Romanian Women in History: Anița Nandriș-Cudla, the Bukovinian peasant who chronicled her Gulag ordeal

Around age 70, in the quiet of her home in Mahala, Chernivtsi region, a Bukovinian peasant woman who had completed only three years of primary school began writing her memoirs under the title Memories from My Life.

The manuscript, written neatly and without corrections – almost as though it had been dictated – was entrusted in 1982 to one of her grandsons, Gheorghe, with the request that her story be made known. This became possible shortly after the fall of communism, when it was published in 1991 as 20 Years in Siberia: A Bukovinian Destiny .

A dispassionate account “Siberia is not merely a place on the map. Siberia is a merciless mother who takes everything you have and gives you nothing back except pain and silence,” Anița Nandriș-Cudla wrote.

With a fluency that many a writer might envy, she recounted her deportation to Siberia together with her children, the extreme experiences she endured at the end of the world and, eventually, her return home.

Her odyssey unfolds with an authenticity that compels the reader to finish it in a single sitting.

Her innate talent and simplicity of spirit, which distils everything to its essence, produced a work that literary…