She is an old woman now, but she remembers the day her father was taken.

It was the middle of the summer; they had both come back from working in the fields, she says, and she was inside doing housework while he was out in the yard. Someone from the mayor's office appeared and told her father to come with him, and Lydia never saw her father again. "I think he knew he was in danger," she says, "because he was trying to teach me everything about the farm, as if he was in a hurry for me to know."

An industry of misery

To speed up the "Russification" of the Soviet Union states—in this case, the small country of Moldova situated near Ukraine—Stalin turned force labour into an industry, one which played a central role in the Soviet economy. Whether it be the gulag (a vast network of nearly 500 camps throughout the USSR, each containing thousands of prisons) or deportation to colonise the bitter, hostile terrain of Siberia, every non-communist was at risk.

And successful farmers were especially at risk, considered to be counter-revolutionaries because their notable business skills did not fall into Stalin's concept of collectivisation. Lydia's father was a successful farmer.

Stalin required quotas to be met, x number of people for x number of prison labour camps. So blacklists were compiled at local levels, and anyone crossing the wrong person had someone from the mayor's office come calling. "Our house was near the town hall, and all the time, especially after the war (WWII), a lot of reconstruction was going on. My father was a good farmer and had all of this equipment, and they always came to him to use his stuff. My father finally got angry and (told them) please don't bother me anymore," says Lydia. "And the mayor's office took revenge in the worst way."

That fall, after her father was taken from his front yard, Lydia started college in Moldova's capital city, Chisinau, not far from her village.

She stepped outside during a break in classes one afternoon. A large, flatbed truck filled with workers rumbled past. "Your father is in here! Your father is in here!" shouted the man. "He's in here, but he's too sick to stand up!"

As the truck trundled on out of sight, and as Lydia stood shocked on the pavement, she only then recognised the man screaming at her about her father. He was a neighbour, a man from the same village as she, who had disappeared on that same hot summer day her father did.

She learned her father was in a prison in Chisinau and each Saturday she'd try to bring food for him, knowing it would be consumed by prison guards, but bringing it nonetheless. Thousands of prisoners would shuffle past in a thick line, shoulders crouched, heads down, forbidden to look up, click-clacking in their handmade, wooden shoes.

She and the others would stand quietly as the parade of prisoners passed by, making their way from the canteen back to their cells. "If we shouted their names," says Lydia, "guards pointed guns at us to shut us up."

Word got out that winter that her father had died. In a few years she would also be taken away.

A similar fate

It was dark out. A late night in early July, the same month her father disappeared years before. There was a ruckus unfolding on the street below, and her Russian roommates moved to the window to see what was going on. Lydia stayed put, but strained to hear what the other girls were whispering about at the window in their native tongue. She got up to see for herself. From their second floor window the girls watched as a Russian soldier entered the house across the street.

The night of July 5, 1949, was the largest Siberian deportation that Stalin conducted in Moldova, carrying away nearly 36,000 people overnight—12,000 of them children. The only other one occurred June 12, 1941. Both happened in the dead of night, both were a surprise, both stole lives and livelihoods in a single blink.

But Lydia only saw a single Russian soldier enter a single house. It was not history yet, and she could not yet see her own history reflected in it.

On her lunch break the following day, she went over to her uncle's house for a quick visit. He lived near the food shop where she worked and there were no customers about—eerily quiet, she would later reflect—so she just wanted to nip out for a few minutes to say "hi."

She entered through the front gate. No one at first appeared to be home, but the front door was standing wide open. Unusual. A small dog was in the yard. In the house she noted other things—her cousin's handbag on the table. Inconsequential snapshot memories of small dogs and handbags have inserted themselves like props into Lydia's recall of her life's drama.

She also remembers seeing two women in the kitchen; one was a neighbour she recognized, a communist who was helping another woman count things, such as spoons and plates, taking an inventory of her uncle's household items. Writing down what could be used, what couldn't.

She slipped unnoticed into another room, but her crying led them to her. Who is this, asked the inventory-taker. The niece, said the neighbour. The two of them kicked her out of her uncle's house and resumed tallying up his family's possessions.

Lydia says she wasn't in shock but her actions would indicate otherwise. She didn't go to her family in the village, or return home even to cry, she simply returned to work. They found her there at the shop. Four people pulled up in a truck—two Russian soldiers, a driver and her sister's husband, a communist who led the soldiers to her.

Her boss, also a communist, appeared from the back office and began taking a little salami and cheese from the store shelves and putting them into a bag to give to her.

Why will I need this, asked Lydia. Maybe they will take me out to the woods and shoot me, she said.

You will need the food for your journey, said her boss. You're going to Siberia.

And then suddenly Lydia knew. She knew everyone knew but her. She knew why her Russian roommates were whispering the night before, and she knew why so few people were in the shop and she knew that her communist boss had information about her fate and hadn't warned her. And that her brother-in-law had betrayed her. "I don't know why he did it," said Lydia. "Maybe because he was frightened of what (his fellow) communists would do to him if he didn't."

The two guards circled around her with their guns drawn. You don't need to do that, she told them, I won't escape. We have our orders, they said. At the train station she was asked if she wanted to travel to Siberia with her mother and younger brother. "You've taken my mother, too?!?! Of course I want to be with her!" she said.

The long, hard journey

They were loaded onto cattle cars. Her memory is fussy. Particular. She doesn't remember how many people were in her car--only that it was overcrowded--or if there were young children, but only that she had a watch, and that the train left the station at exactly 1 a.m. And that they had only one layer of clothes. "My family was lucky because we had a spot near the little window, so it was easier to breathe." said Lydia.

She tilts her head slightly to the left to demonstrate how she slept, standing up and resting her head against something. Or someone. There were a number of Jewish people in her car and one of them was Anna, who became her best friend.

They were in a cattle car and thus, no toilets. The train stopped periodically—Lydia doesn't recall how often—so they could go outdoors.

After two weeks they were allowed to take a bath. After two more weeks they arrived in Siberia. When they arrived, they arrived at nowhere. No houses, no roads, no paths; an isolated, uninhabitable forest near a river.

Much can be recorded about Lydia's life in Siberia: mosquito bites so bad faces were swollen beyond recognition; working outdoors in -40C temperatures without adequate clothing, under constant surveillance by guards. Four weeks standing up in an overcrowded cattle car with no toilet facilities. They are the facts. They are no testament to the indignities and hardships endured by millions of unlucky Soviet citizens.

A legacy of suffering

Nearly every Moldovan has a relative or knows someone who was sent to the gulag or to Siberia. Fathers and grandfathers were taken and put on the front lines without weapons during wartime, an easy and cost-efficient way for Stalin to rid the USSR of dissidents. Others were taken because of special skills, and still others because they were blacklisted for spite, like Lydia's family.

Memoria, a non-profit organization in Chisinau, has been set up to keep the memories of these victims alive, and to help them psychologically cope with a tragedy that few will speak of. Molly Lamphear, a peace corps volunteer, is putting together an oral history, so that when this younger generation is ready to hear, they will have something to listen to. Lydia's sash, the click-clacking wooden shoes, her uncle's house, her roommate's hushed tones, her betraying brother-in-law, will not be forgotten.

Lydia and her family spent six and a half years in Siberia, returning home to Moldova only after Stalin died in 1953. "We heard the news of Stalin's death on the radio. A Russian worker (at the Siberian camp) was crying. She said 'Look at them! Stalin has died and they are laughing!' " she says.

When she came back to Chisinau her former boss, the one who packed salami and cheese for her deportment, asked her why she didn't stay. Didn't you like it there, asked the boss.

Her brother-in-law is still alive, and she shrugs before she stops to talk about him. "When I came back from Siberia I saw him. The only thing he said to me was 'I'm sure you're upset with me.' "