The release

It was July and we were still being told that we would not be released unless we were re-educated. In my condition I could only wait to die. But in the last days of the month hundreds of people began to leave every day.

I was taken to the cell. I was given the personal rags I still had after more than 20 years in prison. I still didn’t know and didn’t believe that I would be released. But on 31 July I was given my release form and a train ticket to Bucharest. I was in a state of shock and cried uncontrollably. I couldn’t believe it.

I didn’t know where to go or who else in my family was still alive. My father had been declared insane, so it was hard to believe that my family still lived in the old house. I only knew of a more distant relative in Bucharest who might have survived, and I asked to go and see him. Everything seemed to be spinning around me. 

I was put on a lorry and taken to the railway station with a whole group going to Bucharest. It was 1 August 1964. I left crying. My heart was breaking with pain, humiliation and helplessness. We were defeated, finally defeated. Of the thousands of people in Aiud, a few dozen had re-educated themselves by behaving as despicably as possible, and the vast majority tried to escape, each as he could and as he saw fit. There were also a few hundred who remained intransigent, uncompromising, brave. Now we all left the dungeon, weak, ragged, dirty, shadows of what we had been twenty years before. Many had gone to the battlements sick. We all looked pitiful. We waited at every station for them to arrest us and for this bad joke to end, but we were wrong: we were actually going to the big dungeon.

It seemed to me that I was carrying a grave inside me, that I was moving in a grave and going to a grave. Oh, I said to myself, how happy are those who have died and never experienced the bitterness of this liberation!

In the lorry, people began to give free rein to their thoughts:

– It’s not the Communists who are liberating us, it’s the Americans,’ said a democrat.

– It’s over with them. Free elections are coming and we’re going to smash them!

I listened with indulgence to these people who lived on illusions.

-It is not weakness that will set us free, I told them, but strength. They no longer fear us. We have even been given the chance to die as martyrs!

Then someone close to me whispered a word that shook me:

– If I had to start my life all over again, I would follow the same path!

In about ten years’ time I was to meet this man in Bucharest. When he saw me, he got scared, his face changed and he wanted to run away, but as he was too close, he mumbled something and made himself invisible! What had happened? Was it re-education, a psychiatric hospital? What devilish method had shattered this mountain of character!

But back to the day of my liberation. I had boarded a workers’ train. Word spread that we were in a compartment and that poor people were coming to see us. Some ventured to talk to us, others gave us a piece of bread, and all shared our great grief, not realising that we did not have a tram ticket in our pockets.

When I got off at North Station, I asked a woman for change and she gave me everything she had in her pockets. She was a cleaner somewhere. The families of the prisoners were waiting on the platform. I met a mother with two big children, all full of horror, who asked us:

– You haven’t heard of X, have you? He is my husband and the father of these children. They all come, but I don’t hear from him. Even if you know he’s dead, tell me frankly, because the uncertainty in which my heart has been trembling for ten years has destroyed me!

– “Madam, dear mother,” I replied, “forgive us, but we cannot alleviate your suffering, for we do not know your husband. But if he doesn’t arrive in two or three days, you can stop waiting for him!”

She cried, our words drowned in tears.

I looked around the platform to see the silhouette of my fiancée, but neither she nor anyone else in the family was waiting for me. I got to the tram, but I didn’t know the operating times. I wanted to make a phone call, but I couldn’t remember how it worked. Finally I reached my relatives. I wasn’t mistaken, they were still there. But instead of their villa that they worked so hard to build, there was now a pile of bricks, a reminder of the bombing by the Anglo-American air force. The present and the past both haunted me. A plump woman rushed over and kissed me, sobbing. She was a hard-working party activist who had done a lot of damage around her, threatening, beating, denouncing, but who had finally come to see the cruel and lying reality she had served. She had an outburst of her mediocre, contradictory and confused soul towards me.

Relatives greeted me with pity and tears. I felt they were hiding something from me. I wanted to know about my fiancée, my parents, my brothers and sisters.

– Yes, yes, Petrică is fine, he lives in Bucharest. And Mărioara has two daughters, she’s with her parents. Uncle (that’s dad) is a bit ill, but he’ll get over it, it’s easy!

– Mum?

– Your mother died three years ago with your longing in her heart!

I gathered my last strength then:

– And your fiancée?

– You’ll see, she’s fine, healthy!

– Have you seen her? But how is she?

– She waited for you until a year ago. The rumour that you died has disappeared. We all advised her to get married, it was enough for her to wait eighteen years for you!

– So? I asked.

– And she has found a decent man to marry!

I bowed my head and burst into a deep, deep cry that will never leave my soul. Everything was a mess, a ruin, a wreck, and I was a sham, an apparition, a chimera.

I left myself at the mercy of my relatives. Hand in hand with two old men, I set off into a new, hostile, desolate world.

(Return to Christ. Document for a new world, Ed. Bonifaciu, Bacău, 2012, pp. 217-220)