The problem of deportations should be treated in a broader context. The figures that are known today about the number of those who were persecuted and exterminated in the 1940s haven’t been examined appropriately, chairman of the Association of Former Deportees and Political Prisoners of Moldova Alexandru Postica stated in IPN’s public debate “Stalinist deportations: echo of the past, for present and future”.
Alexandru Postica said the figures known today about the atrocities of the 1940s do not show the reality of those times. About the famine of 1946-1947, it is known only that approximately 250,000 people died from malnutrition and associated diseases, but the real number of those affected was much higher.
“What about those hundreds of thousands of people who remained with sequelae for life? We speak about those psychological traumas that cannot be healed and that are transmitted from generation to generation. That’s why many particularities of the population from Bessarabia, which is from the current Republic of Moldova, can be explained as we are somehow different from the rest of the world. Why? Because the repression to which we were subjected, those limitations of 1946-1947, had an impact, including the trangenerational trauma. We speak about hundreds of thousands of people who died. But what about the hundreds of thousands of people who practically didn’t have what to eat during a year?” asked Alexandru Postica.
He noted that there are no concrete data about the arrests and cases of torture during the deportations. “Over a year before the first wave of deportations, they definitely compiled particular lists and those lists were based on particular statements. We know that the NKVD was already present by torture, by homicide, by limitation of freedom. Evidently, the current state cannot recognize the status of victim of those persons as there is no relevant documentary evidence. We have some data about the first deportation wave of June 13, but we do not have lists of those who were killed and arrested,” stated Alexandru Postica.
The head of the Association of Former Deportees and Political Prisoners of Moldova said there are similarities between those deportations and the war that is now being waged by Russia on Ukraine.
“First of all, we should not forget that what we saw in 2022 as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine actually happened earlier in the Republic of Moldova. And we could draw particular parallels and make particular comparisons. The same lime pits that existed in Bucha. The people saw those hundreds of bodies that were buried in forests, mass grapes that actually existed also in the Republic of Moldova, in Chisinau, in the 1940s,” he noted.
Alexandr Postica also said that only those who were more insisted among the repressed ones obtained the status of victim, while the state didn’t do much, except for historians and particular commissions that made attempts to analyze the figures.
The public debate entitled “Stalinist deportations: echo of the past, for present and future” was staged by IPN in the framework of the project “Impact of the Past on Confidence and Peace Building Processes” that is supported by the Hanns Seidel Foundation of Germany.
