Patarei

Former embrasures run along the curve of the stone facade; vaulted casemates lie behind them. The Russian military built a coastal battery here: nearly two hundred guns were meant to keep the Tallinn roadstead and the approach to Saint Petersburg under fire. The name Patarei came from the Estonian word for “battery.” When the fortress lost its military purpose, the embrasures were turned into windows, and the casemates were first used as barracks and then divided into cells of the Central Prison.

On February seventh, nineteen forty-four, sixteen-year-old Henri Zajdenwergier was walking to a lycée in Angoulême, France. His mother died shortly after giving birth, his father had been taken away in a roundup two years earlier, and Henri was living with an elderly acquaintance of the family. German police officers detained the teenager on the street. To determine whether he was Jewish, they made him undress. Henri was not allowed to go home again.

After the camps in Poitiers and Drancy, he was assigned to Convoy No. 73. On May fifteenth, SS men loaded eight hundred seventy-eight Jewish men into freight cars. Henri believed they were being sent to construction work. Three days later, in Kaunas, cars carrying about six hundred prisoners were uncoupled from the train. The remaining five cars were taken farther on. This was the only train carrying deportees from France that was sent to the Baltic states; historians still have not established why this route was chosen for it.

On May twentieth, about three hundred men were brought to Patarei. The complex had already served as the Central Prison for a quarter of a century, yet it had been built for guns. Emperor Nikolai I wanted to protect the sea route to Saint Petersburg and, in eighteen twenty-seven, ordered a fortress built at the Tallinn roadstead. Vaulted casemates were arranged inside the curved stone structure, while embrasures for nearly two hundred guns were opened on the outside. The name also came from the artillery battery: in Estonian, “patarei” means “battery.”

The fortress became obsolete without ever facing a major battle. In eighteen fifty-eight, the military removed Tallinn from the list of land fortresses, turned the embrasures into windows, and housed barracks here. After the fires of nineteen seventeen, the city lost its two former prisons. The Ministry of Justice of the young Republic of Estonia chose the vacated barracks: walls almost two meters thick no longer required special reinforcement. Builders added partitions, iron gates, and double bars. In nineteen twenty, the casemates became cells.

The German occupation administration acquired a ready-made place for prisoners and for allocating forced laborers. Henri spent about ten days inside, then was transferred to a camp in Lasnamäe subordinate to Patarei. There, together with other prisoners, he restored the runways of a military airfield after bombings. When the front approached Tallinn, the prison administration evacuated both Patarei and its branch. On September first, of the roughly three hundred French Jews who had arrived here in spring, thirty-four people remained to be sent to Stutthof.

Henri was forced to fell trees, then driven through the snow on a death march. In March nineteen forty-five, he became exhausted and refused to leave the barrack. The guards left, leaving him lying there. When Henri regained consciousness, a Red Army officer was standing beside him. Twenty-two people from the entire convoy returned to France. There Henri learned that no one from his family was left.

A memorial stone stands at the entrance to Patarei. It bears two numbers from this story: eight hundred seventy-eight deportees and twenty-two returnees. Henri Zajdenwergier was one of them.