The Ellenpontok – Tóth Private Collection includes several hundred letters dating from that time. Especially interesting are the letters and notes of various shapes and sizes, smuggled primarily across the Romanian–Hungarian border by individuals during the eighties. In that time the relevant Transylvanian events had news value. Measures taken against the Hungarian minority were hardly talked about in the press, so it was essential to spread information to the broader public, partly with the purpose of protecting the victims of such measures, and partly in the hope that the situation of the minority would be improved by drawing the attention to these atrocities occurring under the Romanian communist regime.

This smuggled letter, size 15 cm x 14 cm, was delivered to the Tóth family in October 1984 while they lived in Budapest. The senders were the Spaller couple, old friends of the Tóths living in Oradea. Both Árpád Spaller and his wife Katalin obtained their degrees at Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, in 1970 and 1971 respectively, in special education (health pedagogy) and Romanian language and literature. After graduating they both worked as teachers in Oradea (Spaller and Spaller 2006).

 

The text of the letter is as follows:

 

”Dear Ica, Karcsi and Zsuzsika!

Excuse us for not having written so far, although we were glad to receive your postcard. The truth is that we hesitate to even send a postcard for fear we might end up like Kati Gyulai [Gyulai Katalin, verse performer from Oradea (Molnár 1993)], who underwent a thorough customs control only to be refused entry to the country. Quite an unfortunate case. On the other hand, they keep a close eye on us and they mean it seriously. They keep harassing people. Árpi Varga, [Árpád Varga, 1951-1994 (Sipos 1995)], that miserable historian from Tileagd was also threatened. They also showed up in the home of Sófalvi, that photographer from Satu Mare who took photos at the Literary Round Table, and confiscated some of his films and books. We have no idea when this will end but we ought to be cautious.

Unfortunately, we were denied entry to Hungary. We were informed about this in September, although the decision was already made in June. So, we can apply again next June. Unfortunately, we cannot expect much. The help from our acquaintance hasn’t been efficient which doesn’t surprise us. We do not have any other contacts to turn to, so applying under such circumstances is totally pointless. Do you happen to know anyone influential who could help us? To be honest, it would mean a lot to us now, because we are rather disappointed. We would appreciate your help.

Otherwise, everything is the same. We are working and living from one day to the other. Endre attends school, he pretty much needs our assistance. The little one is growing. As for us, not much good news to tell. The Ady Circle is still active with the old members. Sometimes, when we have time, we also attend.

If you don’t mind we need to ask you to stop writing to us, or if there is anything important, address your letter to Péter Juhász [railway worker] Biharkeresztes MÁV station 4110. From time to time, we shall send you news about us. So, please don’t write directly to us. But please let us know how you are in a letter sent to the above address. And please be cautious in the case of the others, too.

 

With love, Árpi and Kati.

October 6, 1984”.

 

The letter of the Spaller family perfectly illustrates the fear present in those times, affecting both the public sphere and the everyday life of the individual. People, afraid they might be observed and harassed by the Securitate, in the constant climate of insecurity, chose to be silent, avoiding any form of public manifestation. It also says a lot that the senders of the letter did not give a Romanian address for direct correspondence, but that of the railway station in Biharkeresztes, a Hungarian settlement 6 km from the Hungarian-Romanian border, which is also a border crossing point.              

The reasons behind emigration did not require much explanation back then. Beginning with January 1983 it became increasingly difficult to obtain a residence permit from the Hungarian authorities, as the application involved the presentation of a letter of invitation. This seemingly insignificant administrative obstacle – as revealed also in the above letter – could represent an enormous impediment for families who planned to emigrate, though emigration did not prove to be an impossible endeavour on the whole: in 1987 the Spaller family moved to Hungary where they managed to find jobs that suited their qualifications. At present they live in Budapest (Spaller and Spaller 2006).

The case of “Rock Compass” is a typical example of how a music brochure in the 1980s could be published semi-legally or as a quasi samizdat. A Rock Club hosted by the Youth Club of Pécs since 1983 gave an opportunity for this kind of publication by publishing a kind of information bulletin (or franzine) for its members. The “program guide” printed in 1984 presented, for instance, Laurie Anderson and the second album of the band Bikini (“Twentieth-Century Newsreel”), and it also published an article by Koszits on the local event Art Rock New Wave Festival, which included a concert by the band Trabant. It is astonishing that printed material like this could be published at the time with neither preliminary and nor after-the-fact permission from the censors. The afterlife of ’Rock Compass’ was nevertheless strange, since there was also a survey published on club members’ interest in the bulletin, which, for some reason, caught the attention of the local police. Koszits was interrogated some secret agents responsible for “the protection of youth.” They asked him several questions about new trends in music, including punk, new wave, hard rock, and especially black rock, which the authorities regarded, because of its name, as somehow the most dubious novelty. Koszits eventually managed to calm them and reassure them that the Rock Club in Pécs was not a meeting place for Satanist kids. Still, this remained the one and only issue of “Rock Compass,” and Koszits and friends could not publish any more issues.

In 2009 Zbigniew Grzegorzewski donated to the Institute of National Remembrance a 30-minute video recording from reverend Jerzy Popiełuszko's funeral in November 1984 in Warsaw. The author of the film remains unknown, but the footage shows social mobilization around the murdered priest and the climate in Warsaw just after the end of Martial Law.

The Budapest foundation, founded in May 1984, was George Soros’ first pilot enterprise in the one-time communist bloc, years before he opened the similar Beijing, Moscow, and Warsaw offices in the late 1980s or established his huge foundation network in the early 1990s throughout Central and Eastern Europe. At that “pre-Gorbachev” time, it was the only legally authorized private “foundation,” even in Hungary, with a more or less protocol-like, official partnership with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. This set a challenging precedent with unexpectedly major and far-reaching consequences.

The church of the former Mihai Vodă Monastery is one of the oldest surviving buildings in Bucharest. The monastic complex of which it was part, nowadays partially destroyed, dated from 1594, and had served various purposes over the centuries, including princely residence, military hospital, and medical school. The most important of these was its transformation into the home of the State Archives after the founding and international recognition of the modern Romanian state in 1862. The Mihai Vodă monastery, an emblem of premodern Bucharest, was founded by one of the most important rulers in the pantheon of the national history of the Romanians, Michael the Brave (Mihai Viteazul), whence its name. As ruler of Wallachia in the period 1593–1601, he was the only leader of any of the premodern states existing within the present boundaries of Romania who managed to bring under his military control, “to unify,” for a very short time (1600–1601) a territory approximately corresponding to that of contemporary Romania. For this reason, Michael the Brave has been considered to be a key figure in national history, starting from the early nineteenth century and the first professional attempts to codify that history into a narrative frame. Paradoxically, communist historiography conferred on Michael the Brave an infinitely more important role in national history than he had ever been accorded by historians before the First World War or in the interwar period. Due to the teleological reading of national history that characterised the (re)interpretation of historical materialism in the time of the Ceauşescu regime, Michael the Brave came to be seen as prefiguring the so-called “Union of 1918.” This expression refers to the joining of the historical regions of Austria-Hungary with a majority Romanian population to the Old Kingdom of Romania, which did not in fact happen until after the Peace Treaties of Saint-Germain (1919) and Trianon (1920). This historic moment became fundamental for the national identity of the Romanians following the (re)codification of national history under the direct guidance of the Party and the imposition of this version as representing the “single historical truth” through the intermediary of the documents adopted at the Eleventh Congress of the RCP in 1974. According to this interpretation, Michael the Brave was the first ruler who achieved the union of the Romanians and anticipated by his actions the culminating moment of national history, the “Union of 1918,” which was achieved by popular action from within, the “will of the masses” of Romanians, and not at the negotiating table. This image of Michael the Brave was intensely promoted under the Ceauşescu regime, not only through school textbooks or works of historiography, but much more efficiently through the intermediary of a cinematographic narration: the film Mihai Viteazul (1970), in which the protagonist is played by one of the best loved actors of the communist period, is to date the most viewed Romanian historical film, with over thirteen million viewers, and in third place in an overall ranking of films produced in Romania, with only 1.3 million viewers less than the film that takes first place.

In spite of the special importance of this historical figure in the redefinition and reproduction of national identity under the Ceauşescu regime, the monastery complex that he founded and that had constituted an emblem of pre-modern Bucharest became the victim of the most notorious of the demolitions ordered by the same regime. Due to the elevated position that it occupied in the urban landscape, its site was destined for the House of the People. Consequently, in 1985, the monastery ensemble was demolished, while the church and bell-tower were moved from their original position to make room for the communist architectural ensemble, whose pièce de résistance was to be the House of the People, today home to the Romanian Parliament. Initially scheduled to be demolished (and thus to share the fate of the twenty churches that were demolished between 1977 and 1989), the Mihai Vodă church was saved from destruction at the last minute. The compromise solution was to move  it from the hill on which it had been established by Michael the Brave to a new position at the foot of the hill, where it would be hidden by the new apartment blocks that were to be built. As a result of the operation of moving the church down a slope, it was shifted a distance of 289 metres, descending by 6.2 metres. Initially sited on the Mihai Vodă Hill, at what was then Str. Arhivelor no. 2, it is now to be found at Str. Sapienţei no. 4. In the course of this process of radical reconfiguration of the centre of the city of Bucharest, another eight churches were moved in the same way as the Mihai Vodă church. These operations necessitated much inventiveness on the part of the engineers, and so may themselves be counted among the actions of cultural opposition, of finding a way not of directly disobeying the orders received but of moderating their consequences by proposing solutions that would be tolerated. In Alexandru Barnea’s private collection there are three photographs of this church, taken in 1985, a few months before it was moved. They stand as testimony to the policy of remodelling the past that was characteristic of the Ceauşescu regime, which made intense use of national history for the purposes of legitimation, but at the same destroyed all that did not fit the new secularised version of that history. By transforming all national history into a prehistory of the Communist Party, past rulers who had fought for “unity and independence” became precursors of the General Secretary of the Party, who – continuing their model – was trying to pursue a policy of distancing in relation to the Soviet Union. However all that did not fit the atheist vision of the communist regime was condemned to oblivion or even to destruction. Actions such as that of the collector Alexandru Barnea contributed decisively to the preservation of the pre-communist historical memory of the Romanians.

Ádám Modor’s bequest offers insights into a chapter of samizdat publishing in the 1980s: the history of the Katalizátor Iroda. The collection presents the various stages in the history of the publisher and represents samizdat publishing as a (counter-)cultural act, as well as a document of the trajectories of a samizdat publisher.

This letter from the Sanda Budiș Collection reflects the way the Romanian exile community acted to preserve, at least among those who emigrated from Romania, the memory of the territories occupied by the USSR, Bessarabia and Bukovina. An example in this respect is represented by the work carried out by Asociaţia Mondială prin Corespondenţă Pro Basarabia şi Bucovina (The World Association by Correspondence Pro Bessarabia and Bukovina). The Association was founded on 1 December 1950 in Paris by the Romanian diplomat Nicolae Dianu. The initial name was the Pro Bessarabia Association, modified on 27 November 1955 to the Pro Bessarabia and Bukovina Association, and from 1975 it became the World Association by Correspondence Pro Bessarabia and Bukovina. In 1955, the headquarters of the Association was moved to Brussels, where the leaflet Pro Basarabia and Bucovina together with a series of volumes about the two Romanian provinces were published by the Nistru Publishing House. Between 1975 and 1989, the Association was coordinated by Nicolae Lupan. Its purpose was, on the one hand, to preserve the memory of Bessarabia and Bukovina among emigrant Romanians. On the other hand, it was designed to attract the attention of politicians and international public opinion to the history of these former Romanian provinces. Many exiled personalities were actively involved in the activity of this Association, including Sanda Budiș, who joined it in 1984. On 13 October 1984, Nicolae Lupan, the president of the Association, sent her a letter, the typed original of which now is preserved in the Sanda Budiș Collection at IICCMER. In this letter, Nicolae Lupan congratulated and thanked her for her desire to join and contribute to the Association. On the same occasion, he sent her a membership card and some advice on how she should act as a member of the Association. She was informed that members’ activity was varied, consisting in: organising the commemoration of the anniversaries of the unions of Bessarabia and Bukovina with Romania (27 March and 28 November, respectively); publishing reports of these commemorations in the local press in their countries of residence; preparation of documented communications on the issue of these two territories annexed by the USSR and their submission for publication by the Association at the Nistru Publishing House in Brussels; supporting the publishing activity of the Association by means of money contributions and distributing its books among Romanians in their countries of residence; the collection of papers, articles, studies, maps, photographs, and newspaper cuttings relating to the Romanian identity of the provinces of Bessarabia and Bukovina with the purpose of centralising them at the Association's headquarters for publishing; explaining, in private and public discussion, the importance of Romanians' solidarity for the integrity of Romania, irrespective of political and religious beliefs; drafting suggestions and proposals on the functioning of the Association; and attracting new members by spreading membership forms.

The many letters to be found in Monica Lovinescu and Virgil Ierunca’s collection are indisputable evidence of their commitment to using RFE’s broadcasts to protect Romanian dissidents from the abuses and acts of violence organised against them by the communist authorities. An illustrative example of this is the letter that Father Gheorghe Calciu-Dumitreasa sent to Monica Lovinescu and Virgil Ierunca in October 1984.

A former political prisoner, Calciu-Dumitreasa was imprisoned again in 1979 after delivering a series of seven sermons for young people the previous year. Through his sermons, Father Calciu-Dumitreasa hoped to strengthen the faith of young people whose Christian spiritual life was threatened by communist atheism and materialism (Petrescu 2013). The letter written by Father Calciu-Dumitreasa describes his situation and the situation of his family after his release from prison (August 1984) due to a huge campaign organised by the Romanian diaspora, and also makes known to the listeners of RFE’s Romanian desk his decision to emigrate.

At the beginning of his message, Calciu-Dumitreasa mentions that while imprisoned he refused any kind of collaboration with the regime. Furthermore, he continued to perform his duty as a priest despite the threats, terror, and beatings he was subjected to by the communist authorities. After his release, Calciu-Dumitreasa has been welcomed by his friends, acquaintances, and former students but to his very great disappointment the Romanian Orthodox Church has decided to strip him of the priesthood. Thus, in his letter he urges the Orthodox Church’s hierarchs to reconsider their position regarding his removal as he has proved to be a faithful defender of Christian values even in the most unfavourable circumstances. Moreover, the Securitate continues to watch each of his movements and its "unbated persistence in hate and malice" means that persecution against him and his family has continued.

In this context, Calciu-Dumitreasa mentions that despite his immense investment of love, faith, and suffering in "our country and Church," he has decided to emigrate due to the harassment his family continues to be subjected to by the Securitate. At the end of his letter, Calciu-Dumitreasa expresses his belief that those who have stood by him in difficult times in Romania will also surrender him with their love into his forced exile.