An open-air museum complex in memory of the victims of political repression, which is being built in Mereni village of Anenii Noi district, is supported by the Corneliu Coposu Foundation. The Foundation’s executive president Ion-Andrei Gherasim said the museum complex is an absolutely exceptional project that the Corneliu Coposu Foundation will support, as it did in the case of similar projects in time, IPN reports.
In particular, the proceeds collected at the Corneliu Coposu Gala staged by the Corneliu Coposu Foundation at the Organ Hall in Chisinau will go to support the laying out of the complex. In the Gala, Ion-Andrei Gherasim invited everyone to contribute so as to help keep the national history and memory. “It is very important for this open-air museum complex in memory of the victims of political repression in Mereni to be built as soon as possible,” said the executive president of the Corneliu Coposu Foundation.
The head of the Association of Former Deportees and Political Prisoners of Moldova Alexandru Postica, the initiator of the building of the museum complex, who is from a family of deportees, said that those who experienced political repression should not be treated as victims as these are heroes who overcame difficulties, returned to the native place and helped built society. “At the beginning of the 2000s, in the Republic of Moldova there were about 20,000 museums. At present, we have about 2,000 museums. I refer to people who were victims of political repression and died. I consider these persons represented those archives that hadn’t been discovered,” he stated.
According to Alexandru Postica, the museum complex does not claim to be a perfect museum. It is a museum in which the young and older generations will be able to meet. It can be an “active museum” that will generate an exchange of information between specialists from different areas, including historians who could later pass on this information.
Historian Sergiu Musteață said the project implemented in Mereni is more than a museum. It is a place that reminds of the ordeal, tragedy and victims of the Communist totalitarian regime. It is a place about suffering and fear. “Not many after those events had the courage to say or the wish to remember what they went through. Our task is to discover that story and to pass it on to the young generations so that that these understand how painful the story of communism was and, as those who believe in happy stories, they realize that this so-called “Soviet happiness” had an enormous price. Hundreds of thousands of people died. Hundreds of thousands of people didn’t have the freedom to say what they believed,” said the historian, noting that this is an initiative worth of support.
The museum complex occupies an area of 3 ha and is divided into a number of zones. A series of auxiliary constructions are to be erected there, including a peasant’s house. There will be exhibited units of transport used to transport victims of political repression, cellars and other types of places where persons who were deported to Siberia and other distant locations were kept.
The Corneliu Coposu Gala was organized by the Corneliu Coposu Foundation in partnership with the Hanns Seidel Foundation, the Cultural Foundation “Memoria”, the National Museum of History of Moldova, the Agency for Military Science and Memory, the Embassy of Romania in Moldova, the Museum of Communist Horrors of Romania, the Mereni mayor’s office, the State Teacher Training University “Ion Creangă” in Chisinau, the Association of Former Deportees and Political Prisoners of Moldova.
