Moldova Honors Stalinist Deportation Victims
A memorial plaque honouring the mayors, priests, intellectuals, and landowners of Bessarabia who were illegally condemned to the Soviet gulag in 1941 was unveiled today.
The plaque was installed on a commemorative stone in Train Station Square, near the monument to the victims of Stalinist deportations. The ceremony was attended by several deportees who commemorated the victims of the repressions, 84 years after the Soviet occupation.
Vera Florea, along with her sister, parents, and grandparents, were victims of the second wave of Stalinist deportations. Tears welling in her eyes, Florea recounted being only 6 months old and her sister just 2 and a half years old when they were herded into cattle cars and taken to Siberia. They only managed to return home after ten years.
"They deported us from our house, which was right on the road," Florea said. "According to my grandmother, they grabbed me like a dog by the chest and threw me into the car. I was just a baby. The elderly say we arrived there in just our underwear, with no doors or windows, on the edge of the forest. It was a place of utter destitution and hardship. My parents went out and gathered cut hay, spread it on the floor, and that's where we slept, in the hay."
Dumitru Cebanu was born in Kazakhstan, where his parents had been deported in June 1941. He says this experience left an indelible mark on him.
"There were difficult times for our parents, they suffered greatly," Cebanu said. "At that time, the most cultured, educated, and hardworking people were deported. The entire intelligentsia of our people was taken away. This mark will stay with me for the rest of my life. We managed to return to Moldova when I was already one and a half years old."
The President of the Association of Former Deportees and Political Prisoners of Moldova said the new plaque installed on the Commemorative Stone near the monument to the deportees honours all the victims of communist repression. He also called for the renaming of Train Station Square to "The Square of the Victims of Communist Repressions" and the creation of a complex to memorialise all the victims of the communist occupation regime.
To this day, the exact number of those who suffered as a result of the repressions remains unknown, but estimates suggest it could be hundreds of thousands of people who were deported.
Translation by Iurie Tataru
