One Woman's Story of Stalin's Deportation of Thousands of Moldovans to Siberia

She is an old woman now, but she remembers the day her father was taken.

They had come back from working in the fields, and she was inside doing housework while he was out in the yard.

Someone from the mayor's office appeared and told her father to come with him, and Lydia never saw her father again.

"I think he knew he was in danger," she says, "because he was trying to teach me everything about the farm, as if he was in a hurry for me to know."

To speed up the "russification" of the Soviet Union states--in this case, the small country of Moldova--Stalin turned force labor into an industry, one which played a central role in the Soviet economy. Whether it be the gulag (a vast network of nearly 500 camps throughout the USSR, each containing thousands of prisons) or deportation to Siberia--every non-Communist was at risk.

Stalin required quotas to be met, so blacklists were compiled at local levels, and Lydia's father fell victim.

That fall, Lydia stepped outside during a break in classes. A flatbed truck filled with workers rumbled past, and someone shouted at her from the back of the truck. "Your father ‘s in here! Your father's in here!" shouted the man. "He's in here, but he's too sick to stand up!"

As the truck trundled on, and as Lydia stood shocked on the sidewalk, she only then recognized the man screaming at her about her father as a neighbor who had disappeared on the same day her father did.

She learned her father was in a prison in Chisinau and each Saturday she'd go there. Thousands of prisoners would shuffle past in a thick line, shoulders crouched, heads down, forbidden to look up, click clacking in their handmade, wooden shoes. Lydia is startled by her memory of the click-clacking wooden shoes. Says she can't believe she remembers the sound.

She and the others stood quietly as the parade of prisoners passed by, making their way from the canteen back to their cells. "If we shouted their names," says Lydia, "guards pointed guns at us to shut us up."

Word got out that winter that her father had died.

In a few years she would also be taken away.