Russia threatens to use 'nuclear force' over Crimea and the Baltic states

[LiberalEsto]

92. Mine were in a DP camp in Germany too.

Heidelberg, I think.

Did the war and its aftereffects traumatize them too?

Losing one's homeland, being cut off from family, being worried sick about family and friends behind the Iron Curtain (what with deportations to Siberia), losing one's house and property and savings and possibly one's business or farm, having one's education cut short...was hard on them.

Life in the DP camps was extremely difficult too, with people trying to keep the Allies from sending them back to the countries they had recently fled in fear of their lives, trying to find a way to relocate to Sweden or the UK, U.S., Australia, Canada, someplace in a free country where they could try to start over, meanwhile coming close to starvation in the camps, living on little but potatoes and a monthly ration of horsemeat. My mother told me about stealing cabbages from the gardens of Germans just to survive.

And finally, if they were lucky, they got sponsors, and immigration papers, and made their way to a new country where, penniless, they had to find work and rebuild their lives from scratch, doing this all in a foreign language. My parents were fortunate to know English as well as Estonian, German and Russian, but they spoke with accents and struggled to increase their vocabularies. At least people from Eastern Europe had it easier in one sense: they were white and were able to blend in more easily than later refugees from Asian, Middle Eastern, African and Latin American countries.