Free World War II Behind Closed Doors by Laurence Rees

kittens, grabbed us by the neck, kicked us. They treated us as cruelly as they liked – they did not take pity on one single child’. Many of the carriages had previously been used for transporting cattle, and were full of lice-infested straw. ‘The stench was indescribable’, says Kebire. ‘It was terrifying – a nightmare’.
    As the train pulled away, they heard the noise of the abandoned dogs and cows in the deserted villages. Just hours earlier the Tatars had been celebrating the end of the conflict in theCrimea and dreaming of a return to normality. Now they were being transported like animals to an unknown destination. And as she stared into the night through the slats in the freight truck, one thought obsessed Kebire Ametova. ‘I didn't know what we had done’, she says. ‘We were children – how could we know? Even today we still don't know what we were being punished for…. I have never considered myself to be guilty. What could these old people and children have been guilty of? What had we done in our lives that justified being given just fifteen minutes in which to get ready to leave?’
    But however confused Kebire remains about the reasons why she and her family were so brutally evicted from their homes and deported, one emotion still boils within her – the desire for revenge: 'If I met that soldier [who evicted her and her family] I would cut him into pieces and hang him…. I would rip his medals from his chest and shove them in his eyes. Because he did things that he should not have done. He should have been fighting the war, not evicting innocent children…. I would knife that soldier – even though my blood pressure [today] is 220, I would still knife that soldier myself.
    Eleven-year-old Musfera Muslimova 56 was another child thrown with her family on to one of the deportation trains on 18 May: ‘Many people began saying: “Surely Stalin doesn't know about this? If Stalin knew [about it], this would never be happening”. And during the journey rumours began that Stalin had found out [about what was happening] and that we would soon be going back home again…. Stalin liberated us from the Germans, so there was a kind of trust in him’.
    But if the mass deportation was designed to punish those Tatars who were guilty of collaborating with the Germans, then it was a failure. Many of the Tatars who were serving with the enemy simply retreated with their units, leaving large numbers of innocent people behind. And amongst those deported by the NKVD were around nine thousand Tatars who had been serving in the Red Army, together with over seven hundred Tatar members of the Communist Party. 57
    Not surprisingly, the apparently illogical nature of the deportations has led some who have studied the subject to suspect a hidden motive. 58 The key to understanding the action, so this theory goes, was the Soviet attitude to Turkey. Stalin made no secret of his desire to exercise greater influence over the Dardanelles, which linked the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. This narrow sea lane was historically controlled by Turkey – a country that, much to the irritation of the Allies, remained neutral during the war. The Soviets wanted to place military bases in the straits, as well as to occupy nearby Turkish territory. The persecution of the Tatars, with their historical links to the Turks, was – it is speculated – part of the growing anti-Turkish movement within the Soviet Union. Subsequently other nationalities, such as the Chechens and Ingush, were deported supposedly for similar anti-Turkish reasons.
    It is an interesting theory – but almost certainly mistaken. The deportation of the Tatars in fact fits a broader pattern of mistreatment of ethnic minorities within the Soviet Union – one that has nothing to do with the undoubted Soviet desire to put pressure on Turkey. For example, on 28 December 1943, over four months before the deportation of the Tatars, the NKVD deported just under a hundred