My name is Lea Toivola and I am a free lance writer and lecturer. I live in Espoo, a city near of Helsinki.
I was born in 1951 in Mäntsälä, 60 kilometres north of Helsinki.
I studied in the school Swedish, German and English. In addition, I understand a little Estonian, a language related to Finnish.
I received my MA from the University of Helsinki after studying Finnish Literature, the Finnish language, Folklore, Sociology, Journalism, Finnish History and General History.
I have worked as a librarian in the City Library of Porvoo and in Helsinki University Library.
At the same time, I wrote and published several articles, mostly about Literature or History. From 2002 I have been a free lance writer and lecturer.
My subjects have been f.ex. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sophie Scholl as well as Finnish authors, f.ex. Mika Waltari.
The subjects of my blog are war novels, mostly Finnish ones and how they are developed since WW2. If you want to know more about them in English, please contact me: firstname.surname@welho.com.
If you want to see photos about Finland in WW2, the Finnish army’s pictory achive is now open: SA-kuva
If you want to read about the political and military events during the Winter War and Continuation War against the Soviet Union and Lapland War against Nazi Germany, I recommend Hitler’s Nordic Ally? Finland and the Total War 1939-1945 by Claes Johansen.
You can buy the book f.ex. here: Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
In his book Johansen loans my story what my father about saw in the Karelian Isthmus when the Soviet great attack had broken two Finnish defence lines in 1944 : ’We met crying soldiers, whose eyes were popping out of their heads. ”No one can stand being out there,” one of them said.’
But the third defence line held and so peace could be made in September.
sotaromaanit 