CHAPTER X

THE STAGES

"I, the undersigned bandit (Name and biographical data inserted here) unmask!"

Thus began the "declaration" that was to take the student who consented to make it (and who could refuse?) down the road of degradation to an enforced, inhuman transformation of character inconceivable to a normal human being. Until this declaration was made, the student had somehow kept some part of his personality intact his soul proper was not irremediably affected, or so the unmaskers thought. He would not yet readily betray those whom he, though under torture, had managed to protect during the Securitate's investigations.

The real tragedy, however, began immediately following the "outer" unmasking, and the "prison activity. " It was necessary in the project to repress any tendency to return to an anti-Marxist equilibrium, which was based on the following principles of life: faith in God, tradition and family; trust in the political personalities who led the anti-Communist resistance materially and morally; friendship; love in its usual worldly sense and love of mankind in general; and, finally, one's own ego, with its own intimate life and its anxieties. Such, in fact, were the pillars sustaining the Romanian people, which was born Christian, you might say. There is no recorded historical date of a transition from an earlier faith to Christianity, as in the case of most European peoples. When the fusion of conquering Romans and vanquished Dacians was consummated, the resulting nation was both Christian and Romanian at the same time. From the moment of entering history to the present day, with very few periods of peace in a long chain of painful tribulations, the Romanian people defended equally their own independence as a nation and their Christian faith -- a Latin island lost in a Slavic sea.

Attacked throughout the centuries by all nations which it has had the misfortune to have as neighbors, Romania alone has never nourished any desire for conquest. Her struggles have been for defense, for inner living, for getting closer to God. For the Romanian, altar and plowed land blend together. When no ray of hope, of help, came from anywhere, the Romanian has knelt in front of the despoiled altar to invoke God's help. Innumerable monasteries, retreats, and crosses set up throughout the countryside, at almost every crossroad, are proofs of the place God occupies in the life of the Romanian people. This faith constituted, and constitutes even today, one of the strongest supports of the resistance to Communism. Romanians have today gathered in the shadows of the altar, even though they know it to be the greatest of risks, whose consequences cannot be guessed at by one who has not actually lived today's drama of our people.

If the Communists have not bothered the Church officially, it is because they feared the consequences. Uprisings in the name of one's faith, especially if supported by a nation in the throes of despair, are much more dangerous than those of a strictly social-economic nature. So out in the country, the Church was perforce allowed to function within certain limits, but such toleration inside the prison walls was out of the question. The churches of the old Aiud prison, for instance, were transformed into coal-bins (the Eastern Orthodox), oats-bins for horses (the Catholic) and a wood-shed (Protestant). The priests not only had no place to officiate, but they were even forbidden to hold services in the cells.

In Pitesti prison the terror exceeded all limits, as this was the place where the prime guinea pigs, the students, were brought. The cruelest torments fell upon the heads of the "mystic" groups made up of the more intensely religious students, who had been first imprisoned by Antonescu following the so-called "rebellion" of Jan. 21-24, 1941. Their numbers were later augmented with numerous freshly arrested students, particularly from the Faculties of Theology and Philosophy in Bucharest, Cluj and Timisoara Universities. This persecution of Christian students, in intensity, length of time and more particularly in method, perhaps surpassed that of the early Christian martyrs who died in the arenas on crosses or at the stake, in pits with wild beasts, or as human torches, giving up the ghost in a matter of minutes. In Pitesti, the martyrdom lasted for months, hour after hour.

What heathen emperors had demanded of the martyrs renunciation of faith, denial of God and of Jesus -- was forcibly induced in prisoners. A simple denial, a formal promise not to believe or pray or fight for this "false" faith, was not enough. It had to be accompanied by a whole set of proofs, including first of all the ridiculing of the Savior's name by use of the most insulting epithets. Some accordingly alleged that Christ spent the first thirty years of His life in India learning to be a fakir; others said He was a quack, a cheat and speculator in the faith and superstition of the people, who were kept uneducated by the priests. Some denied His historical existence. Others presented Him is a utopian socialist revolutionary, initially animated by good intentions but in the end coveting the throne of Judea; they said His condemnation resulted from a power struggle between Him and leaders of the Hebrew people, who were subservient to and thus accomplices of the Romans! His morals were placed under the microscope, and Gospel references to Mary Magdalene interpreted to mean the relationship was one of worldly love. The Virgin Mary, His Mother, was labeled a woman of loose morals who deserved not sanctification but a prison sentence for adultery. And through it all, the Leninist slogan, "Christian superstition, the opiate of the people" was the constant theme.

In order to extinguish the last trace of respect for holy things, ritual parodies of all Christian ceremonies were arranged, with students of theology compelled to modify prayer texts, substituting vulgar oaths for religious phrases. Holy Week and Easter were made occasions of particular vilification by the O. D. C. C.

The "rehabilitated" were often obliged, if they did not proceed on their own initiative, to stage spiritual orgies ridiculing Jesus. I shall relate only one scene of many. It took place in the section occupied by those condemned to hard labor, at Easter 1950.

"Christ's robe," as the students called it, was improvised from a few white shirts and bed sheets. Out of the soap used for inscribing declarations a masculine genital organ was made and the theology student chosen to play the part of Jesus was forced to hang it around his neck. He was compelled to walk about the room, receiving severe blows from broomsticks, to symbolize the road to Golgotha. He was finally stopped by the window. There the rest of the students had to file past him, making the sign of the cross and kissing the piece of soap, exclaiming, "I pray to your omnipotence, only true master of those who believe," etc.

There was only one, a youth named B., who refused to stoop to this sacrilege. He was only a high-school student, and although tortured for hours in front of the others in order to force him to do it, he stood firm. Finally it was the re-educators who gave up, but no one could find out what made them stop. This conduct was particularly strange, it being the first time the tormentors had stopped short of achieving complete obedience to their commands. Could it be that perhaps the tender age of the youth had aroused in their dry, and at the same time terrorized, souls, a trace of pity? If so, the tender age did not deter them from bludgeoning B. into unconsciousness several times.

The individual who related this event to me was at the time sharing B's cell, and he was himself a participating victim. I asked him how he felt when he saw that a man younger than himself and not having his ideological background could have the strength to refuse till the end.

"At first, pity," he said, "because of the way he was tortured; then a kind of anger seeing that he did not give in; and finally shame and contempt toward myself. At the moment I became aware of the implications of harboring these thoughts, I experienced a real shock of terror. If the person who had unmasked me, still in our cell, could have learned my thoughts at that moment, he would have ripped me to pieces. "

"How could he find out," I asked, "if this was only a thought?"

"All he had to do was to place me in the unmasking position and ask me to reveal my thoughts at the time B. was refusing. In the end, I am sure I would have told ... "

Such travesties of this sort, some even more vile, were enacted in all cells Sunday after Sunday. Each religious holiday was an occasion for some novel profanation.

Those who were undergoing unmaskings were watched closely especially in the evening, because they were then permitted to lie down in bed and might seek solace in their faith. A far-away look, prolonged staring at the ceiling, a look of serenity -- any of these was considered sufficient indication of prayer, and he who was caught in such an attitude was brought back to reality by a powerful bludgeon on his ankle bones. Next morning the victim so surprised received from the committee his due.

A simple trembling of the lips was considered the equivalent to praying aloud. The morning beating was mandatorily followed by a declaration made in front of all, in which the inmate in question had to admit he erred, that the "bandit" within him was not yet vanquished, that he had committed an unspeakable crime, and that he promised never even to think of praying again; and furthermore that if he should catch someone else seeming to commit the same crime of praying in bed, he would report him mercilessly and thus help rid himself of "banditism" sooner.

All students were forced to deny and revile Christianity, whether they believed in God or not.

The Church had to be denounced as an organization under whose mask of faith swindles were perpetrated, plots were hatched, extra-marital rendezvous were arranged with the priest's cooperation, young girls were corrupted, women came to show off and men to seek bodies. Or the Church was described as the place where the fight against the Communist Party was organized, where, in the shadow of the holy icons, arrangements were made for the assassination of the leaders of the working people, etc. As there were no priests among the students imprisoned at Pitesti, the O. D. C. C. 's anger was directed against the sons of priests. Through their mouths must the Church be denigrated; they themselves must delineate their fathers in the blackest possible terms, so that the others would have this information from "eyewitnesses. "

Jokes and anecdotes about the clergy, that were making the rounds of Romanian villages, were now naturally given the stamp of authenticity. The priest had to be described as a drunkard, skirt-chaser, card player, and thief, contemptuous of the misery of the people (and especially the peasants), an inveterate liar who had sold out to the class of capitalist exploiters, had been an agent of the Nazis or of the former Securitate, and was in fact responsible for the complete breakdown of village morality.

For all these epithets, proofs had to be found; whoever supplied the "proofs" had to sound convincing so that his revelations would lead to other unmaskings. Both those who made the required statements and those who directed the unmaskings knew that the testimony was absurd, but the more monstrous these inventions were, the more pleased were the unmaskers. Such lies made it impossible for those who told them to look parents or friends in the eye ever again, or step over the threshold of a church, if they ever regained their freedom. The memory of unmaskings would be a lingering torture after their liberation.

The second principal element in the destruction of faith was denigration of the monastic life. Students were forced to say that they heard things "with their own ears," and saw things "with their own eyes. " Any monk being discussed had to have on his record at least several adulterous affairs in the villages near his monastery; the nuns several abortions! Among the stories told by a student from Moldavia, I shall mention the following monstrous lies. He said that at the request of a high dignitary (whose name escaped him!) a small lake in the neighborhood of a convent was drained. On the bottom were found several hundred skeletons of newborn infants, who had, of course, been drowned so as not to compromise the convent. All this was done with the connivance of the Mother Superior and the leading heads of the Church. If the whole affair was hushed up, it was because the hierarchy desired it! Nothing was done to stop this lustful life, in fact it was encouraged, and the only one to suffer was the individual who demanded an investigation!

As to the monks, it was positively affirmed that they were all spies for secret American agencies, they would hide parachutists who came to commit acts of political and military sabotage; they used their monasteries as storage places for weapons to be used the moment war should break out; problems of faith concerned them not at all; persons wanted by the Securitate for anti-Communist activity were given food and shelter by the monks; all in all, the monks should be considered highway robbers rather than servants of the people.

In order to make students bear witness to such things, a whole gamut of tortures was necessary. But in this way, the first stage of the inner unmasking, that of breaking away from God, was accomplished. Thus, the students were sufficiently prepared to go on to the second stage, the breakaway from tradition.

The education of students, structured on everything they had already learned in the home, was based on the cultivation of a healthy rural tradition on the one hand, and a historical one on the other. The roots of the past were the foundation on which the Romanian people leaned in time of vicissitude and trial. Remembering the past of their nation, Romanians confront the trials of today with faith and hope for future freedom. Especially in rural environments one finds even today traditional conservatism so deeply rooted that it is the peasants or the peasants' sons who give Moscovites the worst headaches.

Coming from such a background, the students in colleges kept unaltered their rural culture and tradition. Their advanced education merely added the scientific and historical knowledge needed to bolster their convictions.

Communist propaganda said that the majority of school children come from the middle and upper classes and that the schools, like other institutions, were unequivocally in the service of the ruling class. Previous to 1944, say the Communists, the school was a reactionary institution whose purpose was not to prepare and educate "the sons of the people," but to prepare the recruits for the ruling class to assure continuity of the regime in power. If they thought it not feasible or desirable to denigrate some well-known representative of the intellectual world, they described him as a rare exception to the general rule.

The following cliches about the academic system were repeated ad infinitum: "It was in the service of imperialism;" "It sowed discord among ethnic minorities; falsified history;" "It altered the student's soul by a chauvinistic education which neglected every scientific criterion;" "It ideologically nourished hatred of the Russian people in the past, now hatred of Communism;" "It supported the Fascist war of 1941-44;" "It falsified the fact that the Czar helped in gaining our independence in 1877, presenting the opposite of the truth. " (With regard to this last, no Romanian student was unfamiliar with the historical fact that it was the intervention of Bismarck that induced the Russians to withdraw from our Principalities[1] in 1880, and that, instead of being thankful for our help in the war against the Turks, they took away from us again the three counties in Bessarabia! [2] The students also knew all too well that in 1924 Communist agents attempted an insurrection in the Romanian province of Bessarabia -- the same Bessarabia that was to be kidnapped for the third time in 1940, then again in 1944! [3]

The school was also reproached for infecting children with Christian mysticism, causing religious fanaticism and intolerance; for cultivating superstition in order to keep the people in the dark and thus afford reactionaries the opportunity to oppress the people more easily; and for "deforming history" to create "nationalism. " Beginning with the elementary school teachers, and going all the way up to university professors, everything that contributed to the education of youth was "corrupt, sold out, immoral, and opportunistic. " The main preoccupation of educators was not quality of education but their own careers, in particular their political careers, and the school was used as a jumping board from which to spring to more interesting and remunerative positions.

Anecdotes were presented as fact, jokes were used as irrefutable argument. If, for instance, a story was told of a teacher "accepting a bribe" from a pupil for promoting him, it was implied that all teachers did the same thing. Those most blamed for "indoctrinating" students were, of course, the university professors. Naturally, explained the Communists, it was only because of such influential educators that there could possibly be such a large number of students who opposed the Communist Party and showed themselves enemies of the people and of scientific-realist-socialist progress!

The attack on learning opened the way for attacks on the creative elements in art and literature. If the writers did not reflect "social reality" in their works, it was becausa their education had detached them from the real problems that had to be dealt with in literature. If poetry was symbolic, or folkish, or philosophical, the school was responsible for this also. If a great part of novelists' creations had a nationalistic character, that proved the guilt of their teachers. Not even Eminescu, [4] whose memory the Communists did not dare to denigrate publicly, was exempt from such criticism.

History also came under attack, especially that covering the monarchial period. The O. D. C. C. had high on its list for destruction all sentiment of loyalty to the monarchy. Of course, really damaging material was not lacking -- the scandals of Carol II, his ten years of embezzlement of public funds, the murder of Codreanu and other officers of the Legion in prison, or the massacre en masse of Codreanu's followers throughout the country on one night in 1939. [5] The Communists did not think it important to mention that before Carol Romania had two highly respected and beloved kings; Carol's character and crimes were attributed to both. To further undermine loyalist sentiment, specious arguments were cited from Communist history to the glorification of Stalin.

Up to this point, the trials which the student had to undergo following his outer unmasking (physical torture in particular), were somehow relatively impersonal, external forces, even when they touched on faith. But now came the most painful phase of all, and the decisive blow.

The student had to renounce his own family, reviling them in such foul and hideous terms that it would be next to impossible ever to return to natural feelings toward them again.

Although the most beautiful pages ever written have been in praise of a mother, at Pitesti the most offensive of words were uttered to degrade her name. The prime character which a student had to attribute to his mother during his unmasking was that of a prostitute; and since only a moral prostitute could give birth to a moral monster, all students before their unmaskings were, naturally, moral monsters. I shall give here, almost in his very words, the forced statement of a student, which he, with agony of the spirit, repeated for me more than two years after the frightful scene in a main-floor cell of the Pitesti prison, where the "unmasking of his family" took place.

"I am the son of a fairly rich family in ____ ____. Of course the wealth amassed by my father is the fruit of embezzlement while he worked as a purchasing agent for the government. Having so much money at our disposal, we lived quite independent of one another, more so than you would imagine. My father, for instance, met a young woman who was married to a fellow government worker; he lived with her almost openly, sleeping at her place almost every night. Although he left the greater part of his earnings there, my mother did not object. On the contrary, she took advantage of the situation to find a friend for herself -- no other than my father's close associate. This was no secret to any of us, for before they retired alone, ofttimes they kissed in front of us and my father left them in peace, for he needed the freedom this afforded him to spend with his girl friend. My mother's friend had a daughter of about my age whom I knew better after my mother entered into intimate relations with him; she also came to see us often. Encouraged by both my mother and her father, I courted the girl and she did not repulse me; on the contrary, she seemed to expect my advances. The same relationship developed between us as existed between my mother and her father, who both encouraged us in our sexual relations; they said it was only in this way that I could overcome my social inhibitions. Once engaged in this sort of life, I introduced a student friend of mine to my sister, and I started inviting him over more often. After a while, there was no need for my invitations, for my sister brought him over herself, developing a relationship with him similar to that of the others in our circle. As a matter of fact, influenced by what she saw at home, she asked me to find her a friend of mine who was more 'virile. ' Oftentimes in our home orgies took place in which we all participated, exchanging roles and intermixing promiscuously in the dark. " I cannot bring myself to put down on paper the rest of the "testimony" he had to give at the orders of Turcanu.

When I asked him to try to explain to me why he said these things, he answered unhesitatingly, but with pain born of grief, that the only motivation was hope that it would mitigate his physical and moral suffering "in that hell. "

The father was likewise subjected to ridicule and opprobrium. The son's degree of guilt was measured by the status, attitude, and the family from which the father came. Peasant parents were no exception; they had to be portrayed in most despicable terms so the son would be shown to have inherited the character and personality of the one responsible for his physical and moral existence.

The father's shortcomings were determined by his occupation. If he was a simple peasant, then he must have been the servant of the "boyar," his informer, the denouncer of the other peasants who opposed exploitation. If he was a merchant, then he must have cheated on weight, selling cheap merchandise at high prices, failing to pay the clerks and laborers, beating them when they demanded their rights, or threatening to denounce them for Communist activity. If a teacher, he "falsified history," persecuted workingmen's sons, promoted students for bribes, made use of students as laborers in raising his cattle or in gardening, or making them work hard in difficult chores at his home so they could not study properly and were thus unable to compete with the sons of the wealthy. If he was a magistrate, he had sold justice for money and condemned workers to heavy sentences on false charges in order to suppress any social aspirations they might have had. When he presided at political trials, he was in league with the police and assisted in condemning unjustly at least several Communists. (The number of active Communists in all Romania had been only 822, according to the Party Secretary himself, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej!) Students whose parents were army officers were given special attention. The slanders contained in Zaharia Stancu's novel Barefoot or Eusebiu Camilar's The Mist, were almost pathologically exaggerated in order to demonstrate the guilt of "the military in oppressing the working class and provoking war against the Soviet Union. "

Among students undergoing unmasking, there were a few, a little older than the others, who came from the ranks of the military. Having been purged from the army when the Russians occupied Romania and having no other means of livelihood, the more courageous went to college to prepare themselves for another profession. In their unmaskings they were forced to relate fabricated events so dreadful that they could scarcely have been envisioned by the imagination of a sick man. The artillery captain Coriolan Coifan, now an engineering student fallen under the bludgeon of the re-educators, told of orgies that took place on the Eastern Front, unimaginable pillaging, numberless assassinations, fantastic rapes, wanton arson of workers' homes merely for the sadistic pleasure of seeing fires, and executions of women and children who were guiltless except of having been convinced Communists, "Stalin's children. "

Blaming parents for their children's faults, they tried to establish a "family culpability" complex to convince the student that he was but a victim of his elders, and thus hasten his breakdown. Here is an example to show how far they went:

When the political prisoners were sent to the Canal for work, their free relatives were permitted to visit them and bring packages of food and clothing, for that supplied by the administration was inadequate. A former military man named Dorneanu, who as a youth had joined the cadres of the Legionary Movement where he received an education that was staunchly Christian, patriotic and anti-Communist, received his mother on her first visit to the Canal with the following greeting: "Get out of here, you whore; it is because of the upbringing I received at home that I am now at the Canal. I do not want to see you again. I have no mother!"

Another student who had passed through Pitesti, Enachescu, derived a special pleasure, while at the Canal, whither he was sent following the unmaskings, in torturing his uncle, Pitigoi, a former National Peasant Party congressman, now himself also a slave-laborer. This the nephew did simply to demonstrate to the camp's administration that he definitively had broken with his family and the reactionary bourgeois way of thinking. The misfortune of the poor ex-congressman was thus all the worse for having been put in the brigade whose boss happened to be his re-educated nephew!

The degree of guilt ascribed to a parent was also determined by the "banditism" of which his imprisoned son was accused. The greater the contempt in which a student was held by the re-educators, the more he had to insult his parents, accusing them of heinous sins. The accusations had to be justified with "irrefutable" proofs, which oftentimes were so absurd as to have caused laughter anywhere but at Pitesti. Here is "the story about my father" as told by a high-school student who at the time of the unmaskings was no more than fifteen years old. It was told me by the boy himself in the prison at Gherla in July 1953.

"My father," he had said, "had a flour mill in X village in Muntenia; several peasants from neighboring villages worked at the mill, but none remained very long because my father replaced them frequently when they protested his failure to pay the wages agreed upon. In order to avoid being sued, he never signed contracts with them. He fed them from our leftovers, and mush from cornmeal like that used to feed hogs, which he raised nearby. They had to sleep in a stable, without any covering and on a thin layer of straw; worked 16-hour shifts with no rest other than the noon meal eaten in the mill at their working places. The work was very hard, consisting of unloading sacks, carrying them up to the hopper, and then loading the flour into freight cars or wagons. If father thought they were not working hard enough, he reduced the small wages they received; and if they protested, he beat them. When a worker threatened to sue him, he beat him unmercifully and denounced him to the gendarmes, accusing him of spreading Communist propaganda. The worker would be arrested and taken away. My father systematically cheated the peasants who brought in their grain to be milled. In order to get away with this, he made certain of the complicity of an older mill-hand by giving him his share of the 'profits. ' Scales were so rigged that when weighing in the grain, they showed less, and when weighing flour out, they showed more, than the actual amount in the sacks. When an unusual amount of flour was stolen, sand was substituted to make up for the lost weight. Peasants knew they were being cheated, but could not oppose him, for he was on excellent terms with the mayor and other authorities, who refused to permit operation of any but my father's mill in the village. Part of what my father stole went to the mayor and part to the gendarme chief; so if anyone complained, the matter went no further than the gendarmerie of the village. Because I was his only son and the heir to the mill, father began introducing me to the secrets of his occupation. He showed me how to rig the scale so it would read falsely, how to add sand to the flour, how to cheat in the process of drying grain to account for the moisture loss. "

After the boy related to me the story of his unmasking, I asked him how he could have fabricated such a story, for he said his father was guilty of none of the accusations he had invented.

"From the moment I realized I could no longer resist," he answered, "and that I too would have to tell about my father in the 'unmasking of the family's weaknesses,' as the committee head in our room was proud to say, it was quite simple. You see, during my childhood I often went to the mill. In the evenings an old miller, whom I liked, told me stories, among them that of Prince Charming and the Giant. I learned from these stories how the Giant always tortured those he caught and put them to work in his mills; how he fed them and how he beat them. Thus it was quite easy for me to substitute my father for the bad giant, and tell the story as if it happened at our mill.

"As for the 'political' slant, namely, that about denouncing his workers as Communists, or his arrangement with the gendarmes, I knew this before my arrest from the propaganda spread in villages by the agitators against the 'well-to-do,' the opponents of collectivization. The interesting part of it all is that in the same room with me were others who knew my father. None of them, not one, questioned my story. On the contrary, they affirmed that they knew these details, for their parents were among those cheated by my father.

"Every one of us knew we were all lying. But if by lying we could escape torture, then lie we would! If someone dared say I was lying, he would not have had the freedom to denigrate his own parents, for either I or someone else would have unmasked his lie. Even when one fellow who knew my family became head of the committee and I related -- at his request -- more lies, he dared not interrupt me. Because when he made his unmasking, I was present and I heard everything he told about his parents -- lies likewise. Thus we stuck together in lies and destroyed our souls only because we wanted to save our bodies. "

Each "confession" was "evaluated" by the re-education committee, whose members were now inflicting on others what they themselves had suffered a few months before, and were furthermore stimulated by a maddening fear lest they be condemned to pass through another unmasking, for any suspicion that they had been lenient in accepting a "confession" made too easily or without the maximum debasement of the person making it would be considered a grave relapse from their own state of "purification" and punished accordingly. When the committee was at last satisfied that the victim had done all that he could to defile his parents and himself with the vilest calumnies, to the truth of which he in his wretchedness would frantically swear, they judged him ready for the next lesson.

The victim was now stimulated to revile and defame with repeated and invented lies the teachers and writers under whose influence he had matured, and especially the political thinkers and leaders whom he had revered and followed.

Particular care was taken to befoul the reputation and character of three men of national prominence, two of whom were still alive, incarcerated in Communist prisons in which they would soon die, while the third, whose name the Communists most feared and liated, had at that time been dead for more than a decade. The three were: George Bratianu, who had been the head of the Liberal Dissident Party and was highly esteemed for patriotism and foresight; [6] Iuliu Maniu, the leader of the National Peasant Party, on whom, in the time between the Russian occupation and his imprisonment, had been centered the hopes of all Romanians for eventual liberation from the Communists; [7] and Corneliu Z. Codreanu, the educator of an entire generation of young men, to whom, after he was murdered in 1938, his spirit was ever present: he still lives in the heart and soul of all whom he inspired by his teaching and example. [8]

Each student, as part of his unmasking, had to give "lectures" in the most opprobrious and filthy terms about the men whom he had most venerated, accusing them of every conceivable vice and crime. Since the students were young and had only imperfect recollections of Romanian political history before their own experience began, the "lectures" were often ludicrous, containing accusations that were chronologically impossible or politically preposterous, based on a confusion of one man with another or of one event with another that happened years before or later.

Since Codreanu, the founder of the Legion, had had a moral and spiritual influence that transcended his political leadership and endured, undiminished, after his death, and since the elite among the students had dedicated themselves to the principles and ideals of the Legion, all the old slanders that had been contrived by the leftist and crypto-Communist press in his lifetime were endlessly repeated and, if possible, improved upon, and his living followers who had taken refuge in the West were similarly traduced and "presented in their true light. " [9]

In this unmasking, of course, everyone lied with a straight face and without the slightest trace of embarrassment. The lying not only served the purpose of Communist propaganda by heaping filth on the men who represented everything that was great and true in the culture arid history of the nation, leaving in the mind a void that would be filled by Soviet "internationalism," but, more important for the purposes of the experiment, it made the victim habitually and almost automatically subordinate truth to the most monstrous and absurd falsehood. The victim, now accustomed to sinking ever deeper into the quagmire by a kind of conditioned reflex, and conscious that he is destroying himself, despises and hates himself for his submission to what he cannot resist. He has thus been made ready for the final disintegration of himself: his "autobiography. "


1)

The autonomous principalities of Walachia and Moldavia were united in the person of their ruler when Alexander Cuza became Prince of both in 1859, but, at the insistence of the European powers, separate governments were maintained in the two principalities for some years thereafter. Romania became a kingdom in 1881.

2)

When Russia declared war on Turkey in 1877, Romania, although she had painful memories of the Russian occupation in 1853, which had been terminated only by Austrian protests and pressure, allied herself with Russia, permitted Russian troops to pass through her borders and base themselves on her territory, and sent into the field her army, under the command of Prince Charles. The Romanian troops compensated for the overconfidence and military ineptitude of the Russian forces, and thus made possible the Russian victory in 1878. Romania recovered some territory from Turkey, but Russia demanded from her ally the retrocession of Bessarabia, which had been a part of Moldavia since 1856 and had a population that was almost entirely Romanian. The Great Powers, who were most interested in forcing Romania to repeal provisions in her Constitution that restricted the power of resident Jews to control the country by financial manipulation, moral corruption, and political infiltration, abandoned Romania, which had to yield reluctantly to Russian demands and cede part of her territory to the erstwhile ally whom she had saved, if not from ultimate defeat, certainly from a prolonged and difficult war. Even then, Russia delayed withdrawal of the troops that she had brought into the territory of her ally during the war, and her claims were not finally settled until 1884. The conduct of Russia at this time was such that the Prime Minister of Great Britain, although himself a Jew residing in England, felt constrained to remark that "in politics ingratitude is often the reward of the greatest services. "

3)

Bessarabia was part of Moldavia since 1367. In the Sixteenth Century, Moldavia was subjugated by the Turks, who, in 1812, ceded Bessarabia to Russia. Southern Bessarabia was returned to Moldavia under the Treaty of Paris in 1856 and so became part of Romania, which, as has been described in the preceding note, was forced to cede the territory to Russia in 1878. After the Jews destroyed the Russian Empire in 1917-18, Bessarabia first declared itself independent as the Moldavian Republic and then reunited itself to Romania in 1920. The Jews resident in Bessarabia and trained Bolsheviks brought in from the Soviet attempted a revolt in 1924, but without success. In 1940, King Carol, ignoring the protests of the Legionary Movement, of many other patriots, and of his own army, supinely yielded to a Soviet demand and surrendered Bessarabia. The territory was regained by Romania in 1941 and remained a part of the nation until it was occupied by Soviet troops in 1944; it was formally ceded to the Soviet in 1947.

4)

Mihail (Michael) Eminescu, who was born in 1850 and died in 1889, has been compared to Byron, Heine, and Leopardi, and is generally regarded as the greatest of all Romanian poets. In his biography of Eminescu, Professor Miron Cristo-Loveanu says of him, "He unites and embodies the whole intellectual genius of his country. " An English translation of some of his poems was published at London in 1930. The almost universal veneration accorded Eminescu by the Romanian people made it impolitic for the Bolsheviks to denigrate his memory openly.

5)

See Cronologie Legionara, Munich, 1953, p. 182, which records for the night of Sept. 21-22, 1939, the murder of 252 Legionaries throughout the country, a few from each county plus others from three detention camps and a military hospital. (Tr. )

6)

He was especially known and respected for his strenuous efforts to prevent King Carol's capitulation to Soviet threats in 1940. He is not to be confused with his relative, Dino (Dinu) Bratianu, head of the Liberal Party, who promoted the treason that ended in unconditional surrender to the Soviet in 1944; he, too, died in a Communist prison. On the political history of Romania and the character of the men who were prominent in it, for good or evil, see Prince Sturdza's The Suicide of Europe (cf.).

7)

During the first years of the Soviet occupation, the young king was kept on the throne as a useful figurehead and there was a pretense that the occupation was temporary. Maniu was permitted to maintain an attitude of independence, and he was widely believed in Romania to have influence with the government of the United States, which, they fondly imagined, favored "democracy" and "self-determination of peoples," as stated in the propaganda disseminated from Washington. Maniu himself may have entertained such illusions; he was elected to the Romanian Senate, arrested, given a theatrical imitation of a trial, and sentenced to imprisonment for twenty-five years. On Maniu's character and career, see the work by Prince Sturdza cited above.

8)

On Codreanu, see above, and the work by Prince Sturdza, in which his career and the activity of the Legion in the climacteric years of Romania's history are recounted in detail. The original text of Prince Sturdza's book contains some fine appreciations of Codreanu that are omitted in the heavily censored translation, but enough remains to illustrate the greatness of the man. (Tr. )

9)

One must remember that the young Legionaries who vilified Codreanu in their "unmasking" venerated him as the father of their highest ideals, so that their "lectures" were for them much more than lying defamation of a great man and made them guilty of an ultimate blasphemy. (Tr. )