Almi was a young woman of nineteen when she left her parents’ farm on Saaremaa to find work in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia.  She did not know then that this set the stage for a life-time of hardship and struggle.  After a year she met Aleksander, whom she married a year later. 

Towards the end of WW2 the small family moved from Main land Estonia to Saaremaa, the trip that would normally have taken one day to complete became a seven-day nightmare, mostly walking and if they were lucky, getting a ride on a donkey cart or army truck.  Taking shelter where ever they could, in a barn or under a tree and sometimes in some ones deserted house.

By 1944 the family had expanded to three children and at this point they made the decision to flee Estonia to Sweden to avoid the incoming communists. Little did they know that this was just the beginning of a time of travel, hardship and adventure, ending in a new life in South Africa on the other side of the world where two more children were added to the family.

Almi and Aleksander died after many years leaving behind six children, eight grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren. 

About the Author

Towards the end of 1944, when the Second World War was raging, five-year-old Tiiu Priilaid-Kleyn and her parents fled Estonia to escape the advancing communists.  The family lived in Sweden till 1948, when they set sail for Argentina.  Fate intervened and they ended up in Cape Town, South Africa, with virtually nothing but the clothes on their backs.

In 1959 she married a man twenty-three years her senior and the marriage endured till her husband’s death in 2005.  Tiiu has a son and a daughter as well as two beautiful granddaughters.

Tiiu’s mother, Almi, wrote her story in Estonian and Tiiu translated it into English little-by-little over a period of thirty years.  This work entailed a trip to Estonia in 1994 where she found additional material from surviving relatives which helped to fill in some of the gaps in the narrative.