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A letter from T.K. Mochalova

During the war there was a great number of camps in the city of Krasnoyarsk. And one of these camps was just situated in the place, where we lived at that time. I am talking of the so-called „resettlers’ camp“. It extended from the shipbuilding yard to the Predmostnaya Place – on the right banks of the river. I was then studying at the district technical college No. 2 and during the winter sometimes had to set out for home at 10 or 12 o’clock in the night. On such days it sometimes happened that carts came towards me. They were loaded with dead bodies, which lay about in a jumble – their hands, heads and feet jutted out into all directions; the bodies were tied together with cords and they were all unclothed. Once you had seen this, it would stick in your mind and rob you of your sleep for a long time.

Only in the spring, when we left the school after the lessons to plant potatoes, we learned, where they had taken all the corpses to. We went across the Torgashinsk cemetery. And there our group purely accidental discovered a huge heap of dead bodies only cursorily covered with earth. Later they were, of course, entirely buried; we verified this.

In those cruel times lots of people were punished even for having committed petty crimes, most probably even many were completely innocent; and then they met such a tragic death that even their closest relatives do not have the faintest idea of where they were buried.

In my opinion this place is not hard to find. It is situated on the left side of the cemetery. However, it seems to me that nowadays garden plots are located in this area.

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