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 situation in which one of us, Aurel State, had tried to save his soul by sacrificing his life. After several sessions of torture during the Uranus investigation, when he realised that he would not be able to endure the tortures indefinitely and thus miss out on incriminating statements about other accused, fellow prisoners, he decided to commit suicide at the first opportunity. On the way from his cell to the “air” (the prisoners’ daily walk), despite his dark glasses, he noticed a metal ladder leading to the roof terrace. He planned it in detail, and the moment he got it right, he took off his glasses, bumped into the guard and ran up the ladder. When he reached the terrace, he ran to the edge and threw himself off. Nearly dying, he was picked up from the pavement, taken to hospital, stitched up, put in plaster and finally reconstructed. In this condition he was put on a trolley and taken, crippled, to the famous military court in Negru Vodă Street.
There he was tried for the “crime” of having attended the funeral of George Fonea (“an opportunity to conspire against our state order”, according to the prosecutor’s indictment) and for having visited the tobacco factory where Puiu Atanasiu worked (“a conspiratorial centre of legionary criminals against our regime of popular democracy”, according to the same source). In fact, the real reason for his persecution, like that of so many other former prisoners, was the attitude of resistance in prison against political interference in the camps, expressed mainly through hunger strikes, especially the one for repatriation in 1948 (…) Considered an instigator at the time, like Fonea and Ilarion Stănescu, as well as so many others, he was tried with them before the Soviet military tribunals for committing imaginary war crimes. Sentenced to heavy prison terms, he served with them in the white death zones beyond the Arctic Circle, from where they were repatriated after Stalin’s death in 1955.
He enrolled at the Faculty of Letters, but was arrested and never had time to finish. Now he was to receive a heavy sentence from the sinister court in Petru Vodă, which he was to serve in Aiud. A few years after the release of all prisoners under the 1964 decree, I saw him again by chance at a painting exhibition in Calea Victoriei, in the accountant’s office of a mutual friend, Pantelimon Guțu, also an ex-prisoner. His crippled body was seated in a chair, flanked by his two crutches, and he had a bright, slightly mischievous smile on his face, as if mocking his dramatic achievement. “I clung to an angel’s wing when I fell,” he told me jokingly, as if to justify his failed suicide.
He had finished university and was teaching German at a high school in the capital. That was the last time I saw him. After the revolution, I heard from another prisoner, the painter Sandu Cumpătă, that he had written a memoir of his arrest and imprisonment (and, thank God, he had something to tell) and had published it in 1983, under the title The Way of the Cross, in the Coresi publishing house in Freiburg, in “refegist” Germany, on the occasion of the Year of Political Prisoners in Romania. But the book fell into the hands of the Securitate and he was arrested, beaten and brutally tortured.
A few months after this encounter with the Securitate, he was hospitalised for I don’t know what ailment and died, ending his tormented but heroic existence with the apotheosis of a martyr. For me and for the others, former prisoners and political prisoners who are still in the realms of this world, Aurel State remains the holy confessor of our sufferings. May he rest in peace!
(Radu Mărculescu – Testimonies for the Last Judgement, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 2012, pp. 207-209)