Originally posted by Siaf__csf
As what goes with your idea of U.S. saving the world with the marshall plan, as in the recent article posted in another thread, finland is a good example of surviving without a dime of marshall money - and paying the war retributions in full while doing so.
I was going to tell you about my Great Uncle Emil---your Great Great
Uncle--- my grandfather, William Odella's brother
I write to his daughter, Gertrude, who lives in Finland. They lived in
Clinton, Massachusetts, and around 1935 or so, there was great wave by the
communists to have U. S. people come over there (Karelia) to make the "great
society." I guess that was a society where everyone prospered. Bless his
heart, My great uncle Emil fell for it. As I have read from books
recommended by Gertrude, the people sold everything they had and used the
money to get to Karelia and I guess whoever got the money, kept some of it.
The Finns, Swedes, etc. who returned were not unusual people, but people
with trade skills. They built brick houses where there was no lumber by
making brick, they had engineers who put in electricity and built dams, etc.
I think you get the idea. Stalin was in charge, a horrible maniacal despot,
probably worse than Hitler because he caused the deaths of more people. The
Finns and Scandinavians built up an area better than what the Russians
had... What was their thank you. The purge!!!!! For no reason really,
except maybe they had come from America and whatever stupid reason someone
like Stalin needs to use, the purge began. People were taken in the middle
of the night and they disappeared. This happened over and over and over
again, and it didn't matter who was taken, fathers, mothers, sons,
daughters, etc. On my first Christmas Eve, December 24, 1937, they came for
Great Uncle Emil. What for? God knows.
My heart breaks for him because he had no idea of what he was getting into
as he and the others were not Communist because at that time they didn't
even know what it meant.
Gertrude tells me they eventually got a death certificate saying he died of
gangrene. When Khrushchev took over, they finally got a death certificate
saying that he was shot in February of 1938. She wrote me that she wondered
if he got gangrene before or after he was shot. The reason my heart breaks
for a great uncle I never knew is that I feel how terrible he must have felt
knowing he brought his family into this - a wife, a daughter, a son.
This was the purge. Gertrude tells me the story is the same for everyone.
I had to order the books she recommended from Superior, Wisconsin, which
were written by a woman she knows who as a child was taken to Karelia by her
father and all of the fates of these poor people was basically the same.
This was sent to me by my cousin Gerri not long ago when we started putting together our family history..
The Finns have always paid their debts--I know because my grandfather sent money back to the "old country" to help pay this off-----so a lot of the money didnt come from Finland itself, it came from Finns living in countrys (USA) that allowed them the chance to repay the debt......
