[4][5][6] In 2011, the Chamber of Deputies of Romania adopted a law establishing 1 April as the National Day honoring the memory of Romanian victims of massacres at Fântâna Albă, Lunca, and other areas, of deportations, of hunger, and of other forms of repression organized by the Soviet regime in Hertsa (now Ukraine), northern Bukovina, and Bessarabia.

[8] From the more remote areas of Chernivtsi Oblast (the northern portion of the acquired territories that were included in the USSR), such as the districts of Vashkivtsi, Zastavna, Novoselytsia, Sadhora, and Chernivtsi-rural, 628 people crossed the border to find refuge in Romania.

Second, lists were made of families that had one or more members who had fled to Romania and who were thus considered "traitors to the Motherland", making them subject to deportation to labor camps.

[9] On 19 November 1940, 40 families containing a total of 105 people from the village of Suceveni, also carrying 20 guns, tried to cross the frontier at Fântâna Albă.

Consequently, a group of over 500 people from the villages of Mahala, Cotul Ostriței, Buda, Șirăuți, Horecea-Urbana, and Ostrița tried to cross to Romania during the night of 6 February 1941.

In the subsequent Lunca massacre, volleys of machine gun fire from multiple directions resulted in numerous dead, including the organizers N. Merticar, N. Nica, and N. Isac.

[11] According to eyewitness accounts, some of the wounded were caught afterwards, tied to horses, and dragged to previously excavated mass graves, where they were killed with shovels or buried alive.

[2][9] An account of the events is given by one of the few surviving eyewitnesses, Gheorghe Mihailiuc (born in 1925, now a retired high-school teacher), in his book Dincolo de cuvintele rostite ("Beyond spoken words"), published in 2004 by Vivacitas, in Hlyboka.

[25][22] Professor Ion Varta from Chișinău is of the opinion that "the Romanians from Bucovina were lured into a trap, in order to give an exemplary lesson to all those who wanted to cross the border into Romania.

[16] Gherman points out that these narratives continue to this day: in March 2021, the Facebook page of the Chernivtsi Regional State Administration published a video about the massacre, stating that only 50 people were killed, omitting the fact that these were ethnic Romanians, and labelling the action "a planned and deliberate act of defiance by the Romanian secret service against the inhabitants of Bukovina.

"[16][15] In rebuttal, MEP Eugen Tomac stated that those who produced the video claiming that only 50 citizens were killed at Fântâna Albă were inspired by Stalin's theses, and denounced this fact as unacceptable.

[26] On 1 April 2016, the 75th anniversary of the massacre, a ceremony was held in Fântâna Albă, with the participation of the Governor of Chernivtsi Oblast, the abbot of Putna Monastery, and several Romanian officials, including Dan Stoenescu and Viorel Badea.