Finnish Canadians in Sudbury remember a different war

Some of Heleena Heikkila's most vivid memories of the Second World War are when her husband Olavi would come back from the front.

The Finnish front lines, where the country's army spent years fighting the Soviet Union after the Russian invasion of Finland in 1939, were not far away, so soldiers would routinely get short visits at home.

Heikkila said she remembers her husband, who she married during the war in 1942, coming home with bullet wounds. Another time, he showed her how three of his toes had been amputated after they froze during the bitter cold that came to embody the conflict.

"I worry about 'is he going to get killed,' but I worry more if was to get captured," Heikkila, now 92, said from her apartment at the Finlandianursing home in Sudbury, Ont.

But Heikkila didn't just sit and worry. She was busy in the women's auxiliary, baking bread and knitting socks for the soldiers, cooking hot meals for the troops being rotated away from the front and working in a munitions factory.

Heikkila also remembers keeping horses hidden and windows covered at her family farm, so they wouldn't be targeted by Russian bombers.

She also remembers when the war ended in 1945.

"It was really hard to believe they were going to come home," Heikkila said with a laugh. "He looked so good, he never looked that good."

The pair had three daughters and two sons, but Olavi worried that they too would see war one day if the family stayed in Finland, so they immigrated to Canada in 1951.

Toivo Valenius is one of a handful of Finnish veterans still living in Canada.

The 92-year-old served in the army in a unit with the specialized task of stringing telephone wire sometimes even erecting posts behind the Finnish lines, so the different units could communicate with each other.

But that doesn't mean they were far from the fighting.

"We [were] close, you have to get the line in so they can talk," Valeniussaid.

His unit was so close that he remembers one time being woken up in their tents then told that the Russian army was heading their way.

"Everybody up and leave everything there, you can't take anything, only stuff you can carry," he said.

Both Valenius and Heikkila live at the Finlandia Village nursing home in Sudbury, where a room adorned with war artifacts including bullets, boots and a pair of fox fur gloves is maintained by the Sudbury Finnish War Veterans Association.

Reijo Viitalais the association's chair. He was born in 1945, but his father fought in the war, although Viitala said he rarely spoke about it.

He said Finnish veterans living in Canada would talk to each other about the war where Finland was, for a time allied with Germany but not to anyone else.

"They maybe thought they were now living in a country that was not of their own and as Finnish veterans, they had fought for the wrong side in a lot of ways, so they preferred to keeptheirexperiences quiet," said Viitala.

Morning North8:02Finnish Canadians remember their war on Remembrance Day

CBC reporter Erik White shares the stories of Finnish Canadians in Sudbury, who lived through a very different version of the Second World War than their future neighbours in Canada.