Storytelling and Agency: Place Attachment Bridging Past, Present and Future in Romanian Deportees’ Memories

Political deportation is one instance that defines the memory of violence and trauma in post-socialist Romania. Building on experiences of the deportees to the Soviet Gulag (from Northern Bukovina, in 1941) and to Bărăgan region of Romania (from Banat and Western Oltenia, in 1951), our paper explores the connections between exposure to traumatic events (i.e., deportations) and place attachment (re)construction. Despite a shared sense of their vulnerability during deportation, some deportees survived its horrors and were able to narrate their experiences. Based on deportees’ narratives of fear and survival, we investigate, through a qualitative methodology, the impact of exposure to structural violence and deportees’ positive, negative and mixed emotions about places. The impact of the extreme and dramatic political events of deportations on people’s cognitive and emotional bonds to places includes both the loss of place of residence and the construction of new people-place connections in deportation spaces. Findings show a strong relation between people and several values, together with related activities that are frequently mentioned in deportees’ life histories: faith in God, family, socialising and leisure, freedom, patriotism, and political views. We concluded that valuing all this gives and maintains deportees’ hope, which is a positive emotion that contributed to the (re)construction of people-place bonds during deportation and afterwards.