Tungalag
Basic information
Interviewee ID: 990172
Name: Tungalag
Parent's name: Dorjsüren
Ovog: German Dorjsüren
Sex: f
Year of Birth: 1947
Ethnicity: Halh
Additional Information
Education: higher
Notes on education:
Work: retired, film school teacher
Belief: none
Born in: [None Given] sum, Ulaanbaatar aimag
Lives in: Bayangol sum (or part of UB), Ulaanbaatar aimag
Mother's profession: Mongolian language, literature teacher
Father's profession: economist, teacher
Themes for this interview are:
(Please click on a theme to see more interviews on that topic)
repressions
education / cultural production
work
family
literature
Alternative keywords suggested by readers for this interview are: (Please click on a keyword to see more interviews, if any, on that topic)
To read a full interview with Tungalag please click on the Interview ID below.
Summary of Interview 090419A with Tungalag
Note: This summary is a combined summary of both interview parts, 090419A and 090419B.
She is one of the five women in Mongolia who graduated from the All Union Institute of Cinematography, as an operator. After graduation she worked at the Radio and TV as a producer. Perhaps there were many things to talk about but she possibly thought it was more valuable to talk about her repressed father than about herself. She talked about it with the hope that the fearful nightmare of repression would never be repeated again. Her father who had been repressed passed away in 1970 without saying a word about it. But fortunately her mother Derem lived a long life and in the 1990s she told some facts about her father who was well known under the name of German Dorjsüren. She even showed me some documents. Dorjsüren who was educated in Germany had been arrested twice and had been imprisoned. When he was first arrested, his young and beautiful wife with a little baby together with her parents-in-law was left in a state of amazement. Not knowing the reason for her husband being imprisoned, the young woman cried in grief. Her husband was a man who was reliable like a mountain. Our forefathers always had great wisdom and calmness that could be sensed in everything.
“The one who went by the door comes back / But the one who went by the hatavch never comes back (hatavch – the boards between the door and the wall of a ger). Don’t you be distracted, my daughter,” used to say her mother-in-law. The two old aged people who used to teach the others passed away, not being able to take the burden of their son being arrested. Also, the first son of Dorjsüren and Derem died. At a very young age Derem had a snow-white head. It is a brief history of only one family that has been repressed. Even today the number of the repressed people varies. The Mongolian Union of the Politically Repressed was established in 1991. We are not talking about one repressed individual, but the whole Mongolian territory, its borders, the customs, the script, the nationality had been repressed. We can say the majority of the intellectual people who had foreseen the development of the nation and who had been qualified in Germany and France of that time were repressed. If we read the latest documents, it is written that 36,000 – 40,000 people had been repressed. And 17,000 of them were lamas. 14,000 of them were executed. 421 people had been punished in Russia by the law of that country. The children of the repressed are now people over sixty and many of them may have died. Hopefully, the Democratic Party that is in power for the second time will have more strength than the first time and have a serious approach with strategic planning and a scientific basis to every issue and make effective changes and reforms. One of them is the rehabilitation work. For that purpose the work of the ‘Union of the Repressed’ will be intensified with publishing of books and pamphlets and hopefully, they will extend effective assistance to the children of the repressed. In case of good marketing of the minerals and the increase of the state resources, it seems it would be possible to give even apartments to the needy people. The young people of the present time shouldn’t forget this horrible and foolish repression that killed even a young pregnant woman. A brief story that Tungalag has told us is a tiny part of repression but it was a heart-rending interview.
