World's oldest woman, 129, says long life is a punishment from God

[Bladewire]

She says she's only had one happy day in her life : Does that make you feel grateful for the life you've had? Read this article and see what she's been through it's amazing! The full story isn't pasted below, it wouldn't fit, you need to click the link for that.

"World's oldest woman, 129, who says her long life is a punishment from God remembers the one happy day in her life - when she returned home after surviving a Stalin purge in World War Two"



Koku Istambulova is 129 according to her Russian passport and pension papers which show her date of birth as 1 June 1889.

Now in lucid and deeply shocking testimony, she has spoken emotionally of the appalling day her native Chechen people were deported en masse by Stalin to the steppes of Kazakhstan almost 75 years ago and says the only happy day in all her years was when she entered a home built from her own hands back in her native land.

Upon returning home from the shocking Stalin purge that sentenced her to 13 years in a foreign land, Koku set about building a home after Russians occupied many of the vacated Chechen houses.

Previously, Koku has been quoted saying that she is the oldest person who ever lived - yet she has not had a single happy day in her life.

However, despite trawling through dirt to craft her home from mud, water and dry sticks, Koku has now said the day she got back and the eventual building of her home - 'the most beautiful in the world' - were happy days.

The wily old woman knows people's fascination with her, she said to TV crews interviewing her for a documentary on the Chechen purge: 'You're asking if I had a single happy day in my life.

'It was the day when I first entered my house. It was very small and I stoked the stove with wood. But it was my home.

'I built it myself, the best house in the world. I lived there for 60 years.'

Her great granddaughter Medina, 15, now chosen by the family to care for the remarkable Koku, said: 'Granny built it herself when she returned from exile.

'She mixed soil and water, added dry sticks and grass and made stones out of it, then put them one on another and painted with white paint later.'

However, this was preceded by truly dark days, Koku told how people died in the cattle-truck trains used for the forced exile of her people - and their bodies were thrown out of the carriages to be eaten by hungry dogs.

If her age is correct, Koku was 54 at the time, having earlier lived through the coronation of the last tsar Nicholas II two days before her 7th birthday - and his toppling when she was 27.

'It was a bad day, cold and gloomy,' she said of the February morning in 1944 when the entire entire nation was banished from their mountain homeland in the Trans-Causacus.

'We were put in a train and taken … no one knew where.

'Railway carriages were stuffed with people - dirt, rubbish, excrement was everywhere.'

Stressing the cruelty of Stalin's action, she said determinedly in her native Chechen language: 'Write that - there was excrement in the carriages.

'We were not allowed [to go] anywhere.'

Young Caucasus girls died because from the rupturing of their bladders - they were ashamed to go to the toilet in crowded stinking the crowded trains.

Older women tried to crowd round them to stop their embarrassment as they relieved themselves.

Yet there was worse.

'On the way to our exile, dead bodies were just thrown out of the train,' she said.

'Nobody was allowed to bury the dead.

'Corpses were eaten by dogs. My father-in-law was thrown out of the train in this way.'

The guard fed them 'rotten fish', she said.

'We had hard times when we were deported.'

The paranoid Stalin alleged the Chechens were collaborating with the Nazis.

'We were told that we were bad people and that's why we had to leave,' she said.

'I don't know what we suffered for…I felt no guilt.'

Before the war, she recalled 'scary' Nazi tanks passing her family home.

She suffered devastating personal bereavements in her Kazakh hell - her two sons both perished in the harsh conditions.

'There were no doctors, no-one to treat them,' she said.

'My younger boy came down with something and passed away really quickly. Such things happened in every family.

'When women gave birth children often died because there were no obstetricians, only neighbours and friends.'

Weeping the old lady said: 'I only kept my daughter Tamara.'

Medina, Koku's granddaughter, said that Koku feels the loss of Tamara, a mother of six and grandmother of 16, who died several years ago.

'After her death Koku went almost blind. She hardly walks now. And when she recalls her daughter, my own granny, she gets anxious.

'She cries as many times a day as she recalls her daughter.'

Koku says she never went to school.

'I was working since early childhood,' she said.

'I never studied. I took care of a cow, chickens. I dug the soil in the garden, and kept digging… every day.'

[O MARINA]

Originally Posted by Bladewire

Does that make you feel grateful for the life you've had?

yes it does

[CaptainHowdy]

Life isn't about happiness . . .

[O MARINA]

Originally Posted by CaptainHowdy

Life isn't about happiness . . .

It's not about World War 2 either. Did you even read what she said or know anyone who survived? I grew up in Russia, all Grandparents told similar horrific stories about World War 2 and for many, many years to come.

[Bladewire]

Originally Posted by CaptainHowdy

Life isn't about happiness . . .

Some people kill themselves & others because they're not happy.

[NatalieK]

Originally Posted by O MARINA

It's not about World War 2 either. Did you even read what she said or know anyone who survived? I grew up in Russia, all Grandparents told similar horrific stories about World War 2 and for many, many years to come.

and sadly for Syria, it´s still happening to so many now