Jewish Finns fought alongside Germans in WWII
Passing through a gate into the Jewish cemetery, one immediately notices on the right-hand side a small area demarcated by a low fence made of heavy iron chains. Here lie Finnish-Jewish war heroes - young men who fought and died in the wars of 1939-44 between Finland and the Soviet Union. A large black stone slab with the dates 1939-1944, a Star of David and a picture of a hand brandishing a sword engraved in it, dominates the small plot where the graves are arranged in rows. Each grave is marked by a marble slab bearing the name and dates of birth and death of the person buried there....
The Jewish war heroes' graves and the monument on the hill are emblematic of the fate of Jews in Finland during the years 1941-44, when the country was allied with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union, their common enemy. The fact that Finnish Jews fought in an army allied with Hitler's Germany is very peculiar - not only in the history of Finland, but also in that of World War II, when the Nazis put their lunatic racial fantasies into practice and declared that Jews all over the world were enemies who had to be exterminated down to the last soul....
The Winter War (1939-40 ) between Finland and the Soviet Union broke out after the Finnish government rejected Stalin's territorial claims and demands for military bases to be built inside the country. In that war, Finland fought bravely, and alone, against the overwhelmingly more powerful enemy. It lost important areas to Russia, the Finnish Karelia among them, but was not occupied. Finnish Jews fought in the Winter War on equal footing with their countrymen; 15 were killed on the battlefield. Altogether about 25,000 Finns lost their lives in that war. Among them were 1,000 civilians who died in the bombardments of cities and towns.
I meet Aron Livson in his beautiful terraced house in the lush area of Espoo, the Western satellite town of the greater Helsinki area. Livson is 94 years old but still in good shape both physically and mentally. He's the chairman of the Finnish-Jewish War Veterans' Association, which was established in 1979 and belongs to the national war veterans' organization.
Livson has made his living in private business. His father was originally a skilled artisan, who established a factory called Eastern Finland's Cap Factory, in Vyborg (in Finnish Viipuri ), the main town of Finnish Karelia, during the early years of the country's independence. The younger Livson performed his military service in the infantry regiment of Vyborg's famous Karelian Guard. After completing his peacetime service and returning to civilian life, Livson was again called to arms in 1939 just before the Winter War broke out.
During that war, Livson fought in the Karelian Isthmus, defending this legendary and nostalgia-ridden area between Lake Ladoga and the Gulf of Finland, which the country lost at the end of the war, reconquered during the first phase of the Continuation War in 1941, and finally lost again after heavy battles in the summer of 1944.
When the Continuation War broke out in June 1941, Aron Livson found himself fighting again in the Isthmus. After the Finnish forces had crossed the old border, with some disgruntlement among the ranks, they advanced, captured East Karelia's capital Petrozavodsk and reached the important river Svir, which flows from Lake Onega to Lake Ladoga....
Livson recalls that he was always the only Jew in the units where he fought, and he never saw any German officers at the front. The first Germans he came across during the war were in Kotka when he was doing office work. His father had established a shop in the same town. "My father never let German soldiers enter his boutique," Livson notes....
Three Finnish Jews were awarded the German Iron Cross for their courage in battle, but all of them quite demonstratively refused to accept it. One of them was Captain Salomon Klass, who saved a German unit from a siege in one of his military exploits. Klass, whose family came from the Baltic countries, had been active in the right-wing Civil Guard in Finland before the war. In the late 1930s, he lived for four years in Palestine, where he was a member of the Etzel underground. Klass was still in Palestine in 1939 when he got the call to serve in Finland's army, before the outbreak of the Winter War....