Beti – She was so pure and gentle, so pure and good, you thought she was an angel come down among us

I remember a young girl – a frail, 17-year-old teenager who was arrested and held for a year by the Securitate, only to be sentenced to 12 years of hard labour and 5 years of civil servitude – just like me. She was called, so beautifully, Elisabeta Crâng… We prisoners used to call her that: Drink… She was so clean and gentle, so pure and good-natured, that you thought she was an angel descended among us.

Sometimes, when we had to work in the crochet workshop, she would sit in a corner, take her wood, which we would weave with thick nylon thread, cross herself discreetly, go to work and talk to no one but the good Lord…

Her face lit up, and her blonde hair, braided into a rich ponytail, looked like a golden crown on her beautifully combed head. When we returned to our cell in the evening, she would go quietly to her bed of suffering, near the “tineta” (the barrel in which we did our necessities), and until the evening porridge arrived – usually a long arpacaș juice – she would give the impression of listening to someone far away… She stood with her head resting on the iron of the bed, her face lit up and her big, piercing eyes broke through the cold walls, radiating nothing but peace and tranquillity. She looked like a white lily blooming in the deep night of the dungeon.

(Iuliana Preduț-Constantinescu – Shackled Hopes, Tiparg Publishing House, 2000)

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