On Friday I went with my student researchers to the village of Sadovaya to interview more Karachai survivors of the 1943 deportation. Sadovaya is about 35 kilometers outside of Bishkek. They interviewed seven more people, four women and three men. The trip was very productive and the people we talked to were very nice and cooperative. This research project is working out much better than I anticipated. The students involved are very motivated and skillful and the Karachai community of Kyrgyzstan has been extremely helpful and friendly. I definitely would like to organize similar student research projects on other groups in the future.
Update: One of the students involved has written an account of our trip to Sadovaya on her blog.
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4 comments:
Just wanted to say hi. I teach at a university in Japan, but am of Mennonite descent, so I stumbled upon your blog through Google. I'll be following your deportation survivor research. That is fascinating stuff to me.
Thanks for the comment. My students will be giving two presentations soon on their findings. I will do a blog post on each of these events. The first will be on April 30th and the second on May 11th.
Next semester I intend to do a project on the Russian-Germans in Kyrgyzstan during the 1940s and 1950s. I have already had some students express interest in participating in this research. Ideally I would like to cover most of the smaller minorities in Kyrgyzstan.
I will be looking forward to those posts. My grandfather came to Canada from the Crimea region, but I never knew anything more of the parts of the family who "went to Siberia". That's all that was ever said.
Are you originally from that area?
The Crimean Germans were mostly sent to Kazakhstan not Siberia. I think I have a post on them somewhere around August 2006 on this blog.
My grandfather was from Winnipeg. His father was from Volhynia in Ukraine. My father and I were both born in the US.
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