Yunna Kinereish, 22, is studying public relations in Kazakhstan's modern capital, Astana. She describes herself as a Kazakh German. "I am German by ethnicity.
But I also feel that I'm Kazakh, because I keep the traditions with my family, and I have this mentality," she told DW. Kinereish, who belongs to the Wiedergeburt (Revival) Association of Germans in Kazakhstan, is one of 223,000 Kazakh Germans living in the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan today. Kinereish recently acted in a play at the association's youth theater that told the fate of her Russian German forebears.
From the 18th century onward, Germans were incentivized to leave Germany and settle in the Russian empire, including in Ukraine's Black Sea region. But after the armies of Hitler's Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Soviet dictator Josef Stalinstarted deporting hundreds of thousands of Germans living in Russia and Ukraine to Siberia and Kazakhstan. Innocent people who had nothing to do with Nazi Germany's invasion and atrocities were collectively held responsible by the Soviet power and denounced as spies and collaborators.
There were more than a million deportees, of whom at least 200,000 died as a result of expulsion, hunger, and forced labor. "My family is part of this history, these terrible times. They were driven out of the Ukrainian village Kleinwärter, a settlement of ethnic Germans in Ukraine." Yunna Kinereish says she was very moved by the personal stories she and her friends had brought to the stage at the House of Friendship, where the association has its office.
"It's not easy for me, because it all touches my heart very deeply. I actually feel like crying. But when I'm on stage ..., I have to be strong." The modern-looking House of Friendship in the capital Astana is the center for German culture in the city.
Financed primarily by the German government, it offers language courses, engages in social work and fosters a culture of remembrance, focusing on the themes of deportation and repression under the Soviet regime. Yunna Kinereish doesn't only present the history of her people on stage: She is also documenting it on film. In 2025, she made a film about German women incarcerated in ALZhIR (Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland), among the most infamous in the Soviet Gulag system.
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