0000000000067096
AUTHOR
Sinikka Maliniemi-piispanen
The lost mother tongue : An interview study with Finnish war children
This article presents the third study of an interview investigation concerning 10 Finnish war children who were evacuated during the World War II to Sweden and who did not return to live in Finland after the war. The focus is on how they remembered or did not remember their early experiences of displacement and on how they expressed thoughts about their childhood and their adult life. We found that all of them as adults still bore signs of trauma. The younger the children were at the time of the evacuation, the more difficult or even impossible it was for them to think or fantasize about the past. It was consequently not possible for them to work through their experiences of loneliness, abs…
Traces of the past: an interview study with Finnish war children who did not return to Finland after the Second World War
ABSTRACTThis paper is an in-depth qualitative study based on interviews with 10 Finnish children who were evacuated to Sweden during Second World War and who did not return to Finland after the war. The interviewees were asked to tell about their lives. Nine of them were between 2 and 5 years and one was 7 years old at the time of evacuation. The aim was to study how their childhood experiences were reflected in adult memories, how they remembered or did not remember. This paper focuses on the consequences of not knowing about one’s early life and also on whether it is possible to observe signs of the Finnish mother. She did not appear explicitly but could be sensed in the tendency of the i…