Premium
Photo-documentary images that reflect the lives of Bessarabian children deported in the period 1940-1941 and 1944-1953 can be seen, until June 25, at the National Museum of the Alba Iulia Union as part of the exhibition Childhood in the Gulag, unveiled on Tuesday.
The exhibition brings together around 180 photo-documentary images, accompanied by memoirs and archival documents from the collections of the Museum of Victims of Deportations and Political Repressions of the National History Museum of Moldova and the Edinet County Museum.
The images reflect the life of Bessarabian children condemned to deportation, starvation, Russification, indoctrination and forced excision from their own families. There are images of Bessarabian children in schools from the special settlements, of young people who were forced to work to clear the taiga, of children who were born there, of children who died in deportation.
"Today, when we present this exhibition, we insist on saying and drawing attention to the fact that what happened in these images, today we are witnessing their repetition [the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia]. They are almost drawn to indigo, an attempt is being made to erase of identity. Ukrainian children are separated from their families, they are trying to erase their identity," said one of the curators of the exhibition, Ludmila Cojocaru, associate professor at the State University of Moldova.
According to the organizers of the exhibition, as a result of the repressive policies of the totalitarian-communist regime in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Stalinist deportations in 1941, 1949 and 1951, about 20,000 children were deported, of whom 11,899 children were only in the second wave of deportations, from 5 -July 6, 1949.
The exhibition is carried out within the project "Consolidation of the European culture of memory through the dissemination of historical knowledge and the promotion of democratic values: the exchange and implementation of good practices between Lithuania and the Republic of Moldova", supported by the Cooperation and Democracy Development Program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Lithuania.
Childhood in the Gulag was also presented in our country in Timisoara.
The event in Alba Iulia is organized by the Alba County Council, the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in the Republic of Moldova, the National History Museum of Moldova in Chisinau and the National Museum of the Alba Iulia Union, in partnership with the Museum of Victims of Deportations and Political Repressions and other institutions.AGERPRES
