Baltic Refugees of World War II and Their Descendants: Resettlement and Adaptation in Four Lands

Abstract

At the end of World War II, an unprecedented burst of politically motivated emigration occurred from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, to escape incorporation into the Soviet Union. This report describes processes of resettlement and adaptation in four lands: Sweden, Canada, Australia, and the United States of America. The analysis examines how refugees’ and descendants’ experiences were shaped by selectivity of evacuation, camps for displaced persons, clustering patterns, and host country policies. The traumas, disruptions, and deprivations experienced during several years of war, foreign occupation, and rootlessness in refugee camps did not prove to create enduring disadvantages, as the second generation more than made up for the ground lost (at least for several years) by their parents. The yearslong journey of the refugees in finding new homes and new careers turned out to be most conducive to the creation of a global network of cohesive, viable, and interdependent ethnic communities. The Baltic refugees prefer to think of themselves as maintaining the traditions of their homelands, but they learned to do some important things differently on the way to new lands, through a process of social levelling and cooperation within their own local ethnic group, as well as through interacting with other local communities of their own kind, with other Baltic groups, and with their new neighbors in the host countries. Later generations will not continue to do everything like their elders did, but substantial numbers of descendants still show a rather high degree of commitment to maintaining their cultural and even linguistic heritage in some form.