Memories of a Totalitarian State

By Maurice Nachtigal

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9798369416792

Maurice Nachtigal

The author has published three books, two autobiographical and one about love. As he has reviewed his life in these books he was impressed how major goals were set up and fulfilled. He wondered what were the events that led to the development of his life pathway and that led him to probe an authority which he defines as destiny. It is remarkable how the idea of destiny gained presence in these three books reflecting its progress in this author’s mind and led him to investigate the potential role of destiny in his life. The results of this research are the subject of this book.

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Copyright © 2024 by Maurice Nachtigal.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Rev. date: 02/16/2024

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CONTENTS

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Foreword

Chapter 1   How Romania Became a Totalitarian State

Chapter 2   The Romanian Popular Republic

Chapter 3   The Independence Decade

Chapter 4   Ceauşescu Personality Cult

Chapter 5   The Securitate

Chapter 6   A Locked Up Totalitarian Regime

Chapter 7   Families Broken by Totalitarian Regime

Chapter 8   The Medical School under Totalitarian Regime

Chapter 9   A Day in the Totalitarian Regime

Chapter 10   Running Away from a Totalitarian Regime

Chapter 11   Censorship

Chapter 12   Securitate Conniving

Chapter 13   Visiting the American Embassy

Chapter 14   Securitate False Leads

Chapter 15   The Communist Party Committee Meeting

Chapter 16   Light at the End of the Tunnel

Notes

Letters

Epilogue

The cover page is Sidonia’s picture on the much-fought Romanian passport.

A totalitarian regime crushes all autonomous institutions in its drive to seize the human soul.

—Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

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FOREWORD

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I WAS BORN AND spent the first half of my life in Romania a middle-sized Eastern European country created at the end of the nineteenth century by uniting principalities founded in the thirteenth century into a kingdom with a German king. During my life, Romania changed political regimes, from a parliamentary monarchy to authoritarian fascism followed by totalitarian communism culminating with the Ceauşescu personality cult. The totalitarian Communist regime was installed in Romania in 1945 and started being dismantled in 1990. I lived under this totalitarian regime until 1980 when I moved to the United States where I am living now.

Time passed and strangely enough, I noticed that talk about matters that I thought belonged to the past reappeared in the media, newspapers, television, and the internet. A new term—totalitarianism—that was not used by the time I lived under the Communist regime was applied to manifestations reproducing previous regimes. The word totalitarian first came about in 1926 as totalitario, an adjective to describe the Italian fascism of that time. The English form was adapted from the Italian to describe an absolutely powerful regime.

Totalitarianism is now recognized as a form of government that prohibits opposing political parties and ideologies while controlling all aspects of the public and private lives of the people. Under a totalitarian regime, all citizens are subject to the absolute authority of the state. Totalitarian states are typically ruled by autocrats or dictators who demand unquestioned loyalty and control public opinion through propaganda distributed via government-controlled media. Totalitarianism is generally identified by dictatorial centralized rule dedicated to controlling all public and private aspects of individual life, to the benefit of the state, through coercion, intimidation, and repression.

In the mass media and the public opinion, there is an increasing interest and talk about totalitarian regimes and dictatorship. There is a resurgence of a topic which preoccupied Europe during the last century when it has known quite a number of totalitarian regimes and dictators. Examples of such states in the past century are Spain with Franco, Italy with Mussolini, Germany with Hitler, Soviet Union with Stalin, Chile with Pinochet, and the list can go on. If one looks at the world today, there are countries which are fully fledged democracy and countries that are totalitarian. Between these two poles, there are countries which exhibit a variety of combinations between democracy and totalitarianism, countries where the economy is run like a democracy, but the government is totalitarian, and countries that are personal dictatorships or uniparty dictatorships or both.

I spent the first half of my life under a totalitarian political regime. I have seen the regime taking over everything and growing like a malignant tumor until it swallowed each and every aspect of public and private life. The Communist regime in Romania displayed all the features depicting a totalitarian regime. The life of every individual and family was directly affected by the totalitarian regime. The terror was widespread and personal. Thousands died in horrific jails or labor camps. Trust and honesty became rare items; we lived in a world of lies.

Communist Romania has known all the horrors of totalitarianism. The jails at Piteşti, Aiud, Jilava, and others where people were beaten, tortured, and killed, and the Danube-Black Sea channel labor camp where ten thousand people died of disease, hunger, and accidents were all parts of the general picture of terror and oppression aimed to the elimination of any free-thinking human being. The totalitarian regime behaved as expected with me and my family.

A depressing description of living under totalitarianism comes from George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984 when the main character Winston Smith is told by Thought Police Interrogator O’Brien, If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever. Orwell’s description matched the Ceauşescu dictatorship of communist Romania, but it is incomplete as it lacks the humiliation and despair that come from waiting for hours in line for some food, or not having warm water for a shower or heat in a home when outside a blizzard is blowing.

As I grew up and spent years of my adult life in Romania, I learned about the totalitarian regime that took over the power and evolved under my eyes until it reached the grotesque outlook of Ceauşescu personal cult. I managed for some time to advance in my career as a medical researcher, but refusing to become a communist party member had important negative consequences on my professional career in the totalitarian regime. After my wife and I benefited from the independence decade in our medical research carrier in the following decade we struggled to survive professionally under the increasing Ceauşescu personal cult. The high point of my encounter with the totalitarian regime took place when I decided to leave the Ceauşescu dictatorship. My defection has been planned seven years before with the help of my best friend who was in the United States. It was almost like a jail getaway. I choose to live the rest of my life in the United States, which was a democratic country. I became a naturalized American citizen.

The years passed, and my family and I were busy enjoying our life in this new world. I went on teaching pathology to medical students and doing research mostly on atherosclerosis. After retiring I wrote a few biographical books sharing my life experience with whomever found out about these books and was interested on this subject. As I have spent a good part of my life under a totalitarian regime from which I and my loved ones managed to escape, I thought that it might be useful to share this life experience with whomever would be interested in learning how such a political regime works and how life is under such a regime.

In this book I describe how totalitarianism was brought to Romania and overcame every aspect of life affecting me, my wife, and our families. I am publishing these memoirs describing life of an ordinary family under the totalitarian Communist regime in Romania. I am doing that because I noticed an increased interest on the subject of totalitarian political regimes, and this often comes from people who have no personal experience of such a regime and therefore have little understanding of what life under such a regime means. Americans have a vague understanding of totalitarian regimes, which is explicable considering that after the American Revolution, this country has never experienced a totalitarian system. For instance, I read recently that former Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard became an independent after running for the Democrat presidential nomination in 2020 because she considered the growing totalitarian nature of her former party. There was no explanation as to why she considered her former democratic party totalitarian.

After I defected, Sidonia, my wife and our children, Noël and Alina, were left behind in Romania, and they had to be pulled out from the totalitarian regime. They were there living under permanent supervision and pressure from the regime’s secret police while I struggled for our family reunion. The fight was between the conniving totalitarian regime trying to persuade Sidonia to divorce and me getting American political support to force the totalitarian regime to respect its international agreements. This fight with the totalitarian regime, which tried, by all means, to keep my wife and children in Romania and me to free my family from the totalitarian regime, lasted eighteen months. The support of several American senators and representatives was critical in winning their freedom and is described in this book.

During that time, we exchanged about eighty letters, and I enclosed in this book these letters translated in English. In these letters one can find the apprehension, anxiety, and restlessness that marked the daily life of my wife and my son watching the days go by without knowing if and when this ordeal is going to end. The letters mirror the fight for our family reunion as well as the plotting of the totalitarian political regime trying to destroy our family. Sidonia and Noël’s letters are numbered and are ordered in this book by the date of their writing. My letters are marked MN and are sorted by the date of their receipt. These letters are an immediate expression of life under constant supervision and oppression by the totalitarian regime.

The list of individuals that made our escape from the totalitarian Ceauşescu regime possible includes twenty-one individuals and four couples. These were people who helped setting up the breakaway plan (Ştefan, Nicolae), giving advise (Jean, Mihai, Mira, Petre) providing material support (Luc, Nardi, Claude, Colette), protection (Melnick, Andrei, Mihai, Ileana), and logistical (Jackon, Svarcz) and political support (Melnick, Kennedy, Thurmond, Paul, Hollings, Spence, Tower). My eternal gratitude goes to each one of those who made our escape from the totalitarian regime possible.

Petre Bădulescu

Jean & Ileana Brucker

James Caulfield, MD

Nicolae Ciobanu, MD

Titus Ciugudean

Ioan Costică, MD

Shelly Epstein, MD

Claude Hohnel

Fritz Hollings, US senator

Nardi Horaud, MD

Henry Jackson, US senator

Rabbi Kandel

Edward Kennedy, US senator

Joseph Melnick

Colette and Jackie Meyer-Moog

Ştefan and Donna Mironescu

Luc Montagnier, MD

Mira and Vlad Pauker

Ron Paul, US representative

Floyd Spence, US representative

Igor Svarcz

Strom Thurmond, US senator

John Tower, US senator

Andrei Vermont, MD

Mihai Zamfirescu, MD

The main characters of this story are Marius Ciugudean (a.k.a. Tataie, father), my father-in-law; Sidonia (a.k.a. Ţuţu, Adorata), my wife; Noël, our son; Alina, our daughter; and myself (a.k.a. Burşi, Tuchi). Details about other persons are found under Notes.

Although I am not a professional writer, I hope that this testimony will shine some light on what life under a totalitarian regime is like.

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CHAPTER 1

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How Romania Became a Totalitarian State

O NE OF THE most important question regarding totalitarianism is how a country could be submitted to such a regime. Romania is a middle-sized East-European country that was founded in the last half of the nineteenth century by uniting principalities where people with similar language and traditions lived. Western powers in particular France supported the creation of a buffer state at the confluence of three empires, the Ottoman empire, the Habsburg empire, and the Russian em pire.

The country that was trying to be a parliamentary monarchy was allied with France and Great Britain but underwent a fascist coup in September 1940, which brought to power a fascist party—the green shirts—and a dictator the general Ion Antonescu. King Charles II (Carol) was replaced by his son Mihai who was about eighteen years old, and Romania became a useful ally of Nazi Germany considering that the country was the world’s fifth oil producer. Additionally general Antonescu added several hundred thousand Romanian soldiers to the German army when that invaded Soviet Union in June 1941.

On August 23, 1944, King Mihai and the leaders of democratic political parties and the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) have arrested Marechal Antonescu, signed an armistice with the Allies (United States, Great Britan, Soviet Union), and turned the Romanian army against the German army. This break in the east German front happened as the Red Army was reaching the Romanian border.

Knowing that the Red Army forces were very close to Romania, which suggested the Soviets would probably enter that nation first, on May 4, 1944, Churchill asked his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, the rhetorical question, Are we going to acquiesce in the communization of the Balkans and perhaps of Italy? Churchill answered his question by saying that Britain must resist the communist infusion and invasion. In May 1944, Sir Anthony Eden met with Fedor Tarasovich Gusev, the Soviet ambassador to the court of St. James, to discuss an arrangement under which Greece would be in the British sphere of influence in exchange for Romania being in the Soviet sphere of influence. The attempt to work spheres of influence for the Balkans led Gusev to ask if the Americans were included. Eden assured Gusev that the Americans would back the spheres of influence agreement, but when asked, the State Department firmly replied it was not the policy of the United States to make such agreements as that would violate the Atlantic Charter.

Placed into a difficult position, Churchill appealed directly to Roosevelt. The British historian David Carlton recounts that Churchill told Franklin Roosevelt on May 31 that the proposed Anglo-Soviet arrangement applied only to war conditions and was not an attempt to carve up the Balkans. Roosevelt was unimpressed and on June 11 held that the result would be the division of the Balkan region into spheres of influence despite the declared intention to limit the arrangement to military matters. Churchill then urged the president to consent to the arrangement being given a three-month trial. And on the thirteenth, Roosevelt rather weakly gave way.

On October 1944 during the Fourth Moscow Conference, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Stalin signed the percentages agreement, which gave a percentage division of control over Eastern European countries to the Soviet Union, dividing them into spheres of influence of the Soviet Union and United States and Great Britain. The content of the agreement was first made public by Churchill in 1953 in the final volume of his memoir.

This deal between Churchill and Stalin turned out to be a ruling of great importance for Romania. In January 1945 during a visit to Moscow by Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the leader of the so-called native faction of the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) (composed mainly of ethnic Romanians), and Ana Pauker, who headed the Muscovites (those who had spent their careers mainly in the Soviet Union and were not ethnic Romanians), the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin approved the seizure of power by the PCR. In March 1945, Andrei Vishinsky, Stalin’s representative, came to Romania and, using the threat of the Red Army which had occupied the country, installed a communist government. On March 6, under extraordinary pressure, King Mihai was forced to appoint a procommunist government led by the fellow traveler Petru Groza.

However, the king went into what was called the royal strike, which is the period between August 21, 1945, and January 7, 1946, in which King Mihai I refused to sign the documents of the Petru Groza government and to receive the ministers in audience. Throughout this period, the Council of Ministers continued to operate illegally. The royal strike was the approach of the sovereign Mihai I to obtain the help of the West at a key moment, but London and Washington preferred to keep their word to Stalin, leaving Eastern Europe within the Soviet sphere of influence. I suppose that King Mihai was not aware of the percentages agreement. Noticeably on August 1944 when the king signed the armistice with the Allies the agreement was not yet signed.

The totalitarian regime was installed in Romania by a foreign power under the threat of military intervention and the participation of a small local political party and a few turncoats. In 1944 the PCR had a few thousand party members. In 1989, when the totalitarian regime was crushed there were about 2.7 million party members, some 8 percent of the country’s population. When I was a faculty member at the University of Craiova School of Medicine, there were about 200 faculty members, and we were only three faculty members who were not Communist Party members. It was a truly totalitarian regime. The Communist Party that was supposed to be the Workers’ Party was now the upper class of society, and its members were opportunists who figured out that the little red card member would allow them to occupy the best paid positions in their field. I believe that very few thought that the slogans emitted by Marx and Engels were anything but catchphrases. The new upper class wanted exactly the same things as the old upper class: a nice home, a good car, good and abundant food, and so on. To get all these goodies, corruption was expanding like a contagious disease. The proletariat was as miserable as before the totalitarian communist system took over. Nonetheless, the regime started an intensive program of industry development and an important part of the predominantly rural population moved to cities and became active PCR members. In many instances, they were the leaders of old or newly developed enterprises without having any experience in their new field. The consequences as far as the economy was concerned did not delay occurring.

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CHAPTER 2

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The Romanian Popular Republic

T HE ROMANIAN COMMUNIST regime that started acquiring the political power in 1945 developed during the following years all the features of totalitarian regimes. According to Yale professor Juan José Linz , totalitarian regimes are characterized by extreme political repression and human rights violations , an absolute lack of democratic ideals, widespread personality cultism around the person or the group which is in power, absolute control over the economy , large-scale censorship and mass surveillance systems, limited or non-existent freedom of movement (notably the freedom to leave the country), and the widespread usage of state terrorism. Other aspects of a totalitarian regime include the extensive use of violent prison camps, repressive secret police, practices of religious persecution or racism, the imposition of either theocratic rule or state atheism, the common use of death penalties and show trials, fraudulent elections (if elections are held), and the possible possession of weapons of mass destruction, a potential for state-sponsored mass murders and genocides.

Once at power, the PCR applied each and every item attributed to a totalitarian regime. Within a few years, the PCR transformed Romania from a parliamentarian monarchy with its capital called Little Paris as it had been before World War II (WWII) to a totalitarian popular republic which featured every aspect described by Professor Linz. Between the installation of the Groza government and the parliamentary elections in November 1946, the Communist Party used its control of the security apparatus and other key government agencies to suppress the opposition. The democratic forces were led by Maniu, the National Peasant Party leader. Maniu had the king as an ally, who despaired of success without vigorous intervention by the American and British governments. These indeed protested the communists’ tactics, but, when they officially recognized the Groza government in February 1946 in return for the promise of early elections, they gave up any remaining leverage they might have had. The Communists postponed the elections because they lacked adequate support among the population and needed more time to cripple the opposition. When elections finally took place on November 19, 1946, the official tally gave about 80 percent of the vote to the communists and their allies, but strong evidence indicates that the results were falsified in order to hide a substantial victory by the National Peasants. Results were simply swapped between the democratic parties (the National Peasant Party and the National-Liberal Party) and the Communist Party. These were the last elections with different parties; thereafter, all political parties, except PCR, were suspended.

The newspapers were one after another suspended until there were only two national newspapers available: one was the official organ of the PCR and the other one was of the general public (i.e., the nonparty members of the society), but everything that was published was supervised by the PCR. Dreptatea was the newspaper of the National Peasant Party and was suspended by July 17, 1947, as part of the takeover of the country by the totalitarian regime.

A broad nationalization was legislated through which all factories, stores, enterprises, companies, businesses, shops, and firms were taken by the state without any compensation. All the medical institutions became state owned. My aunt Jenny’s pharmacy in a village was taken over. Attorneys became all part of a cooperative which decided who will take a certain client and how much he/she will have to pay the cooperative. The attorney designated would receive a percentage of the fee. The same procedure was applied to hairdressers and physicians.

The Romanian currency was canceled, and a new currency was issued. I was vacationing with my father in the Bucegi Mountains at the Diham Lodge when the Communist regime proceeded to mandate so-called stabilization. On August 15, 1947, a revaluation took place, with a new leu replacing the old one. The Romanian currency is leu. This revaluation, called a monetary reform or stabilization measure was carried out by the Communist authorities with absolutely no advance warning and without the possibility to exchange more than a fixed minimum amount of money for the new currency. The only currency accepted by the national bank in exchange for the new currency was gold coins. This was done in order to depose the middle and upper classes of their last assets, after nationalization, to prepare for collectivization and to finalize the installation of communism.

Come December 1947 under the threat of military intervention by the Red Army which was occupying the country king Mihai was forced to abdicate. Romania became a popular republic, a satellite of Stalin’s Soviet Union. From 1948 to about 1960, Communist leaders laid the foundations of a totalitarian regime. They provided themselves with a formal political structure in 1948 by adopting a Soviet-style constitution that reserved ultimate authority for the PCR. Governmental institutions served merely as the machinery to carry out party decisions. It dissolved private organizations of all kinds and severely curtailed the ability of churches to perform their spiritual and educational tasks. In their place and mainly in order to mobilize public opinion, it created mass organizations in every sphere of activity. There were organizations for women, youth, college students, etc.

The installed regime had all the features of a totalitarian state. The power in the country was held by the PCR, which had absolute control of everything, including the economy and finances. The entire economy belonged to the state. In reordering the Romanian economy, the party adopted Stalinist principles: rigid central planning and direction, as well as emphasis on heavy industry at the expense of consumer goods. There was a five-year plan for every enterprise and industry. Every year there were reports about the fulfilment of this plan and these reports were always positive. The plan was also fulfilled and surpassed irrespective of the reality. The party PCR decided who will occupy every position and made sure that every leading position will be taken by a party member. The professional quality didn’t matter.

The regime also undertook the forcible collectivization of agriculture, a campaign completed in 1962. In the first step, the state took the vast agricultural land properties and divided them into small lots that were distributed to the peasants with little or no land. This basically destroyed agriculture, because on small lots, the peasants produced only what they needed for their family. They were not used to what the landowners were doing, producing as much as possible for selling to the market. Years of starvation followed. Then the Communist Party started the collectivization policy, asking the peasants to give their lots to a collective household, a kolkhoz according to the Soviet nomenclature. Most peasants refused to do that, and violence was used to enforce this policy.

This was the time when I was in the lyceum (high school) and students were enrolled in the new political youth organization that was set up by the Communist government. They changed its name, from the Progressive Youth to the Students Union and the Union of the Working Youth. Almost everyone had to be enrolled; refusing meant trouble. Only those who had what was called rotten social origin (children of wealthy people, landowners, politicians, industrialists, or war criminals) were not accepted in those organizations and were in fact second-class citizens. Sidonia was excluded from the Student Union because she had what was called a rotten social origin. Her father was an exploiter because he used labor for his vineyard.

My father told me to stay away from these organizations, which for me at that time made no sense, but he knew better. Being in the concentration camps with Communist leaders taught him a lot about the true ideology of the new masters. I must admit that I and, like me, many of my colleagues did not understand the significance of these political activities. We were as naive or gullible as one could see today even in adults with more life experience.

At lyceum, our class was divided in groups of students to study the biography of Joseph Stalin, and the leader of the youth organization assigned me to direct such a group. We would get together and discuss chapters of this book about the wonderful life of comrade Stalin. Everyone was supposed to have studied the book about his life and learnt what an absolute hero he was. Those were the years when the personality cult of Stalin has reached its peak. Then we had to attend the huge meetings for special dates, such as November 7, the day of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and May 1, the International Labor Day.

In cultural and intellectual life, the Communists expected Romanian artists and writers to subordinate their creativity to party directives and to contribute works that were relevant to contemporary society. A particular aspect of Romanian cultural life in the 1950s was Sovietization, or Russification. Soviet accomplishments in all fields were held up as models to be emulated, and a massive effort was undertaken to make Russian the second language for Romanians. This campaign, however, failed to wean the Romanians from their Western sympathies and instead intensified their traditional Russophobia. I had Russian at the lyceum and also at the medical school and all I know is the alphabet and a few words.

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CHAPTER 3

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The Independence Decade

T HE DECADE OF the 1960s brought to Romania a period of internal relaxation and defiance of the Soviet Union in international relations . Although no genuine political liberalization took place and there was no retreat from the fundamentals of the Stalinist economic model, the intrusiveness of the regime in individual lives was curtailed. The availability of consumer goods and housing improved, and such social services as health care, education, and pensions became more generous. Most political detainees were released from prison. This was the time when taking advantage of this political regime relaxation I could enter medical research being hired at the Oncology Institute and so did Sidonia who, in spite of her rotten social origin, was hired at that insti tute.

The source of this decade of political relaxation lay in the emergence of Romanian national communism, which was accompanied and in part stimulated by growing friction between PCR and the Soviet Union. Strains in the relations between Gheorghiu-Dej the PCR leader and Soviet party leaders came to the surface in the late 1950s. Gheorghiu-Dej feared that the de-Stalinization campaign launched by the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, might force him from power since he had been (and continued to be) one of the most rigid of Stalinists. But he also objected to Khrushchev’s insistence that Romania abandon its headlong drive to industrialize and, instead, accept the more modest role of supplier of agricultural products and raw materials to the designated industrial powers of Comecon, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, created in 1949 to coordinate economic activity within the Soviet bloc. Tension between the two leaders culminated in a so-called declaration of independence by the PCR in 1964.

Change was especially evident in cultural and intellectual life, as scholars were permitted to broaden the scope of their research, and writers dealt with subjects that previously had been forbidden. A notable innovation was the flourishing of cultural exchanges with the United States and Europe, which signaled the resumption of old ties with the West and an end to Russification. These changes had a significant impact on my life.

In1957 when I graduated from medical school, the selection of positions was done according to our general grades calculated over the six years. Since my grade was 4.94 (out of maximum 5), I was the second of my class, so the government allowed me to choose a position in the Argeş county. This was the closest county to Bucharest, and I ended up being a resident in a thirty-bed pediatrics section of a county hospital. After two years of residency, I was considering finishing my third year of residency, taking a licensing examination and becoming a pediatrician specialist. As I refused to become a Communist Party member and had no political connections, I could not hope to have a position to do medical research which I did as a student, and I liked.

In 1961 I found out unexpectedly that there was a pathology trainee position opened at the Oncology Institute in Bucharest. I checked it out and what I found matched my desire to do medical research. Moreover, it turned out that my social status, not being a party member was acceptable. The institute director, Dr. Costăchel, was a high-ranking Communist Party member. To develop his institute, he hired the best radiologists, surgeons, oncologists, and chemists available. What all those had in common was that they were totalitarian regime dissenters. They had relatives that were in jail, or in labor camps; they were part of the former elite families and usually the totalitarian regime would send them to some remote villages to practice their medicine there. But Dr. Costăchel knew better. He hired them, and they were his outstanding surgeons, radiologists, oncologists, and pathologists. All the higher-ups of the Communist Party or their relatives that had some form of cancer would come to him to be treated, and he could do whatever he wished under their protection.

I talked to Dr. Costặchel about the position available, and it matched me perfectly. It was in the pathology division in the tissue culture laboratory. During my internship year, I went to the Virology Institute and worked with Hans Aderca and Marius Ianconescu who were developing technology to prepare human cell cultures. I learned how to prepare those, and I did a small research project. Hans and Marius added my name as co-author to the paper they published about their work. Dr. Costăchel told me that the position was open to anybody, and it will be a written and oral examination. I passed the competitive examination, and I was hired despite the fact that I was not a party member, and my father has been excluded from the bar. When I graduated from medical school, only Communist Party members were assigned to research institutes, although their performance as students was well known as unsatisfactory. Like me and a few other colleagues of mine that have graduated with honor diploma were all assigned to countryside positions. Under the general political regime relaxation, hiring in a research institute was now possible for individuals like me.

Sidonia, who had a master’s degree in biology, was looking for a position. Being a housewife after she had her first child, she needed a job to be financially independent. She was hired by the Oncology Institute and was assigned to work in the genetics laboratory under Professor Caratzali although in her file it was mentioned that she has been excluded from the student organization having a rotten social origin. The independence decade worked miracles for the two of us. Unfortunately, it lasted only a decade. Nicolae Ceauşescu came to power and by 1970–1971 his personality cult started. The following decade 1970–1980 was a steady downward trend that took the country to unprecedented misery. I lived this decade with the predominant dream that one day me and my family would escape this jail in which we were trying to survive, and as the decade reached its end, I managed to escape. The fight to get my family out of this jail would follow.

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CHAPTER 4

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Ceauşescu Personality Cult

G HEORGHIU-DEJ WAS FOLLOWED as leader of the PCR and the country in 1965 by Nicolae Ceauşescu who in 1970 started a personality cult, which mimicked the one in North Korea and China. Ceauşescu promoted a cult of personality that was unprecedented in Romanian history and that served as the foundation of a dictatorship which knew no limits. In domestic affairs, Ceauşescu brought the period of relaxation of the independence decade to an end with his July Theses of 1971, in which he demanded a return to rigid ideological orthodoxy and reasserted the leading role of the party. In the nearly two decades of neo-Stalinism that followed, the Communist Party intensified its control of mass organizations and intruded more deeply than ever before into the daily lives of citizens. The changes initiated by Ceauşescu brought Romania to be a fully totalitarian state. It managed to add to the definition of a totalitarian state the lack of food and life essentials, such as heat in winter, electricity, gas, and medical supp lies.

Ceauşescu vied with Albania’s Enver Hoxha to establish the most totalitarian European Communist state while maintaining independence from Moscow. In fact, Ceauşescu became the West’s favorite Communist, despite the devastation that he wreaked on his own people. Eight months gmurdering their leaders), the Romanian dictator was visiting the United States as the guest of President Jimmy Carter. By taking his distance from Moscow—Romania abstained from the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia—Ceauşescu bought himself freedom of maneuver and even foreign acclaim, particularly in the early stages of the new Cold War of the 1980s. Because the Romanian leader was happy to criticize the Russians (and send his gymnasts to the Los Angeles Olympics), Americans and others kept quiet about his domestic crimes. Romanians, however, paid a terrible price for Ceauşescu’s privileged status.

While following an independent policy in foreign relations, Ceauşescu adhered ever more closely to the Communist orthodoxy of centralized administration at home. His secret police maintained rigid controls over free speech, and the media and tolerated no internal dissent or opposition. Hoping to boost Romania’s population, in 1966, Ceauşescu issued Decree 770, a measure that effectively outlawed contraception and abortion. Doctors monitored women of childbearing age to ensure that they were not taking steps to curtail their fertility, but maternal mortality rates skyrocketed as women sought unsafe and outlawed means to terminate their pregnancies.

Another consequence of Romania’s abortion ban was that hundreds of thousands of children were turned over to state orphanages. When Communism collapsed in Romania in 1989, an estimated 170,000 children were found warehoused in filthy orphanages. Having previously been hidden from the world, images emerged of sticky-thin children, many of whom had been beaten and abused. Some were left shackled to metal bed frames.

In 2013, after Sidonia passed away, I went to Vingard the village where she grew up to decide what to do with the home build by her father where the family Ciugudean had lived. The home has been taken over by the communists who chased the Ciugudean family out of the village and used the home mostly to keep the sheep warm in wintertime. The house was a ruin; there were walls, but the roof was collapsed and the windows and doors have been stolen. Father Ioan Stănilă, the local priest, was running an orphanage, the outcome of Ceauşescu abortion policy. He needed a home for the children who reached the age of eighteen in the orphanage, and he was no longer allowed by the government to take care of them. These boys and girls had no family, no education, and no job, and they became vagabonds, criminals, and prostitutes. They needed a home. With the help of an attorney (Mr. Radu), I deeded the home to the parish, and I started with Father Ioan Stănilă the process of rebuilding the home. In 2017 Casa Sidonia was opened with a great religious ceremony, and two girls became the first residents; one was working for the orphanage and the other was a college student.

As part of his totalitarian regime, Ceauşescu appointed his wife, Elena, and many members of their extended family to high posts in the government and party. To prevent the emergence of other power centers, Ceauşescu continually rotated officials in both the party and the government and relied increasingly on members of his family