Arved Elken was born on the 5th of October in 1932 in Southern-Estonia in Jõgevamaa county in a very small town Puurmani. He was a single child in the family.
When he was 7 years old his father got a job as a car driver in Tartu. So the whole family moved there. Arved went to school (Tartu 6th Secondary School).
In 1939 the World War II. Estonia lost its independence. A lot of Germans left the country in a fear of the Soviet Union. Arved's mother was working in a German institution. She was a dishwasher. Her friend encouraged her to leave the country with the Germans. (This friend of her had a German boyfriend) So her friend tried to frighten her that she will be sent to Siberia because she was working for Germans.
In 1944 Arved Elken and his family (also his mothers friend) started their journey from the harbour of Tallinn to Hamburg. The ship was full of fugitives of the war: Germans from the military and also many civilians. In the Finnish gulf fear sent all the people on their way - Russians tried to take their ship down. A lot of ships got hit and their ship also did. About 10 people died but the ship didn't drown. But many other drowned and there were corpses and pieces of the ships floating in the sea.
When Arved was younger then his granny taught her the Pater Noster and it was usual that people read it daily. Also Arved did it but as a child he wasn't very religious. But sitting in a bomb shelter of the ship and hearing the horrible sound of cracking pieces of the ship he prayed the way he never did before.
In Germany the whole family lived in the English-American zone (Western Germany) in Güteschloh. Arved's mother was working in a hotel. Arved almost had to go to school but they left Germany before that. In the hotel where mother was working stayed a lot of English and American people. Some American officers offered them a chance to go to America to the state of Kentucky and suggested not to go back to Estonia. They would have taken them to America and helped them to get acquainted with the life in the States.
Many Russian war prisoners in Germany were set free and they created a national union so they could return to the Soviet Union. Also some Estonians wanted to return to their home country. Arved Elken and his family arrived to Estonia in the beginning of 1946. (Russian war prisoners were all killed when they returned by the orders from Stalin: if a man was taken to a prison then the right thing to do was to kill himself; staying alive there was a crime against the Soviet Union)
Arved's mother was interrogated but they didn't have any reasons to accuse her: she was just a simple dishwasher. So their family didn't have to scare that they could be sent to Siberia.
In Estonia Arved went back to his old school in Tartu. He had many difficulties with his studies: he wasn't very good at math and physics. So he went to industrial school to learn a profession. He was studying to become a locksmith. He did his apprenticeship in a leather factory. After graduation he worked as a locksmith and mechanic in a factory that manufactured boots. He worked there the longest period of his life.
