Tuesday, August 02, 2016

A Picture from Almaty


1 comment:

Rod Ratzlaff said...

Dr. Pohl;
I’ve recently been doing research on distant family members who were deported from Volhynia to Kazakhstan and I came across your article “Suffering in a Province of Asia”. This article then led me to your blog. Thank you for posting so much information about the persecution of Russian-Germans in the USSR. My ancestors were Low German Mennonites in various places in Ukraine and several families relocated to Siberia or Kazakhstan one way or another.

I started going through your blog to find information about Russian-Germans in Central Asia but I became interested in your stories about daily life in Bishkek, Ghana, and now Kurdistan. I’ve recently become acquainted with a very distant relative who now lives in Germany but was born just a couple miles outside Bishkek – in Krasnaya Rechka.

I’m curious about what I might be able to learn from you regarding Germans who were deported to Kazakhstan from Volhynia in the Spring/Summer of 1936. I’ve searched the internet to some degree but haven’t come up with much. It doesn’t help me that my Russian and German language skills are very weak. Can you tell me if the Soviets kept any lists of names of those deported from Volhynia? My relatives ended up near Chkalovo in a village called Konstantinovka and I’m trying to learn what I can about their deportation experience and subsequent lives in northern Kazakhstan.

thank you
Rod