“I was very pleased that I could lay this suffering at the feet of Christ”
This May, Lăcrămioara Varga wishes you a new edition of “We ourselves”.
What season is better than late spring, with its fresh trees, bright green, flowering acacia and chestnut trees? What setting could be more inviting for a Proustian journey in search of lost youth? We know only too well that youth is not so much about biological life or the number of birthdays as it is about the life of the soul. As the latter is measured in eternity, here, dear mortals, is the chance of eternal youth on earth. But how much do we know how to value this chance? I invite you, dear listeners, to join my guest and me on this imaginary one-hour journey.
We have a very dear guest with us in the studio today. One of those people that today’s young people look up to with awe and wonder. One of those people who smilingly call themselves “old”, not because they are burdened by years, but because their life experience is much more intense than usual. Because others have stupidly and unfairly imprisoned his youth. One of those people with whom we can recapitulate a whole history. He is Mr. Marcel Cazacu, Vice-President of the Association of Former Political Prisoners of Timișoara.
Mr. Marcel Cazacu, first of all, thank you for accepting this invitation to be a guest of “We ourselves”.
I too thank you for the invitation, which I gladly accepted.
You were young, a student during the communist era. How did young people see it? What was their general reaction?
Yes. Fifty years ago, the Romanian nation went through one of the most terrible periods in its history. It was the installation of communism by Soviet tanks in our homeland, a mantle completely alien to the education, to the feelings of this nation. Of course, in that situation, unlike today, when young people are passive and uninterested in the problems, in what is happening in this country, the ferment of the anti-communist struggle was formed by young students and pupils. Having lived through the period between 1944 and 1945, as a high school student, with all these phases of the imposition of communism by force, the students saw King Michael as the exponent of this anti-communist struggle. That is why I wore the figure of King Michael and the Romanian tricolour on the buttonhole of my coat or uniform. Of course, that was fifty years ago, but in the autumn, in November ’46, those famous elections were rigged and the result was completely reversed. Of course, this was followed by a whole host of other arrangements – the dissolution of the historic political parties, the banishment of the monarchy and other such atrocities that were in store for this nation horribly damaged by history. Of course, as I said, even though we were 15, 16 or 17 years old, we felt the need to fight, to impose this opposition to the installation of communism, without any thought of political involvement.
I would like to ask you one more thing. From primary school to high school, we had religion as a compulsory subject. We had a school church which we attended every Sunday. I myself was a member of the choir of this church, which was conducted by our music teacher and consisted of four girls’ voices from the girls’ grammar school and four boys’ voices from the boys’ grammar school. So we had this Christian and national Romanian education strongly impregnated from our family and from school. We were very fond of this ancestral land for which our forefathers had fought and, of course, of our Christian tradition.
What happened next?
Well, at this point, after the dissolution of the political parties and the expulsion of the king, of course all the enemies had to be eliminated. New orders, imported from the East. In 1944, the Communist Party was unknown and, as it was later established, there were perhaps only a thousand of them in the whole country, and they were of foreign nationalities, imported from the USSR. As time went by, they turned out to be the henchmen, people without character, who served them for some material benefits. Then, as I said, they resorted to all sorts of methods that were alien to honesty and fairness. We, as students, saw the existence of this nation in danger at that time. And we expressed our opposition in the way we thought.
As far as I was concerned, I certainly had no intention of making a political career for myself, and I had no intention of being on the side of the school rules, but all the more so as I must admit that I had the lowest mark in gymnastics, and by the idea of happiness I dreamt then of making an intellectual career. I did not dream of being rich, or of partying in pubs, or of anything else. In terms of happiness, I dreamed of having a career. L’homme propose et Dieu dispose, you know? These years have come and they’ve thrown us off balance and changed our plans.
We students, I remember, were interested in reading philosophy. In fact, we did it in high school. For example, in the seventh grade we had three philosophy subjects. That is, the philosophy teacher taught us political economy, sociology and psychology. And we were interested in reading Feuerbach, Nietzsche, all the philosophical ideas, and of course in the end we had discussions among ourselves and we chose one or the other of these ideas. Later, of course, this sphere narrowed and we or the following generations could only have access to Marxist-Leninist philosophy and did not know any other theories.
We now understand that you were an ordinary young man of the time, who wanted to study, who felt the pulse of the cultural, intellectual and social life of the time. But what happened next?
One night, in May 1948, I was a seventh grader in high school and, I repeat, one night, the vans drove through the city where I was. Of course, on the same night they went around all the towns in the country and arrested high school students, for example. Seven students, seven of my classmates, from the seventh class I was in were arrested. The next day my family was forced to leave the house, even though there was no nationalisation law at that time and we had a small family house without a floor, consisting of two rooms and a kitchen. A Securitate officer, called a “gendarme”, made a report and forced my parents to leave the house.
Well, he collected us at the security and that same night he took us to the prison, where we spent about nine months under investigation, in a regime without any contact with the outside world, with our family, with our parents, in a regime of starvation, without medical care. The investigators told us: “You’re cowards, you’ll never go to court, but if you do, you’ll get a few months and they’ll let you go”. It seemed the same to us.
One night, in March 1949, we were taken out of our cell and taken to another, larger room, where there was a red table with some officers at it, and without us having the opportunity to find out the charges against us, or to hire a lawyer, or to notify our families, the formality of a so-called trial was carried out, and immediately afterwards a sentence was pronounced. One of us, who was over eighteen, was given twelve years’ hard labour, and the rest of us were given eight years’ hard labour and ten years’ community service. Of course, at the time it seemed like a joke to us. We said that we had heard from outside that the Americans were coming, that Churchill had said at Fulton that the Communist danger was very great and so on. The reality is that we carried out these eight years on the brink even after the so-called liberation… In case you’re interested, there were other additions to imprisonment later on. With unimaginable hardships, finally…
Let’s go back to what was in the soul of a seventeen-year-old when he saw himself being taken from his home and taken to the Securitate.
You know, we were convinced that we had done nothing illegal, that we had not harmed anyone. I personally have never hit anyone in my life. So I didn’t see what I had done wrong. Because I think that as people we had the right to have different opinions than the management at the time.
Of course, without knowing what would happen next. But why did they accuse you, did they have to or did they give you no explanation?
Yes, I was charged with the crime of conspiracy against the social order, article 209, paragraph 3. So, the crime of conspiracy. Can you imagine, when you hear of a crime, you think, who knows how many people we have killed, but, I repeat, we have not beaten anyone.
Before I go into the details of those eight years and what followed, there is one question I wanted to ask you earlier, but I left it to you to tell us how the ideas came about. What were your passions?
You see, unlike young people today, because I have two children myself, in those days if parents wanted their children to do something and wanted them to do it, we children, whether we liked it or not, we did it. For example, I had violin lessons three times a week from the age of five, and I didn’t like it at all. For five years I was tormented by a teacher with that violin, but I did it very conscientiously, even though I didn’t like it. After five years the teacher left and I gave up the violin and I was very happy.
Later, however, especially in prison, I realised that this passion for music had taken root somewhere, and because in prison and in the labour colonies, on the canal and elsewhere, we couldn’t call each other by name. I, for example, when I had the opportunity, when I was in the labour camp, I would hum either Beethoven’s Concerto in D, or the Ninth Symphony, or some other score, and of course my colleagues and those older than me, because I was one of the youngest, would say that there were Freudian reflexes in Marcel. You always knew that Marcel was around.
Let me pause for a moment and suggest that we take a short musical breather. It’s Lalo’s Spanish Symphony and you’ll probably recognise Ion Voicu’s violin this time.
[…]
Mr. Marcel Cazacu, let’s continue with this passionate musical background, what were your other passions?
Thanks, I repeat, to my upbringing at home. In my family, we went to church every Sunday and every holiday. We prayed as a family, every day. We fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays. This had a strong influence on my upbringing. In addition, those particularly hard years in prison, I must admit, focused me even more on Christianity. This, I could say, is another great passion of mine and I consider myself a follower of Christian philosophy and try to put Christian moral principles into practice as far as I can.
Another passion, and perhaps the last, was getting to know my country. When I was a student, there were no tickets at the races, we did all sorts of exhibitions. I collected money, lion by lion, and in the summer I would go with a colleague to the mountains or to the cities to get to know my country better. I could say that, despite these adventures, I remember them with great pleasure. Of course, I would have loved to get to know the country beyond its borders. The twelve years and four months I spent in prison, and the fact that my release excluded the possibility of crossing the border myself, meant that it was only after 1990 that I was able to go to Germany.
I know that instead of travelling outside, you had to make a long journey in a more than confined space.
Yes. And I’d like to say something else. I would like to point out that in 1948 pupils and students were arrested in every town in the country. In 1949 the political prisoners were divided according to their profession. There were peasants and workers in Gherla prison, intellectuals in Aiud, students in Pitești and pupils in Târgșor. Târgșor is a former monastery, about sixteen kilometres from Ploiești, which was turned into a prison. At the time, the leaders still hoped that the pupils could be re-educated and reintegrated into society. I must admit that for one year, while this experiment was being carried out, life in Târgșor was very pleasant, and I remember it with great pleasure. These young people, between thirteen and twenty, with dreams and ideals, hopes. Especially since we had a certain freedom of movement in the courtyard, it was so difficult to describe a community of souls.
Something came up, re-education came up. An oil worker was sent to us, an old man, we called him Old Man Tăgâță, who forced us to go to a hall there to read from the history of the CPSU and to give answers at the seminar. If we didn’t like this and resisted it, we resisted it even more in prison. Even then, the vast majority were hostile to this re-education and, of course, isolation followed.
In the beginning, everyone walked around in this courtyard. Later, those who were considered to influence others were isolated in solitary confinement without certain rights. Those who accepted re-education, for example, were entitled to a postcard to write ten lines to their families once a month and the possibility of receiving five kilos of food from home. Those who did not accept, and most did not, were cut off from these rights.
I remember that I was also in one of the isolations when General Nicolski and Minister Drăghici came and threatened us in various ways that we would never see the sunlight again. Of course, at that time we didn’t know that there really was something that could have destroyed us completely: Pitești. We didn’t know that at the time and it seemed like a joke. In 1950, the Securitate leadership realised that the Târgșor experiment had failed and divided us. Most of us were taken to the Canal, others to Gherla prison, even to Pitești and other prisons.
What happened to you?
I’d like to talk a little longer about Târgșor. I remember now that during those years in prison, we were generally unable to read a newspaper, a page of a book, a letter, but in Târgșor, miraculously, a New Testament arrived, which, frankly, I handled. It passed from hand to hand, every five minutes, and with the blanket over my head I read a chapter of the New Testament. Sharing is caring, and I must admit that in Târgșor I read this New Testament at least ten times, and I always seemed to find something new.
At night I would hide this New Testament in the straw mattress – we had mattresses there – so that they wouldn’t find it if they searched us.
They took me from Târgșor to the Danube-Black Sea canal. At Târgșor, I think it is important to dwell on an incident. In Târgșor I developed a high fever, which was diagnosed as acute appendicitis. When a van passed through Târgșor, they put me in the van and took me to the only hospital in the country where surgery was performed, the Văcărești Hospital. But the majority of those who benefited from this hospital were common law prisoners, thieves. They also took me to Văcărești Hospital, where I was operated on for apenticitis, without anaesthesia. They took me from the table and there were two guards waiting for me. That’s what we called the policemen, militiamen or guards who accompanied us. Two guards were waiting for me, and when they saw that I had been operated on, they had fun and ran after me with their sticks to the van that was to take me to Jilava. Jilava was the camp for political prisoners.
At Jilava they put me in room six, where I stayed for three months. That was in May 1950, early summer. There were no less than two hundred and forty people in this room at that time. Next to me died, among others, the former director of the Jilava prison, named Mănaru. One of the charges for which he was convicted was that, when he was director, he had put twelve prisoners in this room instead of the six he was supposed to. You see, there were two hundred and forty of us, all naked. There were stacked slats and the most protected places were under the slats, on the concrete. The room had only one window and there was no air. Every night some of my fellow inmates would suffocate from the lack of air. That’s how the director Mănaru died. At six o’clock they would lock the door and by six in the morning the whole room could have died. Nobody opened the door, and in the morning they took the dead out first and then counted us, as if we could escape.
It may seem unlikely. It’s hard to imagine that a single little window, about one square metre in size, with a wooden shutter, was the only source of air in that horror chamber where two hundred and forty people were forced to stay.
I find it hard to find the words to ask more questions. Indeed, it seems incredible, if not unbelievable, how far it could go. How did you manage it, Mr. Cazacu?
You know, I resisted because I believed first and foremost in God. I think this faith was strong and helped me both in prison and afterwards. Then I have to admit something else. Since I didn’t accept re-education, I said to myself: if I ended up here, I don’t understand why I should do here what I didn’t accept to do outside. Then I was labelled a mystic, a fanatic and uneducable. No postcards or parcels were sent to this category. For eight years my parents didn’t know if I was still living somewhere, they didn’t know anything about me. But I had another advantage. My fellow prisoners were people of high intellectual and moral value, most or all of them. University professors, former dignitaries, former generals, engineers, doctors. From discussion to discussion, the peasants also learned foreign languages, even the concepts of medicine. You could expand your culture there in many ways. So the atmosphere was of good quality.
You were practically a student at a less ordinary university, of course, but probably much better than a communist university, which was emerging at that time.
I told you that I was taken to the Danube-Black Sea Canal. I wasn’t really physically fit. As I told you, I wasn’t very good at gymnastics either, and I wasn’t really physically fit for such brutal work. They took me to the Peninsula Colony, where there were about six or seven thousand political prisoners, and they assigned me to a brigade of students, where the brigadier was a re-educated student, who always told us that he wasn’t interested in work, that we were bandits, that we had retrograde ideas, that we were mystics, that we were fanatics, and he put all kinds of pressure on us.
We worked at 2.80 metres. It was a particularly hard rock, a marine rock, where even the pickaxe wouldn’t penetrate. You had to dig with a crowbar and at a fast pace. The brigadier at the back was always threatening you with a stick to load the seals. That’s when I got sick, even though I was twenty at the time. I got a pretty bad heart condition, really bad. I had oedema.
After Stalin’s death, in 1953, when there was a more relaxed period, medical commissions from the Ministry of the Internal Affairs came and classified those who were sick as totally unfit for any kind of work, including me. I had auricular fever, imperceptible pulse, two hundred and forty beats per minute, I had oedema, dystrophy. I ended up in an invalid ward, where everyone was: the former royal advisor, Marshal Filitie, Brăteanu, former dignitaries, old people. I was the only young person there. Professor Miletici from Timișoara, a university professor of medicine, very curious, expressed his wish to consult me, to see how I had become unfit. After consulting me, with his ear, of course, he said: “You won’t live more than three months”. I didn’t believe him and the proof is that almost fifty years have passed since then and I am still alive.
May God grant that from now on there will be as many as possible. Tell me when you realised that, no, it’s not a joke, that it’s not a joke, that the Americans don’t really want to come anymore.
In fact, as we went along, we realised that the westerners had betrayed us at Yalta, because if there had been no Yalta, the situation in our country would certainly be very different from what it is today. There would not have been this sad period of fifty years. But we are small and the great powers share their booty. Of course, I realised that the situation was not favourable to us, and I even mentally prepared myself to stay there forever. To be honest, I was content with it. I didn’t think I’d ever get out of prison. I had come to a resignation in the sense that I said the only thing I could give was the ultimate sacrifice at the feet of Christ. That’s how I interpreted my suffering. I wasn’t hopeless, I wasn’t demoralised, just resigned.
But after twelve years and four months, it seems incredible, so-called freedom came.
Yes, it did. When the eight years were up, I was in Gherla, in the infirmary, sick and waiting to go home. It didn’t happen. I was given an escort, a guard, who drove me to the station and took me to Bărăgan, where I had to stay. It was a big surprise for me when I walked through the town and saw women on the street for the first time in eight years. I found it very interesting. What peculiar figures they were, speaking in a peculiar way and smaller in stature. I was only used to men.
To continue, the militiaman took me, even though my eight years were over, with a gun on my back, pointing it at me, and tried to take me to Răchitoasa, in the Fetești district, where I had been ordered to live for twenty-four months. As I was very ill – I had spent the last few years in the prison infirmary – I was not transportable. The guard realised this, called an ambulance and took me to the University Hospital in Cluj, where I stayed for two months, with a guard at the door.
Then I was sent to Răchitoasa, a commune where the natives had lived, and I chose one of the houses which, in the course of time, because a year or two had passed since the natives had left, the gypsies there had damaged and stolen everything they could steal. I also built a small house that I found more accessible, covered with reeds and with earth on the floor, where I stayed for two years. After two years it was extended for another two years. I didn’t manage to finish those two, and one night, in September 1958, the Securitate Police vans came again, searched us and took us on board. They took about twenty-five of us to Constanta for investigation, and I later found out that they were each given twenty-five years’ imprisonment on the grounds that they had organised in the village church. The rest of us were taken to the Noua Culme colony and the Periprava colony in the Delta with administrative punishment, where we were subjected to a particularly harsh regime.
As you can see, the charge for which my colleagues were sentenced to twenty-five years is a fabrication. I was present at church every day, every holiday. They didn’t take me away to condemn me, but they gave twenty-five years to engineer Tonea, for example, who only went to church at Christmas and Easter. In September 1960, after twelve years and four months, I finally made it home.
It seems incredible, Mr. Marcel Cazacu. You were about thirty years old. Do you think your youth was lost?
Yes, I was in my thirties. Intellectually, I no longer hoped to get married or finish school. At thirty I was still a student. I didn’t tell you that when I had to live in Bărăgan, even though I didn’t have a permit, I ran away at night with various means of transport, by chance, to Fetești, and I repeated my last year of high school. So I finished high school at the age of thirty, but I didn’t manage to do anything else. From one point of view, I dreamed of a scientific career. From that point of view, it was a lost ideal. I didn’t imagine that I would ever manage to do anything, to go to school, to get married, to have children, to own a house.
All of these things came to me unplanned and beyond my expectations. If you ask me whether I regret it or not, I think that this situation was inevitable, I don’t think I could have avoided it. I don’t think others, if they had lived through ’46-’47-’48, would have turned out differently. We also knew a story from school. Then came Roller’s story, which completely falsified the history of this people. I don’t think other people of good faith would have acted differently in my place. I had the misfortune to be at school at that time and was unable to avoid this situation. Once again, I tell you that I was very happy to be able to lay my suffering at the feet of Christ.
I am happy that after 1990 young people are interested in the Church. Proof of this are the weekly conferences held at the Faculty of Medicine. The large auditorium of the Faculty of Medicine is filled with students and young people. I am glad that in the churches a significant percentage of those present are young people. I’m glad that this student church has been established and that it is already full every Sunday. I am glad, and I would like to urge young people to come to the door of the church to discover what, perhaps because of their early contact with education, primary school or even secondary school, has led them away from Christian philosophy, Christian morality. I would urge them above all to seek God.
I know you don’t like this, but I can’t help telling our listeners that the young people of today and the young people who will come after us owe a lot to you in terms of this student church. I know you don’t like it, but I can’t help saying it.
Mr. Marcel Cazacu, I can only thank you for this special afternoon that you have given us and I hope that we will have the opportunity to discuss at length some of the history that you know. Thank you very much for being here.
Thank you very much!
And we say goodbye, dear listeners, in the hope that youth will always be with you, as I believe it has always been with this wonderful man we have had as our guest of honour this afternoon. Thank you very much!
(Marcel Cazacu, interview broadcast on Radio Timișoara, “Noi înșine”, moderator Lăcrămioara Varga, transcript by Irina Josan)