you ask there may have been anywhere from
30-40,000 Baltic refugees in Sweden in 1945.
About 5000 of those would have been Latvians and the rest would
have been primarily Estonians.
Now Sweden kind of falls outside of the international refugee
system that's being created after the war.
Sweden was a neutral country.
It will of course be a party to the United Nations but it wasn't
a belligerent during the war.
So there's a system of displaced persons camps being created in
Western Europe and in Germany and Italy in particular.
And if you happen to be a refugee in Germany in 1945,
it's possible that you'll fall under the classification of
displaced person and with that you'll get certain protections,
you'll be able to go to a camp, you'll be able to get some
shelter and some clothing, but not so for the refugees in
Sweden.
In some ways the Swedish policy affords them a great deal of
opportunity.
The Swedish policy is to integrate these refugees as
quickly as possible into Swedish society.
And so you want to for example, find them jobs in the profession
they've been trained in as quickly as possible.
And so if you're an academic from say Tartu University in
Estonia, you know, teaching literature,
they'll try and find you some kind of academic job in Sweden.
And so actually the situation in Sweden for some of these
refugees isn't too bad in that they're able to transition
pretty quickly from refugee into a self- supporting member of
Swedish society.
And it's this that allows them in some cases to purchase the
boats to sail across to the United States.
Because this represents really a lot of money.
How can they get their hands on all that money as penniless,
bateless refugees; aliens in Sweden.
That's because they're able to work within the Swedish economy.
So they're spending tens of thousands of kroner in order to
purchase these boats.
Now you might be saying, okay, if things were so good in Sweden
why would they want to leave?
Well actually their status in Sweden is uncertain.
Even though they might be integrated economically and to
some extent maybe socially, politically they still lacked
citizenship.
They're still aliens in Sweden.
And so they can't leave the country and re-enter it.
So there's that.
The other problem of course is that after the war,
the Soviet Union is leaning on all of its neighbors.
The Soviet Union claimed to have annexed the Baltic States in
1940; all of the citizens of the Baltic States were citizens of
the Soviet Union as far as the Soviets were concerned.
But once the war ended they said we want all of our citizens back
and so you need to repatriate them.
And of course in some cases repatriation did occur.
And so there was this constant fear that at any moment the
Swedes might give in to Soviet pressure and send all of the
Baltic refugees back unmasked to the Soviet Union.
And of course Sweden, in at least one case,
had done exactly that.
There's a somewhat notorious case in late '45,
early '46 involving 167 Balts who had served in some capacity
in the German military and the Soviets demanded them back as
war criminals.
And so the Swedes complied.
Some of the men involved refused to go back;
they went on a hunger strike.
Some of them committed suicide or tried to commit suicide.
One was successful.
The Swedish public was opposed...