Figure 1.-- Here we see a Finnish evacuee boy still in Sweden during 1950. 5 years after the War. We are guessing that the boy is the Finnish evacueee child and the little girl is the child of the Swedish family which adopted him. There is some writing on the back in Swedish which may provide some information about them. Out your cursor on the image if you are able to translate.

Connections with their Swedish families became increasingly strong and in some cases dominant. Many of the younger children had forgotten all menories of their Finnish birth families. Most of the children reurned home, but quite a number stayed. About 15,000 or 20 percent, never retuned to Finland. [Korppi-Tommola and Sgm] They stayed with their foster families after the war. Most but all of these Swedish parents who did not return the evacuee children formally adopted them. Some Swedish parents didn’t formally adopt the children, but refused to return them. They made foster contracts giving them the right to raise the children. There are reports thn some Finnish parents did not insist on the return of the children. Here economic conditions and the Soviet threat may have been factors. And there were also returnees who went back to Sweden in the post-War period as adults.

Sources

Korppi-Tommola, Aura and Francis Sgm. "War and children in Finland during the Second World War," Paedagogica Historica (September 2008) Vol. 44, No. 4, pp. 445-55.

Paksuniemi, Merja. "Finnish refugee children’s experiences of Swedish refugee camps during the Second World War," Migration Letters Vol. 12, No, 1 (2015).

Created: 7:36 AM 12/11/2016
Last updated: 7:36 AM 12/11/2016