We were put on wagons, with children, allowed to take some belongings and food, and drove off. Of course, I don't remember the whole journey. It was later that I talked to my cousins, they were older, and they remembered. They told me that it was difficult, cold and hungry. It was the spring of [19]44 [wrong dating, it was actually 1943]. And so we were all brought to the village of Sarata, and there was devastation there, huge holes after bombing, after all the Germans had been driven out... The houses were all without windows and doors. And my father was taken to the front, as I recall. My father fought [in the war]. And my mother's brother and his family were also [resettled] to Sarata. We all lived together, they put us all in one house; we later curtained the windows and doors with sacks as best we could. The stove was stoked continuously because it was cold. And many Moldovans were settled not in Sarata but in nearby villages — Nadezhda, Mirnopolye, Svetlodolinsk... And we also had relatives in these villages, and we sowed corn together when we started getting acclimated. Because we had to eat something. I remember, we really needed some kind of transportation. And my mom had a gold pendant, a chain. And she traded it for a couple of horses. I don't remember where she got the wagon. I remember it clearly as day - she put me beside her, and she herself (she was 40 years old then) directed the horses to the neighboring village for corn.
On my mom's side, my father was Boltashov. My mom has her birth certificate [where his name is spelled] Boltasau. And Boltasheu are Romanians. So they were from Romania. You see, when they were giving out passports, their ethnicity was not mentioned anywhere. And Russia changed the surname to Boltashov. Just because they wanted to, they could do it. Actually, our surname is Chakyr. And they spelled it with an “i”, “Chakir”. They changed everything in their own, Russian way.
They were locals, they were still considered their own, and we were “the newcomers”. Because we already had a mixture of the Russian language, and we had already forgotten all our traditions, because there were few of us here, we were all divided. And they all stuck to their villages, their traditions. We had acquaintances in [the village of] Zoria, both Bulgarians and Moldovans, but we visited Moldovans more often.
In the late [19]80s, I remember that there wasn't anything in stores anywhere. It was difficult, constant queues. I worked there in the downtown area, and the department store was across the street. And as soon as you hear, “The goods have arrived!” you leave work and run like a madman, grabbing everything... I still have fabric here that I bought, [my daughter] Olya didn't want to sew, and ready-made [clothes] have already started to appear. We stocked up whenever possible, we thought that since it is a girl, we will have to study, to dress. We bought everything as much as we could afford. We cut three meters of one [fabric], three meters of another; something for pillowcases, something for other things.....
Lidiia Neboha (Chakir) is a Moldovan by ethnicity. She was born in 1938 in Melitopol, Zaporizhzhia region. Her parents came from the village of Dunayivka near Melitopol, where Moldovans had been living compactly since the second half of the nineteenth century. In her childhood, during World War II, the family was relocated to the village of Sarata in the Odesa region. By resettling the Romanian-speaking population of the Ukrainian Pryazovia region to Bessarabia, the Romanian authorities tried to legitimize their rule in the region. After the resettlement, Lidiia Neboha kept in touch with the community of other resettled Moldovans and ethnic Bulgarians who lived in neighboring villages. After finishing school, she worked as an accountant at the local district consumer union, and after studying at the Odesa Agricultural Institute, she became the chief economist at the Odesa-based company Silhosptekhnika [Agricultural Equipment]. She married a Ukrainian man, Ivan Neboha, and raised her two children in three languages — Ukrainian, Russian, and Moldovan — and baptized them in secret. After the beginning of Russia‘s full-scale invasion, she moved to her daughter‘s house in Chișinău, but returned soon after and now lives in Odesa.
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