By L.J. Provost
Like many mysteries in life, Kaia Gallagher’s had been hiding in plain sight. She was 5 years old when she realized she didn’t know who a certain young woman was in the family photos hanging in her grandparents’ home. So she asked and Grandmother Vares began to sob, and Gallagher’s mother (also named Kaia) whisked her away.
The woman’s identity remained a mystery until at 10, Gallagher learned the young woman, was named Asta, she was her mother’s older sister. Gallagher had an unknown aunt, who died during World War II. Asta was cloaked in grief and silence but yet somehow prominent. Gallagher would spend a lifetime piercing the family mourning veil, which is detailed in Candles for the Defiant: Discovering My Family’s Estonian Past. Her intriguing memoir weaves together the details of her family’s story – one of thousands – as they and their countrymen struggle to survive the atrocities of war. The work itself commemorates their bold journey of resilience, perseverance, and liberation.
Gallagher is a first-generation American whose family joined the diaspora of Eastern Europeans fleeing their homeland 80 years ago. Gallagher’s family fled September 21, 1944, only one day before completion of the second Soviet occupation, an occupation that would last nearly half a century. When the family emigrated to the United States many Americans could not find Estonia on a map and the same might be true today. The propensity of Americans to ignore history and current events makes books like this memoir vital. Candles for the Defiant not only records the past but also shines a light on Russia’s ongoing efforts to occupy Ukraine and the Ukrainian resistance.
Estonia is one of the three Baltic states. The Gulf of Finland borders it to the north and Russia to the East. Latvia, another Baltic state, borders it to the south. The remaining Baltic state, Lithuania, is south of Latvia and abuts Poland. Both Russia (both historically and currently) and Nazi Germany recognized the advantage of expanding their territories and resources by occupying these countries.
Gallagher’s mother, Kaia, often expressed her disbelief at the world’s disregard of what took place in Europe. “How could the Western countries turn a blind eye, she asked, when the Soviet Union occupied much of Eastern Europe at the end of World War II? Why was it, she wanted to know, that the Allied countries prosecuted key Nazi leaders as war criminals, while the crimes committed by Joseph Stalin and other Soviet officials were overlooked?” A painful disbelief and frustration resurfaced in me as well as I read this book. How can we who enjoy the freedoms outlined in our Constitution fail to support and protect the inalienable rights of any people no matter their country? How could we then? How could we now? Gallagher herself recognized the gloom behind her mother’s smile over the sense of loss and fear she experienced in her homeland.
Driven to learn the history too painful for her family to share, Gallagher and her family traveled to Estonia in 1985. It was her first of many trips to Estonia and her mother’s first return in more than forty years. The Soviets still ruled the family homeland and they stayed in hotels designated for Western travelers and were accompanied by a Soviet-approved guide. Still, they met old family friends and discovered three family albums with photos Gallagher includes in the book.
Probing into Asta’s world, Gallagher soon discovered a whole world of relatives affected by Soviets. Asta lived in a home that accommodated the medical practice of Gallagher’s grandfather Jaan Vares. They rented upstairs apartments to family and friends, including a widow and her son, Bruno Kulgma. Bruno and Asta’s lives would be irrevocably intertwined from then on, including falling madly in love. Imagining a long life together, Asta and Bruno pursued careers that would provide them a nice life, he in the law and she in medicine. At the time of the first Soviet occupation, Asta was a medical student and Bruno was a lawyer.
Communist bosses recruited influential community members to join the Party as a way to legitimize their presence among the people. They invited Bruno to join the Party, which he accepted after conferring with Estonian partisan leaders. And overnight the widow’s son, Asta’s love, became a secret agent. Neighbors unaware of his covert support of the Estonian cause scorned him for his Party ties, and even decades later spoke of him as a Communist when the Gallaghers visited. Bruno walked a fine line, appearing to adhere to Party ideology while subverting Party plans and furthering the Estonian cause. As Party Secretary, Bruno misplaced job applications from Communists and secretly coached Estonians on how to qualify for jobs. He even destroyed an anonymous letter accusing his future father-in-law of “being a bourgeois nationalist because he permitted patients in his waiting room to criticize the Soviet army.” When tens of thousands were being deported to Siberia, Bruno helped partisans sidestep the injustice. Arrested by the Nazis for his involvement with the Soviets, Bruno wrote hundreds of pages explaining the true subversive nature of his actions.
Asta visited Bruno in prison and held out hope as she fought her own battle. While Bruno was fighting the Nazi’s, Asta was fighting cancer. The first sign was perpetual exhaustion and weight loss. Then a black mole on Asta’s back began to fester. Her father insisted on surgery to remove the mole, but the wound never healed despite constant care. The Soviet mark on the Estonian people was devastating: Within two years of the Nazi occupation, Asta died of cancer at the age of 23, and Bruno faced a Nazi firing squad. Gallagher and the rest of Asta’s family are able to mourn at Asta’s grave in a single burial plot with a plain white stone marker bearing the simple facts of her short life. However, the same is not true for Bruno. He, like many Estonians, was left in the Jakala Trench, one of many anonymous execution sites throughout the country and the region. Unknown mass graves are a ghostly remnant of World War II. Yahad-In Unum, a Paris-based organization working with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, has documented mass graves in 600 Eastern European villages for Jewish people alone. Its work continues.
Candles for the Defiant is much more than a history lesson. Its pages spill over with drama, intrigue, and documented facts that tell the story of a family, a country, and a region. This year organizations worldwide are celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Estonian diaspora (visit www.estosite.org for information).
That this story of Estonia’s Soviet experience 80 years ago parallels Russia’s attempt to occupy Ukraine since February 2022 cannot be overstated. Estonia declared itself neutral before suffering at the hands of the Soviets and Nazis in World War II. They were and are a people who want to live in freedom. The same is true for Ukrainians, who will suffer the same fate as Estonians and other Eastern Europeans, but this time at the hands of an autocrat working from an update Stalin playbook. The Ukrainians know this, and those who cannot resist have fled. The USA for UN Refugee Agency logged nearly 6.5 million refugees from Ukraine as of February 2024. Many of those refugees send financial support to friends and family who remain.
Gallagher wrote the book in her search to find the part of her that was missing. She cherishes her “legacy of strength and determination, of courage and self-sacrifice, and of an enduring commitment to honor my Estonian background.” It is an Estonian tradition to honor deceased loved ones by burning candles on their graves at Christmas. Gallagher has expanded her Christmas tradition to light candles in honor of those who have gone before her. “History, it is said, has a way of repeating itself. Perhaps war will always be with us. Perhaps as well, there will always be the stories of patriotic heroes, like Bruno, who died so that freedom can live, democracies can prosper, and the world, as we know it, can be a better place.”
L.J. Provost co-authored Legendary Locals of Jacksonville. She is a former newspaper reporter and editor whose writing has appeared in Writers Resist, the St. Anthony Messenger, the Potato Soup Journal, and The Pen Woman Magazine. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California-Riverside and a BA in Literature and Communications from the University of North Florida.
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