On Monday, 6 July, at 10 a.m., the Ungheni municipal town hall calls on residents to the Troița Martirilor Neamului (Martyrs of the Nation Cross) to commemorate the victims of the Stalinist deportations. „Let us not forget,” is the authority’s message.
The date was not chosen at random. On the night of 5 to 6 July 1949, the Soviet regime launched the largest wave of deportations in the history of Bessarabia: in just a few hours, thousands of families — declared „kulaks” or „enemies of the people” — were lifted from their homes, loaded into cattle wagons and sent to Siberia and Kazakhstan. It was the second major wave, after that of 1941, when it was mainly the village elites who were taken: mayors, merchants, teachers, members of the national parties.
The thousands of names from the Ungheni district
The figure that measures the local scale of the tragedy is in the „Book of Memory,” the official catalogue of the victims of communist totalitarianism. In the Ungheni district section alone, the fourth volume gathers around 2,900 names, from more than 60 localities. These are people who committed no offence — their guilt was that they had worked and built up a household, or that they had been someone in their village.
The commemoration at the Troița Martirilor Neamului is the moment when these names are no longer just figures in a register. For many residents of Ungheni, the deportations are not abstract history but family stories — a grandfather taken away, a house confiscated, a return years later to a homestead occupied by others.