Dead Run: A Memoir of Escape from Communist Romania to Freedom

By Radu Gherghel

Radu Olimpiu Gherghel was born in the city of Timisoara, Romania, in 1943 during a difficult time in his native countrys history. Once a free and sovereign nation, Romania then found itself in the grips of a foe far stronger, more able to destroy the country of his birthCommunism. As the social, economic, political, and governmental structures of Eastern European countries encountered whirlwind changes, free sovereign states were dominated and forced into the Soviet Bloc of nations.

During this time, in the summer of 1955, a twelve-year-old boy sat on the stone wall at the entrance to a park in downtown Timisoara, Romania. He glanced up at the clear, blue sky watching the birds flying into the beautiful skies and knowing that he was witnessing a freedom few creatures in this world could ever experiencelet alone a child from Communist Romania. How he yearned to be free to go where he wanted, to be what he wanted, to fly like the birds, and to be free. His dreams and hopes take hold of his imagination; his adventures are real, his experiences unforgettable, and his story true as his quest for freedom begins.

Dead Run is the inspiring story of a child who knew the difference between being controlled and being truly free.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475975574

Radu Gherghel

Radu Olimpiu Gherghel. A native of Timisoara, Romania, Immigrated to America in 1967. He is a romanticist with a big heart and adventures mind. He discovered his true passion in writing books and painting. He and his wife, Judy, have two children and six grandchildren. They live in Orwigsburg Pennsylvania. This is his fourth book.

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DEAD RUN

A Memoir of Escape from Comminust Romania to Freedom

Copyright © 2013 Radu Rudy Gherghel.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-7556-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-7555-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-7557-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013902498

iUniverse rev. date: 3/01/2013

Contents

Acknowledgments

1 Initial Flames

2 The Disappeared

3 Distant Voices

4 Discontentment

5 The Decision

6 Gunfire

7 Trieste

8 On the Run

9 Reunion

10 Liberty

Epilogue

Documents

For my grandmother, Paulina Kostic, the woman who planted the seeds of freedom in my heart

Acknowledgments

My grandmother, Paulina Kostic, is at the heart of why I risked my life to escape from Communist Romania in 1966. She inspired my dream of living in a free society when she and I secretly began listening to Radio Free Europe late at night in the pantry of our apartment in the city of Timisoara, Romania, when I was thirteen years old. It was then that I first heard the voices from beyond the Iron Curtain, and it was a revelatory experience that ultimately changed my life. I can honestly say that if my grandmother hadn’t exposed me to the outside world like that, I doubt I’d ever have ended up trying to escape. But she did, and I thank her.

I also want to thank my wife, Judy, who has stood with me for forty-three years. Together we built a life and raised two wonderful sons, who went on to give us six grandchildren. She helped me sort through the writing process, making astute suggestions that really improved the book. My eldest granddaughter, Emily, pestered me incessantly to write the story of my escape. She read the manuscript several times and offered advice, and when I wondered if I should finish it, she kept me going with the enthusiasm only youth can muster. Thanks to you both. I love you more than you’ll ever know.

Others helped with the book. I want to thank the good people at iUniverse for their professionalism. I couldn’t have done this without you! I especially want to thank my ghostwriter, David W. Shaw.

Most of all, I want to thank America. This is the best country in the entire world. It is a place where an immigrant like me can come with nothing and go out having led a full and mostly happy life in the warm embrace of freedom. Sure, it gets tough out there at times. But after the tough times come the good times. I, for one, have never forgotten the gift of freedom; I hold it dear to my heart. It truly has been a shining beacon in the darkness.

1

Initial Flames

In the midst of World War II, the fertile soil of Eastern Europe ran red with the blood of millions. The fighting swept through villages, cities, and farms, shattering lives and filling mass graves with the dead. Families were torn apart. Fathers, husbands, sons, brothers, and uncles were vaporized in artillery blasts, burned alive in tanks and planes, or turned to raw meat under withering machine-gun fire. Mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, and aunts starved or were disintegrated in carpet bombings. The very fabric of civilized society ripped to tatters as the years of war dragged on, and it seemed for a time that darkness would reign over all of Europe, and possibly the world, for a thousand years.

Then, slowly, ever so slowly, the Eastern Front began to change. The Soviet Union stalled the German advance toward Moscow. The Russian people rose up. The munitions factories hummed. The troop trains rolled westward. The Russian Bear pushed on, driving Germany back. Alliances shifted as the tide of war ebbed and flowed, favoring one side or another. Romania was no exception. Early in the war, it sided with Germany in September 1940 under the rule of Premier Ion Antonescu, with the tacit approval of King Michael. It was like that in Hungary and other nearby countries. You might say Romania received an offer it couldn’t refuse: sign on the dotted line or be slaughtered.

German soldiers poured into Bucharest, and the lovely capital would never again be the same. In 1941, Romanians rallied to fight the Soviet Union along with their German masters when Adolf Hitler saw fit to void the nonaggression pact he’d signed with Joseph Stalin in 1939. My father, a man I never knew, was among them, a proclaimed fighter for his king. He graduated from the military academy of the Romanian Royal Army in Timisoara as a lieutenant in the same year Hitler and Stalin made their empty promises not to wage war against each other.

When my father went into action against the Soviets, he fought with distinction, earning an Iron Cross and a promotion to captain. On September 7, 1942, on the Kalmuk Steppe eighteen miles southwest of Stalingrad, his company engaged the Soviets in a fierce firefight. He was on the field telephone in a foxhole when an artillery shell landed nearby, killing him and seriously wounding the telephone technician. It was only ten days after the start of the Battle of Stalingrad, a bloody fight that lasted until the following February and that by some counts killed two million people. My mother was twenty-eight, and five months pregnant with me, when she received word of my father’s death.

I sometimes look at timeworn black-and-white snapshots of my father and mother when they were newlyweds just before the war, back when our family owned an eleven-acre property with a fine house and employed a married couple serving as housekeeper and caretaker. The future of my parents seemed bright when they got married in 1939, but in retrospect their timing couldn’t have been worse. The clouds of war in Europe had been gathering since 1936, when Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland. Germany had absorbed Austria and seized Czechoslovakia, and in September 1939 it invaded Poland, officially kicking off the start of World War II in the European Theater.

I wonder what life would have been like for us all if some Germans hadn’t gotten it into their sick heads that they could conquer the whole planet. My parents, Gordana and Olimpiu, were a handsome couple, she with a tender smile and dark black hair and he with eyes reflecting a mischievous bent. Olimpiu looked quite dashing with his well-trimmed moustache, shock of thick, wavy black hair that resembled mine in my younger years, and a Romanian military cadet’s uniform that must have made Gordana swoon. They’d met as he walked past her apartment on the way to the military academy, and it was almost love at first sight for them both. The war changed the lives of everyone on the globe. It killed my father, like the millions of other fathers lost, and it set the stage for a grim existence in Eastern Europe under Soviet rule. In many ways, the war charted my own life, even though I was only an infant when it happened.

As the tide of war changed in favor of the Allies, King Michael overthrew Antonescu and changed sides in 1944, standing with Stalin instead of Hitler. I was living with my grief-stricken mother, my three-year-old sister, and my maternal grandparents in the rectory in Timisoara’s Christian Orthodox Church. My grandfather, Slobodan Kostic, was the vicar of the church in the city with three other priests reporting to him. He was an important man in many circles, and he was considered one of the elite among the Serbian community. The war was tragic, but Slobodan and my grandmother, Paulina, were financially and spiritually secure. They were busy doing God’s work, helping the needy and war ravaged and running the church for its large congregation, which was so bereft of hope in those terrifying times. I don’t think my mother or my grandparents had any idea of what was just around the corner for them. What could they have done if they had known? It’s easy to look back and make judgments, but I ask myself now and then if I would have done anything differently than they did. I don’t have the answers. I just don’t know.

Suddenly, as a member of Allied forces, Romania was a friend of Soviet Russia, its former sworn nemesis. The Red Army marched in and occupied the land, just as the Germans had done. The steady tramp of hobnailed boots on cobblestones and the rumble of Soviet tanks on country roads filled the air but did not drown out the guns of war. The Soviet occupation