The silence before the storm

On the red, plush, carpeted stairs, my feet sank comfortably and gently.

I climbed up, held by the hands of two strong young men, who took me by the arms and placed me in front of a massive, very elegant desk, behind which a man of about fifty, with a white left eyelash – a detail I should remember – was biting his pen thoughtfully.

A sign and I was alone with Colonel Socol, the Securitate commander of Dolja in 1958.

“So you are Ilie Tudor?”

I looked at him carefully. A choleric face with cold, spiteful eyes was staring at me… He smiled crookedly at my silence.

“What do you know about Gavrilescu?”

I was silent. His white brow flinched.

“- I asked you what you know about Gavrilescu…”

“- Ask Lieutenant Bușu…”

He pressed the button under the table top and a few seconds later the young lieutenant was tapping his heels in an upright position.

“- Do you know him?”

“- No, Comrade Colonel!”

He didn’t know me…??!!!! He had arrested me, he was the ordained sector officer in our commune. A cold shiver ran down my spine. In an instant I understood what he was up to. I swallowed hard. The silence began to hurt. I understood the theatre that was taking place. The flurry of thoughts that wanted to be white overwhelmed me.

Perhaps it was then that fate placed the darkness in my thoughts to interrupt my flight, to leave my children on the road and to scatter all my sense for as long as it lasted.

I hardly noticed how great and powerful villainy is in the world, especially when it has total power as its ally.

Yes!!! I was to be condemned along with the 23 young students and pupils with whom, it’s true, I had discussed how to organise resistance against the terror that had gripped the country since 1946.

Among us was the eminent professor Nicolae Julea and others whom I had not met. We knew only two or three of them. Late, in the dungeon, we understood how we had been discovered. It’s not hard to understand that Judas was present here too, and the hand of Securitate, whose potential we had underestimated, took us unprepared.

I had to sign that we were planning to organise armed resistance, to overthrow the government by armed force. Poor naive people…!!!! I didn’t know who I was dealing with. It was nothing concrete. We had no experience. All eyes were on me.

– You…!!! say you were a legionnaire, you can’t not know how it’s done…

I knew and I didn’t know. The proof is that we couldn’t do anything, one night they took us all.

(Ilie Tudor – De sub tăvălug, 3rd edition, MJM Publishing House, Constanța, 2010, pp. 14-15)