Elmar Tamm remembers the letters thrown from a deportation train near Kadrina in 1941

Elmar Tamm, born in 1933, grew up in Kadrina in today's Lääne-Viru county. His parents had fled from Narva to Kadrina in 1918 to escape the communists. He remembers clearly how people around them began to disappear after Soviet rule was imposed in the summer of 1940. During the June deportation of 1941 he and other boys found by the railway a bundle of letters that deportees had thrown out of a wagon window, and he has kept those letters ever since. Both of his elder brothers lost their lives in the war years.