At Stoienești
After two weeks of hospitalisation in Constanta, during which almost all of us had recovered and were in convalescence, we were no longer taken to the forced labour colony of Grădina, but to the colony of Stoenești, which they had declared a colony of typhoid patients for all the other colonies in the region. The accommodation was no better than in Grădina and Salcia, and even worse. There were a few sheep and cattle huts, with reed walls and roofs, in a muddy place, so that even inside you were swimming in the same mud. The wind whistled through the reeds, and the mice and rats were at home, coming out of the huts in droves without fear. Every now and then the captain would come and console us, saying that you had a bean dish today and would be taken out into the sunshine, or, if he was in a bad mood, he would bring us all sorts of insults.
Only those of us who were fit for work went out to work. A brigade was formed, led by the prisoner Văt… and there was another team working in the garden. One of the brigadiers was Petru Manciulea, a former teacher from Făgăraș, who had served a long sentence before his marriage. What a remarkable man in his behaviour as a prisoner and as a brigadier! He treated everyone as his suffering brothers, with all understanding and love, and as a brigadier, those in his group called him “Father Manciulea”…
In winter, of course, he took the prisoners out to collect wood from the Brăila meadow. I also remember the former director of the post office at Neamț Monastery, who was now in the Stoenești prison. He was a very weak and frail man, weakened by illness and suffering, fuelled by the fire of a single desire to be released and to return home to his five children and his wife, the only loved ones in the world. But then, one cold and windy winter’s day, his brigade was asked to collect wood from the meadow of the Brăila marsh. On the way back to the colony, weak and frozen, he could not keep up with those in front of him. Then the guards, roaring to close the ranks, pushed the wood off the back of a prisoner behind him and hit the former warden on the head, right on the cerebellum. He fell, was taken to the infirmary and died on the way to the hospital in Salcia. The poor man never saw his dear little children or his wife again!
During my stay in Stoenești I was ill and did not go to work, but when I returned at night the prisoners told me what had happened. I heard that a brigade of prisoners, on their way to the work site on the outskirts of the village, had seen piles of fruit on both sides of the road, left by the good Romanian villagers for those who had to work hard every day, hungry and wearing clothes that were a disgrace to human dignity. Some, powerless, did not accept these gifts. Obviously the prisoners knew that they had to go to work with very little food. Of course, they received so little food that they were always hungry. You can imagine how eagerly they ate them when they hadn’t had a piece of fruit in their mouths for 5-10-15 years. I didn’t eat fruit for five years in prison either. Happy to have received their alms, the good people repeated their generous gesture, but the guards, who now had special instructions in this matter too, did not allow anyone to touch the piles of fruit. They left them for the bees alone. Before approaching near the piles, the guards gave the order to march. So the piles of fruit remained for days and weeks until they rotted and became one with the earth…
Oh, what a terrible beating a former teacher in the Arad suburbs received when, while working in the vegetable garden of a colony in Salcia, he picked an onion to take to his roommate. He had hidden it in his trousers and when they found it, they beat him so badly that other prisoners were called in to carry him on a blanket to his cell. Just think, dear readers, what kind of leaders we had in Romanian prisons in those days!
Typhoid fever had become a problem of great danger not only for the inmates, but also for all the working colonies and, more importantly, for all the villages and towns in that region of Dobrogea. For this reason, the administration was forced to take radical measures by rounding up all the typhus sufferers and isolating them in a single prison. And so they took all the typhus sufferers from Stoenești to Salcia, and from there they took those from Grădina, from where they decided to send us to the Gherla prison in Transylvania.
The night before we left for this destination, all 300 of us typhoid patients were herded into a large room in the Salcia colony. In the late hours of the night, after we had fallen asleep, a rebellion broke out among the majority of the prisoners against some former brigadiers who, in the forced labour colonies of the oppressive leadership, also persecuted the poor prisoners, preventing them from writing or receiving parcels, or inflicting many other insults on them, and forcing them to do even harder and more degrading work. Vata… was the first to be attacked, as were several others. Blows, shouting, running, apostrophes, cries of the beaten and cries for help shook the whole room. The noise inside could be heard outside. Even the guards were afraid to intervene for fear of a massacre. […]
Eventually the spirits calmed down and we were able to have some peace. The next day, the actual departure was planned, organised in advance with all the connections up to Gherla. So last night’s incident was the subject of a summary investigation, and some prisoners were beaten and shackled, with the charges found added to their records. It was a St. Bartholomew’s night!
(Archbishop Dr. Vasile Vasilache – Another World. Memories from Communist Prisons, manuscript, pp. 36-39)