younger sister, Ziver – who was only two and half years old at the time of the deportation – began to starve to death: ‘My sister was so swollen that, had it not been for her hair, it would have been impossible to know where her face was. Everything was swollen. It was only her hair that enabled one to tell the difference between the back of her head and the front’. Ziver died when she was three years old. Her mother bathed her body and wrapped her in a cloth, and then the whole family helped dig a grave in the hard earth.
Kebire's mother tried to earn money to feed her surviving family by digging turnips on the collective farm, but in the frozen winter she got frostbite on her leg, which then became sore and inflamed. In desperation, she told Kebire and her brother that their best chance of survival was to leave her, walk to the next village, and see if there was anyone there who would take pity on them. Kebire was just ten years old when she left her mother and started wandering. As children, she and her brother were able first to pass the NKVD checkpoint at the border of the collective farm and then to enter the nearby forest. Here they came across an Uzbek man who took pity on them. He took them home, fed them and told them that their only chance of survival was to become beggars. ‘He explained what we should say [when we begged]’, says Kebire. ‘“In the name of Christ, please give us something to eat – we haven't got a father and our mother is ill”. And he told us where to go. He told us to save ourselves, and not feel bashful about doing so. He told us that begging was not stealing, and that it is not a sin to ask people for food…. And we started going around begging. We went round the houses begging for something to eat in the name of Christ. Sometimes we even lied and told them that we had no father or mother and they gave us food…[then] we brought our mother the potatoes or whatever we had been given’.
Kebire and her brother would sleep rough, often in empty barrels, when they were out begging, but occasionally Uzbek villagers would take them in for the night: ‘When they [thevillagers] undressed us and put our clothes on the stove to dry there were so many lice they [seemed] to weigh more than we did!’
Although she managed to survive in this way, Kebire was denied an education and grew up illiterate – something that still embarrasses her to this day. Her childhood, she says, was stolen from her. ‘We did not know what life was – we never saw it…. We went around homeless…. Of course it's very painful’.
The NKVD's own figures show that within eighteen months of arriving in Uzbekistan, over 17 per cent of the Tatars were dead. 81 The overall death toll during their entire period of exile – which lasted officially until 1989 – is harder to establish precisely. Some believe that nearly half of the Tatars died as a result of the deportations. What is certain is that this is a crime – together with the deportation of the other ethnic groups like the Chechens and Kalmyks, all of whom suffered in a similar way – that ranks alongside some of the worst atrocities committed during the war.
Even after years of exile, some of the Tatars still believed rumours that Stalin had ‘made a mistake’ in sending them away from the Crimea. ‘We were thinking that the next day we would be put back in those trains again and would return to our homeland…that someone had made him [Stalin] do it or that he hadn't understood’, says Refat Muslimov. ‘I'm telling you in all truth that people even packed up to leave, and were saying: “We're leaving. The order has already been given. Stalin has already given the order and we are waiting for the train”’.
But today, now that they know for certain who was responsible, the Tatars direct their anger at the man who authorized the deportations, and who never sent the train to rescue them – Joseph Stalin. ‘He was a butcher’, says
Kebire's mother tried to earn money to feed her surviving family by digging turnips on the collective farm, but in the frozen winter she got frostbite on her leg, which then became sore and inflamed. In desperation, she told Kebire and her brother that their best chance of survival was to leave her, walk to the next village, and see if there was anyone there who would take pity on them. Kebire was just ten years old when she left her mother and started wandering. As children, she and her brother were able first to pass the NKVD checkpoint at the border of the collective farm and then to enter the nearby forest. Here they came across an Uzbek man who took pity on them. He took them home, fed them and told them that their only chance of survival was to become beggars. ‘He explained what we should say [when we begged]’, says Kebire. ‘“In the name of Christ, please give us something to eat – we haven't got a father and our mother is ill”. And he told us where to go. He told us to save ourselves, and not feel bashful about doing so. He told us that begging was not stealing, and that it is not a sin to ask people for food…. And we started going around begging. We went round the houses begging for something to eat in the name of Christ. Sometimes we even lied and told them that we had no father or mother and they gave us food…[then] we brought our mother the potatoes or whatever we had been given’.
Kebire and her brother would sleep rough, often in empty barrels, when they were out begging, but occasionally Uzbek villagers would take them in for the night: ‘When they [thevillagers] undressed us and put our clothes on the stove to dry there were so many lice they [seemed] to weigh more than we did!’
Although she managed to survive in this way, Kebire was denied an education and grew up illiterate – something that still embarrasses her to this day. Her childhood, she says, was stolen from her. ‘We did not know what life was – we never saw it…. We went around homeless…. Of course it's very painful’.
The NKVD's own figures show that within eighteen months of arriving in Uzbekistan, over 17 per cent of the Tatars were dead. 81 The overall death toll during their entire period of exile – which lasted officially until 1989 – is harder to establish precisely. Some believe that nearly half of the Tatars died as a result of the deportations. What is certain is that this is a crime – together with the deportation of the other ethnic groups like the Chechens and Kalmyks, all of whom suffered in a similar way – that ranks alongside some of the worst atrocities committed during the war.
Even after years of exile, some of the Tatars still believed rumours that Stalin had ‘made a mistake’ in sending them away from the Crimea. ‘We were thinking that the next day we would be put back in those trains again and would return to our homeland…that someone had made him [Stalin] do it or that he hadn't understood’, says Refat Muslimov. ‘I'm telling you in all truth that people even packed up to leave, and were saying: “We're leaving. The order has already been given. Stalin has already given the order and we are waiting for the train”’.
But today, now that they know for certain who was responsible, the Tatars direct their anger at the man who authorized the deportations, and who never sent the train to rescue them – Joseph Stalin. ‘He was a butcher’, says
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