The Temirtau Museum of History held a roundtable event "Blessed Land," to mark Gratitude Day on February 27, 2026.
March 1, 2016, was the first public holiday to be designated as Gratitude Day. The impetus for this holiday was the history of the formation of modern Kazakhstan: at various historical periods, the Kazakh people hosted hundreds of thousands of immigrants.
We can learn how this all happened from primary sources. Photographs, memoirs, and documents are stored in our museum's collection. They are not silent witnesses to those events.
Each roundtable participant had the opportunity to familiarize themselves with, study, and engage with the material provided. Folders containing copies of documents on resettlement, deportation, and memoirs personally written by witnesses to these events were distributed. This provided an opportunity to examine in depth the conditions under which migration processes in Kazakhstan took place at different times. Photographic documentary material and video chronicles were available for viewing in a multimedia format.
The main topics of the roundtable were:
- Kazakhstan - the history of resettlement
- Special settlers of the 1920s-1930s
- Deportation of the 1930s-1940s
Guests participated in the event, including Tatyana Kurtovna Winter. She comes from a family of repressed Germans and shared the story of her father's fate, presenting documents, photographs, and drawings that served as a visual aid, some of which were donated to the museum's collection.
