An estimated 70,000–80,000 people left Estonia during World War II, with many never returning. The largest exodus took place in the autumn of 1944 as Estonians fled from the advancing Soviet army. Meelis Maripuu has spent the last two years coordinating the small team's work to assemble the database. He says the project is important because the history of World War II refugees is under-researched, particularly from a quantitative and demographic angle.

Many emotive personal stories have been published but there is very little solid data. Despite the huge volume of people who became war refugees across Europe, the impact this has had on European societies is therefore "really unknown."

Maripuu wonders: "What does it mean for us, for Estonia, for our society … [that] some 10 percent of the population just disappeared?"

The database is also important on an individual level, he thinks, for ordinary people to "find out their roots" and understand "the experiences we had during the [war]."

While the project's goal is to create a full picture of what happened to the population in Estonia during World War II, the database is at the moment only in its "first stage." It currently offers basic data such as date of birth and date of death, area of origin in Estonia, country of residence at the end of the war and subsequent country of permanent residence.

To collect this data, Maripuu and his colleague cross-referenced names between pre-war local community population registers in Estonia and refugee lists in countries like Sweden, Germany, and the U.S. Different sources pose different challenges, with each country having its own data processing laws. In Sweden, for example, death registers dating back to the 19th century can be bought from bookstores. But in Canada, this data is almost impossible to get, and must be gleaned from the obituaries in Estonian diaspora newspapers or from local church records.

In contrast, there is a treasure trove of data in the U.S., where the Estonian refugees made detailed card files about their community that have now been digitized. But alongside the basic data the team was looking for, each card has a host of chaotic hand-written remarks. Integrating this additional data into the project will take years.

So far, Maripuu says, they've managed to trace and add to the database 65,000 individuals. They hope to find data on all of the estimated 70,000 to 80,000 Estonian refugees, but sometimes there are simply no breadcrumbs to follow.

Maripuu would like to see refugees who left Estonia earlier included, like those who fled from the German advance in 1941 – as was the case with most of Estonia's Jewish population. But it's very hard to find any data on this group because the Soviets did not officially arrange for them to be evacuated.

However, even in this early "first stage" form, the EMI database has revealed some interesting findings. It was generally thought most Estonian refugees were overwhelmingly from the Western coast and the islands, but the database shows that Tallinn in fact lost almost the same proportion of its population. It was also assumed that most Estonian refugees went to Sweden in small boats. But while Sweden may have been seen as a more desirable destination, a bigger number of Estonian refugees actually ended up in Germany, likely due to the German decision in late 1944 to allow Estonians to board large evacuation vessels in Tallinn that sailed back to Germany via Poland.

Maripuu hopes that the database might help to ease what remains of tensions between the Estonian diaspora and the Estonians who lived in Estonia throughout the Soviet occupation. 

While he thinks this has become less of an issue as time has passed, there have been some arguments over "who is the better Estonian." Those who fled Estonia have at times been criticized as "some kind of traitors" who left their homeland for easier lives in the West. In return, they are sometimes "suspicious" of those who remained.

"… [A]n untrust between Estonians in Estonia and in the Estonian exile community, in some points, in some level, it still exists," Maripuu says.

The database can perhaps "help the two groups understand each other" by showing that stereotypical ideas about refugees living easy lives once they reached the West are short-sighted. Consumer goods were certainly in higher supply but starting from scratch was hard and refugees were often forced to move countries repeatedly.

Uncertain about the fate of the families and friends left behind in Estonia, the refugees also had challenges with mental health. 

"You could buy a car or have a color TV … but it was not an easy life," Maripuu says, adding that the suicide rate in the exile communities was "really high." 

They would like to expand the database to include what social groups refugees belonged to, allowing them to provide more nuance. For example, while Germany was common as a first destination, most Estonian refugees had to move on to other countries. Where they went and when they were able to go largely depended on each country's preference. Young women without families tended to go to the U.K., which wanted more nurses. The U.S. and Canada were eager for young men who could join the manual labor force. 

Families with small children and old people were "in an unhappy situation," stuck in refugee camps in Germany, often left behind for years while their younger relatives went ahead.

The challenge is to find sources for this more complex demographic data. Maripuu says they already have data on refugees from the University of Tartu, and so a likely next step for the database will be the addition of data on educational background. He is particularly excited to analyze what happened to Estonia's class of educated professionals. He suspects most of them left Estonia, taking their educations and industry expertise with them. Under the Soviet occupation, education was then limited to those seen as politically loyal, restricting the potential to fill this gap with a new generation. Maripuu thinks it is important to unpick the impact of this education flight on Estonian society: "How was it compensated for?" 

While technological advances and the opening of previously sealed archives mean that more data is digitized and it is easier to integrate different datasets, Maripuu says it is in some ways becoming harder and harder to compile detailed histories of the World War II period.

There is no one left who witnessed it in person as an adult, and those who were there as children or teenagers are now in their 90s. Despite the importance of these stories, they tend not to be passed down to future generations. Maripuu thinks both those who lived through the Soviet occupation and those who became refugees don't typically discuss their experiences with their children and grandchildren.

This is a problem, Maripuu says, because when these younger generations come across the personal items left by their grandparents, they don't always understand their value. All kinds of written material – memoirs, notebooks, diaries – could be invaluable to the database team in plugging the gaps left by sparse archives. Maripuu stresses that EMI would be "very happy" to receive any information about Estonian World War II refugees that has not yet reached major archives.

The EMI database is freely available here and can be searched for names or other terms

You can watch a film about the "boat refugees" who fled to the Swedish island of Gotland below.

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