“The deportation occurred in 1951, but we were among the last to be taken away, because they had a hard time catching my mother.” Says Ana, “Given the fact we were only children, they had to catch my mother first. They had intended to take us away, like they did to our grandfather, around 1949 or 1941, but we were caught in 1951.”

When the Graur women were deported to Crasnai Octeabri, Kazakhstan, Ana, Pasha and Maria with their mother, Maruşca, sitting in front of them, had a family portrait made, a common practice at the time.

Ana recalls, “We had a rough childhood. My mother would work with the pigs [in Kazakhstan]; the poor dear would cook food in huge pots. [S]he would clean, and do everything that the big bosses told her to do. They wouldn’t give us much food. Our poor mother would place some of the pig’s food at the bottom of the pot and would cover it up with a layer of weeds and a layer of horse dung so that no one would catch on [that we were hiding] extra food. She’d tell them that the dung was for the walls. She would visit our house and set the dung and weeds aside so that we could eat to our heart’s content. My mother was glad that she could feed us somehow. It was really hard at the beginning. Then, we managed to slowly build our own little clay house with our bare hands and with the help of [our neighbors]… This is how we lived, among strangers, through no blame of our own. Every day was filled with hard labor, tears and sorrow. We got a desperate letter from home, which told us that they’d captured all the [Moldovans] in Romania (where their father was in hiding). They were brought to Odessa, tried, and sentenced for life all the way in the Kuril Islands. I never heard from my father. We know that a lot of prisoners and fellow villagers died there in terrible [Gulag] conditions.”

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