A travel company launched a tourist tour that is designed to commemorate the victims of Stalinist deportations. During a day, the tourists will visit a number of monuments and museums of history and ethnography that keep recollections of the time of deportations, IPN reports.
The tour “Decade of deportations from Bessarabia” includes a trip to Mereni village of Anenii Noi district, where hundreds of people were deported to Siberia, and visits to a number of museums and to the jail of the dreaded Soviet security in Chisinau. According to the organizers, the goal of the tour is to keep alive the memory of those who were deported and to pass on information about the fate of the deportees to the young generations. “We do not aim to restore the route of deportation. We try to present why and how the Bessarabians were taken from their homes to railway stations and deported to Siberia. We want to reveal information from secret files and the confessions of those who went through the ordeal of political repression,” said the travel company’s director Ilina Milos-Ciurea.
Doctor of History Viorica Olaru Cemartan said the totalitarian regime committed many atrocities and this tour will offer the tourists a life lesson. “They will be able to meet people who experienced deportations. We discover shocking information among the secret files. We tried to reconstruct the life of the deported people. A lot of families from Bessarabia have these wounds open,” he stated.
Emilia Soimu-Postolachi was deported at the age of 10 together with her parents, at night, when everyone slept. They travelled by train for three weeks. “We received by 200 grams of very black bread to eat. The grownups got by 400 grams. We were deprived of all the rights. We could attend only a school teaching up to the seventh grade inclusive. After the ‘Bolshevik thaw’, a hope of returning home appeared. I wish no one to go through what we went,” she stated.
The tour also includes the open-air Museum Complex in memory of victims of political repression. The Complex’s initiator Alexandru Postica said this is an ambitious project that aims to imitate the house and yard of a family of deported Moldovans and to also reproduce a gulag.
Tickets for the tourist tour “Decade of deportations from Bessarabia” cost 150 lei.
