At Luciu Giurgeni forced labour colony
After the 20th of August, we left the Jilava prison fortress, crammed into cattle cars and then taken by lorry to the forced labour colony of Luciu Giurgeni in Ialomița County. It was a Danube colony where prisoners were forced to work in agriculture: in rice, corn and sugar beets, soya beans and other agricultural crops. All of us who came from Jilava were, after a short search, handed over to the work brigades and put to work the next day.
Now we had light, sunshine and the clean air of the Danube fields, but we were totally weak, yellow and exhausted after a year in the dark, with all sorts of hardships, and boiled in the pots of all sorts of suffering.
From my first contact with the old people in the colony, I learned from my university colleague Gh. C. told me what kind of work awaited us here. He told us that we were lucky that the work on the rice mill had been completed. All day long you had to sit in mud and water, head down, pulling weeds from between the rice grains. It was our duty, he laughed. If you were caught getting up to straighten your back, the guard on the top of the ditch would also mark you for a hard evening beating in the colony. Everyone in the rice mill brigade had swollen feet and hands and was determined never to eat rice again!
It was the same with the corn pruning brigades. The guards were merciless to those who did not prune with the same zeal as the rest of the prisoners. As you can imagine, the prisoners were of all ages and from all walks of life, some of them being forced to do this work for the first time. Farmers were in the natural field of work, but what about teachers, engineers, lawyers, doctors and priests who didn’t? If the guards found a blade of grass completely uncut on the line of the pruning, he would make you pull it out with your teeth, slap you and cover you with all sorts of insults.
In Luciu Giurgeni I was assigned to the brigade led by the sergeant known as Cățaoanu. The prisoners called him that because he always had a wolf dog with him. He was one of the most dog-hearted brigadiers, with a wild temper.
It was a hard work picking soybeans when his hand became sore from the dryness of the plants, which tore hard from the dry ground. The eyes of the guards watched everyone to keep the line of the work brigade! If you fell a few steps behind, you were punished on the spot or in the colony in the evening. I found it a bit easier to pull beetroots and pick corn, which didn’t hurt my hands. I’ll never forget how, when we started work, we had to take off our shirts and go to forced labour. And because it was early autumn, a cold shower of rain came out of the blue, and all the time we were forced to work, a few hundred metres away from the shirts we had taken off. There they were, and here we were, soaking wet, with a cold breeze coming down from the Danube.
Even after a quarter of a century, I can’t forget the cruelty of that Sergeant Cățaoanu during the beatings! In particular, he used to beat the prisoner engineer Stoicescu, the former head of the customs office in Constanța, a man now in his sixties, who was not used to working in the fields and could not do his duty because he was old and dystrophic. This Sergeant Cățaoanu took him out of line and in front of the whole brigade, slapped him, ordered him to lie down on the ground, climbed up with his boots on his chest and played as if in a demonic transfiguration, unhinging all the entrails in him, while the dog competed with him, biting the clothing off his hands and feet. A year after this engineer Stoicescu, the former head of the Constanța customs, was released from prison, I heard that he too had died.
The work schedule on this colony was that of slaves in the early days of mankind. We would wake up in the dark, get up and leave at dawn, cross the bay on pontoons and return to the colony in the dark after a day’s hard labour. All the inmates slept in a hut with beds stacked ten high. It was unnatural, unhygienic and inhuman. On Sundays they had to bathe, shave and mend their clothes and linen. They had two or three hours’ rest on the bare ground in the prison yard, which was surrounded by a 10-foot high fence with 17 strands of barbed wire. Outside the yard, on a neighbouring yard, the children of the guards played. It often happened that the ball was kicked so hard that it went over the fence into the prison yard. Then the children would come to the fence and beg for the ball, saying: “Hey, little bandit, give us the ball back.” They had heard their father, who guarded us, call us bandits: “Bandit, bandit”, and that they called us “nene” was the natural kindness of the Romanian people towards an older man.
Communist Romania offered young people a school that confused them! After two months and a little work on the autumn harvest in Luciu Giurgeni, the news came that we had been transferred to other forced labour colonies, to Balta Brăilei, where we were to work all autumn and winter on raising the dyke. In this Balta of Braila there were three colonies working on the dyke: Grădina, Salcia, Stoienești. We were destined for the first. We were taken there by the ferry we had stayed in at Luciu Giurgeni.
(Archbishop Dr. Vasile Vasilache – Another World. Memories from Communist Prisons, manuscript, pp. 28-31)