Because of the tortures Oprișan “had become only a wound”
I arrived [in Pitești n.n.] around March 1950. The neighbours on our right told us that Gioga Parizianu, who was in their cell, had been taken away with his luggage, without knowing where. In this cell were two of his classmates, Dumitru Bordeianu and his brother-in-law Mircea Mihai Iosub, both from Drăgușeni-Baia, as well as Costache Oprișan, the former national commander of the Brotherhood of the Cross. (…)
Then followed the removal to the programme, as it was called, the removal of the buckets to empty those designated for human waste and to fill those designated for water consumption. (…)
Gioga came out with the help of two people, because he couldn’t walk properly, and Iosub asked me how he could have collapsed so much, because he had left the cell unharmed. We were soon to find out, to see with our own eyes and bones what he had not dared to tell us.[1]
We had just entered the room and sat down on the mats when one of the people at the back of the room, a tall, blond man with white, metal-rimmed glasses, came to the centre of the room and addressed us newcomers:
– Listen, we here have decided to change, to go a different way, to re-educate ourselves. What do you think?
There was silence, everyone seemed to be waiting. Were they really so curious to know our opinion? I thought quickly, it’s their business which way they go, I can’t stop them yet, I’ve been going this way for more than a year. And then I thought there were only a few of them, like in Suceava.
– “Come on, old Costache,” he said to Costache Oprișan in a mocking tone, “what do you think?”
– I have nothing against it, he replied.
– And the rest of you?
– “I don’t mind either,” I replied, considering the answer to be compatible with coexistence, not interfering in their affairs. Others had emerged from the beds at the back, from the same group as the first, who, looking around the room, rallied them at once:
– Hey, hear me out!
And as if on cue, and this was the signal, for they had been expecting us from before, they prepared the ambush before, they jumped on us from all sides.
They kicked as hard as they could and wherever they could, with their hands, with their fists, with their feet. Five piles had formed around each of the five of us who had come.[2] There was nothing we could do to resist, except to bend down and put our hands over our heads, but soon it was all useless, for we collapsed and they no longer bent over us, but jumped on us with their feet, kicking and trampling us.
The same conductor, whom I thought was Țurcanu, and the one next to him, Bogdanovici (as I had heard him called by the Suceava re-education bosses), intervened to defend us:
– Leave them alone, you’re killing them![3]
And he sent us all back. (…) This beating was just an appetiser for what we were about to eat. But it was enough to change a lot in me. (…) The explanation followed immediately.
The boss, whom I thought was Țurcanu, was in fact Max Sobolevschi, and his assistant (I thought he was Bogdanovici) was Adrian Prisecaru. I was to find out their identities later, because no one spoke to us anymore, and poor Mircea Iosub and Mitică Bordeianu didn’t dare tell me, even though they knew them. Besides, we were soon forbidden to speak to each other.
No sooner had we sat down on the doormat than my supposed friend Țurcanu (Sobolevschi) started talking again:
– We are determined to destroy all the bandits, to destroy the legionary movement. Come on, Costache, he addressed Oprișan again, in the same mocking tone, but now doubled with hatred, as if to say, of all the banditry you’ve done, have you told all of them to the investigation?
– “Yes, all of them,” said the questioner.
Again: “Hey, hear me out!”, as before, and a mob jumps on the poor man, they hold him by his arms and legs, they bend him over the left-hand ledge of the door, they pull down his trousers, and with the straps they had, narrower and wider, they begin to pull him down countless times. It was impossible for him to resist and his screams were muffled by the Securitate gag in his mouth. Only the moans added to our excitement, for the four of us watched the scene in horror. When they had had enough, they left him. (…)
Finally, when they had frightened us with the beatings, they made us beat each other. They brought Gioga, leaning against the beds, to beat him, or rather to beat Costache Oprișan, whom they had respected and loved as a superior man in every way. Poor Costache had become a means of proving that all the others had left the Legion.[4] He had become nothing more than a wound. A few months later, when we met again, you could still see the linear scars on his back and buttocks caused by the blows of his own belt. But he told those who asked him and who had not been with us, so that they would know the cause, that they were traces of the Securitate.[5] (…)
Max Sobolevschi was taken out of the room during the day by the guard in the room or by another guard who came after him. He was accompanied by others whom he indicated. We still didn’t know where or why. I don’t remember exactly whether it was the first beating, on the first day, or the next day, when he returned to the room he had left, he took Costache Oprișan back to his room:
– “Get out, bandit, the instructions you have from Vică Negulescu for re-education.”
Oprișan denied having any. The persuasive “joke” followed, and Costache then said that in Jilava, when it came to re-education, someone – I don’t remember who – asked Vică Negulescu, from the Land Command, what to do in this situation. He told this third party to accept it. But he did not give him any instructions.
Hence the saying that the Ministry of the Interior, after compromising the Pite;ti action by exposing the horrors that had taken place there, attributed everything to Vică Negulescu.6 From 1953 onwards, Oprișan was taken from Gherla to the investigations in order to implicate him as Țurcanu’s moral leader. The almost 80 people in Room 3 Parter were witnesses to the above discussion.
In fact, the tactics used to bring Costache to the debunking prove it.
(Ioan Muntean – On the way through the re-educations in Pitești, Gherla and Aiud)
[1] In the first phase of the re-education through torture, the students were taken one by one from each room and put in a special room where the re-education action was suddenly triggered. This was one of the elements of surprise without which the ‘re-education’ would not have had the desired effect. When the torture was over, the students were returned to the detention rooms with a ‘warning’ not to reveal what had happened. The shock of being tortured by friends and acquaintances was so great, and the threat of not telling was so terrifying, that many of the ‘spontaneous’ students said nothing to their fellow detainees. It was only after a core group of re-educated people had been formed that group re-education began.
[2] The five were Ioan Muntean, Gioga Parizianu, Dumitru Bordeianu, Mihai Iosub and Constantin Oprișan.
[3] The idea of re-education was not to kill, so that the “bandits” would escape “uneducated” by death, but to compromise them, to turn them into informers and aggressors. So torture was used with care, so as not to kill the victims. That is why in Pitești, in spite of such violent actions, the dead victims were an exception.
[4] Perhaps one of the most difficult pains for Constantine to endure was to be beaten by his own suffering brothers who succumbed to torture. Dumitru Bordeianu, for example, will admit in his memoirs that “I was beaten, but not because of the threat, but because of the confusion that had enveloped me, incapable of reason. Whether I hit hard or not is not important, but the fact that I hit my dearest man, from whom I had learned so much. I hit the man for whom I could have died. That’s when the fall began. Despite this drama, Constantine bore the wounds of re-education inflicted on him by his suffering brothers without flinching or resentment. In this regard, Father Gheorghe Calciu testifies that the happy Constantine “never complained about his illness, never blamed anyone for what was done to him. He forgave everyone and always spoke of forgiveness and love”.
[5] This gesture of blaming the Securitate leads us to believe that Blessed Constantine was in fact trying to cover up the failings of his brothers who had fallen into re-education.
[6] After the end of the Pitești experiment, the communist authorities fabricated three trials in which they tried to exonerate themselves from the horrors they had orchestrated from the shadows. The three trials were:
a) The trial of Eugen Țurcanu – November 1954;
b) The trial of Tudor Sepeanu – April 1957;
c) The trial of Valeriu (Vică) Negulescu – June 1957;
In the third trial, Valeriu Negulescu, as a leader of the Legionary Movement, was accused of having organised the violent action in Pitești in order to obtain information compromising the Communist regime. Constantin Oprișan was also part of the group on trial and was charged, along with the other seven defendants, with “conspiracy against the internal security of the RPR”. Following the trial, Constantin was sentenced to an additional 25 years in prison on top of his original sentence.