The victims of the first wave of Stalinist deportations of 1941 were commemorated in Chisinau on June 13. Dozens of people came to the Monument “Train of Sorrow” in the Square of the Railway Terminal and laid flowers there. The people remembered the times through which they went together with their families with tears in their eyes. The commemoration event involved politicians. Speaker of Parliament Andrian Candu and Prime Minister Pavel Filip were the first to lay flowers, alongside Cabinet members, IPN reports.
The Speaker said the victims of deportations are commemorated each year. The deportations are a black page in our history. “The lesson should be learned so that we do not promote values that are strange to us and owing to which the population of this country suffered. More than 1,300 freight cars were prepared and the people were given 15 minutes to take their belongings and to bid farewell to relatives and friends. The best ones were deported – the mayor, the teacher, the priest and the whole intellectuality - for the simple reason that they were ‘enemies of the regime’,” stated Andrian Candu.
For his part, Pavel Filip said he does not think there are families in the Republic of Moldova that wound not have relatives that had been deported to Siberia. “That’s why we chose as development direction a course that means other values, authentic democracy, freedom, fair competition. The European values that we promote are very important because they bring freedom to the people,” stated the Premier.
Maria Schidan said her parents and grandparents were deported in 1941. The parents, being deported to Kazakhstan, got married and she was born there. Hardworking people who cultivated the land to maintain their children were deported then unfairly.
Peloghia Ciorba said that together with her family, she was deported during the second wave in 1949, but came today to share her pain and to commemorate all the victims of deportations. The woman remembered that she was three then. She had three more brothers, with the youngest one being nine months. They returned in eight years. Her family was deported because her grandfather worked in the mayor’s office. The man was jailed, while his family was deported.
More than 22,000 Moldovans were deported on the night of June 13, 1941. There were three waves of mass deportations, in June 1941, July 1949 and April 1951. The number of deportees exceeded 58,000.
