I meet Niko Rytilahti, 28, and Samuli Antilla, 26, in a forest car park between Kemijärvi and Salla at a memorial commemorating the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1940.
Niko wants to tell me his story. His friend Samuli is translating. Niko was born in Salla, about ten kilometres from the Russian border. When he was three years old, he moved to Rovaniemi with his parents. But he regularly spent his holidays with his grandparents in Salla. As the village was shrinking and ageing, he spent a lot of time with the older generation. "I listened to their stories and was fascinated. I became more and more curious and asked more and more questions." At some point, he started recording these interviews. He now has 190 interviews with people of his grandparents' and great-grandparents' generation from Salla. He has already published some of them in books. But Niko also likes to tell stories himself. His favourites are those of his great-grandmother Helli (1926 - 2017) and his great-grandfather Anselmi (1917-1999). Helli told them to him again and again.
Helli was born in Old-Salla, the part of the municipality of Salla that is now in Russia as a result of the Winter War. Helli became an orphan in 1931 and then lived with a foster family in a small village near the present-day border. During the Continuation War ((1941 to 1944), Helli worked as a domestic servant at different places. During the war, she also met her future husband, Anselmi Aska.
Anselmi Aska came from the northwestern corner of Salla, from the remote Aska farm. He had already fought in the Winter War on the northern front. But when the Continuation War broke out in June 1941, Anselmi was sent to the front in Karelia.
In 1944, he received a two-week leave and planned to return home to Lapland to see Helli. But in June, the Soviet Union unexpectedly launched a major offensive on the Finnish fronts. Anselmi was supposed to return to the front, but he was unsure about going back. He had had a dream that the war would end badly for Finland – and he wanted to see Helli one more time. So he boarded a train headed for the front and had his papers stamped so the official records would be in order. But Anselmi managed to travel all the way home to the Aska farm by train.
During Anselmi's leave, his older brother Matti also received a draft notice. The outlook for the war seemed grim, and the brothers decided not to return to the front. But they had to do something to prevent the authorities from noticing their desertion. So the brothers went to the train station in the village of Kursu, showed their military IDs to the military police, boarded the train, and then secretly got off at the next stop. They traveled through the wilderness toward their home in Ahvenselkä. The brothers hid in a barn near their family’s home. From their hiding place, Anselmi wrote a letter to Helli, asking her to come to the barn and bring them food. That was the beginning of Anselmi and Helli’s life together.
Then the Lapland War (1944 to 1945) between Finland and Germany began. The Finnish army evacuated the population and the livestock. Later, the Germans continued the evacuation, before burning everything behind them. Helli was afraid of the German soldiers, and Anselmi feared the Finnish ones – so they fled together.
The Germans had ordered Anselmi and Helli to herd cattle toward the evacuation route, and they walked along a path with a group of German soldiers behind them. At a bend in the trail, they decided to escape across a swamp into the wilderness, away from their German escorts. The soldiers tried to follow but couldn't go far – only locals knew how to move across those swamps, where one had to step in the right places to avoid sinking. Helli and Anselmi managed to build a small forest cabin, a hiding place, where they spent the entire winter alone, without any contact with the outside world. They survived because Anselmi, being Sámi, knew how to live off the land. But they had no information about the course of the war.
The brother Matti was directed by the Germans towards Rovaniemi and ended up spending three weeks in a German prison camp,
until the prisoners were released during the war. After the war, Matti lived in his home village of Ahvenselkä in Salla, working as a reindeer herder.
After the war, Anselmi was summoned to Kemijärvi for questioning over desertion. But the Control Commission that the Soviet Union had sent to Finland had decreed that former front deserters
should no longer be prosecuted or harmed. Anselmi was released and allowed to marry Helli. Their first child was born in 1945.
This story is based solely on the tales told by Niko Rytilahti as he heard them from his great-grandmother.
