COURAGE

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Vasile Paraschiv’s testimony is filed at number 2164 in the oral history archive of the Sighet Memorial. The interview, whose summary extends to three pages, was taken by Mihai Chiru in 2005 in Piteşti, on the occasion of the symposium “The Piteşti Phenomenon: Re-education by Torture” organised annually by the Association of Former Political Prisoners, the County Museum in Piteşti, and the local authorities in the city, in collaboration with other relevant institutions. This symposium is emblematic for the exceptionalism of communism in Romania: it symbolises the mixing of victims and torturers that was experimented with in several prisons, among them that of Piteşti – the uninterrupted torturing of political prisoners with the help of some of their cellmates, with the aim of completely destroying the personalities of the latter.

Vasile Paraschiv’s testimony was initially stored on a 60-minute Sony audio cassette, but it now also exists in digital format. His testimony sums up the main stages in the violent confrontations that this worker had with the communist state’s apparatus of repression, and the most important episodes in the periods in which he was under political arrest. More precisely, the themes touched on by Vasile Paraschiv in this oral history interview are the following: his renunciation of the status of Romanian Communist Party (PCR) member in November 1968; his public letter of 1971 in favour of the creation of a Free Trade Union; his expression of solidarity with the movement for human rights initiated by Paul Goma in 1977; the refusal of the communist authorities to let him back into Romania on his return from a visit to France in 1978, during which he had given numerous interviews regarding his personal experience of psychiatric repression; and the last years of Romanian communism and his final confrontations with the Ceauşescu regime.

Regarding his experience of psychiatric repression, the most relevant testimony refers to the abuses that he suffered after he adhered to the human rights movement initiated by Paul Goma. “In February 1977, I met the writer Paul Goma, I signed his open letter to the Helsinki follow-up conference at Belgrade, and I was again arrested by the Securitate, who were keeping watch on my home, and taken to the Bucharest Militia, Drumul Taberei district, where they asked me and put pressure on me to give a declaration in which I would retract the signature I had put to Paul Goma’s letter. I refused to do this and for this reason they beat me; they mistreated me until I lost consciousness. For many minutes I was completely knocked out. After midnight I was loaded into a car and taken to the Securitate in Ploieşti, and from there, the next morning, I was again admitted to the Săpoca mental hospital, Buzău county, where I was checked in by the hospital director, Dr Anton Nicolau. Without asking me anything, why I had been brought there, because I was brought by two militiamen in uniform, he gave orders for me to be admitted to Section 2 of the hospital, which was the section for dangerous patients, people who were incurable, were violent, were truly dangerous,” says Vasile Paraschiv in his testimony. He continues with a shocking account of what he experienced during his political detention in the hospital: “If at the Militia in Drumul Taberei, Bucharest, I saw death close up, at Section 6 in Săpoca, Buzău county I saw Hell on earth. Here men and women half naked, with bare breasts, unkempt hair, faces covered with blood, torn dresses, were going round all the time in a state of agitation, the men marching and singing, commanding, some of them songs of grief, others songs of longing – it was a veritable Hell. I forgot to say that in all the other hospitals where I was, at Urlaţi and Voila, no one made me, no one obliged me to follow any kind of treatment; I was just admitted and kept there under observation; no one gave me anything. At the Săpoca Hospital, however, Dr Anton Nicolau, who as an agent of the Securitate obliged me to follow a medical treatment for out-patients. The nurses would put five to seven, maybe more pills in my hand and oblige me to swallow them; I put them in my mouth and then slipped them under my tongue; they gave me a glass of water and I had to open my mouth; I opened my mouth and after that they told me I was free. I went to the lavatory and threw them all down there. I’m convinced, and the doctors can confirm, that if I had swallowed those pills I would have become a real patient and I wouldn’t be here in front of you today. This idea, of putting the pills under my tongue, I’ve wondered how it came to me, and I’ve come to the conclusion that God gave it to me, because otherwise I would be long dead.” Vasile Paraschiv was one of the few direct witnesses of psychiatric repression in Romania, which constituted one of the most barbarous methods of annihilating those who criticised the communist regime, and which was used even after the political detainees were officially released from the prisons in 1964.

The photograph shows participants in the Korčula Summer School discussing the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and preparing an official protest. About 70 prominent non-conformist Marxist and left-wing philosophers from Western and Eastern countries attending a symposium on "Marx and Revolution" at the Korcula (philosophical) Summer School, fiercely condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces in August 1968. According to a Western journalist who took part in the symposium, the protest was expressed in the form of an appeal "to all Communist, Socialist and progressive forces all over the world to condemn this aggressive act." The appeal compares "the situation of Czechoslovakia with that of Vietnam," and the Soviet aggression "with that committed by Hitler's Germany.” One of the declarations was issued by the editorial board of Praxis and sent to Yugoslav President Tito, urging him to "defend the cause of Communism and Socialism against any kind of hegemony, and against a revival of conservative forces." The declaration also urged Tito to fully "utilise the authority of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia to support Czechoslovak progressive forces."

The collection contains Vilnius University Party Committee documents (reports, protocols, resolutions) about the activities of four professors and scholars in the Department of Lithuanian Literature (1958-1959). Four teachers and researchers in the department, Vanda Zaborskaitė, Irena Kostkevičiūtė, Meilė Lukšienė and Aurelija Rabačiauskaitė, were accused by Party activists and the Party Committee of anti-Marxism, taking a 'bourgeois' approach to Lithuanian literature, and idealising Lithuanian history. They were severely criticised at Party Committee meetings. All four were eventually expelled from the university.

The Ukrainian Museum-Archives in Cleveland, OH has in its possession an OST-Arbeiter patch that belonged to Iwan Shuljak, the live in caretaker of the building where the museum is now located. This item is part of a vast collection brought to Cleveland from Deported Persons Camps in Germany. The materials include not only personal items such as the OST-patch, work papers, correspondences, journals and other publications, but also hitherto unseen memoirs that describe a relatively unknown chapter of European history—the experiences of Ukrainian refugees during and after WWII.  

Shuljak was a fixture of the Ukrainian Museum-Archives, living in a spare room on the second floor of the museum. He sat on the porch reading, cleared the snow in winter, cut the grass in spring and summer, in order to show that someone cared for the UMA and its staggering collection of memorabilia, documents, books and artifacts. A lifelong bachelor, Shuljak was born in 1911 to a family of farmers, he lived through collectivization, the famine, as well as brutal arrests and interrogations from being designated a “class enemy.” He carried scars for his entire life where a Checkist had cracked his skull with a revolver, depriving him of hearing in his right ear. Once the Terror subsided, he was released to work on the railroad. After the Nazis invaded the USSR in 1941, Shuljak, along with 2 million other Ukrainians, was taken to work in the German economy. Shuljak’s experiences are important, as they show why diaspora communities were often staunchly anti-Soviet in their outlook and why they expended so much energy and effort in documenting and preserving their heritage. 

Shuljak’s blue and white OST patch identifying him as a forced laborer is now part of the UMA’s permanent collection. Stateless when he moved to the US, he never became an American citizen, nor was he a citizen of Ukraine. With the help of the Ukrainian community in Cleveland, who lobbied on his behalf to expedite the process, he became a Ukrainian citizen at the age of 95 and finally made it home.

Gábor Klaniczay’s collection of vinyl LPs consists of albums released in the 1970s and 1980s, CDs, and tapes of concerts of music by Hungarian New Wave bands.