Remember. 23 August: Jaan Kross [EN]

Jaan Kross (1920–2007) was an Estonian writer, a symbol of resistance against totalitarianism and the ‘conscience of the Estonian people’. His promising lawyer’s career was thwarted by the war and Estonia’s incorporation to the USSR. In 1944, during the Nazi occupation, he spent half a year in jail, and after the country was re-occupied by the Soviet Union, he was sentenced to slave labour in the Gulag (1946–1952). Kross managed to survive despite all odds and once back in his hometown Tallinn in 1954 he devoted himself to literature. Although he was also a translator and poet, international acclaim (crowned with several nominations to the Nobel Prize in Literature) came to Jaan Kross thanks to his historical novels. Every year on 23 August, the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes, the ENRS recalls those persecuted in the name of totalitarian and authoritarian ideologies. Learn more at: (in English)