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 perfected, Aurel State could not be brought to his knees. The same serene gaze and the same answer: “I don’t know”. Or, when it was clear that he knew: “I know, but I won’t tell you. Try to find out from me! And the Securitate of the new regime tried everything, because it could not believe that there were knights in the world who could not be defeated.
Aurel State never wore the green shirt, but he was not afraid to suffer alongside those who, made of the same cloth as himself, had gone their own way towards the same ideals: The Romanian nation and faith in Christ. A discreet but unwavering believer, he spent his whole life between the icon of the Saviour to which the old mother from Muscel prayed and the icon of Great Romania which the boy from Godeni carried in his heart until his death.
Then, in the cellars of the Cîmpulung police station, the conclusion was reached: suspicion of legionnaireism, but no charge for lack of evidence… File X.Z. 47…
In 1940 he entered the Reserve Officers’ School and was assigned to the Mountain Hunters Battalion in Sinaia. In 1941 he asked to volunteer for the anti-communist front. He took part in the fighting in the Crimea and the following year was one of the leading conquerors of Sevastopol. For his many acts of heroism, he was first awarded the Military Virtue as a student plutonier and then, promoted to second lieutenant, the Order of Michael the Brave and the Iron Cross (with oak leaf).
But the X.Z. 47 file followed him from behind (on which the adjective “fanatic” would now appear), and from before his death. He was never afraid of it, for he was driven by “the need to light the stars in the sky”. There, in the “Crimean Bulge”, he fell wounded in 1944, fearlessly defending the fortress he had so bravely conquered. He knew how to win and lose in battle, with the heroic dignity he carried in his Romanian-Macedonian blood.
In the summer of 1944, the great betrayal had taken place, in which he refused to take part, preserving his military honour, as did all the flower of the Romanian army. Prison followed: long and hard years in the Asian desert, until the end of the world…
“In February 1949, Ana Pauker, on behalf of the Romanian government, signed an agreement with the Soviet Union by which Romania accepted that Romanian citizens accused of “crimes committed on Soviet territory” during the war would be tried in the Soviet Union. With this formal cover, the Soviet authorities immediately took action. In mock trials, the most blatant insult to the idea of justice, all the accused, without exception, were sentenced to the maximum penalty: 25 years’ hard labour. After being sentenced, they and their German comrades in the same situation were to be transported to the Vorkuta region, one of the most horrific islands of the ‘Gulag Archipelago’, where they were to serve their sentences by working in the coal mines.
The Vorkuta labour camp is located in the northern Ural Mountains, at the foot of the Pai Noi Mountains, 300 kilometres beyond the Arctic Circle and 300 kilometres from the shores of the Barents Sea. The temperature of minus 40 degrees Celsius is no exception. But even more deadly than the climate and forced labour (“crawling under the northern lights”) was the requirement that political prisoners live in the same work formations and barracks as ordinary prisoners.
While the Romanian communist government was completely abandoning its citizens held in the Soviet Union, Konrad Adenauer, the head of the German government, visited Moscow from 9 to 13 September 1955 with the sole aim of repatriating more than ten thousand German prisoners of war sentenced in the Soviet Union for “war crimes”. His insistence was successful. He obtained their amnesty and, as the amnesty could not be partial, the decree also included the Romanian prisoners of war. On their arrival in their homeland, the German prisoners of war were received as they should have been, as true heroes. The German government will create all the material and moral conditions for them to rebuild their lives. What happened to their Romanian comrades? They travel to the border of the Romanian People’s Republic as free men, happy to see their homeland and their families again. But at the border they are arrested by the Romanian security forces and imprisoned in Jilava. They were tried again for the same charges for which they had been convicted in the Soviet Union and then pardoned, and they were held in Communist prisons until 1964, when Gheorghiu-Dej issued an act of amnesty that emptied the prisons. Thanks to the communist homeland! (Puncte cardinale, year I, no. 12, December 1991, p. 5).
Once at home, the heroes had become “monsters” and “bandits”. What does a world of worms have to do with knights returning from the Crusades? Aurelian State’s file, for example, bore the stamp of absolute disobedience: legionary fanaticism! Again the serene look and the chivalrous reply: “I was not a legionnaire. But if you are so afraid of them, please consider me one of them!” And the Knight of the Cross was called to account… Absurd and rude questions about people and events of the past (especially about his comrades in the Soviet camps, led by his good friend George Fonea, the poet of the prisoners), physical and above all mental torture… And then, alas, patience ran out! Aurel State, brutally interrogated by the villain Gheorghe Enoiu, threw himself from the top floor of the prison building in the former Uranus Street in the middle of the interrogation. But an angel blocked his jump and he fell on all fours, like a cat! “I wanted to jump, but I tripped over an angel’s wing,” he said. After eight months in a coma, with 120 fractures all over his body, with screws and metal plates under his skin, the man continues to face history; broken he was, but defeated – never!
It was not until 1964 that he emerged from the darkness of the dungeons without a stain on his soul. No one was able to get anything out of him, just as they had not been able to get anything out of Arsenie Papacioc, for example, the wise confessor of Techirghiol, or Alexandru Ghica, the blood prince of Legionary dignity.
They continued to harass Aurel State. He had enrolled in the literature course and was the first to graduate (in 1970), taking up a post as a German teacher in Bucharest (from which he was to retire). He had relatives in high places (a cousin of his mother’s, Proca, who was even Minister of Health), who did not hesitate to help him in the most difficult and desperate moments, careful not to lose their chair by having to deal with an “enemy of the people”… But Aurel State never spoke ill of his cousin, and when others spoke indignantly of him, he always defended him, pretending to “understand” him… He was structurally incapable of hating anyone, no matter how much harm they had done.
He spent what little money he had generously to help his friends in need. He also had this curious little trait: if he lent you ten thousand lei, he’d forget to ask for it back; but if he lent you ten lei, he’d nag you to pay it back whenever he saw you (“Hey Marcele, remember to give me ten lei?”)! A few hundred lei a month was enough for him. Suffering from stomach problems (he died of a perforated ulcer), he ate almost nothing but bread with honey and sometimes, along with tea, a little milk. When he was offered a pension in Germany as a recipient of the Iron Cross, he nobly refused: “The ideals I fought for cannot be paid for with money. You have remembered us too late and too untimely…”.
He lived alone in a studio flat on the outskirts of Bucharest. He painstakingly translated from German and Russian (Hans Magnus Enzesberger, Ciabua Amiredjibi, etc.). It was there that he wrote his books about himself and the world he lived in. Its last title was “The Way of the Cross”. Three parts came together in him: the experience of the front, the experience of imprisonment with the Russians, the experience of the communist dungeons at home. He was again harassed for this book testimony (he managed to send a copy to Germany, where it was published, without having the satisfaction of seeing it printed to the end).
On the 17th of November 1983, he set off on his last march to heaven to worship the sword of the One who had counted on him. Until the last moment, he was not heard to ascribe any merit to himself. He liked to think that his mother’s prayers had saved him in all circumstances…
When will his book be reprinted in Romania (for the modest edition from the early 1990s has gone virtually unnoticed)? What a sublime lesson in chivalry for the younger generation! If you are not looking for ‘literature’, you will find everything else in it, in no small measure.
One thing is certain: he has won the wager.
In his wake remains the all-knowing smile of the Good Lord.
(Răzvan Codrescu and Marcel Petrișor – Rost magazine no. 99 of May 2011 (Year IX), pp. 29-31)