A Childhood Story Since childhood I have experienced strange things like spontaneous past-life recollections and out-of-body experiences. But our life was too hard to pay any attention to it. Russian and German armies marched through our backyards and our lives. In 1940 Stalin occupied Estonia within a couple of days, and immediately launched mass arrests. My two uncles disappeared on their way to work and we never saw them again. On the heels of the annexation of the Baltic states came World War II, and the retreating Red Army took my father.

1938:  The last days of Paradise

At the end of the war we were staying on a remote Estonian farm surrounded by woods and swamps. In 1944, Russians on their way back toward Berlin were passing through Estonia, when out of the woods flew a crazy bullet that killed the little girl I was playing with in the yard.

We were holding hands and running to have our breakfast. Suddenly, without a single sob, my friend went limp and fell on the green grass like a lifeless pink Barbie doll with scattered blond curly hair and glassy blue eyes. She was the farmer's daughter. I can still hear the cry of the farmer's wife when she saw her child killed. My mother packed our things, and the same day we were out of that place on our way home. Now, instead of German soldiers, Russian soldiers patrolled the roads. They looked different. We saw the Army that would reach Berlin and win the war. We saw the Army that had grown dangerously strong, and was made up of people who would destroy Hitlerism and undermine Stalinism for good, simply by bringing home the news that people out there, in Europe, lived a better life than Russians did under Stalin's rule.

Relief and celebration were in the air, but not for me. Since the day of our return, I carried guilt for not being killed instead of that beautiful girl. Her parents, the farm people, were nice to us. My mother worked for them, and they fed us. They took their chance by sheltering us. And like all good and righteous people in the world, they expected to be rewarded. Instead, heaven took their daughter. And they were very angry with me. I was sensitive enough to feel and read their thoughts and feelings. My inborn sensitivity turned out to be my damnation. I felt like the one who had killed the girl.

That same week, together with the Russian Army, my father returned home for three days, only to be killed in the battles for the Estonian islands two weeks later. It is hard to believe, but I felt like the one who had killed my father as well. My childhood was over. I entered the land of losers and loners not worthy to be loved, or succeed. Since that time my entire life became a battlefield, a nonstop struggle to overcome that feeling of guilt and worthlessness. This struggle lifted me to the top among my peers in my country and this struggle let me fall down and hit the bottom in exile, and this inner struggle made me look for answers beyond the earthly realm in other dimensions. Is that struggle over? I don't know yet.

At the time I did not notice that it was probably my father's death in the Soviet Army that took us off the list of the people marked to be sent to Siberia in the last wave of Stalin's mass arrests. For three days and nights NKVD (KGB) cars, "black crows," took people out of their homes--elderly, sick and children included--to deport them to Siberia. For three days and nights we sat fully dressed near the window waiting for them to knock at our door as well. They didn't. But when I went to school, half of the students were missing… The teacher seemed not to notice, the students names were not called and our presence was not verified… Soon the classes would be regrouped in order to erase the memory of deported teenagers. Maybe they could erase that memory, but not me… You bet, I felt guilty for not being sent to Siberia…My inner struggle with the eternal guilt feeling was in full swing!

It seemed that the Soviet regime would last forever. But it was not so. In the 1980s the crises of Marxist materialist ideology grew irreversible. A great number of psychics emerged all over the Soviet Union. I met strong clairvoyants who could diagnose a disease by merely looking at a patient. Tourists brought Carlos Castaneda's books from abroad, and Don Juan's teaching fueled our imagination.

I was impressed with the psychics but I didn't develop my own abilities, considering them quite average. But I looked for help from psychics. The very first prediction that I would wind up in America, was made by a Jewish Moscow psychic in the early 1980s. None of us believed that. We had a good laugh at that time. Later the same was foretold by another, Estonian psychic, and again I had a good laugh. I studied astrology with a group in the studio of the famous Estonian painter, Juri Arrak. We cast charts for each other and competed in the eloquence of their interpretation.

But when, in exile, the social role of a film critic--a supporter of talented and rebellious and banned filmmakers--was taken from me, my interest in metaphysics filled the empty spot in my universe. And I recognized that I was destined to change my subjectmatter. Instead of writing about films and celebrities, I had to write about the spirit people who volunteered to talk to me.

One day I noticed that I was already writing a book and a mysterious voice suggested the title: Death the Beginning, as well as messages about the eternal life of the human soul.