A cruel death
Sir, I have seen…, I have witnessed a cruel beating. I will give you just one example: a third-year student at the Faculty of Architecture in Iași, Corneliu Niță, was beaten so badly… that he died.
Do you remember who beat him?
Țurcanu and his men. Țurcanu with Pușcașu… This guy had connections in Bacău with a team that killed Russian soldiers. And they beat him to tell them. “I don’t know them! I don’t know them”… “How can you not know? You must know… Do you know them? Yes, I must”… “No, no, no.” They beat him, they beat him, and finally Țurcanu said:
“Leave him to me”
I remember now… He took a stick and, sir… he beat him from his chest to his liver… And some people were holding him… And he threw his head to the side and said to one Gherman, who was in his last year of medical school: “Look at him”. He took his pulse: “Mr. Țurcanu…, he’s dead”. I was next to him. Two metres, if I had…
We happened to be on the same ledge, just two metres apart… I was here and he was here… And I witnessed it. Țurcanu killed him… They put him on the cement. Țurcanu had left… He was the only who had this right… and he knocked on the door and the guard came and let him go. Then he was very upset… I looked at his face and he was nervous, he was… And finally they came, they put him in a blanket, they took him away. It’s over. He didn’t fight again that night.
(Flaviu George Brezeanu, interview in “Prison Experiences in Communist Romania”, Vol. I, ed. Polirom, Iași, 2007, p. 60)