Testimonies of victims of the Stalinist deportations from Bessarabia were presented in a mobile exhibition titled “Bessarabians in the Gulag”. Two train cars were brought to the Great National Assembly Square on Thursday, identical to those used by the Soviets for deportations.

Organized by the Government, the exhibition offers the public old and authentic images from the National Archives illustrating the lives of deported people. A train car houses a themed exhibition with pieces from the National History Museum and themed books from the National Library. In another car, the documentary film “Siberia of Bones” will be screened daily at 18:00 and 20:00.

Minister of Culture Sergiu Prodan declared during the inauguration ceremony that such train cars must be brought not only in front of the Government, but in every locality in Moldova, because behind these images are real people, families who were picked up and deported.

The “Bessarabians in the Gulag” exhibition will run July 6 to 9, until 9 p.m.

On July 6, the day when the biggest wave of Stalinist deportations took place, Moldova marks the Day of Commemoration of the Victims of Stalinism. On the night of July 5-6, 1949, the Soviet regime rounded up tens of thousands of Bessarabian peasants, took them to forced labor camps in Siberia, and confiscated their property. Between 1941 and 1951, there were three waves of deportations, and historians estimate that the total number of Bessarabian deportees was somewhere between 80 and 120 thousand.