Mari-Ann Kelam
Mari-Ann Kelam, born in 1946 in a refugee camp in Germany. Fought for the freedom of Estonia in the US, now a member of the Riigikogu.
In 2002 Mari-Ann Kelam wrote about herself as follows: “I was born after the end of the big war in a refugee camp in Germany, I was the child of parents who had lived in pre-war Tallinn. I was four years old when I crossed the ocean and six when I went to school in America. By that time I had picked up English, a language in which I can still speak and write more freely than in Estonian. But Estonian has always been the language of my home and in this language I have also spoken with my children. In March 1990, 40 years after my first journey over the ocean, I came for the first time back to the country of my parents. Not as a tourist but as a representative of American Estonians to the Estonian Congress.”
Mari-Ann Kelam's story reflects well the fate of the tens of thousands of Estonians, who had left their home during the Second World War in fear of a renewed Soviet repression. Today we can only guess what it meant to say farewell to one's family and to set on a dangerous journey through Europe in war. Few anticipated that the Soviet occupation would continue for decades. Many never saw their home country again.
In 1950 the family of Mari-Ann was able to emigrate from Germany to the United States; they settled down in a farm close to Lake Erie in Ohio, where they first worked as farmhands. Mari-Ann graduated from the University of Toledo with M.A. in library science; in 1968-70 she worked as a cataloguer in the Library of Congress in Washington; 1970-72 as a lecturer at the University of Toledo. Soon she became politically active, taking part in the struggle for the freedom of Estonia, for which her residence in Washington gave certain advantages.
The most visible part of Mari-Ann Kelam's work was to protect Estonia's dissidents against Soviet repressions. For this she had to persuade the US Congress and the President to raise the issue of prisoners of conscience in bilateral relations with the Soviet Union. Finally they succeeded: during President Ronald Reagan's term in office Washington consistently drew attention to the sorry state of human rights in the USSR. One of the most important achievements of Mari-Ann Kelam and other freedom fighters was the letter of twenty US senators to Gorbachev, which asked the Soviet leader to allow the preparations for the demonstration of Hirvepark in 1987 to proceed. This letter was most likely the reason, why Moscow allowed Hirvepark to happen.
Looking back at her political activities for Estonia, Mari-Ann Kelam has written: „Estonia's freedom was the result of the sense of justice, dreams and efforts of hundreds and thousands of people. /.../ We kept alive the dream of a free and democratic Republic of Estonia, where our parents had had grown up and which we wished to hand down to our children for them to keep and develop.“
- Estonian SSR
- Latvian SSR
- Lithuanian SSR
- Russian SSR
- Byelorussian SSR
- Ukrainian SSR
- People´s Republic of Poland
- German Democratic Republic
- Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
- People's Republic of Hungary
- Socialist Republic of Romania
- Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
- The Moldavian SSR
- The People´s Republic of Bulgaria