In 2020, the Estonian Cultural History Archives and the Association of Estonian Biographies launched the Letters in My Life collection campaign. Over the course of the campaign, Vaike Labi (née Teramaa) handed over to the archives a collection containing one hundred and fifty-seven letters from Canada, sent in 1957–2006 by her childhood friend Hans Jürmann, her brother Harri Teramaa, and the latter’s spouse Linda Pausk. In addition to the letters, the collection included one hundred and twenty photographs. The black-and-white photographs were taken in Germany just before the end of World War II and in England a few years after the end of the war. More than a hundred colour photographs document the lives of Estonian refugees who emigrated from Europe to Canada in the mid-20th century: their houses, home interiors, cars, sports, and cultural hobbies, as well as holiday trips. Despite the poor quality of the colour film, these photographs provide a good overview of trends in the visual self-representation of immigrants in the first post-war decades.

The article focuses on Harri Teramaa’s fifty-one letters to Vaike Teramaa (surnamed Labi since 1970). Like several other boys from his home village, Harri was recruited into the German Air Force Support Service in 1944. He was seventeen years old and was preparing to take over the management of the Raba farm from his father, but due to the war, this plan never came to fruition. During the war years, Harri did not send letters to his Estonian homeland and so his family had no knowledge of his fate until the mid-1950s. In 1957, Harri’s classmate Hans Jürmann, who, like Harri, had been recruited into the German Army, wrote a letter to his father. The letter revealed that after the war, when prisoners were released, Hans had emigrated to Canada. He had built a new home in Toronto, where he had adapted well and advanced a successful career. With the help of Hans, Vaike found contact with Harri, who had settled in Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay), Ontario, which in the 1950s was a small provincial port town inhabited mainly by immigrants of European background. Vaike began correspondence with him, which lasted until Harri’s death in 1986.

The sub-section ‘Selected letters’ presents the complete texts of five letters Harri wrote to Vaike in 1957–1979. Those letters highlight the most important nodes in the reunion story of a sister and a brother who had lost each other in the course of World War II. In the first letter, dated 19 December 1957, Harri tells about the retreat of German forces through war-torn Europe. He briefly but colourfully describes the battles in Latvia, the marshalling of the military unit of Estonian soldiers in Denmark, capitulation, the life of prisoners of war in Belgium and in the British zone in Germany, as well as the first years of exile in England after his release. The next letter focuses on sending parcels to the Estonian homeland. This theme dominated for years, since Harri supplied the family with clothing and footwear. Over time, the list expanded to include new items such as various beauty products (e.g., curling fluid) and even some medicines that were not sold in Estonian pharmacies. The letters create the impression that for Harri, sending parcels meant he was paying his moral debt: since he was supposed to inherit the farm, he felt responsible for the well-being of his close relatives. The letter written in March of 1968 reveals that since Harri did not consider it possible to visit his homeland, Vaike had decided to travel to Canada. Preparation of the necessary travel documents turned out to be a long bureaucratic procedure and ended in failure: the embassy refused to issue a Canadian visa to Vaike, but the reason remained unclear. Ten years later, Vaike managed to obtain a tourist visa for the United States to visit her cousin, who had also left his homeland as a refugee. In the letter dated 25 May 1979, Harri writes about his plan to travel to America at the same time with Vaike, whom he had not seen for thirty-five years. In the summer of 1979, the reunion of the sister and brother took place in New Jersey. The dates of Harri’s letters show that it had taken eleven years from the intention to meet to its fruition.

After Harri’s death in 1986, Vaike continued correspondence with her brother’s spouse Linda Pausk, which lasted for twenty years. One hundred and three letters from Linda to Vaike have been preserved. The letters reflect the most important events in the restoration of Estonia’s independence, in how an ordinary person experienced and understood the complicated political processes. The letters also contain interesting information on the boom in cross-border communication, including travelling, which began in the 1990s. The letters sent by Vaike to her Canadian relatives have not survived, but interviews with Vaike, conducted in 2020 and 2021 by her daughter Kanni Labi, help to fill some gaps in this tortuous family story.