Emilia Bjorn - "So cold and no penguins! #somisleading"

Emilia and Elsa lived happily with their parents in a beautiful Swedish town near the southern border with Norway. Then, one terrible night there was a fire in the cottage where they lived. The girls and their mother were trapped in the back bedroom by the flames and all had become unconscious. Their father, Sven, fought his way through the flames to the bedroom and was faced with an awful choice. Knowing what his wife would have done he picked up the two little girls and carried them to safety. Just as he and his daughters escaped the blaze the firefighters arrived. Sven tried as hard as he could to go back in to rescue his wife, but the firefighters wouldn’t allow him, and he wasn’t strong enough to overpower them. Shortly after he succumbed to the smoke and fell unconscious.


Sven awoke a few days later to the news that he had managed to save his two girls, however, his wife died in the fire. He resolved from that day to give himself for his little girls. He gave up his will paid work to care for them fulltime. He never remarried and was often heard saying that ‘He’d had a real woman once and never needed another’. After many years the small family had managed to find happiness, but it wasn’t to last.


On Emilia’s sixteenth birthday tragedy struck the family once again. Her hardworking father’s life was cut short by an aneurysm. Apparently, the damage that had lain dormant since the fire had suddenly triggered and fatal haemorrhage in her father’s brain.


The small family had once again been cut into pieces and this further disaster threatened to break the two sisters apart. Emilia applied to become her little sister’s legal guardian but because she wasn’t yet eighteen the courts insisted that Elsa was taken to a foster home. This short time represented if it were possible the saddest time in the girl’s lives. For, at least through everything they had always had each other.


For two years Emilia battled in the courts to bring her sister home, but it was to no avail. Finally, Emilia turned eighteen and could adopt her sister and they were together once again.


Neither sister wanted to remain in Sweden after all the pain they had suffered there and the two agreed to emigrate. The trouble was they couldn’t agree on a place to live. They had very different tastes on ideal locations for them to start over. So, eventually, they agreed to open the atlas to a random page and strike it with a pin. Wherever the point landed they would make their new home.


On the first attempt, the pin landed in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and was nowhere near any land at all. So, they tried again. This time the pin landed in the Arctic Circle. Elsa said, ‘It doesn’t could we’re in the middle of nowhere again and Emilia was inclined to agree but just as she was about to close the book she noticed and said ‘Wait, there is a small town right under the pin’.


And there, in short, is the story of how the Bjorn sisters came to Oymyakon.