Installation of Colonel Gheorghe Crăciun as prison governor, 1958
The year 1958 brought a change in the management of the Aiud prison. Kohler, the Jewish fighter in Spain, was replaced by the Romanian and illegalist Gheorghe Crăciun, a Securitate colonel. A Romanian replaces a Jew. Will the prison regime improve? According to national communist theory, it should be. It is said that the Romanian secret service has put an end to the cruelties and abuses of the Jewish and Hungarian secret services.
But reality will not listen to theories, and things will develop as they are. And the first signs of a new direction are coming. One day, while we were in the walking pen, an officer sitting in the watchtower read us Order No. 50 (if I remember correctly) of the Ministry of the Internal Affairs.
The order began with the formula: “The prisoner is not allowed to…!” and continued with an endless list of prohibitions. One gets the impression that this crushing avalanche of prohibitions ends with the stipulation that “the prisoner must not breathe”. In fact, this prohibition does not appear, but everything else is prohibited. Farewell to the ‘golden age’ of ’55-’56! The “Romanian” Crăciun imposed a regime even more intolerable than that of the Jew Kohler. Of course, they were only executors and did nothing on their own initiative, but each of them also gave a personal touch to the regime that applied to us.
After I left the prison, I was asked about the prison regime. Especially when it came to Aiud, the interviewees spoke with a shudder of horror. My answer was always the same: it’s not the prison you’re in that matters, it’s the regime. The same prison can be heaven or hell. Well, not quite heaven, but at least a more bearable purgatory. It’s true that Aiud was usually hell. Only from this reality could Radu Gyr’s verses be born:
“If Satan should think that his old vad
would be called anything other than hell,
He would say, of course, with his cruel smile:
Here is Aiud, here is Aiud!”
(Fr. Liviu Brânzaș – Ray from the Catacomb)