Tens of thousands of Moldovans had been packed into cattle cars and taken to Siberia and other remote places of the Soviet Union in the second wave of Stalinist deportations, which occurred on the night from 5 to 6 July seventy years ago. The victims of the deportations have been commemorated today in a ceremony held at the Deportees Monument in the Chisinau Train Station Square.

Valentina Sturza, president of the Association of Former Deportees and Political Prisoners, declared that seventy years today “hordes of barbarians broke into the homes of the finest people, sowing fear and dismay within their families.” There are still an estimated 7,000 former deportees living in Moldova, and Valentina Sturza has asked the Sandu Government to review the laws to make amends to them.

Iacub Mardova is one of the survivors taken away to Siberia as a child with her entire family. “My parents and their seven children. The youngest, my brother, was two months old. The oldest were 13 and 14. We had to stay there until 1957. Fortunately, everyone survived and was able to return home,” she told IPN.

Addressing the former deportees, Prime Minister Maia Sandu declared: “Your only blame was that you were industrious and educated people, people of high moral values, the country’s best.” She said that her own grandparents were able to avoid being deported in 1949 by hiding in the woods. Maia Sandu admitted the social benefits offered to survivors are meager, and promised that the Government will make steps to amend the law.

Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Năstase said more needs to be done to make propagate the truth about the deportations. “One day a year is not enough. We need a memory cultivation policy that tells the truth and shares memories about those difficult times.”

MP Octavian Țîcu, a historian by education, says there are valuable lessons to be learned from those events. “Today I want us to learn from the deportees the notion of strength and courage to live, the notion of solidarity and that of the existential impulse that allows us to survive.”

The Government has decreed July 6 a day of national mourning, with national flags to be flown at half-mast and a moment of silence to be kept at 10:00 across Moldova.