From the many sufferings of the martyr Ion Flueraș

In every memoirist there burns a spirit of exactitude born of an irrepressible need to tell the truth, and only the truth, about the inhuman conditions in which the General Directorate of Prisons decided to contribute to hastening the deaths of those entrusted to its care. None of those who went to freedom, leaving behind a few Bolshevik guerrillas, will ever get used to the misery they had to endure and will always wonder that a man was found to subject them to it and that they themselves had the strength to endure it. He may be forgiven, therefore, for dwelling on some of the details that made his life so odious at one period of his existence.

But none of the writers of prison memoirs we have read so far has the quasi-scientific gift that Timofei Mândru has shown in analysing to the last detail the corner of the toilets that served the Gherla factory. However misplaced our admiration for the thoroughness of his exposition may seem, let us not forget that it has a sacred purpose: to make us understand the animalistic conditions imposed on the dying days of the hero we are following.

“Ion Flueraș’s work consists of the following:

(a) He had to clean the dirt (urine, faeces) from the chairs, ten of them, which were in full view;

b) on the corridors between the toilet seats, which had no doors, but only two openings at the ends of the corridor and on the wall in front of it – a wall with four rectangular horizontal windows and no glass – Ion Flueraș had to press sawdust onto the floor, which he brought from the circular saw for cutting planks and cabinets, set up in the factory yard;

c) he had to fetch strips of used sandpaper or glaspapir from the carpentry shop, then cut them into pieces the size of half a palm and put them in a box from which the inmates took them to wipe themselves after doing their business. These pieces of sandpaper were used instead of toilet paper. And after use, the sandpaper and the glass paper were not thrown into the mouth of the toilet seats, but into collecting boxes placed under the plank trough, which was long from one end of the toilet to the other, into which the inmates urinated, and which was installed under the unglazed windows of the toilet;

d) Ion Flueraș was obliged to sweep and sprinkle water around the toilet. And during the times when he did not have to do anything, Ion Flueraș was not allowed to sit outside or on an empty toilet seat. He had to sit inside the toilet, in the corridor, and only on his feet.

“Whenever Captain Goiciu Petre came to inspect the factory and saw Flueraș outside the toilet, he shouted at him: “What are you doing outside, bandit? Why don’t you stay in the toilet? That’s where you belong, bandit!… There, you damned traitor!… If I find you outside again and not in the toilet, I’ll break your beak and stick your head in the toilet! You hear that, boy? That’s what I’m going to do to you!”

“And it was in the toilet that Flueraș was forced to eat. That’s where I saw him eating all the time. And when he was taken to work, the director, Goiciu, spoke to him like this: “You bandit and bum, I’m taking you to work! You have to work to pay for your accommodation: food, light, clothes, barracks (the place on the floor with the mat and the worn blanket), supervision and security! Yes, security! Because we’ll guard you, you bandit, so that the working class doesn’t come and kill you for betraying them!” The director said these words to Flueraș one morning at the beginning of October 1952, in the large courtyard in front of Cell C (large), in front of us, the inmates of the first shift, who were lined up in the workshops waiting for the night shift to leave and for us, the day shift, to enter the factory.

“Around the beginning of March 1953, Ion Flueraș was taken from Gherla prison to the Ministry of the Interior, whose minister at the time was the dreaded Alexandru Drăghici. Why he was taken to the M.I.A. was known only to Ion Flueraș and those who investigated him or spoke to him there.

“In mid-June 1953, Ion Flueraș was returned to the Gherla prison. He was placed in a cell on the first floor of cell C (large) and was not taken out to work.”

“One night, around 20 June 1953, the duty officer, together with the warden, unlocked the door of the cell where Ion Flueraș and other prisoners were being held, took him to a cell on the ground floor of Cell C and handed him over to a team of three re-education prisoners.”

I have previously used the author’s explanation of the three, where their names first appeared.

“The three prisoners – Juberian, Rek and Henteș – on that night in June 1953, when they ‘handed over’ the prisoner Ion Flueraș, in that cell on the ground floor of cell C (large), from about midnight until the morning, did nothing but beat and maltreat the former leader of social democracy in our country. They beat poor Ion Flueraș, who was about 75 years old. They beat him all over his body with fists, broomsticks, boots and a long thick sock filled with sand”.

“All this happened especially after Constantin Juberian was taken from Gherla to the M.I.A. in July 1953 to be investigated for his crimes in the Pitești, Gherla prisons. But even more was learned after 15 January 1954, when the factory in Gherla prison ceased to operate and all the uneducated and re-educated prisoners were confined to rooms and cells, all subject to a cell and room regime”.

“In the morning, the three re-educated prisoners severely beat and mutilated Ion Flueraș, not only until he lost consciousness, but also after he lost consciousness. In the morning, they took Ion Flueraș in their arms and took him to the cell from which he had been taken at night by the duty officer and the head of the section, and threw him on the clothesline”.

The cycle of the prisoner’s death sentence, now that it has come to an end – minus the lack of medical care that followed – is clearly the result of the talks or investigations that took place at the Ministry of the Interior. He was, of course, offered to sign a self-denunciation of all his political activity, as was the leader of his party, Titul Petrescu, in exchange for the release of all his followers who had followed him in denial. Flueraș is said to have refused the deal.

But it was not the leadership of the Bucharest ministry who would stain their hands with his blood by offering to prosecute them for murder in the future. Neither would their colleagues in the Gherla prison administration, nor even the last and most humble of the guards. There were people who had been specially trained to kill without question, believing that this was the way to win their freedom and the stripes reserved for them. They were young re-educated legionnaires (in this case an informer in the ranks of the workers’ movement, to prove to Flueraș that even a dissident against the Communists was more valuable to them than a person who opposed the formation of the Romanian Communist Party and who opposed Moscow!)

Thus began the last journey of the Social Democratic leader, under the direct observation of the narrator, who himself died in the hospital:

“Ion Flueraș, remained unconscious, with a swollen head, bruises on his face and traces of blood in his mouth and nose. His hands were also swollen and bruised. There were blood stains on his trousers and socks. He was unconscious, his eyes were closed and he was moaning. And after the morning count, the guard from the large infirmary on the third floor – the infirmary that was in room 87 – came and, together with one of the two orderlies from the room on the third floor, took Ion Flueraș and took him to the infirmary and placed him on a bed in the right-hand corner at the back of this large room. When the guard at the infirmary – a young man named Coroi or Coroian, about 20 years old, of medium height, rather well built, Transylvanian, a nice boy, fair and authoritative in this room – entered the infirmary, he did not speak to anyone but me and my bedmate (a young man also from Ardele, who, before his arrest, had graduated from the military high school in Tg. Mureș), except for what was necessary. I was taken to the hospital by the medical officer, Platooner Vereș Grigore, with exudative pleurisy in both lungs”.

“When Platoon Coroian completely undressed Ion Flueraș in order to dress him in a shirt and clean clothes, bruises, contusions and lesions were visible all over his body.”

“The official doctor of Gherla Prison, Bărbosu Viorel, did not even go to the infirmary to see the prisoner Flueraș Ion, who, since the night he was beaten and mutilated, had not recovered from his state of unconsciousness, did not open his eyes, did not speak at all, but only groaned! He moaned and moaned: ‘er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er…’ for a month, until about the beginning of the last decade of July 1953, when he died one night. The only official who came to the infirmary was the sanitary inspector Vereș Grigore”.

“During that month of days when Ion Flueraș was kept in the infirmary, the warden Coroian (Coroi) looked after him! He used to lift his head with one hand, and with the other he gave him water with a spoon, and the juice of the soups – liquids that flowed from his mouth onto his chest more than he could swallow. Coroian wiped him and washed his face with a damp cloth and changed his shirt and his clothes”.

Feiu N. Mândru does not leave his former colleague in the infirmary without naming those responsible for his death under such terrible torture. “Ion Flueraș, after having been sentenced to 25 years of hard labour, of which he served 5 years and 4 months, was murdered in the manner described above. The task of killing him, given by the Comintern since the thirties, was accomplished in the fifties (June-July 1953)! At that time, the chief political officer (head of the Operations Bureau) of the Gherla Prison was Sergeant M.I.A. Capană (?), who had succeeded the political officer Sergeant Avădanei Constantin, who was arrested on 24 March 1953 for his participation in the criminal action known as “debunkings” in the Gherla Prison. Gherla Penitentiary. Given his age (he was about 30 years old in 1953), Sergeant M.I.A. Capană could still be alive and could testify about the murder of Ion Flueraș”.

“Of the three prisoners – Juberian Const., Rek Ștefan and Hențeș Nicolae – who killed Ion Flueraș by beating and mutilating him, we know for sure that Juberian Constantin has not existed since the night of 17/18 December 1954, when he was shot together with Țurcanu E. and sixteen others sentenced to death in the Țurcanu trial.

(Mihai Rădulescu, Timofei N. Mândru – Memory. Journal of Arrested Thought, no. 39 (2/2002), pp. 64-75)