Video: Curly Strings dedicates music video to victims of 1949 deportation
Curly Strings unveiled a new music video on Wednesday dedicated to everyone who lost their homes or loved ones in the Soviet mass deportations of March 1949.
The song "They Won't Catch Me" tells the true story of a young man who by chance managed to avoid being deported by Soviet powers in the mass deportations of 1949, known in Estonia as the March deportation.
The young man in question was Aksel Herbert Lindal, the grandfather of Curly Strings singer Eeva Talsi.
Speaking on ETV morning program "Terevisioon," Talsi described how her cousin, singer-songwriter Kristiina Ehin, first told her the story about a year and a half prior; Talsi's grandfather and Ehin's grandmother, she noted, were brother and sister.
"Early in the morning, 71 years ago today, my grandfather took his horse to the mill, and when he started back, a neighbor ran to meet him and warned him not to go home," she described. "'Your mother and brother have already been taken away, and soldiers are waiting for you there. If you go home, then you will be taken away too.' It was at that moment that my grandfather decided he would flee. And he couldn't take his horse with him, so he said goodbye to his horse and sent it on its way back home. He himself escaped across the bogs."
Operation Priboi
From March 25-28, 1949, more than 90,000 people across the Baltics, including more than 20,000 in Estonia, ranging from infants to the elderly, were forcibly removed from their homes by Soviet forces and deported to Siberia as part of Operation Priboi ("Coastal Surf"). Thousands would never return.
The music video was directed by Johannes Magnus Aule.
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Editor: Aili Vahtla