Father Coriolan Buracu’s sufferings during the 1946 elections

On election day [in 1946], order had to be maintained by two groups of soldiers led by a captain. With all due respect to the military uniform in the villages, it never occurred to anyone that underneath the military coat were Communists from Brăila, and that the ‘captain’ was nothing more than a Communist Party activist.

The elections took place quietly. People from the surrounding villages came cheerfully. There was only one sign: “The eye”. The voting ended late in the evening. The P.N.T. representative was Coriolan Buracu, a retired military priest. I had known the priest for a long time; when I met him in bad weather, in a wagon, sick, I was surprised that he had taken on such a difficult task: “My dear, if we don’t win this election, Romania is lost. The votes were counted correctly. As expected, 90% of the electorate had voted for the P.N.T. candidates. The president of the electoral commission, Dr. Negrea, took the minutes. Father Buracu had gone outside to announce the result of the count to the hundreds of people who did not want to go home and were waiting to avoid the theft they feared. The people burst into applause and left in groups for their villages and homes. In the hall, the minutes were read by everyone, the president gave a copy to Father Buracu; the representative of the F.N.D., a brute who always stood like a frowning barrel, approached the priest with his hand outstretched, supposedly to congratulate him. But the hand turned into a fist that struck the priest on the cheek. The priest’s report was taken and further beatings followed from the soldiers present. And the old man, who as a priest had kept alive the flame of faith in Christ and the Romanian nation in Mehadia before the First World War, who had known the dungeons of Seghedin and Vatz for four years during the war, who had signed the Act of Unification in Alba-Iulia in 1918, a former deputy and senator in the Parliament of Greater Romania, father of eight children, the eldest of whom died at the front, a priest colonel who had fought in the war in the East and in the West, who had become a ball under the blows of fists and of weapons. The men picked him up and hid him, for in the following days they came looking for him and arrested him. Hunted for several years through the villages of the Făgăraș district, he was finally caught and sent to prison. At home, the priestess Maria, with five small children, was going mad with grief and rebellion, terrorised daily by the Communists. I visited her in the spring of 1947. “We are starving and the robbers are killing us”. She died the same year and the children scattered like partridges, hunted by the Securitate forces and thrown into prisons. Today, in 1990, as I write these lines, no one remembers this family on whom the communist terror in Făgăraș began.

(Ion Gavrilă Ogoranu – Brazii se frâng se frâng, dar nu se îndoiesc, vol. I, 2nd edition, Marist Publishing House, Baia Mare, 2009, pp. 42-43)