“Forgive me! Be strong! You can’t resist, but don’t accept re-education either!”
From Gherla we play another scene. A group of students from Târgșor are brought into a large room. They knew nothing about re-education. The “re-educated” students start to challenge them and they get involved in the game. The head of the Brotherhood of the Cross himself was brought in to incite them. An anti-revolutionary, mystical, nationalist atmosphere was created, with meetings, oaths, songs and heated speeches.
The young students vibrated with an unspeakable joy and expressed their convictions with enthusiasm, openness and devotion. But all this was carefully recorded by the “re-educated”. Then one day the thieves appeared. They entered the room with a group of re-educated men, including the head of the Brotherhood, and ordered the students to sit down and listen carefully. The following address was solemnly given to them:
– I have brought you here to show you the true face of humanity. You are the victims of these murderers and bandits whom you call chiefs. You have accepted them in good faith and adopted their poisonous ideas. You will understand their lies from their own mouths. Behold, Constantine Oprișan will now speak to you.
Constantin Oprișan was the leader of the Brotherhood of the Cross, loved and trusted by these young people. He had gone through all the horrors of re-education in Pitești, as someone who was considered a bandit with authority among the legionaries. He spoke like this:
– I was born on the night of an orgy, to a drunken father and a syphilitic mother. I am half idiot and half mad. I’m gnawed by sadistic and vile desires. I’ve corrupted myself with my sister, my mother and anyone who got in my way. I’ve killed. I’ve stolen. I’m a crook by trade and a liar by profession. I’m a drunkard and I’ve done everything dirty. But I covered up my true reality with my faith in God, my idealistic philosophy, my nationalist aspirations and other big, pompous words, because that was the only way I could capture you against the great international revolution of the proletariat. I deceived you by making you victims. Beat me, for I deserve it. Smash me and no one will blame you, but I ask you to hate everything I have told you, to renounce all the bandits I have told you about and to go over to the side of re-education. I have re-educated myself, but I will never deserve “re-education”. I’m a bastard, a scoundrel, an animal. Kill me and save yourselves.
Amazement, astonishment, despair. The students didn’t know what to think. Some went mad on the spot, some committed suicide, some didn’t believe it, and others accepted re-education, if not from the first day, then in the days or months that followed, as the ‘lesson’ continued with similar arguments. Those who resisted, however, went into battle. They were disfigured. Constantin Oprișan himself was beaten, but he still had the strength to whisper:
– Forgive me! Be strong! You can’t resist, but don’t accept re-education either!
***
Constantin Oprișan. A young poet and philosopher, a good student of Kirkegaard. He knew the darkness of re-education, but came out of it purified. His poetry spread from mouth to mouth. He died of solitary confinement, starvation and lack of medical care in Fort 13 in Jilava.
(Ioan Ianolide – Return to Christ. Document for a New World, Bonifaciu Publishing House, Bucharest, 2012, p. 315)