“If you don’t release the Legionaries, take me back. I won’t make the deal”

I was in Gherla prison.

One day – after the alarm had gone off – a single person was taken to a room on the ground floor.

The cells to the right and left were emptied. The cell on the next floor was also emptied. The lockdown was total. It was not possible to make Morse code contact with prisoners in neighbouring cells. I was working in the paint shop at the time. In order to meet my standard when painting some parts, I made a small innovation. I made a kind of tile out of a pressed pig’s hair “ball”, poured paint on it and then used the stamp method to apply the piece to the painted “cake”.

Such “balls” could be found in the workshop in the neighbouring courtyard. The door was always open. The success of a “ball” theft depended on how quickly we worked so as not to be seen by a guard who might happen to be passing by, or – even more dangerously – by a snitch…

On the ground floor, in a cell, the “re-education” office was set up. It was towards evening, neither light nor dark. When I went to the workshop where the pig-hair balls were made, I heard someone being beaten up in the re-education office. A man was being beaten to death.

You could hear the blows like a beanbag. There were muffled groans.

I walked on. I knew how these horrors came about because I too had been through them many times. As I came out of the workshop with the noodle, four men came out of the mobile phone carrying a beaten man on a blanket. I recognised one of the men carrying the blanket. It was Juberian. I recognised the second. It was Reck. I didn’t recognise the other two, except that I suspected them from their stature and movements, for their backs were to me.

I retreated around the corner. The danger was deadly. Had I been noticed, I would have suffered the same fate as the man on the blanket. The four of them went with the victim to the corner of the boat and I crept into the paint shop. Nobody noticed my absence.

On the second or third day I went back to stealing gingerbread. Just as I was leaving the workshop, the alarm went off. You had to face the floor or, at best, the wall. I turned around, facing the wall, but somehow in the corner of the window so I could see what was going on outside.

Suddenly I saw a whole squad of sergeants enter the yard, led by the prison warden, Goiciu, followed by the doctor and then a number of other officers. They went to the corner of the guardhouse. We stayed there for a long time. About an hour. Then they went back. The alarm went off and a weight was lifted from my heart. This time I got away.

The victim was the socialist Fluieraș. In the prison – like lightning – the news spread that Fluieraș had been killed. I was the only one who knew how he had been killed. I didn’t say a word.

As timekeeper, I had the right to carry a pencil. The paper was at my discretion. I made up some flyers and wrote on them, with my left hand, in faded handwriting, “JUBERIAN AND RECK KILLED FLUIERAȘ”. With great discretion I distributed these leaflets wherever I could.

Within a very short time the whole prison knew who the perpetrators were. The investigation to find the “agitator” began immediately. They made all of us with pencils give a long statement to check the handwriting. They found nothing. Much later I realised that they could have found out who had written the leaflets – if they had wanted to. But they didn’t want to. They were happy with that. The real perpetrators were well hidden in the shadows.

The police solved the mystery. Here’s how it happened:

“One day, before lunch, Fluieraș was picked up from Gherla prison by a Securitate officer, put in a limousine and driven to Bucharest. A week later he was brought back and placed in this solitary cell. Even his food was not given to him by the guard, as was the custom, but by the guard himself…

It was a holiday when a more comfortable and phlegmatic guard was assigned to the ward. After all the prisoners in his ward had eaten, he said to the guard

– Then the guard went about his business and disappeared around the corner of the corridor.

The guard spoke to Fluieraș, who told him, with the speed that only prisoners can, everything that had happened during the week he had been out of prison. He asked the guard to pass the news on to his 5-6 socialist comrades…

– From here I was taken straight to Bucharest and put up in an extremely luxurious room at the Ambasador Hotel.

Shortly afterwards a man came into the room and said to me:

– Comrade Fluieraș… You have been brought here because comrade Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej wants to talk to you. I am the one who is preparing you for this meeting.

Over the next few hours I’ll be given pyjamas, a dressing gown and slippers. Then I was served good food… I was brought a new suit, made of expensive cloth, tailored to my size, a white shirt, shoes and all the clothes needed for a meeting with high ranking personalities.

Over the next few days I was bathed, scrubbed, shaved… When everything was ready and I was well rested, I was loaded into an ultra-luxurious car and taken to Gh. Gheorghiu-Dej.

With great affection, Gheorghiu-Dej shook my hand and said:

– “Hey, Fluieraș, what are we going to do? That was the situation… That was the situation then. Now the situation is different. Now you can consider yourself free. I’ll take you into the government and give you the Ministry of Labour. That’s it. No more evil.

– I don’t understand. I’m the only one getting out of jail?

– No. I’ll get you all out of prison.

– All the prisoners?

– Not all of them, I’ll get only you socialists out.

– That’s not what I want. You’ll release the legionnaires. If you don’t release the legionnaires, take me back. I won’t make the deal.[1]

Surprised by this answer, Gheorghiu-Dej did not insist. He let him go. He was taken back to the hotel, stripped of his expensive clothes and dressed again in rags, then taken back to the prison and isolated”.

The train fulfilled Fluieraș’s last wish by informing his comrades of what had happened during the week he had been out of prison.

I was also a friend of the socialists, and one of them told me Fluieraș’s whole story.

(Testimony of Tache Rodas in Man in the Pit. Povestiri din perioada cruntei terori comuniste 1948-1964, edited by Gheorghe Andreica, Printeuro Publishing House, Ploiești, 2000, pp. 17-21)

[1] We express the reservation that this was the essence of the dialogue with Gheorghiu-Dej because:

a) First of all, Ion Flueraș’s account of what happened in Bucharest to the planton took place under pressure, against the clock, and many of the nuances of the dialogue between Flueraș and Gheorghiu Dej were certainly lost.

b) Secondly, the narrator Tache Rodas was an intermediary and not a direct witness to Ion Flueraș’s account of the Bucharest event. Given that any account is inevitably distorted from one transmitter to another, it is highly plausible that the accuracy of what happened in Bucharest may have been further distorted.

c) Tache Rodas’s account of this episode is made many years after it took place, or else memory gaps are again inevitable.

Sorin Radu, author of the most extensive study dedicated to Ion Flueraș, states that “At the beginning of March 1953, Fluieraș was transported from Gherla to the Ministry of Internal Affairs headed by Alexandru Drăghici. The real reason for this is not known, but Mihai Rădulescu claims that Flueraș was then asked to sign a self-defamation of his entire political activity, as Titel Petrescu would agree to do a little later, in order to obtain, in exchange for this self-betrayal, the release of all his fellow believers. “About Flueraș”, continues Rădulescu, “it is believed that he refused this deal”. This refusal was to seal his death” (See Ion Flueraș (1882-1953). Social Democracy and Trade Unionism, 2nd edition, Cetatea de Scaun Publishing House, Târgoviște, 2013, p. 331, electronic edition)

So, we have chosen to focus on the “deal with the Legionaries” because whatever deal Ion Flueraș was offered or forced to make, we have every reason to believe that he refused this deal, as evidenced by the stoning to which he was subjected immediately after his return from Bucharest.