In each locality, there should be created by a museum of Stalinist deportations so that the local population and the tourists who visit the Republic of Moldova know the drama of the people of Bessarabia, said historian Igor Cașu. According to him, the National Archive Agency is ready to provide documents and photographs that bear testimony to the Stalinist deportations for the terror of the then regime to be known by as many people as possible, IPN reports.
According to official data, about 25,000 people from Bessarabia and northern Bukovina were deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan on the night of June 13, 1941. The head of the Association of Former Deportees and Political Detainees of Moldova Alexandru Postica said the number of victims of repression is much higher.
“In cattle wagons, the people travelled for weeks and in the period were given by only a bucket of water and a bucket of boiled grain a day. The special deportation operations represented only a part of the repression. We should not forget that there were a lot of dubious deaths, arrests, searches in 1940-1941. Later, there was the mass refuge taken by Bessarabians in Romania. Over 100,000 people left as a result of the invasion,” Alexandru Postica stated in the program “Good Evening” on the public TV channel.
The terror of deportations is the subject of Petru Hadârcă’s play “Dossiers of Siberia”. This depicts the attempts to exterminate the Romanians in the area between the Nistru and the Prut under the soviet occupation of Bessarabia through organized famine and deportations.
“We, by artistic moments, try to reproduce the echo of this tragedy. In the “Dossiers of Siberia”, all those who inspired me have only one piece of advice that we use at the end of the play: Don’t take revenge for us, but don’t forget. It is our duty not to forget. I’m very glad to see many young people who express interest and come to the play, stay and listen. I hear reactions of pain and I’m glad that our young people realize what our ancestors went through,” said the director of the National Theater Petru Hadârcă.
National Archive Agency director Igor Cașu said that each locality should have by a museum of deportations so that the young generation learns about the sufferings and humiliation experienced by the victims of the red terror through photos, documents, letters sent from Siberia.
“We proposed that each locality should create by a museum, at least a mockup of a wagon with photograms and documents. We, those from the Archive, offer gratis the dossiers we have to everyone. There are about 20,000 such files and they contain information about each locality. We resumed the process that had been suspended for seven years and work on documents from the SIS, the Ministry of Interior. I think a museum in the form of a wagon mockup will have an impact on local communities and on those who visit us,” stated the historian.
In Chisinau, the Museum of Victims of Deportations and Political Repression was created by a Government decision of 2010, as a branch of the National Museum of History of Moldova. On June 13, 2012, the first exhibition entitled “Soviet Moldova: between myths and the Gulag” was mounted in the basement of the National Museum of History of Moldova.
