Gioga Parizianu – He went to prison for defending the homeland

Moldova first had to be conquered by communism in order to bring it closer to Moscow, for which special deterrents were provided. All active opponents of communism were rounded up in Suceava, where the largest prison in Moldova was located (as I said, a legacy blessed by the Habsburg civilisation).

Special teams of investigators were brought here from Bucharest, they conducted on-the-spot investigations in the prison, and full trials were held here, on the premises, with the highest sentences being handed down, compared to other large cities where trials were held, in the rest of the country the leaders of student centres got 15 years each. In Suceava, 15 years was a pittance, with many students getting up to 25 years, surpassing the Nuremberg Tribunal, where they were at least tried.

So with the arrival of the Suceavians, the hard labour section was filled. My new companions were Virgil Lungianu, Gheorghe (Gioga) Parizianu and Gheorghe Costea.

The first, a fifth-year medical student, seemed an intelligent and professionally well-prepared boy, the son of a Botoșenean priest, brought up in the Romanian priesthood and steeped in the faith of his ancestors. He went to battle and to prison with his younger brother, who was still in high school. Their father had died and their poor priest mother was crying for her children in Ivești-Tecuci, where she lived, crying like my mother. In prison, the day starts at 5 o’clock in the morning and lasts until 10 o’clock at night, when the lights go out and you can go to sleep. How do you fill 17 hours with nothing to do? Stories, often autobiographical, so we got to know each other’s families. Later, the conversations were also of a professional nature, since neither of us wanted to give up our interrupted careers, or of a cultural nature, since we benefited from the presence in the cell of people with a more spiritual background. So, in the beginning, mutual acquaintance.

The second student from Suceava was the Macedonian Gioga Parizianu, a second year student at the medical school in Iași. A short, flamboyant, tough, persistent boy. Born in Gorna-Djumaia, he had attended his first classes at the Romanian Gymnasium in Sofia and was proud of his school and its uniform, which differed from that of the Bulgarians not only in language but also in dress.

In September 1940, on the basis of the exchange of population provided for in the Cadrilat cession treaty, old Parisof, as his father was then called, tired of the enmity of the Bulgarians towards the Vlachs, made the necessary arrangements and in 1942 they moved to Romania, where the language was apparently foreign to the old family, albeit of one generation, but where no one hated them for their right. They were assigned to Moinești-Bacău. Gioga’s older brother was in Constanta, another was a student in Bucharest, called Parizescu, who wanted to integrate with the North Danube Romanians, and the youngest, Paris -Pisi-, was still in high school with his parents and kept the family name Paris (without -escu and without -anu, as they called them at the Population Office, as the Bulgarians did when they added the of to their names).

Gioga was 20 or 25 years old, I can’t remember exactly, because he had been part of a team that had stored weapons left over from the war in the mountains. Ghiță Ungurașu had collected what he had found scattered around his native places and buried the “treasure” in a shelter specially made in the mountains near his father’s rock. Gioga took part in this burial. I don’t remember where the thread came from, but he was beaten to death. They beat him and starved him until he literally went mad. In this state they took him to dig up the storehouse and, according to other witnesses, when he passed by the shepperd Ungurașu’s stable, he ran to the dogs’ trough and drank the whey from the trough.

They hadn’t even given him water for I don’t know how long. He was a good boy, modest and eager to learn, as he admitted he had difficulty with the language. He was the first Romanian I had ever spoken to, and I loved listening to him speak Romanian – daco romana – with his mouth closed, his speech slipping through his teeth and his ‘r’ pronounced shorter.

(Ioan Muntean – On foot through the “re-educations” of Pitești, Gherla and Aiud)