Today the flags fly at half-mast.
On the night of 14 June 1941, doors were knocked in the dark across Estonia. Mothers were given minutes. Children clutched whatever they could carry. More than 10,000 people — among them infants and the elderly — were loaded into cattle wagons and sent east, into the cold, into silence. Men were torn from their families and sent to camps from which most never returned.
They committed no crime. Their only offense was being Estonian, being educated, being landowners, being someone the regime decided to erase.
We lower our flags today not out of habit, but out of memory. For the empty chairs at kitchen tables. For the letters that stopped coming. For the graves that have no markers in the Siberian earth.
A nation that forgets its grief forgets itself. So we remember. We say their names. We teach our children why this day is quiet.
Mälestame. We remember. 🕯️🇪🇪