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Senator Claudiu Tarziu, president of the Committee for Romanians Everywhere and co-chair of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), laid a wreath at the bell-tower monument erected in the forest of (northern Bukovina) Fantana Alba (White Fountain) "in tribute to the Romanians killed on April 1, 1941".
"We are in a place of sacrifice. Fantana Alba is a real Romanian Katyn. Here there was one of our national history's darkest episodes. The 3,000 Romanians killed here by Soviet border guards 80 years ago were guilty for nothing more than being Romanians and wanting to repatriate beyond the border dictated by Hitler and Stalin. They were massacred because they confessed their national creed, identity and love for their mother country. They are heroes and martyrs alike. Martyrs of the Church and heroes of the Nation. Remembering them today and every time does not mean that we do them any honor, but we seek a source of power in their example of courage, in their dignity, in their backbone. They were not afraid, they stood in front of bullets," Tarziu was quoted as saying by AUR in a press release.
"The Fantana Alba massacre took place on April 1, 1941, when more than 3,000 Romanians from 16 villages in the Siretului Valley tried to take refuge inside Romania in the northern part of Bukovina, occupied by the USSR and incorporated into Ukraine," the cited source says.
April 1 is the national day of honoring the memory of Romanians - "victims of the massacres at Fantana Alba and other areas, of deportations, famine and other forms of repression organized by the Soviet totalitarian regime in Hertsa, northern Bukovina and all of Bessarabia," the AUR press release further specifies.
