A little something about my grandfather and happenings in his life.

One Sunday I went to visit Eberhard in Rapla with my mother and my father. He lives with my grandmother Elle on Viljandi road, where he moved after marrying my grandmother in Kabala, where he went after being released from the Russian army in 1957 or 1956, because her mother Aliide and her husband invited him there. At first he became the manager of the local community center and started to live in an apartment there. Then he met grandmother Elle and they married in 1962. A short time after they moved to their current home.As a child he lived with his mother, sister Erna, brother Egon and father Aadu in Vigala, they had their own farm and a store(Mann's store), mother took care of the store and father looked after the farm. They had 24 hectares of land and also cows, horses, chickens and sheep, but when the time of collective farming came, their land was reduced to only 0,6 hectares.Grandfather had terrible headaches every two weeks and her mother's heart was ill. The first story I can recall is from the time when my grandfather was about 6 or 7 and the WW2 began. A German spy-plane flew over Vigala and when the Russians discovered this, they started to bombard the plane. My grandfather remembers that one of the bombs landed near Mann's tavern and the next one landed right in their backyard, but someone in the barn saw it and ran inside to tell the others and then it exploded. The house remained intact, despite shrapnel and dirt flying in every direction, because the bomb was too far away. Lucky ducks.

When he was young, my grandfather went to school at Päärdu manor and after reaching the age of 16 and having finished 8 grades he went on to become a furniture-maker at Tallinn Industrial School, because at that time the only other option was to become a collective farmer, especially because his father was herd brigade leader at the local collective. Noone wanted to become a collective farmer, so he tried to avoid by all means. After finishing his studies they wanted to recruit him straight away in May, so they could hold him there for the whole summer without official record, so he never signed the document stating he had received his recruitment papers and went back to Vigala to his father to spend the summer there and eventually left on 9^th September. This was in 1952.