The Lebavere bunker

The Lebavere bunker is a forest brother bunker reopened in 2020, restored following the example of one of the bunkers of the forest brother Martin Tamm, based on the memories of his brother Kaljo Tamm.

The Lebavere forest brother bunker is an underground structureplanned to construct it as close to the original bunker „In the Punkripaksu woods“ (literal meaning – in the thick bunker woods) as possible. This is what people used to call the thick forest grove back in the day and the name is still in use today. The forest itself, however, has changed a lot over time, which is why, decades later, the people involved have not been able to determine the exact location of the bunker that had been built without a foundation and has by now completely disappeared.

The Lebavere bunker was inhabited by the local forest brother Martin Tamm. Before using the bunker here, Tamm lived and operated as a forest brother in several bunkers in the surrounding forests. The original bunker in Lebavere was built in 1948 by brothers Martin and Kaljo Tamm and their brother-in-law August Poom. The one who mainly lived in the bunker was Martin, and at times, August did as well. Martin’s brother Kaljo was only 13 years old when the bunker was being built, and his tasks also included bringing Martin food from home. Food was delivered every couple of weeks, often using a horse. To hide the tracks, they used to visit relatives in several places, and only then would take the food to a bush in the forest, from where Martin brought it to the bunker. Martin picked mushrooms and berries for his family, and gave some to the forest keeper who helped hide him; he also braided baskets and removed tree resin for his sister.

The biggest issue they had was with having a wash. At first, Martin went to the sauna at home at night, but later it was too risky. Then, he built a new bunker with a furnace in the middle and a water container on top, large enough for him to wash himself in.

Tamm survived two Soviet anti-guerilla raids and escaped them intact, but did not have any luck in the third one in December 1954 and got arrested. His brother Kaljo Tamm, who had founded the youth resistance organisations Tasuja (Vigilante) and Roheline Kaardivägi (Green Guard), was also arrested for this and sentenced to 10 years in Gulag in 1955. He returned home in 1956. Martin and Kaljo’s father, Juhan Tamm, had been killed by the Soviets already in the Battle of Lebavere in 1941.

Martin Tamm was sentenced for a classic of the time, 25+5, which meant 25 years in a prison camp and five years in forced settlement. He did 17 years and was released in 1971. When he went into the woods to hide in 1944, he was 32 years old and should have had the best years of his life still ahead of him. Instead, his homeland was occupied, which made him hide and fight the enemy in the woods for ten years. He spent the next 17 years in a Gulag . When he returned home, he was an elderly man of 59 years already. Fortunately, fate allowed him to witness the restoration of Estonia’s independence in 1991 before he passed away in 1993. However, the successors of the occupiers left Estonia only in 1994 (then already Russians instead Soviets). The bunker in Lebavere serves to preserve the memory of Martin Tamm and all his comrades-in-arms in Lebavere and elsewhere in Estonia. They lived for Estonia, so let us honour them and preserve our freedom.