75 years since the second wave of Stalinist deportations in Moldova

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the second and largest wave of Stalinist deportations from Bessarabia. On the night of July 5-6, 1949, the communist Soviet regime deported tens of thousands of Bessarabian peasant families, including women, children, and the elderly. Their fortunes were seized by the Bolshevik regime.

The 1949 operation was conspiratorially named IUG (SUD), being later cataloged as "the largest deportation of the Bessarabian population".

Following the operation, 1,183 families or over 35,000 people were deported, according to official data. The arrests were made at night, with people being taken from their homes by Soviet soldiers and forcibly loaded into cars. Some citizens who tried to escape were shot. Later, the arrested householders together with their families, children, old people, without being allowed to take provisions with them, were forced into cattle wagons and taken away.

All the goods - the houses, the equipment of the deported peasants - were transferred to the collective farms, and some of them were stolen, sold by the management of the respective districts. Many of these edifices were given to officers who were here in the NKVD, the nomenclature, etc. Many of the deported householders could not return home. Many were shot on the road, died of hunger, disease, physical exploitation in inhumane conditions, or even heartache.

There are deeds that are forgiven, deeds that are forgotten, but there are deeds that, even if we should perhaps forgive them, as Christian teaching tells us, we can never forget them. The torture that the Romanians between the Prut and the Dniester went through in the three waves of Stalinist deportations must not be forgotten forever, and we have the obligation to say out loud the names of the executioners who planned these heinous crimes.

The sourse: voceabasarabiei.md

Iurie Ciocan: The criminal Stalin and his general Fyodor Tutushkin, at that time the Minister of the Interior of the USSR, are the ones who thought and engineered this horror campaign, for which more than 4,500 Venetians sent from other Soviet republics were trained, as well as many miserable people our. The deportations broke the backbone of the Romanians between the Dniester and the Prut, sending wealthy peasants, intellectuals, priests, and former members of political parties from interwar Romania to death and terrible torture.

They were picked up and taken without right of appeal in the middle of the night, loaded into wagons and treated like slaves. Among them were my relatives on my mother's side, who were accused of returning secretly after the first wave of deportations. I know firsthand about this whole rollercoaster of pain, I know how my family was deported twice. I grew up with these terrible stories, which deeply marked my character. The descendants of our people still live today in the Kîzâl Orda region, Kazakhstan.

Today marks the 75th anniversary of those sad events. My children know what happened to us, and their children will know.

I cannot get over and I will never be able to get over the torture to which over a hundred thousand Romanians of ours were subjected.

Today, we live in freedom, in relative peace, with a war on the border, but, thank God, in freedom. Go to church, light a candle for those who died then, and pray for the health of those who managed to survive. However, we must be vigilant, because the descendants of the executioners are among us, grinning at the corners and fiercely denying the ordeal experienced by our people. We have an obligation to be vigilant and stamp out any attempt to bring death and pain back to our land.

Source: the Facebook page of the politician Iurie CiocanIurie Ciocan