Many toys were lost during wartime since they were not the most important things one would think of at the time of distress. But children have a creative imagination and they play with self-made toys, such as cows made of cones, or simply set up a shop by a stone, for example. There are a few wartime board games in our collections. Those days the games had names such as “Journey to the Frontline” or “Struggle for Food".

War-time memories

“We were children evacuated from Sortavala (village in old Carelia) to Jyväskylä. It was a late summer night and we eagerly waited for a taxi to appear from behind the corner – our aunt Viivi was to return from Helsinki. We fought sleep – and pretended to be asleep: after all, we were well-raised children. The sleepiness was almost unbearable.

Suddenly, we heard laughter and conversation downstairs – aunt Viivi had arrived unnoticed. Perhaps the sleepiness got the better of us for a moment. Finally, light steps on the attic stairs and a silent knock on the door. A divine smell filled the little attic room. Our beautiful aunt Viivi had a porcelain dish in her hand, and on the dish there was a miraculous orange flower: it was the first orange I had ever seen. Even today, I treat myself and my grandchildren to such orange flowers. If I close my eyes, I sometimes manage to reach the unrivalled, enchanting smell that I first felt as a child.”

Years of war and shortage were golden for paper merchants. There were many kinds of paper dolls and cardboard replicas: cars, trains, tanks, fortresses and Indian camps, which were cut out and assembled in the evening hours. Potatoes were used for glue. At paper stores, table games such as “Asemasota” (Position War), “Elintarvikekamppailu” (Battle for Provisions), “Taistelu Karjalasta” (Battle for Karelia) and “Rintamaretkeily” (Frontier Expedition) were also available. There were hardly any problems with involvement of grown-ups in such battles.

“We assembled a dollhouse in a corrugated cardboard box: the furniture was glued together of empty matchboxes and spools of thread. We made mirrors out of the tinfoil package of Koskenlaskija processed cheese, polishing it slightly by nail. Beautiful figs were made out of cowberry twigs, by way of inserting the twig ends into bottle corks. Stoves were made out of paper rolls. When all of this beauty was completed, it was taken outside. Then, a nice fire show followed – this is how real houses burnt at home, in Karelia.”

Various boxes were sewn from old postcards, balls made by covering cores of cork pieces and string with wool yarns of different colours. Pictures of movie stars and cars were cut out from newspapers and glued with potato paste to blue-chequered notebooks. Diaries were kept and hid on the mother’s permission into the box of a Singer sewing machine with pedals, away from those nasty, nosey sisters.

“In late winter, at the yard of the Jyvälä nursery, the children competed on whose paper string-covered and wood-soled shoes caught the highest lumps of snow. Pity us, wearers of leather shoes; under the wooden soles, lumps could grow to the height of almost two feet!"

These memories belong to Piippa Tandefelt, founder of the Toy Museum. Piippa was born in Sortavala in October 1939. When the Winter War broke out on 30 November 1939, Piippa was evacuated at the age of less than two months.