“We have lost the best of us” – echoes of Mircea Vulcănescu’s death in Aiud prison

During my time at Aiud prison, as in other prisons I’ve been in, there was a severe lack of medicine. The few that were available were kept under lock and key by Doctor Ranca, the head of the hospital, who distributed them very sparingly. Cases that broke out during the night couldn’t be treated at all. People died one by one, as happened to Mircea Vulcănescu, Dr. Balaban Constantin, Anghel Sebe, and others, hundreds and perhaps thousands, unknown in all the prisons in the country.

[…] When Mircea Vulcănescu, the leader of his generation, passed away, people spoke about and commented on his case with a lot of anger. If he’d had a few sulfonamides, he could have been saved. The same goes for Dr. Balaban in Constanța. During that period, I had the chance to chat with a number of people from Mircea Vulcănescu’s generation: Dumitru Iordan, Nicu Iunian, Corneliu Velțianu, Petre Țuțea, and so on. 

I actually lived with the first three in the same cell. The others and I met during the fresh air break, in the courtyard of the third ward. For days on end, when they met, they asked each other questions: Did you hear the news? Mircea Vulcănescu passed away. Those who hadn’t met him were keen to find out more about him and the circumstances around his death. Many of them ended up saying something like, “Mircea was the best of our generation” or “We lost the best of us.”

(Ion Antohe – Rejections in Romania after Yalta, Albatros Publishing House, Bucharest, 1995, pp. 152-153)