NOTE 2/20/23: A very-rough-draft of a short assignment for Edwin Torres’ Brainlingo class. The interview text comes from my dissertation. The other text (denoted with quotation marks and a paragraph indentation) comes from a few Amnesty International reports about Romania that I managed to find online.
I read this text aloud whilst a series of images were passed around in our class circle. You may listen to a recording below and you may view the images at the bottom of this page. The images include peasant farmers, city folk in queues, youth in dormitories.
*I’ve opted to share this draft as I’d submitted it for class—as such, it is extremely exploratory and the images are for private use (i.e., there would be use-rights protocols for anything beyond the private-use sphere)—consequently, I’ll be removing this webpage once the Dean’s Grant application process is over.
Interviewer: Let us begin with your earliest memories. What do you remember of your childhood?
ION b. 1949 Crețești : My childhood was not out of bounds of what was common. We were not very poor but we also did not have any excess. We had pigs, we had chickens for eggs, there were no refrigerators back then, but everything was assured.
“The Socialist Republic of Romania is in southeast Europe: it is bounded by the Soviet Union, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and the Black Sea.”
16 May 1966
“The problems, needs, and shortcomings of current Information Reporting are so complex—“
“First, I consider it extremely difficult to separate—“
“To put the heart of the problem in the simplest terms, I believe—“
“—in past years—the number of refugees dropped drastically at a time when the regime presses and radios were becoming more informant.”
“In these terms the reduction appears justified, but it did not take into consideration the fact that, at the same time,—“
Did you ever feel as though you were living in a communist society, or how did you feel, how was it then?
*
Nitu: It was [there was] back then—
Livia: Well, I did not feel this, because I was born, I went to kindergarten, I went to school...I completed high school, then I went in to work, I got married, I went in to work, I had kids.
“Let the figures speak for themselves”
Maria: I had a friend who worked at the meat shop. There was a summer salami that cost sixty-four lei, and on the phone my friend would say, hey someone is coming, make sure to give her eight times eight, because eight times eight is sixty-four—and so you would not say make sure to give her so many roles of salami. Things were said, like that, in code.
Year: 1963 — Reports received: 949
Year: 1964 — Reports received: 504
Year: 1965 — Reports received: 277
Year: 1966 — Reports received: 75
“Whereas in the 1950’s there were Rumanian reporters and stringers in Athens and Salonica, Istanbul, Israel, Vienna, Salzburg, Linz, Munich, Frankfurt—Bonn, Berlin, Rome, Trieste, Paris, Brussels, London and Stockholm, today there is only one reporter — in Paris.”
*
How did you feel about all of this?
*
Mioara: I didn’t like it but ”nu aveam în cotro” [I didn’t have any other way], you were somewhere “încolțit” [cornered], there was nothing you could do, you didn’t have any sort of information from the outside, you didn’t have information; you’d listen to Europa Libera (Radio Free Europe) but you didn’t have information, you didn’t know how it was in other parts, you believed that this is how it should be.
“There are no statistics available on the number of Rumanians traveling to the west—”"
They have closed the country! They have closed the borders!
Amnesty says:
“A 56-year-old building worker makes a speech and distributes leaflets criticizing President Ceausescu — he is sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment for ‘propaganda against the socialist state’…”
Amnesty says:
“A teacher complains to a foreign radio station that he was unfairly dismissed from his job — he later dies in prison while serving an eight-year sentence for ‘disparaging the central organs of the party and the state’…”
The Central Organs
Maria: My dad, he was a butcher, and he’d cut a veal, hidden, you know. So we had, you know, meat when he’d cut some, but it was done with fear.
And for Christmas, one time, the police officers knew that people would cut a pig to have more sausages or to smoke, so it would keep for next year. And someone ratted my father out, for cutting a veal, but he really hadn’t, he hadn’t cut one that time. And the police came and they searched through everything in order to find the skin of the animal because they said that was the proof that you’d cut the animal.
What were they afraid of?
*
Ion: They were afraid because a terror was instituted, a fear of those in charge because they could, at any time, judge you as an instigator, as a human who was against how things were. And so, then, people were quiet, they spoke quietly among themselves. But there wasn’t a public activity, to go in public and say something, to address someone like it is now—”I have the right to express my opinion in public”—no, then it wasn’t like this.
*
And you remember thinking that this is how it has to be?
*
Mioara: Yes, yes.
My ex-husband would listen to Europa Libera (Radio Free Europe), but softly with the radio underneath the covers. That is, for instance, how we heard about the uprisings in Timișoara on the 16th of December, because it certainly was not televised.
*
How was that: to be afraid that someone is listening in when you’re already under the covers, in your own house, it is a bit, not necessarily extreme, but a bit extreme.
*
Mioara: So he would listen to Europa Libera (Radio Free Europe), quietly, on a battery powered radio, and while the tenants were there very quietly. What you knew to not be allowed you would do in moderation and with ochii-n paișpe (eyes highly alert, spread out in fourteen directions). And at that time, listening to Europa Libera (Radio Free Europe) was clearly banned and prison was certain if they’d catch you [listening to it].
*
So the fear was that they would imprison you?
*
Mioara: Yes but not only that, even if they simply took you [but did not imprison you] te bătea de te rupea, they would beat you senseless, to the point of breakage. Understand?
*
So it was a corporal fear.
*
Mioara: Because, perhaps, they would not have anything to do from a legal point of view, but beat you they would.
*
And you wouldn’t have anything to do about it?
*
Mioara: What could you do about it? What could you do about it?
Gabriela: You were not allowed to buy gold. I was at a market in St. Petersburg [on a group vacation] when I saw some lovely necklaces before which the grams were written, and I took the grams to mean the price: I said [to myself that] it was a ruble, two [rubles]. Anyway, I go to the saleslady, because everything was quick, everything was moving quickly to buy to sell, and I tell her “Va” and she says “Neihman Va.” I repeat “Va,” I mean if I want two…anyway…I communicate through gesticulations with her and finally I see her taking out a receipt pad (to fill out); when I saw that receipt pad, in my head I said “gold”, and I did not know how to run—I did not get them, of course, I did not even know how much they cost—I did not know how [fast] to run and I had an extraordinary fear that somehow someone might have reported me at the airport and held me up for control (inspection) [there]...[I was imagining that at the jewelry market] they’d photographed me, they’d whatever.
Also, with this theme of fear, which remained, and which was within us, because in fact it was a defense mechanism, because it could have happened at any time and to anyone and anywhere…special motives were not necessary in order for them to do something, meaning to arrest you, to whatnot.
*
And who? To arrest you [I mean].
*
Gabriela: In your own country, one would come and they would arrest you…I did not live this experience, but it was possible, or you would disappear (be disappeared), or I don’t know what.
“Amnesty International has received many allegations of prisoners of conscience and other political prisoners being ill-treated during pre-trial detention in order to coerce them into making confessions. In some instances political prisoners are reported to have been tortured, including by being beaten on the soles of the feet, being kicked and being beaten with rubber truncheons. Two prisoners are reported to have died after torture. After one death, in 1985, the prisoner’s family was allowed only a brief view of the body before it was cremated. Relatives said they saw bloodstains on his shirt and injuries to the dead man’s left temple — but the authorities claimed he died of ‘heart failure.”
Gabriela: When you live it [your life], you don’t dream of a change and you accept [things]. You don’t know of other levels and so you accept, with a lot of ease, that this is the only path possible. (For instance, when I was born in 1941) even though there was a war, it seemed to me that this is how it is because there’s a war. You can’t philosophize, you can’t get outside of…you’re within the aquarium in which you’re born and you perceive things from that perspective.
