Testament of an undefeated: Cicerone Ionițoiu
I can’t remember when I first met Mr Cicerone Ionițoiu. I knew him as if I had always known him. His gentle and peaceful air, always spiced with a smile, did not change even on the threshold of the most heated disputes. I would say now, when I still don’t know that I will never see him again, that he had what former political prisoners often call the power to forgive and the duty not to forget. With him it was not just words.
Mr Ionițoiu has perhaps reluctantly given up his desire to see those who destroyed not only his youth, but the destiny of an entire generation and, ultimately, the past and future of a nation, brought to justice. In 2008, when I read the manuscript of his memoirs, which I had the great honour of prefacing, I realised that history is not only the correct and honest interpretation of the past, but precisely the power to make a leap – a break with oneself. I called these lines “The Confession of an Unconquered”, paraphrasing Panait Istrati’s book. Now his memoirs have a truly testimonial value.
Cicerone Ionițoiu, leader of the University Youth in Bucharest, was arrested for the first time in 1945, ten days after listening to Iuliu Maniu’s speech to the students on 18 July 1945, and the words of the great man of our history would change his life in two ways. Firstly, by considering young people as “the hope for today and tomorrow of the Romanian nation”, he felt himself to be among the chosen ones. Second, by accepting a personal martyrdom and carrying it through to the end. The young Cicerone Ionitoiu was released in 1945, kidnapped, investigated and tortured by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police omnipresent in Romania (which makes his fate somewhat similar to that of Corneliu Coposu, who had the same experience). Then he went to prison. At the age of 40, he had six politically motivated convictions, totalling twenty-four years in prison, of which he had served ten – that is, a decade, a quarter of his life; 3,650 days of which were widely considered to be the best years of his life.
It was undoubtedly very difficult for him to forgive – to return to the power to forgive and the duty not to forget. In prison he was not a submissive person; when he was released (he was one of the last “politicians” (political prisoners) to be released from Jilava, only on 28 July 1964), the prison registry wrote these words in the characterisation on his release certificate: “He behaved badly during his detention”. In the concentration camp universe of communist Romania, this label represents everything that is the opposite of human evil: the strength to have kept one’s composure and one’s head on one’s shoulders at the limit of a treatment of hunger and humiliation that tended programmatically to remove the prisoner from the ranks of the people, the strength to endure every hour of cold, darkness and fear with hope, as the first step towards preserving dignity. After his release from prison, he carried it with him, in a way, as if it were imprisonment. To support himself after his release, he worked for six years in various mines around the country, a kind of forced labour far below the level of his education. But that was the extent of the communist regime’s “leniency” towards former enemies of the people. Re-education through labour’ had begun, and Cicerone Ionițoiu was to pave the way for this pioneering experiment by the regime, having been one of the first to be imprisoned for political reasons, along with many others. It was not until 1970 that he was allowed to work in Bucharest.
After Nicolae Ceaușescu signed the Helsinki Accords in 1975, an agreement in which Romania undertook to respect, at least minimally, human rights and freedoms (an obligation that was immediately circumvented by bureaucratic trickery and threats by the militia and security police against those who asserted their rights), Cicerone Ionițoiu applied for a passport to leave the country; It was forty years since his first arrest and since then he had never felt freedom, except for the inner freedom he had never lost. He received his passport in 1979 and settled in Paris. Incidentally, during one of our meetings, he told me an anecdote that circulated among the “passport holders”, those who queued up on Nicolae Iorga Street to obtain the right to leave the country for good. An applicant for a passport was taken through several offices, after many opinions, and at the end he was beaten, but he did not say a word. The process took months. Faced with his docility, but also with the firmness of his decision, the head of Security Service finally gave in and said to him: “Look, I have a glass eye. If you tell me what it is, I will give you a passport”. “My left eye,” he replied without hesitation. The guard gave him the passport and, as he left, asked him how he had guessed. “It was the only one with a glimmer of humanity,” the man replied, and stormed up the stairs without looking back.
Well, Cicerone Ionițoiu didn’t. He left the country with his mind and soul full of faces with names, of voices. Of memories. Settling in Paris, he began to compile more than 150,000 files on the victims of communism. His power to forgive had a limit; he confessed that he compiled these true lists of suffering and death, which fortunately saw the light of print in a true Golden Book of the Victims of Communism, out of a desire to “argue the genocide that the Romanian people suffered at the hands of the communist regime”. His entire oeuvre is marked by this idea, and anyone who consults his prodigious bibliography cannot doubt it. Cicerone Ionițoiu is, through his life and work, the first public prosecutor of communism, who systematically collected and interpreted data on victims and torturers, hoping to achieve not only a symbolic condemnation of the regime that systematically destroyed Romania for half a century, but above all the punishment of those who killed and tortured. There is no doubt in my mind that if President Băsescu had listened to common sense rather than political reason, if he had used the acumen of Cicerone Ionițiu and the impetuosity of Constantin Ticu Dumitrescu in his famous commission, things would be different today.
But today things are as they are; I can just imagine those two gentlemen sitting around a table from above, from heaven, where all those who have experienced the sufferings of the Communist dungeons, which we are only now beginning to glimpse, have met, exchanging memories from time to time and looking at us, sometimes with reproach, sometimes with understanding, but never with hatred.
A few weeks ago, the Civic Academy Foundation published the book Figures of Legend by Cicerone Ionițoiu. I quote from the presentation on the fourth cover: “Among the tens of thousands of former political prisoners and fighters that he has presented in his books over half a century, Cicerone Ionițoiu – this true chronicler of Romanian suffering and dignity – chooses those closest to his heart and portrays them with colourful accuracy. Doctors or peasants, diplomats or civil servants, engineers or students, members of various political parties or apolitical, women or men, young or old, their fates are intertwined with the struggle they waged against Communism, their shackled homeland. Figures of Legend is perhaps the most vivid of the dozens of works (apart from the autobiographical ones and those about Iuliu Maniu) that the almost nonagenarian author has left us”. It was the last book that Cicerone Ionițoiu published in his lifetime.
(Marius Oprea – Observator cultural, no. 708 of January 2014)