Here is a riddle, what is the last thing a jew in a foreign city thousands of miles from home wants to see? Well if Nazi tanks are not the first thing on your list, that’s understandable, but they should be.
I was walking the streets around my apartment on a quiet Sunday afternoon to get to know the city. Out of the corner of my eye I spy what I think is a Nazi tank. So for like three or four meters I kept walking, figuring I must just be jet-lagged. I’m sure what I saw though – and it got my whole attention fast – so I backtracked.
Turns out – yup. It was two tanks. I found out a few days later – in what was an embarrassing cultural faux-pas that they are not in fact Nazi tanks. Luckily I made the mistake with a close friend, so he set me straight rather that get more than a little offended. This type of swastika was apparently in use in Finland before the Nazi’s came to power. It also seems complicated historically since the Fins allied with the Germans in world war two to fight off the Russians, then fought them when they were fleeing back out of Russia.
Anyway – I think this building is some sort of museum. Or possibly a barracks for a reserve unit. There was some artillery on what looked like display, but none of it looked functional. So I am going with museum.
There were some plaques on the side of the building. I’ll need to them translated, but I am waiting until I have a firmer grasp on what might offend people to ask.
and
The fins fought a bunch of battles that you tend not to hear about in western history books. They cut close and hard into the country. On some of the older buildings, even right in the center of the city, you see signs of damage from the war. The statue of the three blacksmiths I posted about has bomb damage on the anvil. Or the building with the tanks has this scarring on one wall which I think is from a bomb blast.
Easy to forget just how big the scope of world war II was, and what it cost everyone. I grew up in a place where our survival time in the event of world war III was measured in microseconds. The nuclear blasts from taking our the Nikey missile bases would roll across Seattle until they hit the mountains, then roll back as a shockwave leveling everything that was not vaporized in the initial blast. While horrifying, there was nothing we could do about it – so it didn’t impact our daily lives. Certainly not like this. It was a totally different type of war. Humans can do some tremendous things, but we also suck.