They were given an hour to pack.Ī few hours after the start of the deportation the first trucks began to arrive at railroad cars waiting on sidings. All their property was declared to be subject to seizure. A decree declaring them to be under arrest or subject to deportation from their homeland without any due process was read aloud to them. Families who had gone to bed on Friday night with no inkling of anything bad about to happen, were woken up in the early morning hours by pounding on their doors. The first deportation raid was begun on the night of 13 June and early morning of 14 June in 1941. The two deportations that affected Estonia the most deeply, on 14 June 1941 and 25 March 1949, are annually observed as days of mourning. The Soviet occupation brought about an event that until then had only been read about in history books and which became the most horrible memory of the past centuries – mass deportations that affected people of all nationalities living in Estonia. In the aftermath of World War II, Estonia lost approximately 17.5% of its population. In the summer of 1940, the Soviet Union occupied Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as a result of the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union on 23 August 1939. Estonian World brings you some of those preserved images of life in Siberia.* The Vabamu Museum of Occupations and Freedom in Tallinn holds some memories and pictures of Estonians who were deported to Siberia by the Soviet Union.
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