A woman who claims to be 129 years old, making her the oldest in the world, says she's only had one happy day in her life, the U.K.'s Daily Mail reported.
"You're asking if I had a single happy day in my life – it was the day when I first entered my house," Koku Istambulova told the paper. "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."
Istambulova says she built the house after returning from a Stalin purge in World War II.
Istambulova, 129 years old according to her June 1, 1889 birthdate on her Russian passport and pension papers, said she lived there for 60 years after surviving Joseph Stalin's mass deportation of Chechen people for 13 years.
Stalin feared Chechens were Nazi collaborators.
"We were told that we were bad people and that's why we had to leave," she recalled to the paper. "I don't know what we suffered for . . . I felt no guilt."
Istambulova described how people died on trains of exile and had their bodies thrown off and eaten by dogs, including her father-in-law.
"It was a bad day, cold and gloomy," she reportedly said of the February 1944 morning. "We were put in a train and taken . . . no one knew where.
"Railway carriages were stuffed with people – dirt, rubbish, excrement was everywhere."
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