THE LEGACY OF SILENCE

The silence did not begin with me
To my sons, you who never received the whole story.
Just as I, my father and my grandmother never received the whole of ours.
There are moments that etch themselves into the body rather than the
memory. In the summer of 1970 I am standing in the schoolyard in Hageby.
The asphalt is warm; the smell of dust and grass hangs heavy in the air. I
am eighteen. She is seventeen. We stand side by side, yet the distance
between us already feels insurmountable.

I was born in 1951 in Sweden to Estonian parents. My mother and her family came in 1944 via a home-built boat from Nuckö in Estonia. They were Estonian Swedes. My father came to Sweden in 1947 via Kiel as a stowaway after he had fought for Estonia against the Bolsheviks in a German uniform. It was not until 1958 that I, my sister and father became Swedish citizens. My mother and her family became Swedish citizens in 1947.