It all started with a murder
Look this is why I have done what I have done, lady! That I now stand before the icon and God help me if I lie… He killed my uncle. There it is! They shot him when the communists came. First cousin of my father, parents, brothers. They couldn’t turn him into a communist, so they shot him. Because he was a merchant: he had a mill, a wool machine, a factory, a shop… He had a job, everyone cared about him. He had no children, poor man, and he helped. He helped the poor, the widows of 1916, because a brother of his, Nicu, died in the war. Madam, one of them was Gheorghe Șuța from Domnești! He was a Sir! A Sir! He liked to teach people and to be worthy, to work. I can’t tell you what a good and decent man he was. And the communists shot him. You see, that’s why I hated the communists…
They killed him for nothing, ma’am… They took him out of the house, took him to the Security Service and shot him. And Mr. Mihalache, a farmer, was a teacher in Domnești, and he had someone there who was able to get him out of the mortuary and take him to the cemetery. Yes, when it was heard that they were taking him, people went out from the whole village and after other villages, the driver got out because he didn’t want to drive the car anymore and took him to the people with the car driven by hand. They pushed the car all the way to his house… They took him home and kept him there for two days and two nights and then buried him. They’d arrested him twice before, but they had nothing to charge him with. He let him go home because he had nothing to try him on. And he buried him, finished him.
I cried, I mourned, as we say, I complained about my uncle that the communists had shot him. I said bad things. I said. I can’t say I didn’t do it! And someone whispered to my husband to get me out of there, or they’d kill me. And my husband said, ‘Come here, I’ll tell you something.” He took me somewhere else and put me in a carriage. He put the blanket over me and took me out of the commune.
When I got home and heard the carriage, I’d run. I had two jars in the garden and when I heard a car I’d run. That was in ’47. And then it started in ’48. That’s when Mr. Iancu Arnăuțoiu was scared, the priest Drăgoi, these people who were the heads of the village, the smartest people in Nucșoara.
(Elisabeta Rizea – The Story of Elisabeta Rizea, edited by Irina Nicolau and Theodor Nițu, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 1993, pp. 17-19)