Buried In A Casino Wall, A Dark Secret From Romania's Communist Past

[rpannier]

snip

In 1949, as the communists tightened their grip on the Eastern European country, Nicolaie Voicila, 17, was arrested and later sentenced to four years of hard labor for “plotting against the social order.”

His crime was joining a literary club at which members discussed the relatively new communist regime led by Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and hoped it would disappear.

The high school student was one of the thousands the communists incarcerated in prisons and labor camps after World War II, often simply because they had fallen afoul of the communist regime.

There are no universally accepted figures, but a 2006 presidential commission established to study the communist dictatorship said more than 600,000 Romanians were sentenced for political crimes between 1945 and 1989. Thousands died from beatings, illness, exhaustion, cold, or lack of food or medicine.

https://www.rferl.org/a/secret-political-prisoners-note-buried-in-casino-wall-revives-dark-memories-of-romania-s-communist-era/30773148.html

[DFW]

1. The uncle and father of a friend of mine were two of those victims

They were Hungarian-speaking Transylvanians in a small village in Romania. After the war, the new socialist regime charged their secret police with rooting out elements hostile to them. Any pretext was fine. My friend's uncle and father were hauled in and interrogated by Romanian-speaking secret police about secretly hoarding airplane parts. This was in a village that had no running water or electricity. After "refusing" to divulge information about where they had hidden their airplane parts, they were beaten repeatedly and released. The uncle died from the beatings, and the rest of the family was expelled as "useless Jews" to West Germany, where his father died within a year from the beating.

Most Romanians of all ethnic groups know this went on. It is no secret in Romania.

[crickets]

2. So very sad.

It's good that the list was found and will be placed in an exhibition validating this piece of history. Their story deserves to be told and remembered.