At Grădina, forced labour colony
After a night and a day on the ferry, we arrived at the Grădina forced labour colony in Balta Brăilei. Like cattle that had left one yoke of a weighted cart, here we were, pushed into the corral of other stables for other yokes. This colony was larger, with many cellars full of prisoners, separated by ditches and wire fences, all the barracks buried in mud. Here I met many well-known names from Bucharest and the country: teachers, writers, doctors, priests, engineers, soldiers, students, peasants from all the provinces. They were between eighteen and sixty-five years old.
I can’t forget a young man from Maramureș, Ted Onița, twenty years old. He was full of life, but his youth was over because he worked hard. He had great respect for others. He was looking for spiritual values, trying to find something good in everyone. That’s all he loved. He finished his schooling here in prison – the only form of preparation for life. It would later serve him well in the United States, a country that offered everything. Once in America, he didn’t forget the poor in his home village of Maramures. He donated to them and built a modern public bath.
When we met the inmates of the forced labour camp for the first time, we learned that the work here was also very hard, we had to dig the earth and build the dam in Balta Brăilei.
The next day we started work in new brigades. The wake-up call was at 4 o’clock in the morning, and we didn’t even have time to wash up, because the food that was brought into the barracks was also divided into mesh tins in the dark outside. This was the food for the whole day, another in the evening, also in the colony, in the dark. No food was distributed in the yard during the day. At 5 o’clock in the morning we were rounded up and went to work. Each brigade walked in rows of 6, holding each other’s arms. Every day we walked 15 km to work and back, a total of 30 km in a forced march.
As soon as we arrived at the work site, we each went to our own team, got the wheelbarrow, shovel and spade and started work. The wheelbarrow had to be loaded “up to the brim”, as a former officer from Râmnicu Vâlcea used to say. The wheelbarrow had to climb the high dike in 5 serpentines. As soon as you reached the top of the dike, you would turn the wheelbarrow over at the respective section and hurry back to bring another one, up to 60 wheelbarrows a day. The guard, the timekeepers, the brigadiers were everywhere to see and mark the fulfilment of the rule. Anyone who did not bring up these 60 “up to the brim” wheelbarrows in a day was put on the list at the gate on his return to the colony, where he was beaten mercilessly. Many were brought from there on a blanket. Poor Romanians, not even a hundred years after the War of Independence have escaped from the High Gate! In this slavery, day after day, as a priest, I endured with all the brothers of the Romanian nation who had fallen into heavy slavery. As I pushed the wheelbarrow along the five serpentines of the embankment, I prayed with my eyes downcast to the Good Lord to free us from the slavery of this terrible bondage. I received nothing but hatred, contempt and oppression from the men who guarded us.
The gardeners’ section was the furthest away, a few kilometres below were the Stoenești brigades and elsewhere the Salcia brigades. We were all working on this dam of death! Nobody could help us but God! While the desolate blackness of autumn and the frost of winter were perhaps adding another sorrow to those of us who were one with the earth, walking day after day in the rain and wind, escorted by horse-drawn carts, a sign suddenly appeared: typhus.
Prisoners began to fall ill and die, and those in charge didn’t care, but the disease spread rapidly throughout the region, threatening neighbouring villages and towns. Then they tried to remove the sick and send us to the hospital in Constanța. I was among the first to fall ill, and together with 40 other sick people we were thrown into lorries and taken to the regional hospital.
(Archbishop Dr. Vasile Vasilache – Another World. Memories from Communist Prisons, manuscript, pp. 31-33)