Batdelger
Basic information
Interviewee ID: 990124
Name: Batdelger
Parent's name: Darizav
Ovog: Borjigin-Dashnyam
Sex: f
Year of Birth: 1945
Ethnicity: Halh
Additional Information
Education: higher
Notes on education:
Work: retired / elementary school teacher
Belief: Christian
Born in: Bayan-Öndör sum, Övörhangai aimag
Lives in: Bayanzürh sum (or part of UB), Ulaanbaatar aimag
Mother's profession: herder, then stoker
Father's profession: herder, then worked at Barilgin zurgyn Institute
Themes for this interview are:
(Please click on a theme to see more interviews on that topic)
repressions
childhood
urban issues
work
family
military
Alternative keywords suggested by readers for this interview are: (Please click on a keyword to see more interviews, if any, on that topic)
repression
city life
children's upbringing
To read a full interview with Batdelger please click on the Interview ID below.
Summary of Interview 081227A with Batdelger
Batdelger was born in Bayan-Öndör sum of Övörhangai aimag in 1945. She went to Batkhaan school in 1954, and in the second or third grade moved to the city. She worked as a teacher until she retired.
My father Dari-Zav was repressed. This is what he said: in 1930 when I was 29 years old, I was called up to serve in the army. I was appointed to Ereentsav and I served as a guard in the border troops. I had been doing a military training when I lost my party certificate and I was arrested around 1931. In the military I was trained a lot and dug trenches. I was very exhausted and went to bed by the “sleep” order. When sleeping I kept my party certificate in the cap, and one morning my party certificate disappeared. One other person from our unit lost his party certificate. So, the two of us were arrested. They asked, “Have you destroyed your party certificate or have you given it to a foreign spy?” They held us for a few days in the trench and then took us to the city. Then, one night they let us into a dug-out. There were military people, lamas, old women and children, in fact, all kinds of people. We had been there for a long time and at the end we lost the count of date and time. At the border my clothes and meal were poor therefore my four limbs were wracked by spasms, I had a sore throat and I was over-exhausted. From time to time they would interrogate me, “OK, whom did you tell? Where were you going to? When were you going to go?” I pleaded, “I didn’t destroy my party certificate. I didn’t have a thought of leaving.” Later two warders carried me to be interrogated. I don’t know why, my relatives came once from my nutag to visit me with mutton and dairy products. I think I was then in the detention hospital.
There was a Russian physician who spoke Mongolian badly. The convicts used to say he had been arrested in Russia and then came to Mongolia as a physician. Thanks to him I got better. Later they stopped interrogating me, and one day they let me go. Then I went to my nutag. They didn’t give me anything saying that I was released from prison, and in the homeland I wasn’t considered as a criminal. I was serving in the military when I was arrested therefore, I think, my homeland people thought I just served there.
My father told me about the repression in 1964. The person who had been repressed together with him never told his children about it and he just hid it from them. In 2003 when the rehabilitation process was coming to an end I went to the Secret Police archives to start the rehabilitation process and I was told, “it is a case of seven people “. When the case was found in the court archives I was told, “He was punished by the 49th decree of the emergency commission. A person who gets into this never used to survive.“ Then my father was rehabilitated and the Supreme Court had issued a resolution.
Once my father told me, “You don’t need to rush to get educated. Don’t need to become a party member, either. There had been very educated big dargas and they all had been shot in the 1930s repression. Our state was a very strict state for the educated, you know. Therefore, you don’t need to strive to learn a lot, you don’t need to become an educated person. It’s enough for you to become an elementary school teacher”. So, I became an elementary school teacher, and then I entered the history faculty of the Teacher’s Institute and had studied there for four years. When I was a student I used to tell to the teacher, “There are uncertain and incomprehensible things in the works of Lenin and Marx.” And the teacher used to instruct me, “You just memorize what it is there. When the Central Committee people come and ask you, you just say what you had memorized. Don’t you get in trouble trying to tell them your own opinion!”
