Mass Deportation from Moldova, 13-16 June 1941

This database contains information about 2,517 individuals deported from Moldova by the Soviet occupation authorities on June 13-16, 1941.  This data was derived from a study of this mass deportation, which was performed with the support of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Moldova Institute of State History and Law.

About the Book

The book contains the lists of people from several Moldovan districts who were sent to concentration camps (primarily family heads) and those who were deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia (primarily children, women and older people).

Despite the fact that some of the list of deportees and those sentenced to concentration camps are lost and unlikely to ever be recovered, the data in this volume allowed the Academy to not only reconfigure important aspects regarding the social categories targeted by the operation, but also to determine the national entities that suffered the most from such policies.

Among the categories targeted by this wave of first mass deportations in Bessarabia were the so-called "anti-Soviets" and "counterrevolutionary" elements.  They included the great landowners, the great industrialists and the great merchants (many of which no longer existed by that time).  The deportee lists also included those who had served in the local public administration, members of Romanian political parties, former policemen and gendarmes.

Apart from the Romanians who predominate in the respective lists, the Jewish minorities made up an important part of the lists of people who were deported from Moldovan cities and villages.  This is of particular importance because it gives clear evidence of the plight of the Bessarabian Jews during the mass deportations of the summer of 1941.

Description of Book Tables

The book contains over 150 distinct tables of which about 50 contain lists of names and associated data.  The other 100 or so tables contain statistics and other such data.  Of the 50 tables that contain lists of names, about 35 of them contain some or many Jews among the names listed.  In total, over 2,500 Jews are found within these tables.  Since many of these tables have “overlapping” purposes, the same named people are often found in several tables.

The original information was documented by the Soviet authorities and was therefore done primarily in Russian Cyrillic.  The conversion and transliteration was most likely done by a large number of students of the Academy.  The transliteration of names did not seem to follow any particular standard because the same named person in different tables had very different spellings, something not usually found in original Soviet lists.  There are often many misspellings of names and words which seem to indicate that there was little review done of the work.

The tables which contained some or many Jews consisted of a number of different types of lists.  Primarily they consisted of the following types:

1. Lists of persons condemned to death
2. Lists of persons deported from different districts (most of the lists)
3. Lists of major merchants and traders
4. Lists of dossiers submitted on persons for investigation
5. Lists of persons registered as anti-Soviets or counterrevolutionaries
6. Lists of family heads sent to concentration camps
7. Lists of persons missed during the deportation activities
8. Lists of persons with foreign currency that was confiscated

About this database

Each table had different columns of information.  Therefore, in the database that was constructed many fields are often found to be empty for many of the tables.  The database contains the following fields:

• Seq — A sequence number useful only for the people who constructed this database
• Tbl# — The number of the table in the book, useful only for finding the original record
• Page# — Page number of the record, useful only for finding the original record
• Item# — Item number of the record, useful only for finding the original record
• Family Group — In some tables families are listed together.  This column is used to help identify those members of the same family.  All people with the same code in this column are known to be from the same family.
• Surname — Surname of the person
• Given Name — Given name of the person
• Father Name — Name of the person's father
• Relationship — Relationship between members of the same family
• Birth — Year of birth
• Occupation — Occupation or Profession
• Home-District — District in which the person lived
• Hometown/Village — Town or Village in which the person lived
• Address — Actual address within the town or village
• Purpose of Table — The purpose of the table that the person is named in
• Comments — Any other fields of information for which there is no distinct column.  Usually a detailed description of some information about the person.

Districts, Towns and Villages Represented

Some of the tables list the district and town or village in which the person lived.  Other tables just list the district only or no information at all.  The table below shows which districts and towns have information in this database.  In the cases in which no town is listed, it is most likely the main town, since that is where most of the Jews lived.

Acknowledgements

The project manager and database creator was Terry Lasky of Ruidoso, New Mexico, USA.

Search the Database

The “Mass Deportation from Moldova, June 1941” database can be searched via either the JewishGen Romania Database, the JewishGen Ukraine Database, or JewishGen's Holocaust Database.