Tag #116709 - Interview #99625 (Dora Feiman)

In 1949 the second deportation of Estonian residents occurred. However, while the first deportation in 1941 involved Estonian residents despite their nationality, the second deportation was focused on Jews. Some people returned to Estonia from exile after the war. The Jews among them were deported again, including women and children. My niece’s mother-in-law Lia, who is living in the USA now, was deported twice, and she was just a child when this happened the first time. Of course, there are few of them living now, only those who were children at that time. This was terrible and one wouldn’t argue with that, but I do think that those who were deported had a chance to survive. Of course, the exile was hard, and the deportees were involved in wood cutting or other hard physical work and they were starving, but at least they weren’t shot at. Many died, but there were survivors as well while Hitler was killing all Jews, and the survivors were few, if any. That made a difference.