Mihai Timaru – hero on the front, outlaw in the mountains and martyr in communist dungeons

Mihai Timaru was an organist from Târgu Mureș, from a large family, a hero of the battles of Odessa, and now, instead of the decorations he had received, his body was badly damaged as a result of the torture and suffering he had experienced during his re-education in Gherla prison.

In addition to lung disease, he had a very enlarged liver and many broken cheeks from the jaws with which he was tortured.

During our stay together, he told us about a beautiful love affair he had experienced during the occupation of Budapest by the Romanian army in 1944. A young Hungarian girl from a good family was screaming in despair at the hands of Soviet soldiers who wanted to kidnap her from the street. Michael, who happened to be passing by, saved the girl’s life at the risk of his own and returned her unharmed to her parents. The young girl, who was in love with her rescuer, couldn’t imagine life without him. The girl’s parents, however, were against the marriage, and Michael himself had to convince the girl that it was better to part with only the memory of this idyll. What Michael did not tell the girl was that he could not marry her because his mother had been whipped on the cheek by a Hungarian officer during the Hungarian occupation of Transylvania (1940-1944). The scar was not only on his mother’s cheek, but also in Michael’s heart.

At the end of the war, Mihai married in Panciu and, as a newlywed, he had to join other people from Vrânceni in the Romanian people’s resistance fight against the Soviet invaders.

From now on, a true epic story began for Mihai and his family, because the resistance struggle was long, hard and full of self-sacrifice, carried out to the point of supreme sacrifice. And during Mihai’s absence, Lucica, his wife, raised their son Toader as a true mother-heroine.

(Nicu Popescu-Vorkuta, Crez și adevăr, Bucharest, 2009, pp. 247-248)