“On June 28, the world turned over”, witness accounts

84-year-old Teodora Severin from Straseni told Info-Prim Neo the events on June 28, 1940, started the massive deportations which destroyed the national elite. She remembers how on June 28, a convoy of tanks with red stars passed through her village, heading for Ungheni. “It was like the whole world turned over, day and night swapped places. Good became evil and vice versa. People, who had been cadging and begging the well-to-do members of the community for a job, then met the Soviets with flowers and sweet basil. It is them who soon enrolled in the NKVD. They became “authorities” and got everything they wanted from people’s houses and farms”, she says. “Such a man, who had enrolled in the NKVD, once entered our yard. I won’t name him, as he’s dead and his children share no guilt. He took father’s horses and wagon and asked him: “Don’t you smell burnt rubber?”, suggesting he could decide whether the so-called liberators would kill my father or not”, Teodora Severin said. Afterwards, former military men and policemen, politicians, doctors and intellectuals, even the only nurse in the village, were all deported. “They were listed by another villager, previously a beggar. We were afraid to sleep, as arrests took place at night. Sometimes, whole families with their children were deported. We heard the vehicles, the noise, the screams and then silence. People disappeared. We never say them again. After a while, that beggar shot himself in his office in the village soviet”, she said. Some years ago, late former deputy and Soviet dissident Gheorghe Ghimpu told Info-Prim that in 1917-1990 about 1 million Moldovans suffered because of the Soviet regime’s reprisals, deportations and organized famine. According to historians, the first large-scale protest after WWII was organized by People’s Front on June 26, in the Victory Square in Chisinau, now called the Great National Assembly Square. The action publicly condemned the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and Hertsa lands on June 28, 1940.