Finland and the Holocaust by Hannu Rautkallio (1987: Holocaust Library. ISBN 978-0-89604-121-9)
My wife Rene’, our son Jack,and I visited the Holocaust Museum this past August in D.C. As you’d expect, it was a moving, distressing, enlightening experience. While there, I found Finland and the Holocaust in the museum gift shop. Given my interest in all things Finnish, and given that I am contemplating a sequel to Suomalaiset melding the histories of Finland and Estonia during the Great Depression and WWII (including the post war period), the book looked interesting. That’s a pretty lame adjective, I’ll give you: “interesting”. Too bad the book doesn’t measure up to that meager adjective.
Dr. Rautkallio obviously knows how to research and how to write. The problem is, he’s no storyteller. So what I found, as I read the book, is a collection of data, accompanied by numerous footnotes, regarding the experience of Jews in Finland during WWII. The most compelling information, the trial of Valpo (state police) commander Anthoni, isn’t chronicled in this work. Though the author references the post-war trial of Mr. Anthoni on many, many occasions, one is left to wonder what the Finnish state ultimately decided regarding Anthoni: Was he complicit in the extradition of a handful of Jews (including a mother and her child) who’d sought asylum in Finland, returning them to certain death at the hands of Finland’s “co-belligerent” Nazi Germany,or was he simply following Finnish law? That question is never answered.
Additionally, I was disappointed by the scope of the work. The book spent much of its 268 pages dealing with Dr. Cohen, a German Jew who escaped the Holocaust by removing himself and his family to Finland. His story is interwoven with the story of the eight Jews deported by Anthoni to German authorities in Estonia. But the title of the book, Finland and the Holocaust leads one to believe that a larger story will be told. It isn’t and that’s severely disappointing.
Well researched and concisely written, the book reads more like a PhD thesis than a text for general public consumption. 2 and 1/2 stars out of 5.
