Presidency of the Republic of Moldova
President Nicolae Timofti has conveyed a message in memory of the victims of the first wave of Soviet deportations.
The message reads:
“Dear citizens,
History should not be forgotten. And who has no memory of history, runs the risk of repeating it.
On the night of 12 to 13 June 1941, the first wave of Soviet deportations started in the Moldovan Soviet Republic. Today, 13 June, we mark the 75th anniversary of the day when bloody pages of a tragic fate started being written in the history of our people, when tens of thousands of Moldovan families were sent by the Stalinist totalitarian regime to the icy Siberia.
In stifling carriages, without food and water, best householders were taken out of their homes, their own country and were thrown into Gulags of torture and inhumanity.
I am a descendant of a family of peasants, who experienced deportations. Weeks of hell started. Separated families, teenagers separated from parents, mothers separated from spouses. Our people was under the torture of Stalinist policies.
These shocking moments in the biography of Moldova cannot be erased from our collective memory. The railway stations from the country, on those days, turned into a stage of political repressions applied by Soviet authorities. Over one thousand of carriages from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina left for Siberia and Kazakhstan.
Thinking of those terrible days and nights, during which peasant families were destroyed, let’s no longer admit and never commit errors, as their consequences might be fatal for a nation. At the same time, we should not tolerate slogans of hate and the revenge paradigm from the current political environment”.
