ESTONIA: An 82-year-old villager who fought the Red Army and survived the gulag talks to Daniel McLaughlin in Monister, Estonia
Beyond the dark fields that surround Alfred Kaarmann's yellow cottage, ancient forest shrouds this remote corner of Europe. This is where the 82-year-old grew up and fell in love, where a Russian bullet tore away his left arm and where Soviet agents eventually caught him and condemned him to the Siberian gulag.
He lived as a fugitive in these woods for more than eight years and is one of the few surviving Forest Brothers, partisans who offered doomed resistance to the Red Army when it occupied the Baltic states at the end of the second World War.
Mr Kaarmann says secrecy was the key to his survival and still peppers a new arrival to his village with questions before agreeing to tell his story, which spans Estonia's 50-year journey from independence, through occupation and oppression, to freedom regained and now membership of NATO and the European Union.
He was one of thousands of Estonians mobilised by the Germans after they drove out the occupying Red Army in 1940. But when Josef Stalin's forces counterattacked, they had bleak options: retreat with the Nazis, or wait for the approaching Soviets to arrest him.
He went another way, joining scores of Latvians and Estonians who chose the wilderness over a reckoning with the arbitrary justice of a Soviet tribunal.
Most quickly gave up or were caught and deported to Siberian labour camps. Mr Kaarmann held out, hunted and fished to supplement food gleaned from sympathisers and slept in simple, crudely camouflaged shelters.
On October 1945, a few miles from this wooden house through the forest towards the Latvian frontier, Soviet agents caught up with him for the first time. "I suspected nothing and heard a metallic sound behind me. I turned and saw about 20 men after me. They fired, and I still remember the pain," he said.
He escaped through a swamp, his shattered arm pouring blood, before collapsing unconscious inside Latvia.
Local Forest Brothers found him, bandaged his arm and gave him shelter.
"My smashed arm looked terrible. I knew I was badly wounded. 'Do what you must,' I told them." The partisans found a young female surgeon, Ms Lidija Roze, to amputate his arm in the woods. Mr Kaarmann was only 23 years old.
His solitary, fugitive existence was made no easier by his meeting with a local girl, Kleina, four years later. She lived in the house where he now sits and met him at the home of a partisan sympathiser.
"We could only meet in the summer, when the ground was dry and there was no snow," he said of their covert trysts. "I couldn't risk leaving any tracks. Without total secrecy we wouldn't have survived."
In November 1952 - eight years, one month and seven days after he fled into the forest - Soviet agents curtailed Mr Kaarmann's desperate freedom, seizing him in the house of a man he believed to be a friend. They showed him no mercy.
"I felt no pain, although they beat me. I was indifferent to whatever they did. There was no way to be saved, no hope. It was all the same to me if they killed me," he said.
He was sent to a gulag buried deep in the Siberian forest, to join German, Polish and Japanese prisoners of war, as well as other Forest Brothers.
Stalin was already dead, and as the thaw of Nikita Khrushchev's time set in, Mr Kaarmann saw quiet amnesties winnow the prisoners' ranks. But he had no reprieve. "They said I hadn't given up when I had the chance, so I would be staying inside."
In 1965, after more than a decade in captivity, a commission finally struck 10 years from his sentence, leaving him with two left to serve.
After 23 years as a fugitive and prisoner, Mr Kaarmann came home. Kleina was waiting for him, but other locals were less welcoming.
"The communists hated me so much. Here was this man, whom they had loathed and pursued for so long, coming back as if resurrected. I put down my little case and thought 'Now I can rest'. But no."
Just four months later, in February 1968, Mr Kaarmann was summoned to the local police station and given 72 hours to leave Estonia. His odyssey recommenced.
For the next decade he wandered Estonia, Latvia and north-west Russia, finding occasional work and staying wherever he could, denied permission to live in his own village.
He was finally allowed to move into this cottage in 1981, 30 years after surreptitiously visiting Kleina here as a young Forest Brother. She died in 1991, and he lives alone now, growing vegetables in a little allotment that looks out towards the forest.
Mr Kaarmann empties a pot of pens on to his kitchen table, and a long brass bullet, tipped with red, rattles on the wood. It is the type the Soviets fired into his arm 59 years ago.
He turns it in the fingers of his right hand and vows never to let Estonians forget their past, how the western powers left them at Stalin's mercy after the second World War, and how Estonian hunted Estonian through the darkest chapter in his nation's history.
"Some people ask me why I can't keep quiet about that time. But how can I say nothing when I still feel my missing arm, when it still hurts me."
He says a tumultuous century has done little to change the villages round here but, while welcoming membership of NATO as a way to keep the Russian bear at bay, he insists that he and his generation have grave doubts about the European Union, which Estonia joined on May 1st.
"NATO could be our saviour, but we'll soon see about the EU. We've had enough of colonialists in Estonia.
"The Soviet Union had a red star as its symbol, the EU has its little gold stars. Who knows what the future holds?"