Book is wrapped in tissue paper, and when it is taken out of its cardboard box, it must be protected from fingerprints with protective gloves. It is the only piece in the War Museum.
The book has not been displayed in the War Museum’s exhibition for years. You can’t show it anyway other than a badge of honor or an ammunition belt. When it has been on display opened from the central opening, it should have been placed high up in the display case.
It gives a view of the war that is not usually found in museums and history books. The pictures of the faces of the 129th soldier who died in the winter war remain in my mind.
“At the time, we considered that one opening of this was enough. You have to think about the customer base as a whole, when there are also a lot of small children as visitors,” says the exhibition manager Lauri Haavisto.
And the pictures cannot be presented as such in this story either.
“At the War Museum, we deal with death every day, but this book is particularly sad to look at. This is one of the few objects that you can really feel in front of, there is somehow a special atmosphere here,” says Haavisto.
The cover of the book reads the small-gesture title “Tunmetmattima hautatutu haudavainajja”. There is little actual text, only one initial page. It shows the essential:
“This list must be shown to relatives of the fallen who have not received information about their fallen heroes. Considering the quality of the matter, the list should not be left for others to browse at all”, read the instructions in the opening words.
On November 30, it will be 83 years since the start of the Winter War.
Face photos are black and white photos the size of a passport photo. Some of the deceased have a lot of bandages on their faces.
Catalog had to be collected and printed in the early summer of 1940 in order to get a name for the soldiers who were buried as unknown. There was no other way than to take face pictures of the fallen soldiers before burying them.
They could then be shown in vicar’s offices and guardianships to relatives whose son, spouse, father, brother or other relative had disappeared in the battles during the war months from November 1939 to March 1940.
If the relative recognized who was in the picture, the information had to be forwarded to the unit called Kotijoukkien rovastintoimisto in Kaivopuisto, Tähtitorninkatu, Helsinki. Now the Mission Church is located at the same address.
The war museum does not know how many books or catalogs were printed and where they were distributed.
The list of faces starts on page 5. The photos are passport size and black and white, and they are mostly taken from the front. The dead are tidy, and many of the pictures also show white bandages.
Each image’s caption lists identifying features such as height, hair color, and body shape.
Nowadays looking at it, two essential things stand out. The deceased are young, i.e. the age starts in their twenties, yet many are missing part of their teeth. However, it was also a way of identification.
Likewise, their height is short by today’s standards, many adult men are more than 160 centimeters tall.
“Height 163 cm; body shingle; hair dark; beard light; missing teeth; age approx. 25 years“, defined the caption of one of the deceased who looks almost asleep.
“Length 170 cm; body stocky; hair light brown; teeth intact, few, hands and arms strong.”, read another young man’s caption.
One of them might have been at sea:
“Tattoos; on forearm of left hand lifebuoy, two flags, anchor; sea level inside the ring and the rising sun.”
Most of the pictures are such that their relatives could probably recognize their own. So not too much time had passed between the death and filming, and the facial injuries weren’t too big.
There are also faces that are almost completely wrapped in bandages. In these cases, it may have been relied on that other identifying marks such as the license plate number help to find the identity.
“Some of them have clear shrapnel injuries on their faces, maybe from a grenade, but many have intact faces as well. In some cases, you can see that the deceased have been on the field for a long time,” says Haavisto.
Exhibition manager Lauri Haavisto from the War Museum.
He also reminds that the attitude towards the deceased was in a certain way more straightforward at that time.
“In Finland at that time, it was not unusual to keep the deceased, for example, in a container in a shed at home, when they could not be buried right away, for example because of the frozen ground.”
When the lists came to be examined by the relatives in the vicar’s offices in the summer of 1940, it was already clear to the relatives that the missing soldier they were missing was probably dead. At that time, several months had passed since the war.
It’s still hard to imagine what kind of moments were experienced in vicar’s offices when, for example, parents recognized their son’s bruised face from the list. Already during the war, in some situations, the relatives had the opportunity to identify those who were placed in the coffin the deceased.
The list also tells about a bigger issue, the ability to survive. Ravaged by the Winter War, Finland as a society was willing and able to search for the names of its unknown heroes immediately after the war.
The topic the best expert in post-war Finland must have been a medical consultant Lauri Saario (1920–1997), who served during the Continuation War as the head of the company and obtained his doctorate in medicine and surgery in 1961.
In 1986, the war history periodical published Saario’s article about his research, in which he explained the situation of the unidentified deceased during the wars – i.e. the years 1939–45 – and the problems related to the evacuation of the fallen.
“Unknown soldier” was a designation that meant a hero deceased who was buried unidentified, and the same term was also used on their tombstones or crosses. There were actually a lot more of them than the 129 deceased photographed in the book.
Memorial Day for the fallen heroes was celebrated throughout the country on May 19, 1940. In the photo, relatives at the graves in Lappeenranta, where the 487 fallen of the Karelian Isthmus were blessed. The inscription “unknown” was on 38 plates.
Finland was in many ways unprepared for war when the Winter War began, and it was also the same when it came to caring for the fallen. It was undefined, Saario writes. It wasn’t until the end of January 1940 that Headquarters gave instructions about the KEKs, i.e. Evacuation Centers for the Fallen.
Even before this, the Headquarters had issued an instruction that was not known in other warring countries: the fallen would be sent to their home regions for burial. Before that, of course, the deceased had to be identified.
The means in the KEK were the information obtained from the basic unit and a tactile plate worn around the neck with a series of numbers. It just wasn’t a sure way, because the soldiers sometimes treated them indifferently, they were exchanged during sauna trips and they were deliberately wasted as “bad omens”. According to him, the mental training was not sufficient.
In the winter war, the feeler plates were round-edged, as can be seen on the left below the number block, in the continuation war the model changed to a more rectangular shape.
“However, it is understandable that troops preparing for battle cannot talk very widely about future losses, mutilations beyond recognition or remaining on the field,” Saario wrote.
The Winter War after the end, around 160 deceased were photographed, and 129 of them ended up being part of the list, which was made in the early summer of 1940 for the investigations of the Sotarovast office. Photographing the faces of the dead continued in the Second War as well.
About 26,000 Finnish soldiers died in the winter war. According to Saario’s research, 220 of those who fell during that time remained unidentified. The number can be considered small, but it was only a small part. The final number was only revealed when, during the Continuation War, the front advanced to the battlegrounds of the Winter War, such as Summa and Kollaa.
“In addition to this, during the Continuation War, 2,137 skeletons of fallen Finns left behind in winter war battle stations and collapsed dugouts or buried by the enemy were found, of which 950 remained unidentified,” he writes.
The list of faces turned out to be very useful in the end, as it helped the relatives to identify the identity of 80 deceased.
The book will be displayed in a display case in the War Museum’s Manees in Suomenlinna on Wednesday, November 30, from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Admission to the museum is free at that time.
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