Cornel Niță – An unknown hero of the resistance
I met Cornel Niță in Jilava in November 1949, in one of the periods of relative relaxation of the prison regime, when we were taken for a “walk” twice a week. As we were locked in different cells, our contacts were few, perhaps 7-8 meetings in all, but as we were the same age and both students at the Polytechnic, we quickly became friends. Despite the hunger, the cold and the weakened state we were in as a result of the agonising months of investigation and imprisonment, we would optimistically discuss the most varied subjects, from politics, history, religion and philosophy to mathematical problems specific to our Polytechnic background.
Little did we know that, only three months later, we were both destined to the terrible ordeals of “re-education” in Pitești, where Cornel Niță would endure the terrible tortures sadistically inflicted by Eugen Țurcanu and his accomplices, facing his executioners with courage, dignity and serenity, until the supreme moment of passing into the world of the pure and just.
I was present at Cornel’s ordeal and the memory of those terrible moments still haunts me to this day. Since then I have been haunted by one question: why did Țurcanu – who, despite his cruelty, was a very calculated individual – rage against the adolescent Polytechnic student more than against all the other students – victims of “re-education”?
Special circumstances gave me the opportunity, since Pitești, to find out some elements of the Cornel Niță tragedy known to very few people. In recent years, the scope of these elements has widened, which has allowed me to outline an answer to the above question. I consider it my duty to make these facts public, even if not all of them can be proven in detail.
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A few weeks after Niță’s murder, I was transferred from the hell of room “4 Hospital” to another cell in the Pitesti prison, together with 20-25 other students, most of them victims of “re-education”, and some of the executioners whose task it was to continue our physical and moral destruction. Among the latter were Steier and Pușcașu, both members of the O.D.C.C. committee. The “re-education” in cell 2 was carried out under the direction of Steier, who, between the “de-bunkings” followed by brutal beatings, lectured us on Marxism, adding new elements to those applied by the “4 hospital”.
One night, sitting on the only ledge in the room near Steier, I overheard a whispered discussion between him and Pușcașu. The latter was telling his boss that he had been called to the security service in Pitești to investigate the Niță “case”. While the investigator was trying (or pretending to try) to find out how and why Cornel had been killed, and Pușcașu was stammering, not knowing what to say, General Nicolski entered the office, looking as if he were casually observing the investigation, replied in the place of the person under investigation, pointing out that Niță was a despicable “bandit”, the leader of a “monstrous” student anti-communist resistance organisation, so that Țurcanu had done nothing but give him a well-deserved punishment for his “crimes”.
From the moment I pretended to be asleep and heard the conversation between Steier and Pușcașu, I had the idea in my head that Țurcanu had acted on orders from very high up on the night he killed Niță.
Six years passed before, thanks to a coincidence, I was able to find out who were the real people morally responsible for the murder of Cornel Niță.
After my release from prison, God helped me to finish my studies and in 1956 I worked as an engineer on a construction site in Bărăgan. Among the many people oppressed by the communist regime working on the site was a former commissioner of the old Securitate, who had arrested Vasile Luca in 1937 or 1938 for communist activities. Sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in 1950, the commissioner was sent to Aiud to serve his sentence, and in 1953 he was recalled to the Securitate and subjected to a new investigation into Luca’s arrest. Knowing nothing of Luca’s disgrace and arrest on Gheorghiu-Dej’s orders in 1952, the commissioner was astonished that his new investigators wanted to extract a statement that Luca was a Securitate agent. This was not true, and the commissioner refused to sign such a statement. The investigator insisted and arranged a confrontation with Vasile Luca. The confrontation could not take place because Luca, in a state of rage bordering on madness, kept shouting and accusing his interrogators of being imperialist lackeys trying to pin crimes committed by others on him. Terrified at being forced to witness a settling of scores between the heads of communism, the former commissioner could still hear Vasile Luca screaming before he was hurried out of the interrogation room: “You want to make me a scapegoat for the crimes of Pitești too, but it won’t work! Do you think I don’t know that Ana Pauker led the whole ‘re-education’ through Nicolski?”
What the commissioner told me, with great courage, led me to make the connection between the bestial rage with which Țurcanu had killed Cornel Niță, the nocturnal discussion between Pușcașu and Steier, and Vasile Luca’s statements about the real responsibility for the horrors of Pitești. The conclusion I have drawn is as follows: the Pitești phenomenon was organised by Ana Pauker[1], probably on the orders of Stalin, with whom she was in direct contact.
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After 1989, I began to investigate other aspects of the Cornel Niță case. Here is what I found out, thanks to the testimony of some members of his family and former comrades in prison.
Born on 31 May 1927 in the town of Bacău to a family of modest civil servants, Cornel was a well-behaved child and a brilliant pupil, winning prizes in all his years at the “Ferdinant” grammar school in his hometown. In the autumn of 1946, he was one of the first to pass the entrance examination to the Polytechnic Institute of Iași, and at the same time enrolled in the Faculty of Law. The young polytechnic student was endowed with exceptional intelligence, as well as being very faithful and kind-hearted. Among his character traits, which were to come to the fore in the last years of his life, his great courage and patriotism should be highlighted.
There can be no doubt that Nicolski’s testimony, given at the Security Police Station in Pitești in 1950, was true, obviously with the modification of meaning to be applied to what executioners say about their victims: Cornel was one of the leaders of the powerful anti-communist resistance organisation operating in central Moldavia. The Securitate was panicked by the actions of this organisation, which included the ruthless punishment of Soviet soldiers who committed murders, rapes, robberies and other crimes in Moldavian villages and towns. When his house was searched after his arrest, Niță’s parents’ house at 3 Precista Street in Bacău was found to be full of weapons and ammunition.
Such an organisation and such a leader could not be tolerated by Stalin, who ordered its liquidation through his henchmen Ana Pauker and Nicolski. So Țurcanu was just a hateful executor of orders from Moscow. Thus ended the life of a young Romanian with remarkable qualities, a hero of the anti-communist resistance, still unknown to public opinion.
(Gheorghe Boldur Lățescu – Annals of Sighet 2, “The Installation of Communism – Between Resistance and Repression”, pp. 343-346)
[1] The author’s conclusion is only a hypothesis because the documentary evidence available so far does not prove that Ana Pauker organised the Pitești experiment, although it is not excluded that she had a hand in it. We do not know which of the Communist Party leaders were involved in the Pitești experiment, because it was so well kept secret that even in the Securitate there were only a few people who knew what was happening in the famous prison: Gheorghe Pintilie, Tudor Sepeanu and Alexandru Nicolski. In the most recent and comprehensive study of the Pitesti phenomenon, historian Alin Mureșan concludes that “the full truth about the action can never be revealed. As long as there are no credible documents, but only interpretable ones, and as long as those who knew the intentions of the initiators remained silent until death (Alexandru Nicolschi or Alexandru Popa), one can only speculate or make partial interpretations about the aims pursued and the real culprits” (see “Pitești. Chronicle of an Assisted Suicide”, 2nd edition, ed. Polirom, Iași, 2011, p. 298).