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Letter written by Olga Borchwald

Dear Comrades!

Thank you very much for the devotional work you are engaged in. Our people needs this kind of y book in Commemoration of the victims of Stalin’s Terrorism.

I spent my childhood in the settlement of Beret, Beresovsk District. There is an entire Catholic „section“ on the village cemetery. Nowadays the gravesites look rather untended, the crosses have become warped. The question is, whether the Lithuanians and Letts, who were buried in this place, still have living relatives. Presumably not! Entire families were entombed on this very cemetery, and are now lying there, all lonesome, right in the middle of the Siberian taiga.

Come to this village! There must be inscriptions on the old crosses yet, which, maybe, someone knows to decipher; I even suspect that there might be a couple of long-time residents who are able to recall the dead people from the time when they were still alive.

I do remember my departed grandmother telling us about the agonizing starvation of the Karakalpaks ((also Qaraqalpaqs - a Turkic speaking people closely related to the Kazakhs; translator’s note). Why did they not go to work? They had neither money nor food. And their children used to eat paper from the garbage disposal.

Until today, families like the Danilovs, Tsyzdans and others, who were all deported from the Ukraine, live in this settlement.

However, I would like to tell you about my repressed relatives (on the part of my husband).

Olga Borchwald

The Krasnoyarsk „Memorial“ Organization received this letter in November 1989.


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