President Nicolae Timofti transmitted a message on the occasion of the first wave of Soviet deportations, saying that these terrible moments in Moldova’s history cannot be erased from collective memory. “Today, June 13, it is 75 years of the day when the bloody pages of a tragic destiny started to be written in the history of our nation, when tens of thousands of families of Moldovans were sent by the Stalinist totalitarian regime to the icy Siberia,” reads the message, quoted by IPN.

“In the stifling railcars, without food and water, the noblest peasants were taken out of their homes and thrown into the gulags of torture and inhumanity. I’m also the descendant of a family of peasants where the NKVD members knocked at the window on that distant night. Weeks of inferno started – separated families, teens separated from parents, wives separated from husbands. Our people were under the torture of Stalinist policies,” said Nicolae Timofti.

“Thinking about those terrible days and nights, when families of hardworking peasants were destroyed in our country, we should no longer allow and make mistakes when the consequences can be fatal for the people. We should also not tolerate the slogans of hatred and revenge paradigm in the current political sphere.”

More than 22,000 people were deported on the night of June 13, 1941. There were three waves of mass deportations – in June 1941, July 1949 and April 1951. About 58,000 people were deported overall. Only approximately 8,000 of these are still alive.