„20 de ani în Siberia”. Drama românilor bucovineni deportați în iunie 1941
“20 Years in Siberia”: the Drama of the Bukovina Romanians deported in June 1941 by the Soviets

Summary/Abstract: Anița Cudla’s book, first published in 1991 by Humanitas Publishing House under the title 20 Years in Siberia: Bukovinian Destiny, recounts the drama of the Bukovinian peasants deported on the night of June 12-13, 1941 to Siberia. 600 inhabitants of Mahala, a village near Cernăuți/Chernivtsi (now in Ukraine), were deported on the basis of the Regulation of Deportation of Certain Categories of Criminals, approved by Stalin in May 1941. On the same night, 22,000 “active counter-revolutionaries” from Bessarabia were also deported. The 360-page notebook in which Anița Cudla recounts her life was entrusted in 1982 to her nephew Gheorghe Nandriș. As the book’s editor points out, “it is a notebook filled with an unexpectedly beautiful, almost calligraphic handwriting, reminiscent of a child’s handwriting.” The story of her life falls into what we commonly call wounded or even diseased memory, because mourning, as Freud states, is always a reaction to the loss of a loved one or of an abstraction that has been elevated to the status of a substitute for that person, such as: homeland, freedom, ideal, etc. In the case of Anița Cudla, in addition to the loss of two loved ones, her husband and mother, she also had to cope with another trauma, that of being separated from her homeland for twenty years as a result of deportation. But, as happens in life, grief is followed by resilience, which is defined as the ability to continue to look to the future, despite destabilizing circumstances, difficult life situations or major traumas.

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