The Long Trek to Solola by Inga Solonevich

Inga translates it from Finnish as “the place of the alone ones.” She has lived there ever since. But according to Inga, “It was love at first sight.” They called their paradise “Solola”. “It had all that we wanted,” Inga says, to The Roanoke Times. The family bought land near Bent Mountain in 1955 which was so remote they had to walk the last mile on a mountain path. They liked the good schools, nearby colleges, forests, lakes, cool mountain summers and pure air.

Their decision to settle in the Roanoke Valley was based on careful research. In 1953 they finally arrived in New York Harbor on a coffee freighter. Inga says she still has nightmares about the dead and dying they met along the way and could not stop to save.Īfter the war, the Soloneviches immigrated to Argentina – where they remained for four years while trying to get visas to America. Paining by Inga Donner Solonevichīy the end of the war they were refugees again, fleeing with millions of others out of Eastern Europe in “The Treck”. Inga tells the story of their flight with words and pictures in “The Long Trek to Solola” and “Lågan i mörkret” in Swedish.” The family journeyed for months in a horse-drawn cart piled high with their belongings. They were married in 1939 and Mischka, their first child, was born during an air raid in Berlin in 1939. The Finnish government declined to let him stay, however (“Stalin had longa arms” Inga once explained to me), and George ended up in Germany – the most anti-communist country in Europe, according to George. Inga met George Solonevich in art school in Helsinki, which he attended briefly after escaping from Russia. Inga Donner was born in Tampere, Finland, in 1915, she came from a Swedish speaking family (where 5.5% of the population has Swedish as our mother tongue). George was born in Russia and hated the Soviet government, escaped on foot to Finland when he was 18. Inga and her family had to flee three dictators around the Second World War, first Stalin, then Hitler and finally also Peron. Her husband George Solonevich died in 2003. The place she had created with her husband and children in the 1950s and where she still lived when she died in March this year. We had the opportunity to once more drive up the mountain dirt road to her lovely Solola on Sheep Mountain in The Smokey Mountains in Virginia. Accordning to the The Roanoke Times Inga Donner Solonevich was the mountain! We are so lucky to have met her but very sad that she died just before we got to visit her again this summer.

The Long Trek to Solola by Inga Solonevich