“This was my wife. She neglected her life to save ours.”
Dear Mrs. Monica and Mr. Dinu[1],
It’s been more than a year since my wife died and I still can’t recover from the grief that has overwhelmed me.
I can’t believe that she is gone forever and that I will never see her again. I look around and everywhere I see things that belonged to her.
Here is the bed where she died after a night of vigil and deep silence. On the rack hangs the dress she wore every morning. In one corner of the room, a modest cupboard with all sorts of trinkets, including the glasses she used almost every day at the sewing machine. She worked for no one but her family. I searched the cupboard and found her mended pyjamas and shirts. One evening, wearing a pair of pyjamas that she had skilfully repaired with several patches, I said to my two daughters who were staying with me that evening:
– “I’m going to wear these pyjamas until the patches come off”. I was very emotional and could hardly hold back my tears. At 3.10am I was awakened by the surprisingly clear voice of my wife: “Why are you wearing these pyjamas, you have good pyjamas in your wardrobe!
Stunned and deeply surprised by the clarity of her voice, I hurriedly and heartbrokenly replied, “I will never wear them again.
I really wanted her to speak, to tell me something more, but her words faded, disappeared, like a long echo, going somewhere, far away, towards eternity…
I remained at the edge of the bed, in perfect wakefulness, tears streaming down my cheeks.
My first thought was to wake my daughters, but they slept too soundly and deeply and I couldn’t bear it. I stayed awake until dawn, lost in a whirlpool of thoughts.
Since then I have had three more encounters on the invisible path of the beyond. I am now convinced, after these events, that the human soul is immortal and that those on the other side watch over us, guide us, see us every moment, day and night, stop us in time from doing evil and constantly urge us to walk only the path of good.
“Great and wonderful are the works of your hands, O Lord; you have made all things in wisdom, and the earth is full of your mercy. (So says the Psalmist).
In the following, I will refer to the sufferings of my tormented wife throughout my imprisonment.
She had two daughters to send to school. She had a husband of whom she knew nothing for years, thrown somewhere far away in the cellar of a prison. How could she survive? She walked down the street, full of thoughts, and when she met a friend of mine, he walked away.
Years later, my wife would sometimes tell me:
– After you were arrested, your salary stopped from the first day. No one could support me. And even if someone wanted to help me, they were afraid to. I had no choice but to help myself. I had my mother’s sewing machine in the house. I worked day and night on that machine, making little things for the children: little shirts, briefs, hats, but what I made was not enough. I had the ambition that my daughters would not miss out on anything at school. I didn’t want them to have to beg their classmates for pencils, ink, pens, notebooks or books. When I realised that I couldn’t do it with my fingers alone, I started selling. First I sold the beehives. Then a piece of land. In the summer, during the holidays, I took my girls to work at Fruct – Export, where my brother Costel Dumitrescu was in charge. And so, year after year, we went through all the hardships”.
But I was not forgotten. I was arrested for the first time on 20 July 1952 and sent to work on the canal. It was very hard work. They didn’t give us any equipment for such work. We worked in the clothes we were given. In the autumn of 1952 it rained like never before. Many people came in sandals and summer clothes.
The rains, which began in September, brought early and very cold fog. You could see people on the building sites with handkerchiefs on their heads instead of hats, and on their feet sandals or summer shoes wrapped in rags and tied with wires to keep them on their feet.
I had the foresight to take my hat, coat and boots with me when I was arrested. But in three months of superhuman work on the Galeș Coast they had deteriorated to the point of being almost unusable. The boots were leaking, the coat was torn in several places and rain was dripping through the cap. Hunger added to the misery.
The Canal Administration, seeing that the rules could no longer be obtained at Galeș, ordered the prisoners there to be transferred to the Peninsula (Black Valley) camp. So at 2pm on 16 November, the 3,000 Galeș prisoners formed a one-kilometre convoy and set off for the Peninsula. It was a convoy of ghosts, not human beings.
Much later I heard that the commandant of the Galeș Coast camp had been sentenced to 25 years’ hard labour for inhumane acts.
He had the rank of lieutenant major and his name was Petrică. When we entered the Galeș camp on 14 August 1952, he gave us the following speech:
– “You have been brought here to work. As you work, you will regain your freedom. Do not forget that you are the worst of society, the scum of society, the scum, the scum of the world, you are the scum of the earth. You will work in the rubbish dumps. You’ll be assigned four men to a wagon. The wagon will be unloaded in 36 minutes. Anyone who is late will be severely punished. We don’t care if some of you die. If five hundred of you die one day, we’ll make a report and be done with you.
I thought to myself: only God can get us out of this mess.
I should mention that among these “scum of society” at least 50% were intellectuals: engineers, doctors, professors, priests, lawyers, teachers.
The convoy of three thousand prisoners heading for the peninsula no longer seemed to be a convoy of people, but of ghosts. The distance between Galeș and the peninsula was only 5 km. We covered it in 3 hours. It was like walking after death. In the evening we arrived at the camp on the Peninsula, run by the Jew Lazarus, where the work and food regime was more bearable.
At the beginning of December we were given a c.p. (postcard – n.n.) to write home so that they could send us urgent winter clothes, medicine and basic food.
It was clear that after destroying us, they were going to destroy our families. How were our poor families going to buy winter clothes, medicines and basic food when they did not have these things?
And yet, around the beginning of January 1953, my name was among those called to come and collect their parcels.
A bitter reproach blackened my soul. I shouldn’t have written to them. But I consoled myself and tried to soothe this reproach, thinking that the letter was a sign that I was still alive. Especially since a parcel sent to Galeș had been returned by the camp administration, so that the family would think I was no longer among the living.
When I opened the food parcel I found: ham, breadcrumbs, cubes of sugar, honey, smoked meat (a total of 5 kg, as much as the camp authorities had allowed).
In the clothing box I found: a cap, brand new boots, 2 pairs of woollen socks, 2 pairs of woollen gloves, 2 shirts, 2 pairs of woollen underpants, a woollen flannel, a woollen scarf and, what saved my life, a brand new pair of stockings. When I saw all this, I said: “My God, what has she bought them with?
When, after the closure of the canal (18 July 1953), we were transferred to Borzești, where work was being done on a large combined factory, we were told to write home because we had the right to speak. (This was after Stalin’s death on 5 March 1953).
Together with her sister-in-law, Elena Dumitrescu, my devoted wife came to Borzesti, to the spokesman, twice, loaded with everything. That was my wife. She neglected her own life to save ours: mine and my two daughters, whom she looked after like the apple of her eye. In those hard years she ruined her health. Her life was an ordeal. She didn’t know comfort or care.
When her illness began to make her anxious and desperate, she was taken to doctors and hospitals for a year and a half.
When the presence of atypical cells was discovered during one of the medical examinations in a hospital in Galați, we all realised that her end was near. The cruel and relentless cirrhosis had set in.
For two weeks she had insisted on being taken to Bucharest for an operation. She wanted to live. Her last hope was with Dr. Racoviță from Vidra. The doctor came, listened to her with great kindness and attention, but could only say words of encouragement. She spoke to the doctor for half an hour, describing her suffering in detail.
In the end she begged the doctor: “Save me, doctor, save me”.
It was three days before she died…
On the last day, the great feast of the Assumption, she asked to be moved to a back room where it was cooler. There she continued to rehearse: “How nice it is here, how nice it is here! In the evening she asked to be taken back to her bed.
During the night she coughed up a dewy liquid from the corners of her mouth. She stopped talking.
At five o’clock in the morning on the 16th of August she went out slowly, like a candle whose oil had run out.
She was a worthy wife, she was a martyr throughout my imprisonment, she was a character pleasing to men and to God.
With best wishes, Const. Caragață,
Tichiriș, 5 October 2001
(Costache Caragață – Notebooks of Sadness. Însemnările unui învătator în cătușe pentru copiii liberi, edited by Gheorghe Nadoleanu, 2010, pp. 261-269 apud Aldine Magazine, no. 313, 20 April 2002, p. 4)
[1] The letter is addressed to the daughter and son-in-law of the poet Radu Gyr, for whom the teacher had a true cult.