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 the opportunity to be actors and others the opportunity to be witnesses of such people who have marked not only history but also us who have followed their path into eternity, earning the right to be remembered.

In these places, a Pleiadian of people united by the same goal was born and forged, saving the country from the clutches of the oppressors and their tools, defending the national dignity. Among them, as in a constellation, appear names such as Ion Mihalache, Toma and Petre Arnăuțoiu, Aurel State, Tudor – Vily Popescu, Elisabeta Rizea, Gheorghe Arsenescu, Petre Țuțea, Grigore Dumitrescu, Dumitru Apostol, Iosif – Toma Popescu, Const. Stănescu and many other “rocks” of the nation’s eternity.

Aurel State, the man predestined to make the Romanian nation proud, was born on 29 April 1921 in the commune of Godeni, on the Bratia River, in a picturesque area at the foot of the Iezer Mountains. At the same time and in the same place, Toma Arnăuțoiu, another legendary figure in the struggle for liberation from foreign rule, was born.

At the age of 20, he took part in the liberation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina and, in 1942, was promoted to second lieutenant in the Crimea. There, too, he was wounded, but as soon as the wound healed, he asked to go to the front and gave up his sick leave. In the fierce battles of Sevastopol, when from all sides, from land, air and sea, the killing fire that foretold the Apocalypse poured in, Aurel State was captured on 12 May 1944, along with thousands of fearless Romanian soldiers.

The further we go back and analyse those terrible times, the clearer we see true figures who are forever part of our nation’s history. In those moments, when the cries of the wounded and the despair of others could be heard everywhere, Aurel State also heard a prophetic word close to him: “It is true that I cannot save anyone by choosing between life and death, but what will these unfortunates think for the rest of their lives when they remember that I abandoned them in their hour of need?” These were the words of Officer George Fonea, a hero of those battles, who refused the chance to save himself even though he was on the last plane out of the Crimea. This brave officer had also lost an eye in those life-and-death skirmishes with the enemy.

Aurel was also attached to this commander on the way to the camp, which was terribly difficult, when George Fonea became useless to the “Nazis”, who forced him to walk faster, and he was “invited” to get out of the line, and by signs they showed him that they would “finish” him quickly, so he didn’t have to bother any more. Aurel State intervened with kind words: “Leave him alone, he was a good man, don’t shoot him, maybe he’ll get away with his life”.

The two of them bound their fates together for life. Together they had the misfortune to witness “the fall of man by man”, both in Oranki and in the Russian death camps.

There, when they “sold their brother’s blood for a bowl of porridge” in order not to die or to get to the country before the others, Aurel State witnessed Captain Tudor (Vily) Popescu’s tirade, directed at the impertinent “high lady” Ana Pauker:

“With what right do you, a stranger to the nation, accuse those who are suffering of treason and give lessons in Romanian sentiment to those whom your patrons have kept in hell and who, despite death threats, do not want to take advantage of the chance you are giving them to get out of here, as the unfortunates who follow you have done? It has never occurred to me, the one who has been struck down and mocked, to label your faith and your struggle, but you do it cruelly and shamelessly”.

Solidarity to the point of sacrifice with those who defended Romanian honour under the diabolical communist regime of the Soviet Union, Aurel State went from torture to torture, through endless hunger strikes, protesting against the extermination work, where the oppressed man was whipped by Beria’s dogs and hunted by Stalin’s beasts.

There he shared the pain and the hope with people who had fulfilled their mission in life, in the service of their neighbour and of honour, together with George Fonea (the prisoners’ poet), Achile Sarry, Radu Mărculescu, Vasile Stoenescu, Puiu Atanasiu, Nicolae Ispas.

Fate changed the places of torture, but not the state of moral degradation of those sold to the Red Devil, for when he reached the land of his ancestors, as he wished, he found the same places of torture, only with the guards changed for the worse. This led Aurel State, like others, to describe the period up to 1948 as “the romantic period of prisons”.

With the usual perseverance and enduring friendships forged in tragic times, Aurel stayed by George Fonea’s side to the grave.

When the hero George Fonea passed into eternity, Aurel State brought members of the Vatra Luminoasă Blind Association (his comrades-in-arms) and buried him wrapped in the tricolour. Aurel and many of his comrades, who were twinned in the Russian gulags, were arrested and accused of aiding and abetting because they had dared to bury their “poet” in a coffin they had bought and with arms full of flowers.

On 12 February 1958, Captain Gheorghe Enoiu, a famous executioner in the Pătrășcanu trial, stood him up and asked him to tell all those who had attended, all those he had announced and all those who had been with the dead man in Siberia.

Unable to bear it and wanting to save others, Aurel ran to the roof of the Uranus prison (Calea 13 Septembrie) and threw himself into the void, falling to the pavement like a mass of flesh.

Wrapped in a blanket, he landed in the Văcărești hospital, where doctors began to patch him up, tying his bones with wires that encircled him like a net.

While he was carried from one operating table to another, begging the doctors to let him die, his friends, nearly a hundred of them, were divided into batches and, after the terrible ordeals of the investigations, were tried in the Trial Factory and sentenced to between 15 and 25 years’ imprisonment, five of them to the death penalty.

Aurel State was dissected, waiting for the doctors to save him. After about a year, when he managed to get up, one leg shorter and on crutches, he was also taken to the “factory”, where he was sentenced to 18 years of hard labour and thrown into a van that transported him to Aiud.

During his “re-education” in Aiud, he sees and hears, but he doesn’t believe it. What Russia had failed to achieve had been achieved here, without a slap on the wrist, without a word of abuse.

He had given his life for the honour of remaining human. Here, now, he felt he was hallucinating.

People who had once pretended to be somebody and given you scolding advice, with the swagger of a flawless man, were now trying to teach you the opposite, to force you to do what they did without embarrassment.

Listen with joy: “I have bowed the torch of my youth to the earth. I have followed the path of madness. The crime, monstrously transformed into an ideal and a method, repudiated by me in the process of conscience I have made over the years, is recently confirmed by… Aware of what I once committed against my country, and admiring what I see achieved in the age of the present (socialist) preaching, I am happy to confess my definitive break with the past and the old ideas. My sincere desire to contribute effectively to the work of building communist Romania is and will always be the moral support of my present life!”

When the criminal executioner Gheorghe Crăciun apostrophised him, Aurel State stood up anxiously and, leaning on his crutches, replied without hesitation:

“I’m educated enough to need it!” “And fierily (he had made me a bandit who despised the achievements of the regime) I shouted that I was not afraid of him, and if his concern was to acquire the epaulet of a general, mine was to remain a man, and as for achievements, the heaps of stones mean nothing as long as people are mocked as in Aiud.”

In the din that erupted, a political prisoner, still mouldy from prison, rushed over, snatched his hand from his crutches and kissed it. This was the supreme heroism of Aurel State in the face of former prisoners of all kinds, buried in the mire of human misery and decay.

The “dice” of fate made Aurel State the victor, who in 1964 was freed along with all the others, but with his head held high.

Now he remembered Mateianu’s admonition: “Even the thinker should say what the earth is silent about”. Aurel State, home on crutches, began to write on paper, as a survivor, for the “unknown future”. And he did it with dedication, sending the manuscript to the free world, a testimony to what was and what should not be. But the Securitate, that barbaric institution, found out and began to call him and Florin Fonea (the poet’s brother), to grind them like the Security did and send them to bring his manuscript and George Fonea’s poems.

This ordeal began in March 1983, and when the news reached Paris, Remus Radina made an appeal entitled “Hands off Aurel State”, which he addressed to international forums, the press and foreign radio stations, which broadcast it.

The atrocities committed by Ceaușescu’s mercenaries continued until they killed Aurel State and sent Florin Fonea to hospital in serious condition, where he met the same tragic end.

While the manuscript lay forgotten and dusty on foreign shelves, Remus Radina, with his well-known zeal and tenacity, managed to recover Aurel State’s pearls and christened them The Way of the Cross, a name that truly represents the life of this martyr.

While Nicolae Constantinescu, director of the Coresi publishing house, was printing and binding the book, the painful news arrived from abroad that Aurel State had been killed by a third executioner. After escaping from Stalin’s clutches, he had fought his way out of Gheorghiu-Dej’s, only to be exterminated by Ceaușescu.

The appearance of The Way of the Cross was like a candle lit at the bedside of Aurel State, and he was not even laid to rest in Bucharest.

Friends and acquaintances were called and warned not to go to the cemetery to see him off on his last journey. Instead, the security police were there, filming the crowd, without shame, without respect for a man of integrity whom they had killed. They did it to intimidate the survivors, just as they did at the death of the hero George Fonea.

Two lives that frightened the executioners even after death. And they weren’t the only ones.

The period of the communist dictatorship is full of blood and murder.

P.S. There should be a street in Pitești named after Aurelian State.

(Cicerone Ionițoiu – Rost Magazine no. 99 of May 2011 (year IX), pp. 34-36)