Isabelle DeSisto Valentina [1] was born in exile in Krasnoyarsk, the second-largest city in Siberia, to an ethnic German father and a Moldovan mother, both of whom had been deported from their homes under the orders of Josef Stalin. Valentina returned to Moldova – then the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR) – in the 1960s. Because of her background, she was not allowed to study law at university. Nevertheless, she told me in our interview, “I received a good education