Aleksander Nõmm's Parents: Jaan and Marie in the Gulag, by Ann Tündern-Smith and Gemini.AI

In March 1949, throughout the Baltic States, the KGB's predecessor rounded up members of the families of those already convicted of crimes against the state and farmers with their families. The aim was to break co-operation with the remaining Forest Brothers and to remove resistance to the introduction of state-run collective farms.

In the case of the Nõmm family, father, mother and daughter Linda fitted into both categories, as family members of a Forest Brother and his helper, and members of the kulak class.

As with the 1941 mass deportation, those rounded up were packed into unheated cattle train cars. When these trains finally began to move, they had the lowest priority on the railways, so their journey to Siberia lasted weeks. Those in the cattle cars had minimal food and water and sanitation probably was a hole in the floor.

Many died under the conditions of the journey, including the still cold weather in late March and into April.

Aleksander Nõmm's father, Jaan, born in January 1886, was already 63 years old when his journey to the Mikhaylovsky region of the Novosibirsk Oblast began. This region was centred on the town of Mikhaylovka, in the southwest of the Oblast, bordering the Kulunda Steppe which, in turn, stretches into Kazakhstan.

Jaan Nõmm's record in the digital version of
Estonia's victims of Communism 1940-1991

Source: Estonia's victims of Communism 1940-1991

The climate there definitely is continental. The winters are long, with temperatures dropping below -40°C and fierce blizzards. In the short summers, daytime temperature typically reach the high 20's, but heatwaves can reach the high 30's. In addition, summers brought the same mosquitoes, midges and blackflies experienced by Jaan's sons, Heimar and Artur, in their more northerly exiles.

The family knew all 3 of these potentially lethal pests from Saaremaa, but not in the same density as experienced inland. Along the coasts (Saaremaa does mean "Island land") breezes keep them at bay. Even inland on Saaremaa though, they breed in the wetlands, lakes or in juniper stands. Back in the 1940s, cheesecloth could be used to screen the insect outs, smoke pots kept them away from outdoor workers and native plants like wild mint or wormwood could be rubbed on the skin for a repellant. Another repellant was tar water, made by leaving pine or birch tar in to soak in water for several days.

In the Novosibirsk Oblast, another biting insect repellant was juice from some of the local Allium species. Allium is the name for the group of plants which includes well known edibles such as chives, various onions, leeks and garlics. Around the world, there now are some 1,000 separate species of Allium known. Totals differ because apparently new, wild species are discovered frequently, especially in Central Asia, near where Jaan was.

Novosibirsk Oblast is the area coloured red,
while the remainder of Russia is a pale yellow colour

Source:  Stasyan117 on Wikipedia

Indeed, the Kulunda Steppe in southern Russia is a continuous extension of the Kazakh Steppe, which geographers agree is in Central Asia. The Kulunda Steppe hosts 10-15 wild Allium species, of which those with volatile sulphur compounds were the most used for masking the smell of humans.

The repellents were also known to the inhabitants of the Mikhaylovsky region who suddenly found themselves sharing their lives and, sometimes, even their housing — such as it was — with the "Special Settlers". Whether their supervisors allowed the workers to stop for long enough to protect themselves is another matter.

The red smudge marks the urban centre of Mikhaylovsky relative to
the much larger city of Novosibirisk in the top centre of this map

Source:  City-facts

And if the workers did stop, they might miss their quota for the day, their "norm" and so receive less food as a result. It was a lose-lose situation.

The principal economic activity on the Kulunda Steppe was farming, an activity in which Jaan had life-long experience. His experience was in completely different climatic conditions, however. The best teachers were gone, as the kulaks of Russia were arrested, deported or "liquidated" in the 1930s, under Stalin's orders. Those peasants who remained were doing what they were told to do by their brigade leaders, whether it made sense or not.

As well as growing food in the short summer, the workers were expected to engage in tree-felling during the winter. Although they were further away from the Arctic Circle from the camps in which Heimar and Artur had laboured, the Kulunda Steppe's winter weather was every bit as brutal due to its location in the middle of the largest land mass in the world. And though the definition of a steppe is a grassy plain, sometimes its topography permits pockets of forests to develop.

We've seen already how dangerous tree-felling could be in the Soviet era, especially if the weather conditions allow biting insects to breed. An alternative winter occupation was stripping the farm machinery down and rebuilding it to have it ready for summer-time operation. As an older, skilled farmer, who maybe had his own machinery, perhaps Jaan was found to be more useful in this area.

Jaan survived this chaotic situation until released on 20 June 1956. Someone as smart and skilled as Jaan might have made extra money as a tractor driver, perhaps had his own plot with produce he sold to his neighbours, and sold everything he was not taking with him in order to purchase the multiple train tickets to get from Mikhaylovka to Novosibirsk, then to Moscow, to Tallinn, and finally by train, bus and ferry from Tallinn to Muhu and Saaremaa.

On Saaremaa, he lived for more than another 18 years, but in a collectivised system. He would have needed a local residence permit, but perhaps Linda's managing to stay on the island through having pneumonia when her parents were arrested was a help here. Although aged 70 when released from the Novosibirsk Oblast, he would still have been expected to work on a collective farm, maybe Linda's. At least he would have been offered lighter duties, such as guarding or repairing equipment.

Unlike the two imprisoned sons who died when they were only 60 and 61 years old, Jaan managed to live until one day after his 89th birthday.

Maria was arrested at the same time as her husband and would have endured the same conditions travelling to the Novosibirsk Oblast. The records show that she too was sent to the Mikhaylovsky region and released on the same day as her husband, 20 June 1956. If this means that they were allowed to stay together, that would have been a massive help to both of them.

Maria Nõmm's record in the digital version of
Estonia's Victim's of Communism 1940-1991

Source:  Estonia's Victim's of Communism 1940-1991

A female "Special Settler" would have been expected to work every bit as hard as the men. Cheerful women driving tractors or helping with the harvest were a staple of Soviet propaganda posters. Maria was 56 years old when arrested with her husband, Jaan, in March 1949. At the time of their release in June 1956, she was 63 years old. She managed to live another 9 years in the Soviet system, but mostly back in Estonia with Jaan.

When they managed to reach their home village of Leisi in 1956, the private fields they remembered from the 1940s were gone. They returned to an industrialised landscape dominated by the large fields, communal cattle barns, and heavy machinery operations of the Saare Tööline (a collective farm covering about 12,000 hectares, whose name meant Saare Worker) and the Karja state farm, used for scientific research by the Estonian Institute of Agriculture and Land Improvement.

Their daughter, Linda, seems to have landed on the Karja state farm when she had recovered from her pneumonia, being paid as a state employee. We do not know if she had been allowed back into the family home once it had been seized by the State. She might have been lucky to cover some personal belongings from it.

On 5 October 1952, she had married another Saaremaa resident, Johannes Voksepp. They were to have 2 children. The information recorded on their Geni.com pages does not include their dates of birth, so we do not know if they had been born before their grandparents returned. Artur might have been back on Saaremaa to attend the wedding, but Heimar was still imprisoned in his Arctic labour camp.

Clearly Aleksander, Sass, the first to be captured and imprisoned, did the best of all these 2 generations of the family apart from Linda. The Germans were lenient when compared to the Soviet Union under Stalin (but far from lenient when it came to the Jewish people and other minorities whom Hitler blamed from his nation’s economic problems). Sass was the first to be released from imprisonment, probably in April or May 1945 depending on when the Allies reached his place of imprisonment. Even as his 2 brothers were appearing before a Soviet tribunal, he was exploring a new life in Australia in relative freedom.

While under contract, Sass was paid award or above award wages and could do what he like in the evenings or weekends. (That’s even though what he liked included earning good extra money on some weekends.)

The contrast between Sass’s work and sporting activities for the good of Australia and the conditions under which the remainder of his family worked on collective or state farms and in prison camps for the “good” of the Soviet Union is almost beyond comparison.

SOURCES

Britannica 'Kulunda Steppe' https://www.britannica.com/science/steppe-grassland,accessed 1 September 2026.

Estonia's Victims of Communism 'Jaan Nõmm' https://www.memoriaal.ee/en/search/?q=%22jaan+n%C3%B5mm%22&f=all, accessed 1 September 2026.

Estonia's Victims of Communism 'Maria Nõmm' https://www.memoriaal.ee/en/search/?q=%22maria+n%C3%B5mm%22&f=all, accessed 1 September 2026.

Geni 'Aleksander Nõmm' https://www.geni.com/people/Aleksander-N%C3%B5mm/4825049969700070188, accessed 1 September 2026.

Geni 'Linda Voksepp' https://www.geni.com/people/Linda-Voksepp/4825086260920082330?through=4825049969700070188, accessed 7 September 2026.

Gulag Online 'The history of the Gulag' https://gulag.online/articles/historie-gulagu?locale=en, accessed 2 September 2026.

Gulag Online 'Virtual Museum' https://gulag.online/en, accessed 1 September 2026.

IAMO 'Kulunda' https://www.iamo.de/en/research/research-projects/details/kulunda, accessed 1 September 2026.

Simpson, Silvi, Personal communications, 2016.

von Geldern, James (nd) 'Release of Prisoners from the GULAG' Seventeen Moments in Soviet History https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1954/prisoners-return/, accessed 2 September 2026.

Wikipedia 'Kulunda Steppe' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulunda_Steppe, accessed 2 September 2026

Wikipedia 'Novosibirsk Oblast' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novosibirsk_Oblast, accessed 2 September 2026.

Aleksander Nõmm's brother: Artur in the Gulag by Ann Tündern-Smith and Gemini.AI

We have just looked at the fate of the older brother of First Transport refugee, Aleksander Nõmm. Heimar Nõmm had sought the protection of the Saremaa woods to become what was known throughout the Baltic States as a Forest Brother, fighting against his country's occupiers. Six months after his capture, Heimar received a sentence of 10 years' hard labour in a Soviet prison camp.

Younger brother, Artur

Their younger brother, Artur, had been providing Heimar with food and trying to help with whatever else was needed. He was arrested on 23 December 1946, so not while making a delivery to Heimar but one week later. Had Heimar been tortured to admit who was helping him or was the arrest made on the grounds of reasonable suspicion?  Any sort of suspicion was reasonable ground for arrest in the Soviet Union of 1946.

The Nõmm brothers, Aleksander (Sass), Heimar and Artur

Source:  Collection of Silvi Nõmm Simpson

The brothers were tried on the same day though, maybe even together. Artur was charged under the Soviet Socialist Republic's penal code's Sections 17 and 58-1b with both treason and assisting treason. He was given what seems, given the charges, the comparatively light sentence of 5 years in a labour camp. The place where the sentence was to be served was probably more frightening than its length.

Artur Nõmm's entry in the electronic part of
Memorial to Estonia's Victims of Communism 1940-1991:
the subheadings translate as 'Family Register',
'Political Arrests in Estonia, Vol. 1' and
'National Population Register'

Source:  Estonia's Victims of Communism 1940-1991

Artur was 22 years old when sent to the Kargopollag in Arkhangelsk Oblast. An Oblast is the equivalent of a State in Australia or the USA, but without their independent governments. In reality, it was then a regional administrative unit carrying out the orders of the central government.

Arkhangelsk Oblast lies to the west of the Komi ASSR, where Heimar was sent, and to the east of Karelia, parts of which were Finnish until WWII (hence Sibelius' Karelia Suite and its central importance to Finnish identity).

The Kargopollag (officially the Kargopolsky ITL or Corrective Labor Camp) was in the southwest of Arkhangelsk Oblast. Its central purpose was forestry or, to be more accurate about what actually happened, deforestation. In addition, the prisoners had to built the infrastructure for these operations, including railways.

Ma

Map of the Russian North region (actually, north-west Russia)
with a red arrow pointing to Kargopol

Source:  Gateway to Russia

The area was grew much aspen, an ideal wood for matches. That's because it doesn't splinter, burns easily and absorbs fire-retardant chemicals for the part of the match which is not the head. Matches in the 1940s were far more necessary than they are today, for many reasons, starting with a wood fire not now being the primary means of heating for most in urban areas. Kargopollag inmates were not only chopping down the aspen trees but processing them into the raw match splints.

Kargopollag inmates provided many other timber products, from railway sleepers for the expansion of the Soviet rail network, including the North Pechora Railway, to pulp, paper and cellulose.

Timber-getting was considered one of the deadliest jobs in the entire Gulag system. Prisoners worked all day in the open air. In the winter, they laboured up to their waists in freezing sub-arctic snow. In the summer, there were constant swarms of mosquitoes, midges and blackflies. The blackflies cut open the skin to lick up the blood, with anticoagulants in their saliva which cause an allergic reaction. Being bitten by a large swarm causes symptoms similar to influenza, known collectively as blackfly fever. That's apart from being in the wrong place when a tree falls.

Of course there was no insect repellant or netting to keep the insects off the prisoners' bodies. A common punishment inflicted by the guards was to tie a naked prisoner to a tree, leaving him as bait for the insect swarms. Such a victim could last only a couple of hours before death.

Those who could speak about the labour camp environment afterwards noted that a prisoner assigned to the heavy forest-logging brigades rarely survived more than two years.

There is a lot of documentation of the cruel conditions in Kargopollag, most famously in A World Apart (Inny Świat) by Polish writer and philosopher Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, who survived a year and a half in the camp's Yertsevo sector. This book was published first in 1951 so it recounts experiences fresh in its author's mind.

Archangelsk was Russia's main port, at least during summer, before St Petersburg was built starting in 1703. This meant that centuries of Russians had been checking the conditions in the Oblast from some 900 years ago.

The people already there in the north were the Nenets, a Samoyedic group. Their language is related to the Finno-Ugrian ones, fitting under the broader umbrella of Uralic. Like the Sami in the Scandinavian countries, they are reindeer herders. Their main food is reindeer meat and fish, but they also drink reindeer blood, rich not only in iron but also in Vitamin C, so they don't get scurvy.

South of the Nenets, the original inhabitants of central and southern Arkangelsk Oblast were more Finno-Ugrian tribes. They have been completely absorbed into the colonising Russian population, but their presence can still be felt in the names of the rivers, lakes and villages in the Oblast. Most of these names come from Finno-Ugrian words.

The Russian colonisers, intermarrying with the Finno-Ugrian natives, developed their own dialect, culture and lifestyle adapted to their harsh environment. They now are known as Pomors, from a word meaning "living by the sea". Their economic activities of whaling, maritime hunting and cod fishing led to them becoming expert boat builders.

Artur was released from the Kargopollag on 12 December 1951. This would have been under highly controlled conditions, starting with a march across the snow or, if he was luckier, a trip on a horse-drawn timber sled to one of the camp's railway hubs, Yertsevo or Nyandoma, on the main Vologda–Arkhangelsk rail line. From there he would have travelled in a guarded prison car through Vologda to Leningrad (now St Petersburg).

From St Petersburg, he would have been put on a train to Estonia's capital, Tallinn. To return to Saaremaa, he needed a permit issued by the MGB (Ministry of State Security), successor to the dreaded NKVD but still known colloquially by the old name. If he had a permit, travel from Tallinn involved a train to Virtsu and beyond that, the mode depended on the thickness of the ice. If it was thick enough, trucks or horse-drawn sleds made the journey. Ice-breaking ferries could travel through thinner ice.

But Artur did not receive his permit, so was forced to live on mainland Estonia. He managed to return to Saaremaa for major family events, like funerals and weddings.  He married but had no children.

Heimar and Artur's brother, Aleksander, taken as a prisoner-of-war to Germany in 1944, then selected for resettlement in Australia, lived passed his 98th birthday.  Their father lived to 89, despite also having spent time in Siberia, as we will see.  Their mother, also sent to Siberia, lived to 82 and their sister Linda, lucky not to be arrested also for her support of Heimar in the woods, lived to 78.  Given this longevity, Artur's death at the age of only 60 in 1986, like Heimar's death at the age of only 61, has to be attributed to his time in Kargopollag.

SOURCES

EBSCO 'Research Starter, Gulag'https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/gulag,accessed 29 August 2026.

'Estonia's victims of communism 1940–1991' https://memoriaal.ee, accessed 28 August 2026.

'Estonia's victims of communism 1940–1991, Artur Nõmm' https://www.memoriaal.ee/otsing/?q=artur+n%C3%B5mm&f=all, accessed 28 August 2026.

Geni.com 'Artur Nõmm' https://www.geni.com/people/Artur-N%C3%B5mm/4825078484760042407?through=4824931125450070101, accessed 5 September 2026.

gulag.cz 'Buried hopes'https://gulag.cz/cs/, accessed 29 August 2026.

Gulag History:  Many Days, Many Lives 'Days and Lives: Guards' https://gulaghistory.org/exhibits/days-and-lives/guards/4.html, accessed 31 August 2026.

Gulag, Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom 'Online Exhibit, Living in the Gulag' https://gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexhibit/stalin/living.php.html, accessed 29 August 2026.

Gulag Online 'Gustaw Herling-Grudziński' https://gulag.online/people/gustaw-herling-grudzinski?locale=en, accessed 30 August 2026.

Guzeva, Alexandra (2024) 'The Gruesome Gulag Mosquito Punishment' Gateway to Russia, https://www.gw2ru.com/history/3185-gulag-mosquito-punishment, accessed 31 August 2026.

Purdue University, Medical Entomology 'Insects and Ticks, Black Flies' https://extension.entm.purdue.edu/publichealth/insects/blackfly.html, accessed 31 August 2026.

Simpson, Silvi (2026) Personal communication, 25 August.

Survival 'The Nenets of Siberia' https://www.survivalinternational.org/articles/3198-the-nenets-of-siberia, accessed 30 August 2026.

Swedish Match, 'FAQ' https://www.swedishmatchindustries.com/about-us/faq, accessed 31 August 2026.

Swedish Match, 'What Are We Leaving Behind' https://www.swedishmatchindustries.com/production/sustainability, accessed 31 August 2026.

Wikipedia 'Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustaw_Herling-Grudzinski, accessed 30 August 2026.

Wikipedia 'Kargopol' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kargopol, accessed 30 August 2026.

Wikipédia 'Kargopollag' https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kargopollag, accessed 30 August 2026.

Wikipedia 'Siberian Minorities in the Soviet Era' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_minorities_in_the_Soviet_era, accessed 31 August 2026.

Aleksander Nõmm's brother: Heimar in the Gulag, by Ann Tündern-Smith and Gemini.AI

In early July, we noted that Aleksander Nõmm had spent 3 years in Siberia with the Soviet Army before being returned westward to fight the German return to the Baltic States. He blamed that period on his loss of taste and smell, but he still knew what to eat to survive. That survival amazed fellow Estonian refugees on the First Transport, the General Stuart Heintzelman.

All but one of Aleksander Nõmm's immediate family were sent from Estonia during the 1947-49 period to the Gulag, including imprisonment in Siberia. One was a Forest Brother so the others must have supported him. We now have the opportunity to consider the cruel conditions in which they lived and worked.

Older Brother, Heimar

The Nõmm brothers: Aleksander (Sass), Heimar and Artur

Source:  Collection of Silvi Nõmm Simpson

Aleksander's older brother, Heimar, the Forest Brother, was the first to be arrested. From 16 December 1946, he waited more than 6 months to appear before a Soviet tribunal on 21 June 1947. If he had not been told before, he knew now that he was charged under the Soviet Socialist Republic's penal code's Sections 58-1b, treason by military personnel/desertion, and 58-11, being part of a counter-revolutionary organisation/group.

Documents from the Archive of the Estonian SSR Prosecutor's Office report that he was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment and sent to the Pechora Labour Camp in the Komi ASSR (Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic) in northeast European Russia, near the Arctic Circle. He was 27 years old at the time.

Heimar Nomm's entry in the electronic part of the 
Memorial to Estonia's Victims of Communism 1940-1991:
The subheadings translate as "Family Register",
"Political Arrests in Estonia, Vol. 1" and "National Population Register"

Source:  Estonia's Victims of Communism 1940-1991

Gemini.ai reports that Pechorlag (or Sevpechlag during its earlier years) was a major forced-labor camp complex within the Gulag system. The name is a portmanteau of the Pechora River basin, where the camp operated, and lag, the standard abbreviation for a Soviet labor camp (lager).

While many neighboring camps in the Komi region focused primarily on coal or oil extraction, Pechorlag’s central objective was infrastructure.

Its prisoners were forced to build the North Pechora Railway — a 500-kilometer-long railroad over treacherous permafrost and swampy taiga. The strategic goal of this line was to connect the remote, coal-rich Arctic mines of Vorkuta to the industrial centres of urban Russia. Vorkuta had become a critical lifeline for the Soviet Union during World War II when western coalfields were captured by Nazi Germany.

The amount of food available was tied to a prisoner’s work productivity. If a brigade failed to meet its daily quota ("norm"), their food allotment was slashed. This created a lethal downward spiral: exhausted, starving prisoners produced less work, received less food, and rapidly succumbed to starvation or disease.

The location of Pechora is arrowed

Source:  Climates to Travel

Desperate prisoners could resort to self-harm to escape their work, chopping off their own fingers, or intentionally rubbing dirt, faeces, or caustic chemicals into minor wounds to cause severe infections. The aim was to get to the camp hospital, the only place where a prisoner could sleep indoors and escape the freezing cold.

Political prisoners like Heimar were abused by the guards, but the camp administration gave authority also to violent criminal inmates (blatnye) to assault, rob and otherwise keep the political prisoners living in fear.

The indigenous people, the Komi, are Finno-Ugrian like the Estonians, although separated by at least a couple of thousand years of cultural and linguistic development. The introduction of prison camps into their homeland disrupted their subsistence lives, by the rapid cutting of forests for timber and the Railway cutting across ecosystems including animal migration routes.

The Komis' previous lives were similar to the pattern still followed by their Finno-Ugrian relatives, the Sami, previously known in English by the disparaging name of Lapps. They live mainly in the north of Norway, Sweden and Finland while there is a small population on Russia's Kola Peninsula.

Before Heimar's imprisonment, a Komi leader who supported industrialisation of his homeland, Dmitry Batiev, had been arrested under false charges of creating a "counter-revolutionary nationalist organisation" and imprisoned in Ukhtpechlag (the precursor camp to the Pechora line system) before being executed in 1941. Under Stalin, much of the Komi intellectual and cultural leadership suffered similar fates.

The camp system had grown out of earlier regional camps and took distinct shape as Sevpechlag (North Pechora Ispravitelno-Trudovoy Lager or ITL, that is, Corrective Labour Camp in English) in 1940. During WWII, the pressure to complete the railway line meant prisoners were subjected to relentless work schedules under lethal conditions.

The complex was formally reorganised as Pechorlag (Pechora ITL) in 1950 and continued operating throughout the height of the post-war Gulag era, before being dissolved or merged into other regional administrative systems in 1959 following Stalin's death.

The conditions in Pechorlag were notoriously horrific, defined by the grueling climate of the frozen tundra, extreme malnutrition, overcrowding, and rampant disease. The camp held a mix of political and criminal prisoners.

The political prisoners were individuals who, like Heimar, had been arrested under the sweeping Article 58 of the Soviet Penal Code for "counter-revolutionary activities." This included waves of dissidents, intellectuals, and citizens from newly annexed Soviet territories, including thousands of Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Poles.

Pechorlag is well-known in the English-language Gulag literature, largely due to a rare and unprecedented memoir titled Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir written by Fyodor Mochulsky. Mochulsky was a 22-year-old railway engineer sent by the Communist Party to work as the supervisor at Pechorlag in 1940.

His account was published posthumously in 2011 by Oxford University Press, translated and edited by Deborah Kaple, with a foreword by her. It provided historians with a unique look at the day-to-day horrors and logistics of the camp from the perspective of the administration rather than the victims.

Today, the modern town of Pechora stands where the camp's main central railway station and administrative hub, built entirely on the forced labor of the camp's prisoners, once sat. The camp system has led to the Komi being forced to adapt to a heavily industrialised, Russified urban environment.

Heimar was freed on 10 July 1955, possibly free to try to make his own way home to Saareaa across more than 2,500 of harsh terrain, often swampy in summer. With luck, and perhaps some money from somewhere, he could make some of this trip by train, along with coal from Vorkuta. 

Heimar was married already when arrested, to Rosiine Rahu, and had at least one infant daughter.  Thoughts of his own family, as well as his parents and sister, Linda, must have sustained him through the Pechora experience.  After his return to Saaremaa, he and Rosiine went on to have a family of 6 altogether:  5 daughters and one son.

Heimar's younger brother, Aleksander, taken as a prisoner-of-war to Germany in 1944, then selected for resettlement in Australia, lived past his 98th birthday.  His father lived to 89, despite also having spent time in Siberia, as we will see.  His mother, also sent to Siberia, lived to 82 and his sister, lucky not to be arrested also for her support of Heimar in the woods, lived to 78.  Given this longevity, Heimar's death at the age of only 61 in 1981 has to be attributed to his time in Pechorlag.

SOURCES

EBSCO 'Research Starter, Gulag' https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/gulag, accessed 29 August 2026.

Encyclopædia Britannica Komi: republic, Russia, https://www.britannica.com/place/Komi-republic-Russia, accessed 28 August 2026.

'Estonia's victims of communism 1940–1991' https://memoriaal.ee, accessed 28 August 2026.

'Estonia's victims of communism 1940–1991, Heimar Nõmm' https://www.memoriaal.ee/en/search/?q=heimar+n%C3%B5mm&f=all, accessed 28 August 2026.

Geni.com 'Heimar Nõmm' https://www.geni.com/people/Heimar-N%C3%B5mm/4824931125450070101?through=4824935170880061629, accessed 5 September 2026.

gulag.cz 'Buried hopes' https://gulag.cz/cs/, accessed 29 August 2026.

Gulag Online 'Pechora' https://gulag.online/places/pechora?locale=en, accessed 29 August 2026.

Simpson, Silvi (2026) Personal communication, 25 August.

Wikipedia, 'Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir',  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag_Boss:_A_Soviet_Memoir, accessed 28 August 2026.

Alexander Nõmm (1922-2000): Sportsman, Builder, Family Man, by Ann Tündern-Smith and Silvi Nõmm Simpson

[Silvi Nõmm Simpson is the daughter of Aleksander.]

The photograph below comes from the collection of Aleksander Nõmm. It shows him with 3 Lithuanians, whose names he could not remember.

Aleksander Nõmm is seated on the running board of the truck in this photograph
which we have used 3 times already in this blog, for Edvardas Lapinskas on the left,
Bernardas Matkevičius in the cab and Juozas Nakas on the right

Source:  Collection of Aleksander Nõmm

Fortunately, it matches exactly with a photograph already supplied by Diana Bučiūtė, a niece of Juozas Nakas, who wrote his life story for this blog. There it was 3 named Lithuanians with an unindentified Estonian.

Now identified, Aleksander was born on a farm on the Estonian island of Saaremaa on 8 May 1922. He was named after his uncle, also Aleksander. Estonians often shorten Aleksander to Sass or sometimes Sander. His uncle was known already as Sander so the younger Aleksander got Sass.

Aged 18 or 19 in 1941, he found himself conscripted by the Soviet military machine into servitude in Russia. This was a period of his life about which he did not like to talk much.

He later believed that his loss of taste and smell was due to the freezing winters he spent in Siberia nearly starving, but being a farm boy, he knew what to eat to survive. His work was mainly building barracks, which meant that he developed carpentry skills which he could offer the Australian migration selection team in 1947.

After three years in Siberia, Aleksander was able to return to Estonia when the Soviets used all the manpower they could find to advance against the German occupation of the Baltic States.

Another Estonian who came to Australia in November 1947 on the First Transport with Aleksander, a man maybe 15 centimetres shorter than Aleks (who was nearly 2 metres tall), once told Ann that there was one Estonian on the ship of whom others were afraid. This was because he was a big man who had walked all the way back from Siberia.

At the time, Ann imagined an escapee on a solitary journey, living off the land. Even if the other Estonian was describing someone who had survived a walk from Siberia with a military unit, he still was talking about a massive effort. It could have been an effort which lost many participants under its wartime conditions. It was a walk from Asia, across Europe to an island off its west coast.

Back on Saaremaa, he joined other local men in what was meant to be a surprise attack from the rear on the German occupiers of their island. However, two German machine-gunners were able to fight off the invaders. Most were killed as the seawater turned crimson with their blood.

Sass was among a handful of survivors taken to Germany as prisoners-of-war. They left from the port of Mõntu on Saaremaa's Sõrve Peninsula.

The report of his interview for possible migration to Australia repeats some of this, saying that he arrived in Germany in October 1944, brought as a prisoner-of-war.

The carpentry skills that Sass said he had developed in Siberia were in great shortage at the time of his interview. As we’ve reported in some other entries in this blog, building was minimal during the War. Many of the people with the necessary skills were in the military, the Federal Government had brought in restrictions and the building that did go on mostly was for military needs.

So what did the selection team write on its report of the interview? Occupational suitability: “Heavy general labouring”. This is why “labourer” Nikolai Müristaja landing a first job in his watch-making profession in an earlier entry is so amazing.

The middle of three sons, Sass was the only one who was taken westwards by the Germans. After the Soviet occupation of 1944, his older brother, Heimar, decided to remain in the woods and fight. He became was the Estonians call a “forest brother” or metsavend.

While he participated in a guerrilla war from his forest bunker, the younger brother (Artur) and a sister 10 years younger than Sass (Linda) were the ones who kept Heimar supplied with food from the farm. Heimar and Artur were caught.

Heimar, the metsavend, was sentenced to a mere 10 years in a labour camp for treason. Artur received a 5 year sentence for assisting treason.

The thinking behind the March 1949 deportations from the Baltic States to the Gulag is said to have been, “Your family member is there already so you can join them”. It also was expected to destroy the economic base of the Kulaks, the small farmers, a class to which the Nõmm parents belonged. Thirdly, it was expected to destroy support for the Forest Brothers. Father, Jaan, then 63 years old and mother, Marie, then 56, were rounded up and sent off to Siberia for an indefinite period, the rest of their lives.

Sass’ sister Linda had caught pneumonia and was being cared by family friends. This meant that she was not at home when the authorities came looking for the family of Heimar and Artur. She was not deported.

Heimar and Artur did hard labour, shovelling hazardous materials, and it is believed in the family that this is why they both died young. Artur was lucky enough to have been released in December 1951, from a camp in the Archangel Oblast, having served a 4 and a half year sentence, and no doubt expected to survive as best he could. He died in 1986, still in a Communist country, aged 61.

Heimar was released in July 1955, from a camp in the Komi Autonomous Republic in the northeast of European Russia (around 1,000 Km east of the Archangel area) after 8 and half years of hard labour. He died in January 1981, also aged 61. In contrast, Linda was 78 when she died, her mother was 82, her father was 2 days past his 89th birthday, and Sass lived until he was 98.

As for destroying support for the Forest Brothers, Estonia had a least 2 who died without giving up, in 1980 and 1987, even after the last active one drowned himself rather than surrender when caught fishing by the KGB in 1978. The last Forest Brother of all was Jānis Pīnups, who emerged from the Latvian forests in 1995.

After his liberation in Germany in March 1945, towards the end of World War 2, Sass was in the Oberkassel camp on the Rhine River. He remembers Canadian Red Cross parcels were received by the camp administration but the managers took out the cigarettes, coffee and best clothes for themselves.

By 1947 he had moved to one of the four camps for Estonian displaced persons in the town of Melle. It was there that he heard about the Australians seeking young men and women to work in their country.

Aleksander in Melle, Germany, 1947

Source:  National Archives of Australia

Sass reckoned that he had his first real meal in six years on board the General Stuart Heintzelman. He was employed in the shipboard butcher’s shop for the duration of the voyage. Like other non-smokers, he used the freely issued American cigarettes to barter for other luxuries.

He remembered that the ship had steam turbines and a system which condensed the steam, giving plenty of fresh drinking water and allowing the use of large shower rooms. (Another passenger on a later voyage to Australia told Ann that the showers were hot, something special in those days.)

Those people who had brought musical instruments on board the Heintzelman formed a dance band which played during the evenings. The tables in the Heintzelman mess facilities could be hoisted up to the ceiling to create a dance floor.

Sass learnt modern dances, such as the samba, rumba and tango, while he was in Germany. He said he was best at the tango, but he was not musical or a folk-dancer.

On the train to Bonegilla, Sass thought that his first sight of eastern Australian countryside was “like a desert”. In early December, the fields were dry already. The yellow grass was a shock because he had thought that Australia was going to be mainly tropical.

Bonegilla itself was very exciting for the young Estonian men at first. They even found the local rabbits exciting. Sass remembers letting two of them loose in the barracks. Possums invaded the barracks without human assistance.

They went swimming in Lake Hume and found that they could catch yabbies for meals. There were big fish in the Lake also, near the Hume Weir, but their attempts to catch them were unsuccessful.

Those who returned late to the barracks would be welcomed with a bucket of cold water perched carefully on top of the partially open door.

Busloads of girls turned up from Wodonga and Albury to meet the new young men in the camp. Despite his dancing skills, Sass was afraid to take any of the girls to a dance as they were well dressed, while he “looked like a scarecrow”.

While in Bonegilla, the displaced persons received 5/- per week “tobacco money” for personal spending, after the costs of their board were deducted from their social security payments. At that time, a packet of tobacco cost 2/6.

His first Australian employer was the company of CJ Row, Webb and Anderson which operated what Sass called the Eildon timber mill. We know it from the Bonegilla cards as a timber mill at Thornton, about 12 Kilometres away from the better-known township of Eildon. Both are more than 130 Kilometres away from the company’s headquarters in South Melbourne. Given that much of the trip is on rural roads, it still is around 2½ hours drive between South Melbourne and Thornton or Eildon.

Sass reported Row and Webb were generous Australians, counterbalanced by Anderson, a “stingy Pom”. Sass received a minimum of £5/12/- for a five-day week, from which he paid 16/- tax and 36/- for accommodation and board. This left £3/-/- to spend or save.

Aleksander stacks timber at the Thornton mill

Source:  Collection of Aleksander Nõmm

After three or four months, his weekly wages went up to £7/10/-. Also, he found that he could earn an extra £3 on Saturday mornings doing piecework for Mr Webb. However, the accommodation provided was in barracks which had grass growing through the gaps in the floor. The gaps also permitted lizards to make forays through the barracks.

Aleksander (left) and another employee among the stacked timber

Source:  Collection of Aleksander Nõmm

While he was at Thornton, Sass attended English classes four days a week. Among the other DPs employed by Row, Webb and Anderson were the 3 Lithuanians in the photo above, who spoke to him in German, so he learnt some German there also. He had not picked up the German language while in Germany as he always was in camps with other Estonians.

Three Lithuanians and an Estonian again, with their clothes suggesting that this photo was taken in the same session as the truck photo: from the left, Edvardas Lapinskas, Aleksander, Bernardas Matkevičius and Juozas Nakas, with the CJ Row, Webb & Anderson sawmill in the background

Source:  Collection of Aleksander Nõmm

After finishing his compulsory employment at the Thornton Mill, Sass was able to find other work, but it was “three weeks here, six weeks there”. The Dunlop tyre company provided him with better employment, but best of all was Kraft Foods.

He started work with Kraft in 1953 and stayed with the company more than thirty years, until he retired in 1985. He was employed as a storeman, and a forklift driver and eventually in the company’s office.

At some stage, possibly even in his Estonian youth, Sass took up sport. As mentioned already, he was tall, and of medium build when younger, so he had the right body for a sportsman. His speciality in Australia was the shotput and javelin, until he damaged his shoulder.

Oberkassel, Germany, 1946:  Two volleyball teams with their trainers/managers
in plain clothes in the middle of the front row, with Sass 4th from the left

Source:  Collection of Aleksander Nõmm

In December 1949, a sports writer for the Melbourne Herald listed him as one of 9 javelin throwers invited to tests for inclusion in the Victorian athletics team. Success would lead to the Australian championships and inclusion in the team for the Empire Games (now the Commonwealth Games) in Auckland, New Zealand, two months later.

The Australian Estonian newspaper, Meie Kodu, reported in January 1950 that he had competed in the Victorian Athletics Championships, despite the heat affecting all competitors. Affiliated with the Box Hill Club, he was placed third in the javelin. It looks like Sass just missed out on the Victorian team in the leadup to an Australian team for the Empire Games.

The first Australian Estonian Sporting Games were held in Melbourne during Easter 1954. Sass did well, coming second in the long jump with a leap of 5.78 metres and second also in the shotput, with a throw of 11.53 metres.

In June 1954, Sass was participating in an Estonian volleyball team which was involved in trial games against others to determine the grades in which eventually they would play. The Estonian team had won its 3 games so far. The following month, Meie Kodu reported that they had defeated a Greek team, Olympic (of course), maintaining a record of 5 wins and no losses.

Meie Kodu also reported in the same month that Sass had chaired a meeting of Melbourne sportspeople and was chosen to be the coach of the girl’s handball team.

Another Australian Estonian Sporting Games were held in 1955. Sass came second in the long jump again, with a slightly shorter jump of 5.74 metres. It looks like there was no shotput competition.

He wasn’t just a sportsman. He successfully played bridge as well. As early as July 1954, Meie Kodu was reporting Sass coming second in a bridge doubles competition when partnering another First Transport arrival, Sven Kiviväli.

By 1957, Sass was building his own house in the northern Melbourne suburb of Fawkner, having married Irene Sein who arrived in Australia in 1949. Their only child, Silvi, was born while the house was going up. Silvi worked as a librarian, married and provided 2 grandchildren to Sass and Irene. Mrs Nõmm also had an older son. The family moved into the Fawkner house in 1958.

That year was also the year when Sass became an Australian citizen, with Irene on 5 March 1958.

A turning point must have been reached in 1957-58, with marriage, house-building and citizenship, as there are no more digitised reports of A. Nõmm’s sporting achievements.

At the time of writing in 2026, Melbourne Estonians had held a Last Hurrah weekend to farewell their Estonian House on Melville Road in West Coburg 6 weeks previously. Back in 1971, they were renovating the recently acquired former cinema. A contributor to Meie Kodu listed those who turned up every weekend to help, including Sass and his bridge partner, Sven Kiviväli.

All dressed up and somewhere to go, 9 Estonians from the First Transport, probably in Melbourne's recently renovated Estonian House:  Standing, left to right, Ants Sumberg, Valentin Reesel, Erich Väli, know to all as "Potsa", Lembit Koplus (looking really happy to have left Pyramid Hill), Kalev Veermäe, Sven Kiviväli, and kneeling, left to right, Ralf Knuude, maybe Mihkel Kaige, Aleksander Nõmm 

Source:  Collection of Aleksander Nõmm

After arriving in Australia, Sass has lived and worked only in Victoria, but travelled by car through NSW, South Australia and as far north as Mossman in Queensland. He undertook bus tours of Tasmania and from the centre of Australia to Darwin. He and Irene toured New Zealand.

Ill health, however, prevented travel back to Estonia, even after its second independence in 1991. He didn’t actually want to go, because he wanted the memories of how things were to stay in his mind.

Irene died on 29 March 2008, days short of her 86th birthday. This was the point when Sass had to leave the home he had built himself. He lived with his daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren for nearly 3 years. Then more health issues forced him into retirement care with Claremont Terrace Aged Care, McKinnon, near where his family lived.

Sass stayed there for another 9 years, passing the respectable age of 98 years. The ashes of both Sass and Irene rest in the Estonian section of the Fawkner Memorial Park in northern Melbourne.

SOURCES

Estonia’s Victims of Communism, Search Nõmm https://www.memoriaal.ee/en/search/?q=N%C3%B5mm&f=all, accessed 1 July 2026.

Hayward, Steve (1949) ‘Jack Davey's Test In Six-Mile Event’, Herald, Melbourne, 8 December, p 27 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/244143925, accessed 19 June 2026.

Meie Kodu (Our Home) (1950) 'Melbourneist' (‘From Melbourne’, in Estonian) Sydney, NSW, 26 January, p 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article85529847, accessed 10 June 2026.

Meie Kodu (Our Home) (1953) 'Melbourne', (In Estonian) Sydney, NSW, 27 August, p4, https://dea.digar.ee/page/meiekodu/1953/08/27/4, accessed 14 June 2026.

Meie Kodu (Our Home) (1954) ‘Terves kehas terve vaim' (‘A healthy mind in a healthy body', in Estonian) Sydney, NSW, 29 April, p 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article85536610, accessed 10 June 2026.

Meie Kodu (Our Home) (1954) 'Melbourne' (in Estonian) Sydney, NSW, 1 July, p 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article85536914, accessed 19 June 2026.

Meie Kodu (Our Home) (1954) 'Sport, Melbourne' (In Estonian) Sydney, NSW, 8 July, p 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article85536935, accessed 10 June 2026.

Meie Kodu (Our Home) (1954) 'Melbourne' (in Estonian) Sydney, NSW, 15 July, p 3, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/85536971, accessed 19 June 2026.

Meie Kodu (Our Home) (1954) Sydney, NSW, 'Melbourne', (In Estonian) 15 July, p 3 https://dea.digar.ee/page/meiekodu/1954/07/15/3, accessed 14 June 2026.

Meie Kodu (Our Home) (1954) 'Melbourne', (In Estonian) Sydney, NSW, 29 July, p 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article85537041, accessed 11 June 2026.

Meie Kodu (Our Home) (1955) ‘Rekordid kõnelevad’ (‘The records speak for themselves’, in Estonian) Sydney, NSW, 10 February, p 3, https://dea.digar.ee/page/meiekodu/1955/02/10/3, accessed 14 June 2026.

Meie Kodu (Our Home) (1971) ‘Eesti Maja’ (‘Estonian House’, in Estonian) Sydney, NSW, 14 October, p 2 https://dea.digar.ee/page/meiekodu/1971/10/14/2, accessed 14 June 2026.

Meie Kodu (Our Home) (1972) ‘Rahvuskapitali Tänu’ (‘National Fund Thanks’, in Estonian, Sydney, NSW, 20 September, p 2 https://dea.digar.ee/page/meiekodu/1972/09/20/2, accessed 16 June 2026.

Meie Kodu (Our Home) (1974) ‘Melbourne, Märkmeid Yarra-Linnast’ (‘Melbourne, Notes from the City on the Yarra’, in Estonian) Sydney, NSW, 11 September, p 3 https://dea.digar.ee/page/meiekodu/1974/09/11/3, accessed 16 June 2026.

Meie Kodu (Our Home) (1981) ‘Rahvuskapitali Tänu’ (‘National Fund Thanks’, in Estonian, Sydney, NSW, 9 September, p 2 https://dea.digar.ee/page/meiekodu/1981/09/09/2, accessed 17 June 2026.

Meie Kodu (Our Home) (1985) ‘Meie Kodu tänab Toetuskaardid’ (‘Meie Kodu Thanks Supporter Cards’, in Estonian) Sydney, NSW, 9 September, p 14 https://dea.digar.ee/page/meiekodu/1985/12/18/14, accessed 17 June 2026.

National Archives of Australia: Department of Immigration, Central Office; A11772, Migrant Selection Documents for Displaced Persons who travelled to Australia per General Stuart Heintzelman departing Bremerhaven 30 October 1947, 1947-1947; 212, NOMM Aleksander DOB 8 May 1922, 1947-1947 recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=5005625, accessed 17 June 2026.

National Archives of Australia: Migrant Reception and Training Centre, Bonegilla [Victoria]; A2571, Name Index Cards, Migrants Registration [Bonegilla], 1947-1956; NOMM ALEXANDER, NOMM, Alexander : Year of Birth - 1922 : Nationality - ESTONIAN : Travelled per - GEN. HEINTZELMAN : Number – 608, 1947-1948 recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=203902046, accessed 17 June 2026.

Nõmm, Aleksander (2003) Personal communications, 9 January and 16 September.

Helmut Nurmsalu (1927-2014): Assimilated Australian, Father of Star Designer, by Ann Tündern-Smith

Updated 10, 17 and 29 June 2026.

Helmut Nurmsalu was one of 5 Estonians sent to Thornton, a locality northeast of Melbourne, Victoria, to work for the timber merchants CJ Row, Webb & Anderson.  The group included 3 Latvians and 3 Lithuanians as well.

When I started to look for public evidence to add to that part of Helmut's life recorded in the files of the National Archives of Australia, but it seemed scant. I thought his life story would be a brief one.

That was because I started by looking through the digitised Estonian-language newspapers which that country’s national library has made available on line through its DIGAR Website. While this produced 14 Results which included the Helmut Nurmsalu name, 13 of them were recent mentions of a person living or recently deceased in Estonia.

Our Helmut was included only in a 1948 list of Estonians refugees who had resettled already in Australia, published at the end of the year in a Swedish newspaper, Stockholms-Tidningen Eestlastele (a mixture of Swedish and Estonian which translates as Stockholm Newspaper for Estonians).

Then I discovered how much of his life was recorded in Australian publications digitised by Australia’s National Library in its Trove collection. I realised that the picture was very different.

How Helmut Assimilated

When the Federal Government took the lead in immigration matters after World War II, the official settlement policy was assimilation. Immigrants were expected to “forget the past, look forward to the future”.* Fortunately, the Government forgot to tell the immigrants much about this, as they set about starting new community groups or building on existing ones, publishing newspapers in their own languages and so on.

Some individuals – or were they individualists? – went their own way. We probably can describe Helmut as one of them, someone who assimilated although he possibly did not know that this was what he was doing. It must have started before July 1950. That’s when his engagement to marry a young Australian woman was announced by an advertisement in Melbourne’s Argus newspaper.

His intended was Elizabeth (Betty) Robinson, third daughter of Mr and Mrs RV Robinson of Sunbury. It was then a rural town, with a population of around one thousand, 38 kilometres northeast of Melbourne’s central business district. (Today it is more like an outer suburb of Melbourne, with many residents commuting by rail into the city for their work.)

His Marriage

The marriage took place on 5 February 1951 in Melbourne’s leading Catholic church, St Patrick’s Cathedral. Helmut had stated that he was a Protestant, most likely a Lutheran, before migration to Australia. In contrast, he is listed as a Roman Catholic on the passenger list (“nominal roll”) for the voyage of the Heintzelman. He may or may not have been required to convert to Catholicism before the marriage.

Having the marriage ceremony reported by newspapers probably required relatives to contact the social pages editor. That looks like what Betty’s family did, as reports subsequently appeared in two Melbourne newspapers, The Age and The Argus, on 7 February 1951.

The focus in the Argus article was on bridal wear, although the groom’s origin in the Estonian town of Türi got a mention. The Age added descriptions of the clothes worn by 2 bridesmaids and a flower girl, it named the best man and a groomsman, and it added a reception which followed Hotel Federal. What a contrast to what Helmut had endured during World War II, which had ended less than 6 years earlier!

Helmut's photograph from his Bonegilla card

Source:  National Archives of Australia

Both partners to the marriage were living in Sunbury. Helmut’s occupation was stated to be Process Worker (someone who carries out repetitive operations in a factory) while Betty was Receptionist.

Might the couple have moved then to rural Omeo? The National Archives of Australia’s RecordSearch Web function can find files relating to one Nurmsalu only, our Helmut. In all cases, his first name is spelled with an addition H on the end, the German spelling. The Estonian T has a soft sound anyhow, more like our D, so Estonian orthography sees no need to add an H where German and even English writers often do. For example, the newly independent Estonian Government had to write to the Australian Government to beg it not to spell the English version of its name as ‘Esthonia’. There’s a whole file on that topic in the National Archives.

Helmuth Plays Australian Football

Back to Omeo, in rural Victoria’s far east. Actually, even more rural, to a town called Ensay on the Great Alpine Road, located between Swift’s Creek and Bruthen. If Australia had villages, this would be one, with a population of 109 in 2016. The local Bairnsdale Advertiser and East Gippsland Stock and Station Journal reported on an Australian Rules football player with the family name Nurmsalu during the 1953-54 season.

He was named first as ‘H. Nurmsalu’, one of Ensay’s goalkickers, in the 1 June 1953 issue. He was named as one of Ensay’s 3 best players for the game. In the 15 June issue, he was named again as one of the goalkickers and best players for the team, although without an initial this time. His team reached the semi-finals played on 15 August 1953, losing to their Swift’s Creek rivals, when he again kicked one goal and was one of the best 6 players for the Ensay team.

For those readers more familiar with the type of football which Nurmsalu may well have played previously, soccer to Australians, jalgpall (literally, football) in Nurmsalu’s mother tongue, there are 18 players on an Aussie Rules team. This means that the top 6 are the best one-third, not more than half.

At the end of the season in August, votes for the Best and Fairest Player in the Omeo District League were tallied. Helmut was not the winner, but he scored a respectable 8 votes, enough to get a mention in the report in the Bairnsdale Advertiser. From this we learn also that his playing position was ruckman, normally the tallest player in the team whose main job is to contest the ball when play is not moving, particularly the centre bounce at the start of the game and boundary throw-ins after the ball leaves the playing oval.

Helmuth’s height according to his Bonegilla card was only 5 feet 6 inches, which is below 1.7 metres. The medical report completed at the Babenhausen camp before Helmut was accepted for migration to Australia says that he was taller, 1.8 metres (5 feet 11 inches, translated to the measurements still used in the USA). That could be tall enough to be a ruckman in a shorter community. (Babenhausen got a mention in our second last entry because Martha Donald, soon to travel to Australia on the same ship as Helmuth, moved to the same camp.)

At the start of the next season, 22 May 1954, Nurmsalu was again one of the goalkickers for Ensay and one of the team’s 4 best players. In the next Saturday’s game, he did not kick a goal but once again was one of the 5 best players. He was the team’s best goalkicker in the 26 June game, with 2 against Swift’s Creek, and of course one of the 3 best players, but his team lost heavily. The final score was Swift’s Creek 17 goals, 7 behinds for 109 points, while Ensay scored only 6 goals, 7 behinds for 43 points.

That’s the last we can read of Nurmsalu playing for the Ensay football team. However, the likelihood that it’s our Helmut is supported by Betty’s presence on the local Commonwealth-State electoral roll for the Division or Province of Gippsland in 1954. Her place of residence was Ensay North (apparently Ensay was much larger back then) and her occupation was Home Duties.

Another 1954 Electoral Roll, dated 25 February 1954 like the Ensay one, has Betty resident at 45 Waverley Street, W5 (Essendon), for the Commonwealth Division of Maribyrnong and the State Assembly District of Moonee Ponds. One of those two rolls was incorrect.

Helmuth Becomes an Australian Officially

The next public record is the grant to him of Australian citizenship in a ceremony on 16 October 1957. His address at the time was on Nepean Highway, Aspendale, now back in greater Melbourne. At nearly 30 kilometres southeast of the edge of Melbourne’s central business district, it was almost as far in the opposite direction as Sunbury was to the north west. A car trip between the two to visit Betty’s family would still take more than 2 hours today.

Helmut officially became Helmuth with his new citizenship. Maybe he just gave up trying to spell it the Estonian way. Maybe putting the H on the end helped other people to pronounce it in a way which sounded more Estonian. Maybe it helped them to stop saying his name as if it was protective headwear.

Helmuth's Residence and Occupations

He first appeared in a 1958 electoral roll, with Elizabeth, for Gisborne, the next town on the railway line beyond Sunbury. He had become a Linesman by occupation. The interesting thing about that is it was the occupation given by his father-in-law on the marriage certificate. Robert (Bob?) Robinson must have introduced Helmut to this work.

His occupation on the Personal Particulars of Person Wishing to Migrate to Australia form completed in Germany was given as Agricultural Work. It records no previous occupation but the AEF DP Registration Record, also completed in Germany, also in September 1947, records his previous occupation as Locksmith.

Maybe Helmut played more Australian Rules football with local teams. We don’t know if he did as not all the small newspapers with local circulations have been digitised for the National Library of Australia’s Trove Web service.

Helmuth and Elizabeth stayed at the same address for the 1963 roll, but moved to another home in Gisborne for 1967 and subsequent rolls, until 1980. The electoral rolls beyond that year have not been digitised yet.

Helmuth's Children

An interesting addition to the 1977 rolls in the appearance of Susan Mary Xavier Nurmsalu, who must have turned 18 on or after 21 March 1973. That’s the date on which Australia’s voting age was lowered from 21. According to Betty’s gravestone (see below) Susan is the middle child of Betty and Helmuth. Her older sister, Helene, does not appear at all on the electoral rolls as Helene Nurmsalu: perhaps she married before she became old enough to vote. Their younger brother, James, must have enrolled after the 1980 rolls closed.

Helmuth Becomes a  Public Servant

During this time, on 17 May 1973, the Commonwealth of Australia Gazette included a notice which said the Helmuth Nurmsalu had been appointed to the Department of Civil Aviation as a Fitter and Turner.  A later Gazette, published on 8 October, said that his appointment had dated from 20 February.

Helmuth was now an Australian Public Servant, at the age of 46. Having previously married an Australia, played Aussie Rules and become an Australian citizen, how much more Australian could Helmuth become?

He also had changed his occupation from Linesman to Fitter and Turner. Presumably he had been upgrading his skills and perhaps practising what he had learned in Estonia 30 or more years previously. Maybe he had the help of his father-in-law again.

Within a few months, Helmuth found out how the Public Service worked. In August he received a provisional promotion to a supervisor position. On 15 November, the Gazette announced that his promotion had been cancelled, with someone else being promoted to the position after going through a formal process of appeal.

He did try again, but it was 9 years later. The Gazette of 29 July 1982 announced that the has been promoted to Senior Fitter and Turner in the Department of Aviation (as it was called now) with effect from 24 June that year.

Public Servants are eligible to retire with superannuation (a pension to which they have contributed part of their salary) from the age of 55. In Helmuth’s case, that would have been on 10 February 1982, so clearly he had stayed on. Not having joined the Public Service until he was in his 40s, he did not have as much superannuation accumulated as someone who had started in their 20s or teens. The compulsory retirement age then was 65, so Helmut may well have stayed in his secure job until February 1992.

There should be a record of his retirement in an issue of the Gazette digitised by the National Library. If there is, it has been missed by the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process.

Deaths

Betty died on 22 April 1995. She was buried in the Sunbury Cemetery, under a plaque which names Helmuth, the three children and two grandchildren. It is in the shape of an open book, with the right page still blank and waiting for Helmut’s details. 

This should mean that he is with us still but 2 followers of this blog, have found a death notice in a rural newspaper using the Ryerson Index.  The Great Lakes Advocate, published in the New South Wales coastal town of Forster, carried the notice for Helmuth, also known as Charlie, on 12 March 2014, so he probably died soon after his 87th birthday.  The distance from Sunbury, in Victoria, is likely to explain why Helmut is not lying beside Betty.

The plaque for Betty Nurmsalu in the Sunbury Cemetery

Source:  Robby in Find a Grave

Of the 3 children, Susan achieved national fame as the designer of a self-titled women’s clothing range.

Susan the Star Designer

The September 1993 appearance of the first Aboriginal model on the front cover of the local edition of Vogue magazine is regarded as a turning point. The model was Elaine George; her apparel was a white top by Susan Nurmsalu.

Elaine George with the September 1993 Vogue cover
featuring her in a Susan Nurmsalu top

Source:  Sydney Morning Herald

Susan’s Web presence indicates that she was designing tailored women’s workwear, jackets and coats, and using higher-quality natural fibres. Her output appears to have been aimed at professional women and was sold through boutiques and higher end chain-stores.

Sadly, her individual designing career did not last long. A 1997 issue of the Commonwealth Gazette carried a notice under the Federal Corporations Law, announcing that a receiver and manager had been appointed to Susan Nurmsalu Pty Limited. This meant that the company had been unable to pay a loan on time.

Susan moved on to design for Trent Nathan. This company, founded by a designer of the same name in 1980, had evolved into one where the brand was more important than the designer. It kept its new designer away from publicity.

The deregistration of Susan Nurmsalu Pty Ltd was announced in an ASIC Gazette (published by the Australian Securities & Investments Commission) on 18 October 2005. That was around the time that Susan left Trent Nathan. I’m guessing that she then was aged around 50, with decades of creativity left in her.

There has not been publicity about her since. Susan's skills as a designer remain on display, though, with clothing bearing her name still available on auction Websites.

Her siblings do not have a Web presence, either, unless under changed names. We can but wish all of them the best.

FOOTNOTE

* This quotation comes from a headlines after the arrival of the Heintzelman passengers in Victoria via the Australian military ship, the Kanimbla.  See, for example, the Courier-Mail of 15 December 1947.

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