From high school to communist dungeons and in romanian Siberia
Arrested on 28 May 1948, in the most massive wave of political arrests, from the benches of the grammar school where I was in the penultimate class, together with seven other classmates, after months of investigation in the Suceava prison, I was sentenced in March 1949 to 8 (eight) years of hard labour and 10 (ten) years of civil servitude for “the crime of incitement against the social order”, art. 209, para. 3
The labels of “mystic” and “fanatic” applied to me by the Security Service, as well as the fact that I was permanently hostile to re-education actions and pressures, deprived me of the right to write at least once a year ten lines on a postcard to let my parents know that I was alive and that I could receive 5 kg of essential food. In an advanced stage of malnutrition and dysproteinemia, subjected to much more work than I could cope with on the Danube-Black Sea Canal, I became seriously ill with heart disease, a fact that was established (after Stalin’s death) by the M.I.A. medical committees, which declared me totally unfit for any kind of work at the age of 23. The three cases of hepatitis I contracted later, after a hunger strike, meant that I spent the last years of my imprisonment in sick-rooms or even in prison infirmaries.
On 28 May 1956, my 8 years of hard labour came to an end in the infirmary of the Gherla prison. The expected “release” came with order no. 120786 of the D.P.L.C., entrusting me to an armed militiaman who accompanied me to the commune of Răchitoasa, district of Fetești, where I was ordered to stay for 24 months. As I was unfit for such a journey, the Salvation Army took me to the Third Medical Clinic in Cluj, to a room guarded by an armed militiaman at the door, and from there, after two months of transfusions, infusions and treatments administered by the clinic’s director, Professor Iuliu Hațieganu, I was released to continue my journey – accompanied – to Siberia Romania.
In Răchitoasa, a suburb of Luciu-Giurgeni G.A.S., a commune founded by Banat expellees on a swampy area on the banks of the Danube, below its level, I chose one of the huts abandoned by the people who had returned to their homes a year before, during which time the people from the surrounding villages, mostly headless individuals, had stolen doors, windows and anything they could use. Personally, I earned my living by working as a seasonal labourer in the 10 hectares of the I.A.S. garden, where I have to admit that I was vitaminised with products whose taste I had forgotten during my eight years of imprisonment.
If in 1956, when I arrived in Răchitoasa, I found there about 50 former political prisoners with F.R., in the following two years, through similar releases, the number of former political prisoners with compulsory residence exceeded 300, the vast majority of them intellectuals of high rank: university professors, doctors, engineers, priests, high-ranking officers, dignitaries and a few young people, former pupils and students, among whom I was one. Among my new fellow citizens I remember Dumitru Bejan, former prisoner of the USSR, priest Dumitru Stoichescu, priest Drăguș, prof. univ. Antonescu, Dr. Petru Ambrus, Grigore Caraza, Neagu Lungu, Ion Vorovenciu, Ioan Pantiș, Ioan Tonea, Dumitru Oniga, Alfred Cureliuc, Marin Dumitrescu, Jan Aristide, Ioan Stan, Ioan Folea, Grigore Merceanu, Gheorghe Ciurel, Pavel Gligor, Ion Ilescu, Nicolae Mândreanu, Mircea Șoltuz, Traian Trifan, Constantin Stamate, Vasile Alupei, Constantin Slătineanu, Mihai Petrescu, Leonard Caciuc, Petre Bangu, Pandurescu, Ganez, Bolboacă, Lupoiu. … and the list should be completed with about 300 names. Some of them had their wives waiting for them. Others got married there to local girls who agreed to follow their destiny. A community of souls was created between us that is difficult to express in words. In one of these huts we set up a small church where our priests celebrated mass and feasts, and I, who was not absent, gave the answers in the pew. On the eve of the Nativity, Ioan Pantiș, an engineer, had organised a four-part choir with which, wearing rubber boots, I proclaimed the great feast to the windows of my colleagues. With perseverance and great risk, because I wanted to continue my education, I sneaked out of the village in a few nights and arrived in Fetești, at the nearest high school, about 50 km away, where I took my final exams. I was not able to sit the exams, which took about 14 days, because I had not received permission from the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
After the 24 months of so-called freedom had expired, the same generous Securitate granted me another 24 months of F.R. But from this second tranche of 24 months, after about 4 months, on the night of 18 September 1958, the Security Service vans invaded the peace of the village, from where they picked up about 70 former political prisoners on the basis of their political colour. Most of us were deported to the “9 Culme” colony with administrative punishment, where we were subjected to a regime of starvation and dehumanisation, and a year later we were transferred to Periprava, in the Delta, to the reed beds.
About 25 of those taken from Răchitoasa that night were taken to the Security Service in Constanța, where, after almost a year of harsh investigations, we later found out that they had been framed for a trial that resulted in sentences of between 20 and 25 years’ hard labour, the main charge being that they had organised anti-statists in the village church. The fact that the alleged organisation was a fabrication by the Securitate is also proven by the fact that some of those convicted, such as Eng. Ioan Tonea, came to church only on major holidays.
In Bărăgan, the place of exile for opponents of the communist regime, there were many such villages founded by expellees from Bărăgan, abandoned by them and repopulated by “liberated” undesirable political prisoners, such as themselves: Lățești, Dâlga, Viișora, Dropia, Valea Viilor, Zagna; Rubla, Olaru, Mivila Gâldăului, Fundata, Schei, Măzăreni, Salcîmi, Pelicani.
This is how the communist state security understood the “liberation” of those who were serving hard years in prison for the crime of loving Christ and opposing the establishment of communism by force, a foreign garment to this Christian nation.
(Marcel Cazacu, “Liberation” by deportation, in the Annals of Sighet, n. 2. The establishment of communism – between resistance and repression, edited by Romulus Rusan, Civic Academy Foundation Publishing House, ebook, 2016, pp. 318-320)