Introduction

Abstract

In the cool hours of early dawn on May 18, 1944, when the cherry blossoms had just begun to open, Asina awoke to the sound of loud knocking at the door.1 Her father and older brothers were fighting at the Soviet front, so her mother, still clad in pajamas, answered the door. Five soldiers of the People’s Commissariat for Interior Affairs or NKVD (predecessor to KGB) were standing with rifles pointed in her direction. “Get ready!” they said, “You have fifteen minutes!” “Where are we going?” her mother had asked. “That doesn’t concern us. Get ready.” In the ensuing moments, Asina’s mother managed to gather a few of their belongings and stuff them into a sack before she and her three children were loaded, half naked, into the back of a truck that took them to the train station in Bahçesaray, Crimea, in southern Ukraine. There, along with Tatars from the surrounding area, they were forced into cattle cars destined for the Ural Mountains and Central Asia, a distance of approximately four thousand miles away. Asina heard dogs barking, sheep and goats baying, and cows mooing into the twilight as they rolled away (see figure I.1).