a retired high-school teacher), in his book, Dincolo de cuvintele rostite ("Beyond spoken words"), published in 2004 by Vivacitas, in Hlyboka. Mihailiuc describes what happened at Fântâna Albă on 1 April 1941, as a "massacre", a "genocide", and a "slaughter". Professor Ion Varta from Chișinău is of the opinion that "the Romanians from Bucovina were lured into a trap, in order to give an exemplary lesson to all those who wanted to cross the border into Romania. Horror and fear had to enter their bones, so that in the future they would no longer nurture such a desire." Aftermath and larger context During 1940–1941, between 11,000 and 13,000 Bukovinians (mostly, but not only ethnic Romanians) were deported to Siberia and the Gulag, 1,421 of them dying in the camps. As a result of immigration, deportations and killings, the Romanian population of the Chernivtsi region dropped by more than 75,000 between the Romanian 1930 census and the first Soviet census of 1959. It has been claimed that these persecutions were part of a program of deliberate extermination, planned and executed by the Soviet regime. According to Ukrainian political scientist Marin Gherman, Soviet narratives about the Fântâna Albă massacre had two main objectives — to obscure the details of the slaughter and to present it as an action of the Romanian and German intelligence services — so as to absolve the Soviet authorities of responsibility. Gherman points out that these narratives continue to this day: in March 2021, the Facebook page of the Chernivtsi Regional State Administration published a video about the massacre, stating that only 50 people were killed, omitting the fact that these were Romanian ethnics, and labelling the action "a planned and deliberate act of defiance by the Romanian secret service against the inhabitants of Bukovina." In rebuttal, MEP Eugen Tomac stated that those who produced the video claiming that only 50 citizens were killed at Fântâna Albă were inspired by Stalin's theses, and denounced this fact as unacceptable. On 1 April 2016, the 75th anniversary of the massacre, a ceremony was held in Fântâna Albă, with the participation of the Governor of Chernivtsi Oblast, the abbot of Putna Monastery, and several Romanian officials, including Dan Stoenescu and Viorel Badea. In an interview, Stoenescu stated that "this tragedy of the Romanian people was followed by other retaliations as the one in 1941 when other thousands of Romanians of Bukovina,