1947-1957

Sorry for the suboptimal picture. The reason for the shrubbery in the foreground was a muddy quasi-vertical wall that was beyond my climbing powers (nu sunt capra!). Some people took me to this place in the forest where the last five people of the anti-communist were hiding until they were arrested. This resistance was powerful, but never managed to get international connections, and it mainly involved people hiding in the mountains in various places in Romania, lasting almost ten years, which is not a trifle, given the conditions. Four men and a woman were arrested on this spot, there was guns firing on that day, the militians were well-trained, and the resistors were mostly put into prison. The woman gave birth in prison. A lot of other people died, who were ‘innocent’ or not. Dej’s regime was more repressive than Ceausescu’s as far as number of arrests, deportations and the extent of torture were concerned. The narrative I was told was mixing historical events of the time of resistance, myth, and current events of a female lawyer having disappeared in September and being feared dead. The current twist on events is that she has been killed by her husband, some kind of rich guy with connections to mafia worlds. In this forest, I was told a story of how the resistance is remembered by some locals. You could not see the cave anymore where the people in the 1950s were hiding, because erosion has pretty much brought down part of the sandy stone, and like in so many areas in the valley, a kind of land slide has made history just a bit more silent. Back in the village, my attention is drawn to a cross in a walled garden, that has been put in memory of the resistance, and which was not received well in the village of origin of some of the last ‘partizani’. Some people there threatened to throw it in the lake, and so it was not put up in that village, but in the neighbouring ones.