“I was singing songs in a railway carriage”. A story of forced eviction and difficult return

Сурган Олександра, Любезна Катерина
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13:26, 18 May
“I was singing songs in a railway carriage”. A story of forced eviction and difficult return
Image source: Суспільне Крим

The forced eviction of the Crimean Tatar people lasted from May 18 to 20, 1944, by order of Stalin and the resolution of the USSR State Committee for Defense of May 11, 1944. The official reason for the deportation was “aiding and abetting the Nazi regime” by the Kremlin. Ukraine, Lithuania, and Latvia call these events genocide of the entire nation.

When the mass return of Crimean Tatars to their homeland began in 1989, the authorities did not help or compensate for the lands that people had lost.

Suspilne Crimea tells the story related to memories, grief, and a great desire to return home. This is the story of the Crimean Tatar Gulsum Mustafayeva from the village of Arpat, Sudak district (after the deportation - Zelenogorye).

We took only the Koran with us

When Soviet soldiers knocked on Gulsum’s house on the morning of May 18, 1944, and ordered them to gather and leave the house as soon as possible, her family took almost nothing with them except the Koran, the holy book of Muslims.

“My mother only took the Koran, she didn’t take other things. We were loaded into a truck, and taken to Belogorsk, then to Nizhnegorsk. In the wagon, I was singing songs. When we passed Volgograd, there was smoke everywhere. The train stopped. Everyone cooked something, but we had nothing to cook. When we arrived in Uzbekistan, we were given one jar of millet with peas”, - she recalls.

Where my brother and father were

There were six members in Gulsum’s family. Brother and father were at the front during the deportation. Her father, Mustafa Mamutov, was a partisan who never saw his deported family - in 1945 he burned in the woods. The family received a funeral letter a few years later. It took Gulsum’s brother more than a year to find his family in Uzbekistan.

Tails and the third eye 

Gulsum, her mom, another brother, and sister were brought to the city of Kitab, Kashkadarya region of Uzbekistan. They were given only one room for several Crimean Tatar families.

“The locals looked at us so strangely. It turned out later that they were told that we (Crimean Tatars - ed.) have tails and the third eye on our foreheads. Our menu consisted of oil-cake and beets, we had nothing to eat. A year later, we were sent to another place in a village. There were four families in one room. My mother started sewing clothes for Uzbeks, and she also worked on a farm”, - Gulsum recalled.

Source: Suspilne Crimea

Homecoming

Gulsum Mustafayeva is 90 years old. Her daughter Zade says that her father and mother were neighbours there before being deported from Belogorsk, where her mother’s family moved in 1933. They were deported together to Uzbekistan. Later, in 1954, they got married. Zade’s grandmother, Vade Chabanova, died in deportation in 1971. She never saw Crimea again.

The family returned to Crimea in 1989, and they remained in the Dzhankoy district in the village of Rysakovo. They say that when they returned, they went to look at their home.

“We were let go inside, we looked around. The new homeowner said that they reworked everything for themselves. How unexpected.The son of the new mistress of our house said that now everything is as it was when they came to live in this house. I recognized the door that my late grandfather had put up, it also remained”, - Mustafayeva recalls.

Gulsum Mustafayeva has six children, twelve grandchildren, and 15 great-grandchildren. She lives in the house where they settled after returning home - in Crimea.