11,000 Basarabian families were deported to Siberia on 6 July 1949

Almost 57 years passed since the black night of July 6 back in 1949, when 11,293 Basarabian families were deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan, and their households were occupied by „specialists” from nowhere „to help” Moldovans „to build a new life”. This was the way the decision of the political bureau of the central committee of the Communist Party of USSR „On deporting from the territory of Moldovan SSR kulaks, landlords, businessmen... and other categories, as well as their families” was implemented. The witnesses of those events say that „raznareadka” of the second mass deporting of Moldovans did not include deporting of entire families, being picked up only family members who were at home, in certain cases children alone, including newborns. One of the heroines of those events, inhabitant of Straseni district, Ecaterina Baltaga said that on a scorching heat, in an animal wagon, where thousands of persons traveled for 2 weeks to Siberia, there were 7 children of a family, aged between 1 and 13, picked up from Voinova village while their father was farming the land, and their mother was in a hospital. “I still have nightmares about dead persons who were thrown out of the wagons in the middle of the night, starving people, and crying babies,” Ecaterina Baltaga said. Her story continues: “after 2 weeks we were pulled off the train on the bank of the river Irtysh, in the district Uvat. The people were falling down, as they were exhausted, but they were pushed with the bayonets on the river’s bank, where they have spent the first night of the Siberian nightmare. The inhabitants were hiding in the woods being scared of Moldovans, without knowing that those trains have brought into the hell of Siberia the most hardworking persons, who have built homes there, in order to leave them for good in 1956 and to return back to Moldova, to start a new life. According to official data, on 6 July 1949, 11,293 families of Moldova or over 35,000 persons were deported to Siberia. Unofficial sources affirm that these figures do not mirror the whole proportion of the Moldovans’ drama, as the number of the victims of the deporting was calculated resulting from an average of 3 member families. But it is known that some of the deported families had 7-8 or even 14 kids.