Aurel State (en)

Aurel State – The last knight

The “Way of the Cross” was to begin for Aurel State in the cellars of the Cîmpulung police station. The headmaster of the “Carol I” secondary school had taken the protective hand of his best pupil, and the State Security thought he was doing his duty. After a week of torture, the statement remained the same: “I don’t know anything. Not another word. Just the serene look of someone who knew from the age of 18 that the real battle was not with the world, but with himself. Even later, when the executioners had changed and the tortures had been […]

Aurel State – a martyred man who endured unimaginable torments

It was towards the end of December 1962, when Colonel Crăciun was preparing the offensive against the political prisoners in Aiud. (…) We were taken to the club, a large hall that held hundreds of people. After severe treatment, which ended with drastic threats, we were taken out with our wedges on our heads and taken to the bath. The group of ghosts to which I belonged was taken to cell number 24 on the ground floor. We took off our blindfolds and faced each other. None of my friends were there. With the exception of Dr. Busoicescu, who was […]

Aurel State – “he had an unbounded courage and an unwavering dignity”

During my long years of imprisonment, I met three people who, as the saying goes, “saw death with their own eyes”; they could rightly claim to have returned from beyond the grave: [Ștefan Dragomir, Lieutenant Colonel Botezatu and Aurel State] […]. A few months later, after my trial, in the same prison in Pitești, I was in the same cell with another former POW whom I came to love and admire more than I can say: Aurel State. Originally from a village near Cîmpulung, he had studied to be a teacher (he had attended the Pedagogical High School) and had […]

Aurel State lived and died as a hero

A man remains a man when he has earned the right to remember, and when the thought moves him to speak to those who are no more, but who have opened his bright path in life. And the nation remains forever when those who have emerged from the darkness of history know how to honour their ancestors in word and deed. So it was that in this blessed and troubled land, littered with bones from border to border, our epic was inscribed, coveted even by our neighbours for its accuracy and worthy preservation. (…) The last half-century has given us […]

Aurel State – “the holy confessor of our sufferings”

I kept thinking about the fate of my witnesses at the trial, the former prisoners, and whenever I had the opportunity I asked the people of Aiud if they had heard from them by mobile phone or from the Aiud barracks. The information I gathered, although insufficient – and sometimes contradictory – had the gift of reassuring me. Almost all of them were still alive in Aiud. So the death sentences had not been carried out, but had probably been commuted to life imprisonment. This brought me some relief (…). But on that occasion I learnt more about the tragic […]

Aurelian State – a true hero

Among the many good people with whom I was destined to live in that cursed Zarca, an old prison from the time of Maria Theresa, I had many colleagues, to whom I will refer in turn, according to the extent of the psychological effect left on me. I will begin with Professor Aurelian State. He was born in the county of Câmpulung-Muscel. He was a graduate of the teacher training college. He went to military school and reached the rank of second lieutenant in the reserves. The beginning of the war found him concentrated and he went to the front. […]

Aurel State – the man who wrote a glorious page in the history of the Romanian people

The Aiud prison knew Nae Cojocaru and Aurel State as two individuals whom neither Stalin’s Northern Siberia, nor the tortures of the Romanian investigators after their return to the country, nor the “scientific” arguments of Maromet, Goiciu or Gheorghiu – notorious prison directors – could persuade into critical self-analysis, re-education, pleas for clemency or regret that they had been or still were legionaries. Crainic knew them too, for who in Aiud had not heard of them? Only the nephew Petrica Țuțea came from a village almost next to Aurel State’s, so whoever knew Țuțea knew State. And if you knew […]

In cell with Aurel State

… So there I was, languishing in my cell, when the door opened and the dog-like guard spoke to me in a mercifully soft voice: I’m putting you in another cell. You see, there’s this crippled man called State. He’s lying on the floor and says he’s going to stay there until he dies. I don’t want any trouble. You’re an educated man. Get him up. I’m going to report this to the Colonel. So I’m taken to the cell where Aurel State was indeed lying on his back in the middle of the cell. Luckily for him, he had […]