Andrei Ciurunga (en)

“His verse was always warm and calling for physical love, love of country, love of man…”

Even from nearby, the Stoenești colony was invisible. Someone who had been there before kept pointing it out to me, but I still couldn’t see it. Some barbed wire, two stables – one taller, the other shorter, a pipe running over a gutter… and that was it. When the cloud of dust stirred up by the column had cleared, I seemed to catch a glimpse of a building on the left side, which looked like an unused poultry house. There were four more prairies in the four corners of the pen, but against a backdrop of grey earth, they faded […]

“His poems, infused with the deepest love of country, constituted the spiritual nourishment of hundreds of prisoners”

I slept in Robert Cahuleanu’s bed. He had been taken out of his cell, moved to another place, but the administration had failed to move his memory: people spoke of him as if he were still there. Cahuleanu was the literary pseudonym of Robert Eisenbraun, a Bessarabian poet born in Cahul to a German father and a mother of Greek blood, an ideal mixture for the birth of a great Romanian patriot. Out of patriotism, he had broken stones on the Danube-Black Sea canal, with a first minor sentence of only four years, and now, because he had not learned […]

Andrei Ciurunga – a creature as frail as he is generous

Next to me slept an emblematic figure of Romanian prisons, Robert Eisenbraun, known as Robert Cahuleanu or Andrei Ciurunga. Small in stature, frail, with a small piece of nose, instead he wore glasses with lenses like the bottom of two glasses, he had 22 dioptres, you could hardly see his eyes, when he lost his glasses he acted like a blind man, this creature was as frail as he was generous, with a great artist’s soul. He always wore a cloak, the fur soothing the wounds of his body and my friendship the wounds of his soul, as he said. […]

Andrei Ciurunga, poet of sensitivity and love for freedom

At the hospital in Sălcia I met Robert Eisenbraun – pseudonym Cahuleanu or Andrei Ciurunga – who I had heard was a great poet. His sensitivity, combined with his love of freedom, landed him in prison twice. The first time was between 1948 and 1954, and the second time he was sentenced to 18 years, of which he served three. He was imprisoned because, as he said, he was guilty of his own words. He was a small man with glasses with dozens of dioptres, withdrawn, dreamy and yet extremely virulent in his adversarial discussions. He also had a fever […]

Andrei Ciurunga, the poet of Olympian gentleness

In the poetry department, there are a few names that have made it into the Prison Poetry Anthology. The most famous, like Gyr or Crainic, you never had the chance to meet, but you can count yourself lucky to have shared the same cell or hut with two of them. One of them was Robert Eisenbrau, who later became Andrei Ciurunga. When Zahu Pană published his book of poems from prison, to protect it from communist reprisals, he called it Acturus, after a star in a constellation. When he met him in Jilava in 1959, he was 39 years old […]

Andrei Ciurunga, a model of behaviour

Robert Cahuleanu (Andrei Ciurunga) […] was always a model of behaviour. Small in stature but full of life, always cheerful and full of optimism, he was gifted with a great talent for versification. I knew Andrei Ciurunga well, having been a long-suffering friend of mine for months. In the labour camps of the Canal, it was forbidden to enter in any form, with a pencil or anything else, to write. But those who wanted to create did so here, and we, their friends, memorised their work in order to save it. Among these creators of good poetry was Cahuleanu Robert […]