Housing had been arranged and a measure of normalcy began to settle in as life routines took shape. Eventually Ralph began to date and at one point developed a serious relationship with a young Jewish woman named Elka. The relationship broke off because Elka would be unable to have children because of "experiments" the Nazis had performed while she was in a concentration camp.
There were countless Eastern Europeans seeking refuge from the Soviet darkness and much of the paperwork Ralph was processing involved helping these refugees reach America, his own dream. Working there helped him see that it was possible. Germany, rebuilding from the destruction caused by the war, could hardly absorb these masses.
For Ralph, the war had ended, but there was still the question of where he would go.
Returning to Estonia was out of the question. The Soviet Union had taken control of the country again, and thousands of Estonians who had fled west faced the same problem. They had survived the war, but they no longer had a country to which they could safely return.
For several years Ralph worked for the Americans in Europe. His ability with languages helped him, as did his typing skills and experience with office work. By then he had learned English well enough to make himself useful. He worked with paperwork involving refugees and displaced persons, people who, like himself, had been left stranded by the war. There were hundreds of thousands of them across Europe.
In June 1948, President Harry Truman signed the Displaced Persons Act. The law created a special means for European refugees and displaced persons to immigrate to the United States. The original legislation authorized the admission of more than 200,000 people during the following two years. Many came from Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, countries that had been overrun during the war or had fallen under Soviet control.
The process was not simply a matter of buying a ticket. Applicants were screened and had to meet American immigration requirements. Arrangements generally had to be made for employment and housing so that the newcomers would not become public charges. Churches, relief organizations, relatives, employers and ethnic organizations helped find sponsors and jobs for those who qualified.
For an Estonian such as Ralph, the new law offered something that had been missing since he left home in 1944: the possibility of beginning again somewhere permanent.
Ralph decided on America.
He remembered boarding a ship crowded with displaced persons, many of them Lithuanians. His recollection was that there were about 600 aboard. The ship was supposed to be bound for New York, but according to Ralph it was diverted and eventually landed at New Orleans.
Records from those years show that ships carrying displaced persons regularly left European ports, particularly Bremerhaven, for the United States. New York received most of them, although Boston and New Orleans were also ports of entry. Ralph remembered the year as 1948, which would place his voyage near the beginning of the American displaced-person resettlement program.
Whatever the name of the ship, Ralph had finally crossed the Atlantic.
After everything that had happened since leaving Estonia—the fishing boat, Danzig, the refugee camps, his travels across Germany and Austria, imprisonment, the end of the war and his years working for the Americans—he was now in the United States.
He eventually made his way to Minnesota.
Ralph settled in the Twin Cities, where employment opportunities were better. Minnesota also had a growing community of Estonians who had escaped their homeland during and after the war. Like Ralph, many had no expectation that they would soon be going home. Estonia remained incorporated into the Soviet Union, and it would remain so for decades.
As Ralph built his American life in the Twin Cities he found work, married and started a family, remaining there through most of his working years. English, which had once been simply another language he was trying to learn, became the language of his new country.
But he never forget Estonia.
In February 1950, only a relatively short time after his arrival in America, a man identified in the Estonian-American press as Ralph Känd took part in an Estonian Independence Day radio program at the University of Minnesota. He spoke in English, giving listeners a brief account of Estonia.
It would have been an appropriate subject for him. Estonia had declared its independence in 1918, only a short time before Ralph was born. He had grown up during the country's brief period of independence, watched the Soviets occupy it, lived through the German occupation and then fled when the Russians returned.
Though America was now his home, but Estonia remained part of him.
There were other Estonians who ended up in Minnesota following similar paths. Some settled in the Twin Cities; others eventually made their way north. One of the better-known Estonians in Duluth was Paul Vesterstein. After fleeing Estonia in 1944, Vesterstein eventually reached Augsburg, Germany, where he lived among roughly 2,000 Estonian displaced persons. In 1949 the Duluth YMCA sponsored him, allowing him to immigrate to the United States, arriving with a small suitcase and 28 cents in his pocket. Known locally as "the Count",he became a successful businessman and remained actively interested in Estonia throughout his life. Years later he would even import Estonia pianos to the United States.
There was something about Minnesota that was familiar to people from Estonia. The northern climate, forests, lakes and long winters were closer to the country they had left than much of America was.
Ralph, however, did not initially settle in Duluth for those reasons. He went where there was work. Duluth came much later.
After Ralph retired, his wife reached the point where she needed nursing-home care. Ralph brought her to Duluth. With employment no longer determining where he needed to live, he could choose where he wanted to spend his remaining years.
He chose Lake Superior.
Ralph found an apartment facing the lake. The climate and landscape of northeastern Minnesota were familiar to him, but it was the great expanse of cold water outside his window that most reminded him of Estonia and the Baltic Sea.
And Ralph didn't just look at it. He swam in it, which was how I met him.
One day in the early 1990s I was sitting on the beach at Park Point reading when I noticed an older man making his way toward the water. One of his legs was badly withered, the result of the childhood injury he had lived with nearly all his life. The other was strong.
He entered Lake Superior and swam for perhaps twenty minutes.
Eventually he came out of the water and made his way toward where I was sitting. We began talking.
I knew nothing about the man standing before me. I did not know about Estonia, his brother Karl, the Russians, the Germans, the fishing boat, the torpedoes, the refugee camps, the jail cell or the years he had spent trying to find a country where he could live in freedom.
I said yes.
"Come over to my apartment and I will tell you stories." And that was how this all began.
Ralph's final years were spent in Duluth, always in an apartment that faced the Great Lake Superior, kindling memories of the days of his youth in Tallin on the Baltic Sea, reminiscing over photos of his cousins, brother, father, mother and friends, especially Eitsi, his first love. It was his hope to die facing the lake, but that's another story.
THE END
RELATED
UPROOTED: Intro and Part One
UPROOTED: Part Two
UPROOTED: Part Three
UPROOTED: Part Four
UPROOTED: Part Five
UPROOTED: Part Six
UPROOTED: Part Seven
UPROOTED: Part Eight
UPROOTED: Part Nine
UPROOTED: Part Ten
UPROOTED: Part Eleven
UPROOTED: Part Twelve
UPROOTED: Part Thirteen
UPROOTED: Part Fourteen
UPROOTED: Part Fifteen
