Memorial to 1937 Deportees Unveiled at Nurzhan Station

NURZHAN — Several hundred people gathered yesterday beside the freight yards of Nurzhan station for the unveiling of a memorial to the Koreans deported from the Soviet Far East in 1937, seventy years after the first trains arrived.

In the autumn of 1937 several thousand deportees were unloaded from unheated freight cars here, at what was then Kobozev, and at sidings along the Chu valley. Many spent their first winter in dugouts in the steppe. The memorial, a granite block bearing inscriptions in Korean, Russian and Iradi, was paid for by subscription through the Korean cultural association founded in the city in 1990. It stands at the edge of the yards where, according to the association, the first trains were unloaded.

Speakers returned again and again to the help that Iradi villagers and church communities gave the deportees, sharing food and shelter through that first winter. "My grandmother said that the first bread she ate in this country was given to her by a woman who had very little herself," one association member told the crowd. Catholic and Presbyterian clergy blessed the memorial together, and elderly residents laid flowers.

The association said that commemorations would be held at the memorial each autumn.