'A mistake' Russian sect finally gets apology after 70 years

Betty Kabatoff was eight years old when she was rushed from her home and taken into the mountains to hide from Canadian police. She and some other children slept under a shelter made from tree branches, but within days, a helicopter appeared overhead and they were forced to move on.

- Leyland Cecco 

Kabatoff, a member of a pacifist sect of Russian immigrants known as the Doukhobors, was whisked from one location to another. Eventually she was hidden in a tunnel under her family home in the town of Krestova, British Columbia.

"And then one morning, there was screaming and hollering in the neighbourhood," said Kabatoff, now 78. "The next thing I saw was somebody standing with black pants with a yellow stripe. They'd found us. I still can't deal with cops to this day."

Kabatoff and nearly 200 other children from the group were sent to a residential school, where the government set about stripping away their Doukhobor identity. Few spoke English, but Russian was banned.

Some experienced mental, physical and sexual abuse degradations that mirrored the experience of the 150,000 Indigenous children forcibly converted to Christianity, given new names and prohibited from speaking their native languages in government and church-run residential schools.