Lack of resources hampers the identification of dead Finnish soldiers Juhani Saarinen, Helsingin Sanomat ”I phoned my children and told them that my father was coming home", says Maija Kivipelto, 74, recalling the moment some years ago when she heard that the body of her father Juho Niemi had been found - almost 70 years after he had died.
Corporal Juho Niemi went missing on the Karelian Isthmus in a concentrated artillery barrage on Christmas Day in 1939.
The family man from Kuortane in South Ostrobothnia had left for the war when his daughter Maija was three years old.
Kivipelto has only some dim and distant recollections of her father. She remembers the sad and sombre atmosphere at home on the day her father and other men from the same village left for the front.
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