29 - The Ordeal

Summary

I was in my study at eleven o’clock in the morning on April 14, 1948, when a Securitate inspector rang the door bell and “invited” me to General Inspector Patriciu's office to provide him with some information on the Romanian-American Association. He spoke broken Romanian.

I turned to my wife and asked her to prepare my hunting bag with the necessary clothing.

“But, professor and dear madam, I give you my word, this is not an arrest, otherwise we’d have come at night, and there would be more of us. As you see, I came alone, because this is only about some information requested by the Ministry of the Interior.”

I got my heavy hunting coat, attaching its fur lining, even though it was warm outside.

At Securitate headquarters on Republic Street I was taken to the waiting room, not to the holding cells in the basement.

“Please have a seat until I tell comrade General Inspector,” the officer who had brought me said.

“Is it true, what he told me at home?” I asked myself.

In a few minutes, another officer came out of the general inspector's office, Breiner, whom I knew.

“Take the professor to the holding cells, like any other detainee,” he told the duty sergeant.

The building housing the Securitate Inspectorate had belonged to the Cluj Army Corps, and had moved to this new home only two or three months before. In its cellar they had built around twenty to thirty cells, one meter wide and two meters long, and the concrete walls were still wet. Inside each was a long wooden bunk one and a half meters long and twenty-five to thirty centimeters wide. An unpainted wooden door opened into the narrow corridor between the cells. The air came in under the door. In the first few instants the darkness was pitch-black. I sat down on the bunk to compose myself. I was remembering the moment I had taken leave of my wife. The children were fortunately in school, so the pain of separation was less. I also saw the school in Obreja once again, where I studied when I was as little as they were. However, desperation did not grip me, the proof of that being that after half an hour I stretched out on the bunk and went to sleep.