Oranki – Memories from captivity
Father Dimitrie Bejan is far from being properly consecrated in the hierarchy of Romanian concentrationist literature, overshadowed by much better known names such as Paul Goma, N. Steinhardt, Elisabeta Rizea or Ion Ioanid. This is somewhat unfair, given the unimaginable biographical path taken by the author of Oranki. Memories of Captivity (and five others published so far: The Great Vifornița, The Joys of Suffering, The Walled Boundary, The Cursed Village and Simple Stories).
Born in 1909, a graduate of the Theological Institute of Iași and of the Faculty of History, for a time a member of Dimitrie Gusti’s research teams, he was ordained a priest in 1938 and took part in the campaign to liberate Bessarabia. He was captured by the Soviets and began his long journey through the gulags.
An athlete of the dungeons of the USSR (probably the same fair and gentle USSR to which several more or less young writers, from here and elsewhere, testify), for six years he “visited” places of great tourist interest, such as the camps of Astrahan, Oranki, Kiev, Sverdlovsk, Karaganda (now in Kazakhstan), Arhanghelsk (also near the White Sea) and Moscow (which is really everywhere). The Socialist Republic of Romania welcomed him with open tentacles – only in 1948 – and took him to Jilava, Aiud and Canal, deported him to Bărăgan for two years and then sentenced him to another six years in Aiud until the 1964 amnesty.
Before 1917 there was a monastery in Oranki (Nizhny Novgorod). Here “the tsars of Russia came to worship the Lord”. In one of the chapels, Leo Tolstoy is said to have written The Resurrection, because only monks and scholars of noble birth lived here, “here the arts and letters were practised, together with mystical exercises”. The Communists, known for their great respect for both faith and culture, took down the crosses, bricked up the town, set up a camp and shot the risen Jesus painted on the iconostasis in the forehead.
“The desert took a hold of Mănăstârca,” sighs Father Bejan, not without a poetic touch. And indeed, as one reads, one understands that the prisoners’ orchestra (with an international composition, from Germans to Spaniards), under the Communist baton, can only play on three notes, from the lowest range, signs of desolation and absurdity: Cold, hunger and fear (as in I.D. Sârbu). Especially the cold: “It was a winter afternoon with a cold sky. In the air there were golden stars, green stars. The mercury had gone down, down, down. It was -47º C. It was ‘chilly'”.
It is not to be understood that the torture was only the cruel freezing cold. To this was added, in generous doses, a cruelty of unprecedented ferocity. Here is a disturbing scene: “We were put on sledges. Four in front, with the sheep, and four more at the spikes; a hundred, two hundred sledges – perhaps more, and all around, guards and wolf dogs. With crossed ropes tied to our chests, we dragged the loaded sledge uphill, one kilometre, ten, twenty kilometres. Every day, without a break. When we climbed up the slope, sweat ran down our foreheads, which immediately froze, and we felt water running down our spines. When we came out to sit down, our clothes and the soles of our sledges were frozen. And in the valley, the sledge would go downhill, fast; it would pull you out of the harness, fast; you had to run like the wind, with your eyes always backwards. So many accidents, broken legs, broken ribs. […] Every winter; one, two, three, four years”.
Instead, in autumn, the absurd was dressed up in the clothes of silent propaganda: schoolchildren, almost starving, sit and stared at their teacher, who taught them to sing the “potato anthem” and, perched on a pile of potatoes, gave them empowering speeches about the importance of vegetables and the duty to pick them, in the name of the “Father” and the Colhoz, amen.
The reality, however, is not limited to such discouraging episodes. Unlike characters in books such as Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the Oranki seem to try – and often succeed – in retaining their humanity in a surprisingly natural way. How else, if not through unspoiled humanity, could one explain such a disarming episode as that in which Bejan, an Orthodox priest, braves the bitter cold to secretly baptise the son of a Soviet security guard and a Jewish woman? Or the so-called “Eighth Ecumenical Council”? A lesson for any artificially created inter-religious conflict, at this “synod” three hundred camp priests – Orthodox, Catholic and Reformed – met for forty evenings in a row (!!) to discuss their dogmas and somehow “put their shoulder to the wheel of history, stuck in 1054”.
How else could one explain, if not with an unadulterated sense of dignity, the start of a… hunger strike (1,500 people have been starving for ten days in a camp in a country where the word “strike” has long since been removed from the dictionary)? Oranki… is full of such scenes, which transcend the serene misery and – surprisingly often for a book of this genre – ooze with spicy humour. Take, for example, the football match between the ad hoc “national teams” of Romania and Hungary, whose exhausted players are struggling in the rain to win a large, heavy, “lazy and clumsy” ball made of rags, a match in which, of course, none other than… the territory of a distant Transylvania could be at stake. The clearest proof that football, a royal but democratic sport, protects the patriotism of its admirers even in the midst of a totalitarian war.
These pages are not, in essence, pages of history, nor are they slices of a man’s life “as it was”. Written without a trace of resentment, by a man who has accepted his fate with dignity, they seem more like an invitation to understand, without any vulgar-masochistic interpretation, the paradoxical joys that a certain kind of supposed suffering can give you. Father Bejan’s voice is calm, a calm after the storm, the storm that mysteriously brings the enlightenment and strengthening of man.
(Silviu Man – Rost Online)