Speaking to One Another - The International Raoul Wallenberg ...

ence”.” So, they killed his brother, she said, “my father got even more angry with them, he said, I haveno gold, kill me too, with my brother...” She said, “they were both lying on the same bed, they were ill. Sothey killed my father too. The blood came, spilled, filled the hearth, the hearth was sputtering blood. Mymother came, when she saw this, she took us – my brothers and me, to take us away... One of my brotherswas too young , he was eight years old. His name was Ishkhan. Our Kurdish neighbor came, he said,Mariam, dear, don’t take this little boy, Ishkhan, leave him, he won’t be able to flee with you, when themassacres are over, you will come and take him”. She said, they left this Ishkhan with this Kurd. Laterthey killed one of the brothers of this woman Satik, when he was studying at the university. The otherone – they wanted to catch him, but he got away to Iran. This was already in Stalin’s period. He escapedto Iran, he was very thirsty, and then he approached some gate and knocked. A young woman came upto him... and he said “Dear sister, I am very thirsty, could you bring me a glass of water”. So this womansaid to her husband – “ there is a man at our gate asking for water... look, she said, you both are as like astwo peas in a pod.” Her husband got up in a hurry, he went to see – it was his brother. So, finally, he andhis brother, they stayed there in Iran. He had sent the photographs of himself and his wife, but Satik didnot show these to her mother. She said “She is an old woman, she may go somewhere and it may slipout of her tongue.” Her (Satik’s) husband was repressed, and his brothers too, so she thought they mightrepress her too along with her children. You see, this Stalin...he also did very cruel things.HKh – Did Stalin do any harm to your village?AH – My child was one month old when they caught my husband. He was taken prisoner 1 , they sentencedhim to 25 years of expulsion but there was an amnesty, so he came back after spending eightyears there. I had lived with him for some ten months only , my child was one month old. My boy wentto school, he was a first year schoolboy when he came back.I have published yet another book, it is titled “Woe of barbed wires”; it is about Stalin’s atrocities. I wentthere, I reached Jiskaskan – eighty thousand young men were being kept there in custody. Cruel, verycruel was the life of our people.1 During World War II any Soviet soldiers who were caught as prisoners of war were repressed when they returned from theenemy.144