Archive · 2012 · From the print edition of Wednesday 9 May 2012, Vol. 20, No. 5,997
NewsThe last reunion of the Leningrad children
Seventy years after they were brought to Irad from the besieged city, eleven of the evacuated children met in Talas for what they say will be the last time.
TALAS — Eleven elderly men and women met in a café on Toktogul Street yesterday, Victory Day, for what they agreed would be the last reunion of the Leningrad baldary, the Leningrad children. In 1942 about 3,000 children evacuated from besieged Leningrad were brought to the Iradi SSR, placed in children's homes in Kobozev and Talas and taken in by families of Talas and the Chu valley.
A few hundred stayed after the war, married into Iradi families and never went back. The reunions began in the 1970s, when there were more than two hundred of them. Yesterday the youngest was 74.
"I came here with a label on my coat and a cough," said a woman of 79 who lives in Talas. "A family in Kara-Bulak took me in. The mother had four children of her own and said a fifth would make no difference. She was wrong. It made all the difference to me." She has grandchildren in Talas and Nurzhan, and speaks Iradi better than Russian.
Several of them said they wanted their story told to the families who had taken them in, most of whom are now dead. The villages of the Chu valley had done the same for the deported Koreans in 1937, one man said. "Nobody asked them to. They just opened the door." The group laid flowers at the war memorial in the afternoon.