How were you taken prisoner?' The interrogator asked my father. 'The Finns pulled me out of a lake.' 'You traitor! You were saving your own skin instead of the Motherland.' My father also considered himself guilty. That's how they'd been trained.

Svetlana Alexievich
About This Quote

Finland lost the Winter War, but won the war of words and propaganda. The Soviet Union and Finland had been at odds since the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Finnish government and people had remained committed to the preservation of their own nation's sovereignty against a hostile outside force, and after initial defeats in 1939, they began to fight back. My father was a middle-aged sergeant in the Finnish army, and as such he was trained to be suspicious of anything out of the ordinary.

He believed that he was doing his duty as a soldier by preparing himself for war. When his unit was captured, he fought hard to escape, but ended up in a lake where he was rescued by Finnish partisans. He could have considered himself lucky, but his interrogator viewed him as a traitor and blamed him for his actions.

Source: Czasy Secondhand. Koniec Czerwonego Cza'Owieka

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