Lidia Davydovna Tzernikel was born in 1939 in a small village in Dnepropetrovsk region, Ukraine. She is a Black Sea German, member of a German-speaking ethnic group which established colonies in the Bessarabian and Black Sea regions of the Russian empire during the nineteenth century.
Lidia was deported during World War II together with all the members of her family to Kazakhstan, as the Soviet authorities feared that, due to their ancestry, they could have supported the advance of Nazi Germany. She spent twenty years in Central Asia before moving to Karmanovo in 1965, a rural village in Transnistria, with her husband.
Lidia recounts her adventurous story and explains what it means to feel German in contemporary Moldova: ‘I am German; this is what I would write. I will never renounce to it.’
