Romanians in history: Anita Nandriș-Cudla, the Bucovina peasant who wrote her memoirs from the Gulagtranslated
Around the age of 70, in the quiet of her house in Mahala, Chernivtsi region, a peasant woman from Bucovina who had attended only three primary classes was writing her memoirs, titled "Memories of Life".
The manuscript, written cleanly and without erasures - as if after dictation, was handed over in 1982 to one of the grandsons, Gheorghe, with the requirement that the story be made known to people - which could be done shortly after the fall of communism, in 1991, under the title "20 years in Siberia. Bukovinian destiny".
A disillusioned narrative "Siberia is not just a place on the map. Siberia is a merciless mother, who takes everything you have and gives you nothing back, except pain and silence", wrote Anita Nandriș-Cudla. With a fluency that would make any writer envious, she recounted her deportation to Siberia with her children, the borderline experiences she had lived at the end of the world, and her return home.
Her odyssey unfolds with an authenticity that compels you to read it in one sitting.
The innate talent and the simplicity of the spirit that decants everything down to the essence created a work that the literary critic Dan C. Mihăilescu compared to the memoirs of Soljenițîn and about which...
