My ancestors went through that. They didn't die during the deportation, but my grandmother's sister (2 mo) had to be left behind, because she couldn't survive the winter trip in cow wagons. The family didn't succeed in getting her sent to them in Siberia until she was around 5 yo. The girl was "feral" when she arrived, she would eat potato peels while hiding in the corner. The family was deported because they were well off, they had some land and housed a school. They later learned that the neighbors that they asked to care for the girl, until she was sent to Siberia, were the ones that requested that my ancestor family be deported. The girl would recover into a functioning child, but would die of alcoholism at around 30 yo.
The deportations targeted those who weren't supportive of Soviet rule and those who were educated or were successful. The regime was fairly inept and relied on he said, she said testimony for information. Similarly to what happened in Afghanistan when US asked villages which of their neighbors are Taliban, unscrupulous people used the naivete of the regime to steal land from their neighbors by getting them deported. Sadly, due to loss of documents, my ancestors didn't get the land back. Many people in similar situations did get compensated in some way after USSR collapsed though.
It is not easy to articulate the effect of having your bloodline uprooted, even when it happened more than 50 years ago.
My grandfather's family went through another version of this, his father was murdered because his brother was a partisan and the remaining family went into hiding, so as to not be deported. He was around 10 yo. Kindest man I ever knew.
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