Abstract
During the Second World War, many Estonians buried family possessions before fleeing overseas. Yet their hopes of returning soon to recover them were dashed by the postwar Soviet occupation. During the long years of exile, these possessions were transformed from everyday objects into a kind of repository for memories. One way for exiles to remember their homeland and sustain their dreams of return was to tell stories. Some managed to retrieve their belongings while in exile, others went back to find them after the fall of the Soviet Union. This chapter examines a selection of stories about underground wartime hoards in order to show how family traditions lend a human dimension to grand narratives of the recent past.
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Acknowledgments
The research presented here forms part of the project Artefactual Memories, which is supported by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies. A full account of the Estonian study may be found in Treasured Memories (Burström 2012).
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Burström, M. (2013). Buried Memories: Wartime Caches and Family History in Estonia. In: Beaudry, M., Parno, T. (eds) Archaeologies of Mobility and Movement. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology, vol 35. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6211-8_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6211-8_7
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