Families heading to Lapland this month in search of a “magical” Christmas experience won’t recognise the country depicted in Petra Rautianen’s Land of Snow
and Ashes.
There was nothing magical about this sub-arctic region of Finland in the 1940s when Finland was allied with Nazi Germany. Lapland became a base for a planned invasion of the Soviet Union and the location of detention camps for undesirables. Rautlainen’s narrative reveals how these camps also engaged in eugenic practices, including racial profiling, and a concerted effort to forcibly assimilate the Sámi people into a Finnish way of life.
The story is told in two timelines separated by a few years. In the first, it’s 1944 when a young Finnish soldier arrives at a detention camp in the Lapland town of Inari ““at the edge of the earth”” to work as an interpreter. His diary is a record of observations about the camp and the interrogations of prisoners ( “ideological and racial enemies” ) by the German Security Police..
These entries are stark and unembellished accounts that often strike a sinister note because the interpreter doesn’t fully understand the significance of what he witnesses.
A woman arrived with the doctor. I understand she is a shamanistic bloodletter. A witch. Noaidi, in the local tongue. For some reason she is working here as a nurse. She didn’t say anything to us and got straight to work.
The soldier’s diary alternates with the story of Inkeri Lindqvist, a Helsinki journalist who travels to a Sámi village in Lapland in 1947. Ostensibly she is there to conduct research for an article about the rebuilding of Finland and the erosion of local Sámi culture. In reality, she is in search of her husband who was a prisoner of war and disappeared she thinks, while held at a Nazi camp in western Lapland.
Through Lindqvist is befriended by a Sámi elder, Piera and his granddaughter Bigga Marja, other residents of the village are not as welcoming, As the book progresses it becomes clear that Lindqvist’s personal desire for the truth means uncovering events from the past that the village would prefer remain secret.
Dual narratives don’t always work for me, too often used as a device to flesh out the narrative. We end up not with a cohesive novel, but two storylines of unequal merit.
Land of Smoke and Ashes is an exception. The two story lines are strongly complementary, each one adding a layer of information that reinforces and elucidates the other. Gradually details of the detention camp’s involvement in Joseph Mengele’s medical experiments comes to light, as does the part played by Lindqvist’s husband.
Rautianen doesn’t dwell on this aspect however. She places more emphasis in the novel on a different form of exploitation — the concerted efforts to integrate Lapland’s nomadic Sámi population into Finnish society.
It was a shock to discover that “researchers” were sent into Sámi communities to photograph naked children and measure their skulls to categorise who was and who was not ethnically Sámi. The Finnish government also removed Sami children from their families, placing them far in dormitory schools far away where they had to learn the Finnish language and culture.
An afterword by David Hackston, who translated Land of Smoke and Ashes explains that such practices continued right through to the 1960s. It wasn’t until 1995 that the status of the Sámi — the only indigenous people in the European Unon — was formally acknowledged in Finland and written into the constitution. It recognises the right to maintain and develop their own language, culture and traditional livelihoods.
Land of Snow and Ashes was often a bleak and uncomfortable read but I’m glad I read it because it portrayed an example of cultural domination and oppression that I’d not come across previously. But I can’t help wondering why the way the Sámi people were treated hasn’t attracted more attention.
If you’re interested in learning more about the Sámi people, take a look at this website .
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