On July 6 it is marked the 72nd anniversary of the Stalinist deportations. Over 11,000 families were taken away from their homes to another corner of the world on July 6, 1949 - more than 35,000 people whose life was divided into “before” and “after” or who didn’t even reach the place of exile, dying on the way from hypothermia, starvation and disease, being transported in cattle wagons. Those 35,000 people form part of the tens of millions of victims caused in time by the authoritarian Stalinist regime, President Maia Sandu said in a message issued on the occasion of the commemoration of the victims of deportations, IPN reports.

“For us, they are someone’s grandparents or parents who never returned. They are children born far from homeland, priests, teachers and hardworking people from our villages who were deprived of what they earned. Many of them haven’t yet managed to obtain justice and get back their property,” noted President Sandu.

“The second wave of deportations showed the real face of the totalitarian regime: the human rights were violated regardless of the ethnicity and spoken language and fear and full control over society were established. In over 70 years of those events, the descendants should help the survivors of deportations and should not forget the horrors of those times. The living memory is the only guarantee that such crimes will never repeat and that the humans will remain more important than any state machinery.”

There were three successive waves of mass deportations. Known as “IUG” (South) operations, the deportations of July 5-6, 1949 represented the second and largest wave of deportations.