A fufaika puffer jacket from Siberia

This puffer jacket warmed a young boy, Hans Luik, in icy Siberia. His father, a farmer of a big farm and veteran of the Estonian Independence War, was imprisoned in 1941 and died in a prison camp in the Kirov region in Russia. Young Hans was deported along with his expectant mother. Soon Hans’s mother was also imprisoned, and the boy was placed in an orphanage. At the end of the war, Hans managed to get permission to return from Siberia to his homeland due to his poor health. He arrived in Estonia in 1946 wearing the same fufaika. However, he kept the fufaika, an inseparable companion day and night, as if it was a talisman of a happy return to his homeland. “I can’t even explain to myself why I kept this old ragged piece for decades.” “Why are you keeping this old stuff?” my wife scolded me when I got married. “It’s not even suitable for a floor washcloth! Let me throw it away!” When Vabamu’s first permanent exhibition was opened in 2003, Hans, a recognized Estonian literate by then, took President
Lennart Meri, who was the patron of the museum, to see his old fufaika on display.

“Hello, Lennart, when you were deported in the Kirov region, did you also wear such a fancy
robe?”.

“Oh, yes, it was high fashion in Siberia,” chuckled his old friend.

“But you didn’t keep yours, did you?”

“It didn’t occur to me that it might still be needed,” Lennart shook his head.

Location: The Vabamu Museum of Occupations and Freedom