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 State, you knew Nicolae Cojocaru, even though he was from Dobrudja.

Their Siberian epic had portrayed them as Siamese twins, and the NKVD, not knowing how to get rid of them after condemning them to white death in the dungeons of the icy north, where the weather had failed to kidnap them, had handed them over to the Romanian Securitate. The charge: war crimes, for which they would pay at home.

And they paid dearly. In the manner of a legend in which, for both of them, miracles were often mixed with luck. (…)

[In Aiud, Nae Cojocaru] was asked or advised by “understanding” friends to do some self-analysis.

– What should I do? he would ask himself, when someone approached him to convince him. Self-analysis? What’s that?

– You’ll see, Nae! cried Aurel State, slipping among those who had gathered to see and hear him.

And his eyes met Nae’s like two flashes of lightning, making Nae wonder what his “Siberian Ballad” companion, whom he had not seen since they had been brought back from Russian captivity, was trying to tell him.

But what State had to say he never heard, for the group gathered around them was broken up by the guards and each taken to the “place” they had previously agreed upon. Nae Cojocaru to the mobile phone and Aurel State to Zarca, to the rebels, to the fanatics, to the “misunderstood”.

The privileges of prison travels, as for Țuțea, Pandrea, Crainic, Gyr and some other “greats”, were not enjoyed by ordinary mortals.

But Aurel State was not concerned with the privileges of others. He was only obsessed with Nae Cojocaru.

What will become of him when he sees what he is “offered” and what he must go through? Will he resist Aiud’s new temptations? The siren songs of those above Christmas, or will he fall in defeat, at the limit of his tested strength?

He knew only too well that man is a finite set of possibilities. His long experience on the front and in prison had taught him much…

He had volunteered for the Eastern Front at the age of 20, with the rank of infantry lieutenant. Looking back, he remembered that a colonel who taught at the military school had once said to the infantrymen: “You, my dear infantrymen, have the honour of being the first to look the enemy in the eye!”

What an honour! He had seen it so many times, as he had seen the eyes of so many enemies – Russians, Uzbeks, Mongolians, Ukrainians, Bashkirs, Kikirs… And even the Jews of a policeman during the siege of Sevastopol. And what different reactions! Silence for some, sadness for others, despair for many, suicide attempts and many curses at the politicians who pushed them from behind and threw them into battle.

Very few had the courage to face the humiliation of imprisonment with dignity and resignation. He himself had experienced and tried it so many times. (…) He, too, had been led down the path of imprisonment by fortune or fate.

In the frozen north of Vorkuta (fortunately closer than Kolima), then in the fiery heat of the Karaganda desert, where there were other camps. Freezing in the northern camps, exhaustion in the peat mines, thirst, hunger, sweat and despair in the Karaganda camps.

He had tried them all and tasted them all, but not according to his heart’s desire, but according to that of the victors…

How many interrogations in those endless rooms, how many hunger strikes and how many battles with the repressive apparatus that had stigmatised them as “war criminals”.

And finally, after five to ten years of imprisonment, the ordeal of Gherla, Jilava and Aiud began, with all the additional torture of the local investigations.

By far the hardest was when, one day, in an attempt to put an end to it, he jumped from the roof of Uranus (the prison on the street of the same name in Bucharest) onto the concrete pavement of the courtyard.

Over a hundred broken bones all over his body. Months in a coma until a new trial, with a sentence to be served. He hadn’t got away with anything, and he’d come through it all with his head held high. He had never for a moment lowered the bar of the “fearless knight”: not in northern Siberia, not in the desert of Karaganda, and not when, leaning on two miserable crutches, he crawled through the courtyards of Aiud, from the Zarca, where he was isolated, to the open meetings of those who had agreed to do their self-analysis. Examples of obedience and devotion that could not be separated from his own. He had given his blood for his country and there was no point in spilling ink for it.

He had endured so much, on distant meridians, he would not surrender at Aiud! Should he give justice to those who had none? Absolutely not! The supreme court for him was the judgement of the Next: the absolute judgement from which he had glimpsed something after the leap into the void: a kind of council to which he had been led by an invisible being through a mist of Genesis, to old men with uncertain white beards. He heard a single voice: “This one, take him down, his time has not yet come!” He couldn’t forget this decision, and it gave him much to think about.

But only about himself, not about Nae Cojocaru, who was so dear to his heart and about whom he was so worried. Could he resist the temptation? Would his strength, so weakened by his last attempt at Gherla, still hold him? And how could they help him if…?

The Administration didn’t want them together, and they were afraid. They were afraid because even the hero can fall in solitude. Only saints don’t, but… Nae didn’t fall into their category. It would have been a mistake to make an idol of the living man. Not of himself, nor of anyone who might disappoint him. So he feared…

And he feared, until one day he found Nae in his cell. The administration had sent him to persuade him, Aurel State, to give in, to understand and admit his mistake of having been a legionary and a fighter for Christ.

As soon as he saw him in his cell, Aurel understood the purpose of his visit. He said nothing, waiting for Nae to open his mouth.

Only Nae, instead of speaking, jumped to him, crying, and hugged him. And Aurel, leaning on the two crutches that supported him, held out his cheek. He was too dear to her, and they had been through too much together!

– Forgive me, Nae said. I didn’t come here to convince you, just to embrace you and admit that you have surpassed me. Vorkuta and Karaganda, your camps, were worse than my Kolima…

When Simion Ghinea told Petre Țuțea what had happened at the meeting between Nae Cojocaru and Aurel State, the old man exclaimed: “Those two, yes! They wrote a glorious page in the history of the Romanian people!”

(Marcel Petrișor – Past Lives of Lords, Slaves and Comrades, Vremea Publishing House, Bucharest, 2008, pp. 157-164)