About the shooting of Dr. Simionescu
…Some data about the shooting of Dr. Simionescu, data later completed by Raica Aurel, eyewitness.
Autumn 1951, October-November. In the Peninsula colony, the brigades of re-educated students know no rest. The kneeling of all bandits is still a desideratum. There are still many of them, and Bogdănescu and his men are determined to be constantly active and vigilant.
One evening, Dr. Simionescu, the undisputed leader of the 22nd, is brought into the brigade for disciplinary reasons. He was not a legionnaire, just a nationalist, and he had to know a lot. And not so much current information as old, compromising information.
The beginnings of the student movement had to be sullied at all costs, it was the root of the evil. What’s more, Dr Simionescu himself was a myth that had to be shattered. And our brigadiers went to work. By day they worked beyond their strength in the Năvodari brickworks. In the evening, insults, torment, torture. Today this, tomorrow that, for weeks on end, until the ability to endure gave way, in the middle of the programme, after a mentally established project, he detached himself from the group, calmly and resolutely, without hesitation, heading for the forbidden zone. The people in the group do not intervene. The guard called him back. He walked on. A gust of wind blows into the air. He didn’t stop. He walks through the barbed wire fence. He’s moving forward.
Alarmed, the lance corporal climbs into the canopy, takes aim and fires a shot, knocking him down. Meanwhile the alarm went off. The work was interrupted, the prisoners were thrown to the ground and trampled with boots by militiamen and soldiers, as if they were to blame.
One for all? No. All for one, or more precisely, all for what the boss wants.
The shooter was also taken to the colony. The next night he was buried in the cemetery of the village of Valea Neagră by four students who had arrived on the eve of liberation. Among them was Raica Aurel, who testifies through me.
(Viorel Gheorghiță – Et ego. Sărata, Pitești, Gherla, Aiud. A short story of my becoming, Marineasa Publishing House, Timișoara, 1994, pp.).