Radio România Internațional

Category: The History Show

  • By ship from Vienna to Constantinople

    By ship from Vienna to Constantinople

    Under Ottoman influence for several centuries, the Romanian Principalities had been looking for and eventually found a new path in the first half of the 19th century. It was the path to modernization and Europeanization. Europe’s geopolitical history of the first half of the 19th century created the context for the Western ideas and the determination of elites to lead to the emergence of the Romanian state. Two of the powerful ideas of the time were: to put the Danube River at the center of the European community and to expand the West towards the East. People travelled by ship on the Danube between Vienna and Constantinople and that widened their horizon, realizing that commercial transport on the big river was profitable.



    The historian Constantin Ardeleanu is the author of the book “A cruise from Vienna to Constantinople. Travelers, spaces, images, 1830-1860”. It is a book of history viewed through the eyes of those who traveled on the route between the two great empires, the Habsburg and the Ottoman empires.



    How did the Romanian society receive the changes from the West, the technological innovations, is the first question to which historian Constantin Ardeleanu answered: “I would say that the Romanian society received those changes with openness. And with fear, initially, but also with a good understanding of the usefulness of those modern technologies. The Romanian space got connected to travel routes in Europe after the introduction of steam navigation on the river. This happened as of the 1830s and the symbolic moment was April 1834, when the first steamer, belonging to the first Austrian steam navigation company, arrived in a Romanian port. A reception ceremony was held, the Romanian elites quickly embraced the innovation, which they knew of from their travels abroad, and made full use of it equally to the West, to Vienna, and from there to the rest of Western Europe, through Constantinople, to the east and to the Holy Land, to Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean. However, for the ordinary people, that terrible invention was hard to understand, but they were aware of it. And this was because the ship and its modern technology had a specific form of territoriality.”



    The Danube was, undoubtedly, the axis of modernization for Romanians. This is how it was seen at the time, and although almost two centuries have passed since then, its current importance has remained intact. Here is historian Constantin Ardeleanu with more details: “This relationship with the Danube is very important, it was the first natural highway that connected us to the world. Undoubtedly, it needed some changes that were made both in the Iron Gates area and the Danube Delta area, in order to ensure the function of pan-European waterway. It was the Austrian company DDSG (Donau-Dampfschiffahrts-Gesellschaft) that came to introduce these lines between Vienna and Constantinople as part of an investment meant to connect the south-east of Europe. I was saying that the Danube was the main waterway that connected the Romanians to the world, hence the name ‘the Danube Principalities’ given to the Romanian Principalities. When this term was concocted, Serbia was also included in the Danube Principalities, but later, during the Crimean War of 1853-1856, the name ‘the Danube Principalities’ was used almost exclusively for Muntenia — Wallachia and Moldavia.”



    1830-1860 is the period chosen by Constantin Ardeleanu to imagine a journey on the Danube from Vienna to Constantinople. We asked him why he chose this period: “This period represents the start and the apogee of this Danube route between Vienna and Constantinople. 1830 is the year when the Austrian company, in British partnership, introduced a line on the Danube between Vienna and Budapest. This is how the connection of the Habsburg space through the Danube waterway started. Then steam navigation on the Danube was introduced, which reached the Romanian space in 1834, as I already said. 1860 was a year in which railway competition became increasingly important. The waterway went into decline with the introduction of the railways into the Habsburg space first. Starting with this decade of the 1860s, the same happened in the Romanian space. In 1860, the first railway in the Romanian space was built in ​​the Danube Delta area, namely the railway from Cernavoda to Constanța, which in a way short-circuited the Danube route. Travelers no longer needed to make a detour through Brăila and Galați, thus saving a few days. A new rush to speed up the process began, after reducing the travel time between Vienna and Constantinople and other destinations.”



    You may wonder who was traveling on the Danube? There were several types of travelers. First, there were the merchants and the military, the oldest travelers, the most adventurous spirits ever. Then there were the spiritual pilgrims to Mount Athos and to the holy lands of Jerusalem and Palestine. But there also emerged a new category, the tourists. The rich people wanted to discover the world and thus boarded on ships that took them across the Danube to the wide world. A cruise on the Danube from Vienna to Constantinople in the 19th century also brought them to Romania, which immediately adopted the models of the time. (LS)

  • Gift-offering as an exercise in power, in communist Romania

    Gift-offering as an exercise in power, in communist Romania


    Personality cult in the case of political
    leaders is a common trait in all historical ages. Flattering the leaders is part
    and parcel of a deeply-engrained human psychological mechanism. On one hand, it
    has something to do with the human being’s wish to receive over-the-top recognition
    as a sign of their power. On the other hand, it has something to do with the
    human being’s wish to climb up the social ladder, undeservedly, more often than
    not. However, over and above such an old practice, dating from time immemorial,
    we find the political leaders’ personality cult as a hallmark of fascism and communism. In Romania,
    the communist regime was no exception to the rule. Between 1965 and 1989, the
    communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu was the figure head around whom a blatantly
    wanton personality cult revolved.


    Such an exaggerated praise
    of the political leader was in fact an outgrowth of the regime’s brutality. In effect, praising the leader translated into hyper-eulogizing
    newspaper articles, grandiose shows on stadiums, parades, television and radio
    shows, official birthday ceremonies. Offering presents was a significant part of
    the personality cult. Presents were offered by economic entities, by craftsmen,
    by people from all walks of life or by foreign cultural and scientific personalities.
    Throughout the years, the presents received by Elena and Nicolae Ceaușescu made a special
    collection, as their diversity was literally spectacular. Paintings and
    sculptures alone make a nonesuch collection of works, whereby painters and
    sculptors were elbowing each other out, in their bid to pay their respects to
    the two communist leaders.


    Thirty years were marked
    in 2019 from the December 1989 revolution, when the Ceausescu regime was
    toppled. On that occasion, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest brought out
    a small-sized, 440-page album. The work included reproductions of paintings and
    various other works of art, dedicated to Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu. The album
    is somehow a sequel to Cornel Ilie’s A Portrait for the comrade, including reproductions
    of objects in the collection of Romania’s National Museum of History The latter
    album was published a year earlier, in 2018.

    Calina Barzu is a museographer with
    the National Contemporary Art Museum’s Photography Archive. Calina is also a
    curator of the tribute art exhibition. Ms Barzu didn’t fail to mention the parallel
    exhibition mounted on the premises, including items that were part of the then
    the automobile owners, members of the Retromobil club. Integrating day-to-day
    objects into the tribute exhibition is a way of understanding the spirit of the
    time when two generations of Romanians lead their lives, between 1945 and 1989.


    The
    exhibition was put together based on the 2019 catalogue that marked 30 years
    from the Revolution. It is a selection of the tribute works from the collection
    of the museum. The exhibition brings together works authored by well-established
    artists, in front of the onlookers and visitors, but also works made by ordinary
    people or working teams, works that were part of the heritage of the museum’s
    collection. The exhibition was initiated in December 2019, it had several
    episodes or series where the collections objects were on display. We initiated
    a collaboration with Retromobil Romania, they joined us along this theme and
    came up with several items belonging to their members’ collections, with automotive-related
    exhibits. The Retromobil items on
    display range from driving licences, automobile publications, maps, magazines
    and board notebooks. We also have a fridge that could be encased in the trunk
    and a TV set which could also be encased in the car’s accumulator. We have several
    registration plates and each of them has a story of its own, how they were
    rated according to the social class. We also have automobile objects that could
    be included in the travel kit. We also have a selection of archive images
    featuring pictures of cars.


    Small-sized though it is, the
    catalogue of tribute items at the National Museum of Contemporary Art quite aptly
    highlights the propagandistic charge of the tribute works of art. Sabin Balasa (1932-2008), was one of the most highly acclaimed painters of the Ceausescu
    regime. In the album, he was included with The Ceausescu Era, a painting he made
    in 1988, oil on canvas, 120
    x 150 centimetres. The work depicts four miners looking forward, against a
    half-dark, blue background. Here is Călina Bârzu once again, this time telling
    us what special items has the museum exhibited, which were part of the Ceausescus’
    presents collection.


    The special items in our collection include scale models
    of the presents sent by the people or by the enterprises that offered those
    presents. One such object, which is rather more special, showing a lot of
    creativity, performance and quality, is this present received from the Aeronautic
    Enterprise in Bacau, which also has a dedication for the two. It is a scale
    model of an airplane, symbolizing the work of the factory staff. Part of our items
    come from the original collection of then the Museum of the Romanian Communist
    Party and the Art Museum. It is a similar manner to place
    the leader centre-stage. The objects were supposed to illustrate the achievements
    of the factory, on one hand, but also his own achievements, on the other hand, they
    spoke about how he succeeded to bring the entire technological process and
    about the fact that it was entirely thanks to him that all the economic achievements
    were possible, thanks to him and to the work of the people. Everything was possible thanks
    to him, since he succeeded to contribute to the people’s progress and well-being.
    Most of the objects are in a good preservation condition.


    The tribute exhibition
    of presents received by Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu, hosted by the Museum of
    Contemporary Art, has a plain message for today’s generation: under a dictatorship,
    valuable as it may be, fine art falls outside the scope of a free spirit.

    (Translation by Eugen Nasta)



  • 100 years since the birth of King Michael I of Romania

    100 years since the birth of King Michael I of Romania

    The year 2021 has been marked by more centennials than usual. One of them is the celebration of the birth of Romania’s last sovereign, King Michael I. He was a king with a difficult task, of leading the country in times of distress, during the Fascist regime, the second world war and the coming to power of the Communist regime.

    Michael I was born on October 25th, 1921, at Peles Castle in Sinaia, the Romanian monarchs’ residence. His parents were king Carol II and princess Helen of Greece and Denmark. He had the blood of the largest dynasties of Europe, Hohenzollern and Romanov, but King Michael I would always say: I am Romanian ,by birth and destiny. He was named Michael in memory of Michael the Brave, prince of Wallachia in the 17th century, the one who attempted, on his own, to unite Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania.

    Mihai first became king at the age of 6, in 1927, after the death of his grandfather, Ferdinand I. His father, the future king Carol II, had given up the right of heir to the throne a year before. In 1930, after three years of regency, his father accepted to become heir apparent and be crowned king of Romania. Michael got the honorary title of Great voivode of Alba Iulia, as any heir apparent would. His second rule started 10 years later, in 1040, after his father renounced for the second time the sovereign’s prerogatives.

    Thus, in September 1940, Michael got to the throne of Romania for the second time, but this time at a very delicate moment, with the country affected by massive territorial losses and the ascent of the far right. General Ion Antonescu became the head of the state, and the relation with him was a dark chapter in the sovereign’s memories, as he recalled it back in 2008, in an interview to the Centre of Oral History of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation.

    To him I was something he would ignore, just somebody who would sign things, the head of the army, somebody dressed up in a uniform who was heading parades, that’s all. He would show more respect to my mother, and thanks to him actually she came back after September 1940 and for that I was grateful. But then, trouble started. In one of our New Year’s messages, I think, at Christmas, in 1943, I said some negative things about the war. The Germans got angry too, but there were no consequences.

    King Mihai I was reproached for the way Ion Antonescu was treated after his arrest on August 23rd, 1944, when Romania joined the allied forces: the king refused to pardon the former head of state. For that change of sides Romania was repaid with the return of North Transylvania, which it had lost in August 1940. In 2008, the king explained what had happened then:

    Many thought that I could pardon him or change his sentence. They don’t know how the constitutional system worked back then. No act, not even one signed by me, was valid unless co-signed by a minister. And that was valid for any kind of decree. Back then the justice minister was Patrascanu, and he refused to sign. That’s what people did not understand. In that case, the Russians and the Anglo-Americans would have never accepted it.

    After the war, the Communist Party got the grip on the entire state with support from the occupying Red Army. King Michael I and his entourage opposed the Soviet roller coaster with all the means they had. But the lack of support from the democratic West made all the difference. On December 30th, 1947, with all the state institutions under the control of the Communist regime, king Michael I was forced to abdicate and to leave the country together with his mother. At 26 he was about to start a new life and a family, based on Christian values.

    During all those years of communist dictatorship, the king’s voice could be heard on the free radio stations condemning the crimes and abuses committed by the Communist regime. After 1989, the exiled king returned to the country and the Romanians started learning about a piece of history that had been stolen from them. In the 2008 interview he also gave some simple advice for the future generations:

    Just behave humanely and don’t despise anybody. Be kind, in general, but not show infinite kindness, because sometimes one needs to turn the screw, as they say. I’ve seen so many terrible things happening to people in the country and when I see that the authorities don’t care and despise them, that makes me sick. I was taught differently: that one should treat all people in the same way, be they poor or otherwise, we are all human beings.

    King Michael I’s centennial coincided with the day of the Romanian Army which, on October 25, 1944, liberated the entire territory of Romania from under the foreign occupation. (MI)

  • Romanian public radio celebrates 93rd anniversary

    Romanian public radio celebrates 93rd anniversary

    Romanian public service radio
    began its uninterrupted broadcasting on 1st November 1928. Seen as
    the most efficient means of disseminating information, the then brand-new
    medium of communication via radio soon grew to become immensely popular with
    the public. In its 93-year-long existence, Radio Romania witnessed some of the most
    momentous events in 20th century Romanian history. To reconstruct
    some of those events, we went to the Oral History Centre of the Romanian Radio
    Broadcasting Corporation which also contains the recollections of the people who
    worked there. Paul Berstein is one of them, and he used to be a translator at
    Radio Romania. He remembers one event that impressed him a lot on a personal
    level:




    Before 1990, many different
    reporters and public cultural figures used to work for the radio. At one time
    we received the visit of a delegation led by a deputy minister of culture from
    the Soviet Union and who met the leadership of the radio. I was the translator.
    One of the members of the delegation was the actor
    Nikolay Cherkasov, who had starred in the film Ivan the
    Terrible. He complimented me on my Russian, asked me where I learnt the
    language and wanted to send me a present when he got back to Moscow. I told him
    that I learnt Russian at home and that I would come to Moscow to collect the
    present myself. The next time I was in Moscow, I asked permission from the president
    of the corporation, a man called Bujor, to call Cherkasov.
    And Cherkasov said he would come to see me at my hotel, but I said to him what
    about my present, you promised me a present. And he said what woud you like,
    and I said that I’d like nothing more than to see him perform a few lines from
    Ivan the Terrible in the church in the Red Square. And so he did. As long as I
    live, I’ll never forget those ten minutes when he played the role of Ivan the
    Terrible. He was a great actor, a truly great actor!




    The beginning of the 1960s
    saw a thaw in Romania’s relations with the West and the Golden Stag pop music
    festival held in Brasov benefited from this more relaxed climate. Paul Berstein
    remembers:




    I got to meet many of
    the musicians who came to the festival, such as Connie Francis, Juliette Greco
    and Amalia Rodriguez, among others. One day I got a call at Băneasa airport and
    they said: Connie Francis is coming, make sure she gets a proper welcome! I
    took her to a restaurant and later found out that she was friends with the
    Kennedys. When she went back to America, she sent me an autographed photograph on
    which she wrote: To doctor Paul from Connie Francis. I also met many foreign journalists,
    from Radio France, from the United States, but less so from the Voice of America.
    I learnt something from every one of them.




    Paul Berstein also
    recalled the earthquake of 4th March 1977, when the public radio
    went through a moment of crisis:




    After I made sure nothing
    was damaged in my home, I took my daughter and went to the radio. Muşat, the president
    of the public radio at the time, had his office on the third floor. The door
    opened and Preda and Negru rushed in. Preda said we should go out in the street
    and record, and Negru said there are people in the street, they have their
    radios with them and they’re listening to other stations, Radio Romania is not
    broadcasting anything. People kept calling the press agency, Agerpres. The approval
    to go out and record people in the street came eventually, after an hour or
    two.




    Arts journalist Magdalena
    Boiangiu also worked for Radio Romania. In 1998, she recalled how some of the station’s
    most popular theatre shows came into being:




    Millions of people who
    are today regular theatre goers learnt about theatre from Theatre on the Microphone
    or Radio Theatre. Theatre on the Microphone was one of the early shows, when
    the building housing the public radio was yet to be built and it was broadcasting
    from St Sava. The actors would go up on stage, microphones were installed in the
    auditorium to capture the sound and that was it, theatre on the microphone. The
    technology evolved in time and dedicated studios were built, adaptations were
    made especially for radio, based on abridged versions of the script. In the
    1960s when I joined the staff, we all realised we were at a crossroads. An era was
    coming to an end and another was beginning. Theatre on the microphone, a type
    of theatre that was being performed in front of a technical device, was coming
    to an end, and radio theatre was beginning – a form of theatre written
    especially for radio, in which authors knew from the very beginning that they
    couldn’t rely on image and that everything must be achieved through words and
    sounds. Our efforts to produce these types of scripts, to create this special
    type of theatre, were not without success, sometimes also international.




    As Radio Romania turns
    93, we’re looking forward to its 100th anniversary in 7 years’ time.

  • Romania-Poland Centennial

    Romania-Poland Centennial

    By the end of WWI, the map of Eastern and Central Europe looked very different than it had been. The Ottoman, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires had broken apart, and national states replaced them. The Great War had left over 10 million dead, and even though it was a detestable war, the losers imagined policies to recover territories lost in the conflict. The winners, on the other hand, tried to form alliances to prevent another war. That failed, and the new war pitted against each other most of the same old adversaries.




    Romania and Poland had aligning interests after 1918. They became even closer, especially since they once again shared a border, easing relations that were going back to the Middle Ages. Historian Ioan Scurtu told us how this closer relationship worked after 1921:


    “The 1921 convention was military, and it provided for mutual defense in case of unprovoked attack coming from the Soviet Union. Poland had faced Soviet Russian and Ukrainian forces, and needed such a treaty with Romania in order to gain support, on the one hand. On the other, it needed a friend to the south, and Romania needed one to the north. The two states shared common interests, especially since the province of Moldavia and Poland had long been neighboring states.”


    Romania and Poland needed recognition, which could be helped by a regional cooperation policy. The second prop for this recognition was the promotion, in Europe, of the principles of the Society of Nations, which centered on consolidating peace. Based on the idea that peace is safeguarded by preparations for war, this Romanian-Polish cooperation was built around the military convention, which got renewed in 1926. Ioan Scurtu told us what it was about in a nutshell:


    “The convention provided for issuing a document regarding military cooperation between the two countries. Several meetings were held between the general staff of the two states in order to lay out the concrete details. In the meantime, in 1926, this convention was renewed in a formula that said that the two states shall support each other in case of unprovoked attack. They removed the provision that explicitly referred to attack from the eastern borders, meaning the ones with the Soviet Union. The discussions went towards finding means to collaborate militarily on all borders.”




    However, this cooperation between Romania and Poland would become complicated, as Ioan Scurtu details:


    “Poland had a territorial dispute with Czechoslovakia, which had become an ally of Romania under a separate treaty. For that reason, military plans could not be seen through, reaching concrete results, such as joint maneuvers. Poland and Czechoslovakia had been reborn, but the leaders of the two states differed on what it meant to be a first line ally. When Romanian Foreign Minister Take Ionescu proposed in 1919 the formation of an alliance linking the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, neither Poland, nor Czechoslovakia accepted. The disputed region between the two was very rich in coal deposits. At that time, coal was crucial. Czechoslovakia also had problems on the border with Hungary, while Poland didnt, so the latter had no interest in working with Czechoslovakia in a situation that could have led to antagonizing Hungary.”




    The European diplomatic shift in the mid-30s led to shifts in perception, in the context in which France and Great Britain guaranteed post-WWI peace treaties, and tried to appease a more and more aggressive Nazi Germany. Poland sought to secure its borders, as it was caught between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, inheritor of Czarist Russia, both countries having previously crushed Poland in 1795. Here is Ioan Scurtu:


    “Polish diplomacy explored, and at some point managed, to form close relationships with the Soviet Union, to reach a sort of non-aggression pact. It also managed to form a similar pact with Germany in 1934. The two states, Poland and Germany, committed to operate according to the Paris Convention of 1928, which ruled out war as a means to settle differences between states. Against this background, Polish Foreign Minister Beck ran a lively campaign against Nicolae Titulescu, the president of the Society of Nations, who aimed at forming a collective security system aimed at Germany. In the end, history proved that this policy was a failed one. Poland was attacked by Germany on September 1, 1939, and by the Soviet Union on September 17 that same year.”




    Unfortunately, both Romania and Poland would fall victim to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, the first in 1939, shortly after the treaty was signed, followed by Romania in the summer of 1940. In honor of the old friendship, Romania helped Poland move to the West the remnants of its army, their political leadership, and their treasury.

  • Romania’s National History Museum

    Romania’s National History Museum

    Museums are cultural spaces,
    public or private, where visitors admire objects or relive times that were
    long forgotten. A museum is a time machine of sorts, an escape from the hubbub
    of the daily world, from routine and from everybody’s daily chores. Also, a
    museum is a place quite similar to the pilgrimage sites where people try to find answers to the questions, old and new, they ask themselves.


    In a museum, we got used to coming
    across portly figureheads, great army commanders, great political leaders,
    cultural personalities. In a museum, we expect to witness heroic, exceptional
    moments as well. But the museums are also repositories of people’s daily lives,
    of the allegedly most insignificant objects people surround themselves with. As
    for such a universe of the ordinary, it is no less important than that of the unique
    or special objects, Ordinary objects become special, just because the passing
    of time makes them special. The museums are specialized sites, yet even the big
    museums, relevant for the memory of a community, can be repositories of
    personal or familiar objects collections. A telling example of that is Romania’s National History Museum.




    Romania’s National History
    Museum was established in 1970. The museum is a continuation of a Romanian
    tradition of history and archaeology museums that emerged in the second half of
    the 19th century. At Romania’s National History Museum, the most
    important treasures were brought. First, there were the treasures made of
    precious metal. They were stored in a place where safety and visibility could
    be provided. Home to the museums is one of Bucharest’s most representative
    buildings. Located in the city centre, the Post Office Palace does attract
    visitors due to its visibility.


    However, the National
    History Museum’s policy also targets the private collections, which should be
    added to the already existing heritage.


    Corina Chiriac is one of Romania’s
    most popular entertaining music vocalists. She has recently donated personal
    collection items to the National History Museum. Born in 1949, Corina is the
    daughter of two musicians. Her father was a composer and an academic with the
    National University of Music in Bucharest, while her mother was a pianist and
    also a professor there. When the donation act was signed the Director of the
    museum, Ernest Oberlander-Târnoveanu, was keen on stating that history was
    equally made by ordinary people and their objects, and by the great
    personalities.


    History is, after
    all, our life, it is everybody’s life. Our life, day by day, goes by, and turns
    into history. Not everybody is aware of that, that’s for sure, but I am
    convinced that through all that she does, Mrs Corina Chiriac does have this
    feeling, that she belongs to history. And I can acknowledge that myself, since,
    among other things, I was a listener of the songs she has performed for a
    couple for decades. In the landscape of Romanian entertaining music of the 70s,
    the 80s and the 90s, Mrs Corina Chiriac stands out as an unconventional character,
    quite all right.


    The donation made by Corina
    Chiriac is also important because of the donor-artist’s notoriety, who can set an
    example for other heritage owners.

    Ernest Oberlander Tarnoveanu:


    Mrs Corina
    Chiriac belongs to a generation that managed to do a lot of things in very
    difficult and complicated times. And, apart from the talent, the charisma, the
    hard work she put in, Mrs Corina Chiriac also has a personality trait we should
    all appreciate: she is also an aware citizen. What has happened today stands
    proof of her ladyship’s responsibility towards her family, towards those who
    preceded her, but also towards her won work. And I think there is no better
    place for these documents to be displayed, kept and put to good use, items she
    has donated to the National Museum, than this institution. This is their home, and
    I would be very happy if more fellow citizens followed the Mrs Corina Chiriac’s
    example. We herewith have the proof that we’re dealing with a great artist,
    with a free individual, with someone who is responsible for the heritage she
    received and who believes that such an institution as the National Museum is
    the best place for the objects to be kept and displayed.


    Corina Chiriac made a clean breast
    out of it: her museum-related childhood memories and the desire to share
    part of the personal treasure with other people prompted her to opt for the
    donation.

    Corina Chiriac:


    For a whole
    year I prepared for that, thinking of what I should do with all these objects that
    are so very important for me. And I realized that, after a life of journeys,
    with my parents or on my own, through the museums of the world, their place was
    not at home in a folder, but somewhere in a museum. I knocked at the door of
    the museum asking them whether they wanted an act of donation dated 1915, with
    an embossed stamp and with king Ferdinand’s portrait? I told them I was also in
    the possession of the baccalaureate diploma of my Armenian grandmother from
    Adapazari, in Turkey, dated 1901. And, little by little, in the sweltering heat
    of last summer, a team of the museum called in at my place and we started selecting
    the stuff. I am very happy that especially the documents of my parents, those
    of my grandparents and even mine from now on can also be viewed by someone
    else, without having to invite them at my place.


    Romania’s National History
    Museum is also a museum of the daily history with a national scope, and beyond.
    As for Corina Chiriac, she significantly contributed to the heritage of the museum.

    (Translation by Eugen Nasta)

  • Interwar Bukovina

    Interwar Bukovina

    Bukovina, also known as the “land of beech trees” is the province in northern Romania whos had a rather sinuous history. In the Middle Ages, it was part of the Kievan Russia, the Kingdom of Galicia and the Principality of Moldavia. Bukovina was the nucleus from which the medieval state of Moldova was born, and the city of Suceava was its first seat. Suceava was also the seat of the longest-living prince of Moldavia, Stephan the Great, in the second half of the 15th century. In 1774, Bukovina was annexed by Austria, and in 1918 it united with the Kingdom of Romania. In June 1940, following two ultimatums, the Soviet Union annexed Bessarabia and North Bukovina, which were freed in 1941. In 1944, the Soviet Union reannexed the two territories, and North Bukovina was incorporated into Ukraine.



    Bukovina has always been a multiethnic and multicultural province. Its been home to Romanians, Ruthenians, Germans, Poles, Jews, ethnic Hungarians, Roma and many more. According to a census conducted in 1910 by the Habsburg authorities, the population of Bukovina numbered 800,198 inhabitants, of whom 39% were Ruthenian, 34% Romanian, 13% Jewish, 8% German, 4.5% Polish and 1.3% Hungarian. In the interwar period, when Bukovina was part of Greater Romania, observing ethnic rights in Bukovina was in line with the highest democratic standards of the time, and the living standard was at an acceptable level. This has been confirmed by both economic statistics and personal testimonies.



    One such statement belongs to Mihai Macsim, a teacher in the village of Vatra Moldovitei, and was recorded in 1998 by the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporations Oral History Center:


    “The village is located in the Obcina sub-Carpathian area. Its a very beautiful place, with hard-working people, who, between the wars were of various ethnicities. But the relations between them were very good. There were no ethnic or religious conflicts, and probably not even political. Most of the people were forest workers, and many were people of means, with their own well-established households.”



    The locals were involved in traditional occupations and trades. Living in the mountainous area, they were all very much connected with the forest. Here is Mihai Macsim describing the community he worked in as a teacher.


    “The basic occupation of the people in Moldovita was forestry, and the forest workers were known back then as tzapinari. They worked the wood which was then taken to the factory. As regards educated people, there were many of them in Moldovita: doctors, dentists, engineers, teachers, priests and other categories of intellectuals. It was also an extremely developed workers center. The lumber factory in Moldovita was considered the best in the area. Many times, intellectuals would gather at the town hall or the at the factory and talk about things, but there were no political differences between them.”



    Economic prosperity is very important in peoples lives. That is why the standard of living is an indicator of how a certain society is doing, politically, socially and culturally. Mihai Macsim recalled some of the things that characterized the life of a teacher:


    “The material situation of a teacher in the inter-war period was relatively good For instance, a substitute teacher, therefore at the beginning of their career, would get 1,600 lei per month, and the cost of living, including the rent, was of around 800 lei. So they could save half of their salaries. So, I couldnt say it was a bad time for teachers. Still, compared to other categories of public workers, they were a bit neglected. But most teachers were rather modest, so it was plenty for them. For instance, when I was a teacher in Breaza, I would get 1,600 lei, the rent was 800 and the rest was for me to spend as I would see fit. Most teachers spent that money on books and that is why interwar teachers had beautiful book collections and were known to study a lot.”



    Teachers were very much respected in rural communities, and the locals would find all sorts of means to protect them. Here is Mihai Macsim once more:


    “Indeed, back then the teacher and the director benefited from a share of the church fund resulting from the wood trade. Also, if one was living at school and the school had land, that plot would be leased and the money obtained that way shared among all the teachers. So there was actual support, also from authorities. I wish teachers today benefited from the conditions back then, from 1937 until 1940. They had very good lives and the neglect was minimal, as it was everywhere.”



    Far from attempting to build an idyllic image, the testimonies speaking of a settled democratic society are useful for us to see, by comparison, how society can degrade during a dictatorship. And Bukovina lived through both the dictatorships of the 20th century: Fascism and Communism. Micro and macro histories do not contradict themselves, they are complementary in the history of mankind. (MI)

  • The French Resistance in Romania in WWll

    The French Resistance in Romania in WWll

    Romania joined WWII in the
    summer of 1941 upon a triple annexation of its territories a year before.


    In June 1940, the Soviet Union
    annexed the Romanian territories between the rivers Prut and Dniester also
    known as Bessarabia and North Bukovina. In August 1940 Hungary annexed another
    part of the Romanian territory, northern Transylvania and Maramures, while in
    September that year Bulgaria occupied southern Dobrogea. The political crisis
    that followed led to the abdication of king Carol 2nd and the coming
    to power of a dictatorship led by marshal Ion Antonescu. The new regime forced Romania
    into an alliance led by Nazi Germany, at war with the USA, Great Britain and the
    Soviet Union.






    The peace
    treaties at the end of the First World War collapsed shortly after the fall of
    France in June 1940. The occupation of France actually threw the continent into
    the bloodiest and most destructive war by that time, with millions of deaths
    and huge material damage.






    Europe found
    itself under the grip of the Nazi Germany and it took almost five years of
    sustained military efforts to get rid of it.


    But even in
    those difficult years many people refused to give up entirely. Although resistance
    to such a powerful enemy seemed to be futile, those people proved that even small
    actions can count in the fight of a well-functioning war machine. In the
    following minutes, Oana Demetriade from the National Council for the Study of
    the Securitate Archives will be telling us the story of three brave French
    residents in Romania who decided to spy for the Allies in the days of WWII.






    Sound bite: There was a group of French nationals residing in Romania who decided
    to spy for the Free France or for Britain. One of these is a French lady, named
    Henriette Sümpt, who got Romanian
    citizenship after two successive marriages and settled in this country in
    1928. She decided it was high time she
    did something for her country which had already signed a truce with Germany.
    She established a connection with Special Operations Executive based in
    Istanbul and started to send intelligence to the British agents there without
    knowing that the aforementioned connection was being keenly monitored by the
    Romanian Intelligence Service.






    Back in the
    day Henriette Sümpt used to be a secretary
    for the Bucharest branch of the famous French news agency Havas. Around 1940
    before the war had broken out she was using the agency’s database to provide
    intelligence to both France and Britain. She started by giving information
    about the movement of the German troops around Romania, military insignia,
    registration numbers of the military vehicles, the type of weapons they were
    carrying, the routes used by the military convoys etc.




    During her
    strolls through the Floreasca district, Henriette Sümpt could easily monitor the German planes taking
    off and landing on the Baneasa airport in the north of the capital city. She
    also travelled to other cities like Galati, Ramnicu Sarat, Focsani, Bacau, Iasi
    and Botosani, all situated at Romania’s eastern border.


    Here’s again
    at the microphone Oana Demetriade.






    Oana Demetriade: Together with French journalist, Maurice Négre, she managed to put together a small espionage
    network and send some sketches to the allies. The drawings she sent were quite common
    and even funny as they pictured only leaves, deer, dogs or a snake. However,
    those were actually symbols for the German military units deployed to Romania,
    which were soon going to see action in the Balkans or the USSR.




    However,
    the group’s activity didn’t remain unnoticed for long. Henriette Sümpt was arrested soon but eventually granted
    clemency. Oana Demetriade:




    Oana Demetriade: The entire network was discovered and its
    members arrested upon a German intervention. Henriette was to be arrested first.
    She was frisked and compromising documents were found on her. According to the
    SSI agent who was interrogating her, she was a pretty lady, very intelligent
    with extraordinary powers of observation and very good at drawing. She managed
    to remain self-possessed while being apprehended by our agents. Upon the quick
    trial that followed, Maurice Negre was released in a couple of months upon the intervention
    of the French state while Henriette remained in custody. She would later pass
    through several prisons, including the women’s penitentiary in Mislea. Her two
    ex-husbands in Romania, who were still very fond of her, assisted the woman in
    petitioning the state authorities and even the country’s king, Mihai, in order
    to get her pardoned. Her previous sentence of 10-year forced labour was
    commuted to one-year in prison and she was released on August 22nd.
    Her release had nothing to do with Romania’s leaving the Axis a day later,
    august 23rd.




    Henriette Sümpt’s
    story also continued after the war. She got involved in charity and worked as a
    massager in recovery centers for athletes. She was monitored by the communist
    Securitate after the war and reports about her were positive. In 1959, upon the
    intervention of her third Romanian husband who had successfully left for France
    and of her relatives there, she received a French passport and got repatriated.
    Together with Henriette Sümpt and Maurice
    Négre, Jean Paul Lenseigne, is the third French
    journalist part of the brave group that got involved in actions meant to help
    their country in times of war on the Romanian territory.




    (bill)

  • Language and computers in Romania

    Language and computers in Romania

    Translation software today employ information technology, which,
    like any other piece of tech surrounding us today, has a fascinating history.
    It is a mix of a plethora of disciplines, which, at first sight, have very
    little in common. The history of artificial intelligence, a new subject
    clustering a number of sciences together, also has a chapter on Romanian
    contribution, which consisted first and foremost in the marriage of linguistics
    and mathematics.


    Emerged in the United States, computational linguistics is the
    successful name of this inter-disciplinary field. It bridges the gap between
    language and computer science, studying the connection between natural language
    and computer language as artificial intelligence. In the years before the
    Second World War, cybernetics was a novel science encouraging the association
    between various fields of research. It was the forefather of computational
    linguistics. At the end of the 1930s, Ștefan Odobleja was one of the pioneers
    of this new field. But after the second world war, when the Soviet occupation
    created a new communist regime, the scientific prospects changed for the worse.


    In Romania, one of the pathfinders of computational linguistics was
    mathematician Solomon Marcus. In a 1998 interview for the Center for Oral
    History, Solomon Marcus described how the ideology of the one-party state
    shaped scientific research.


    Cybernetics was chastised as a bourgeois construct. At the time,
    Romania was following Moscow’s orders to a fault. And Russian scientists came
    up with a very inspiring idea, to separate certain linguistic research, such as
    mathematical linguistics, from the broader umbrella of human sciences. They
    associated it to the branch of technological sciences. After a period of
    criticism against cybernetics, Moscow changed its attitude, hailing the
    technological and scientific revolution. And hence this would become one of the
    goals of communist society, achieving a technological and scientific society.


    As any other shift of policy adopted by the communist regime,
    pragmatism prevailed over ideology. The same happened in Moscow, and Soviet
    satellites followed closely in Moscow’s steps. Solomon Marcus:


    Obviously, Bucharest too set out to accomplish this objective. It
    achieved two things. First, it recognized all mathematical linguistic research,
    and second, computation linguistics was associated with the technological and
    scientific revolution. Mechanized translations was the goal at the time, and
    efforts were made to make this happen. Machines, not people, were meant to do
    translations. The issue was key, as both the Russians and the Americans wanted
    to be able to swiftly translate texts from English and Russian. Linguistics had
    been anathema to Stalin, considering his Marxist views. Yet, all of a sudden, computational
    linguistics was no longer stigmatized, being included in the branch of
    technological sciences.


    The two scientific communities, made up of philologists and
    mathematicians, were unenthusiastic about the new discipline. Solomon Marcus:


    Rosetti was one of the few philologists who hailed and encouraged
    this new type of activity. His peers either ignored the matter or argued
    against it. They said it was not linguistics. Professor Emanuel Vasiliu’s
    approach to linguistics was quite similar to logic and mathematics.
    Mathematicians, on the other hand, believed that mathematics was by tradition
    close to mechanics, physics or chemistry, but didn’t overstep the boundaries of
    these disciplines. Mathematics being associated with a human science such as
    linguistics went very much against tradition. Because of that, a great deal of
    mathematicians were very skeptical. They didn’t believe this could work. I
    can’t say they took an active stance against it, but they were hesitant. Moisil
    was one of the few who were enthusiastic about it. You do realize the luck we
    had. Due to their support, we could teach mathematical linguistics at the
    University of Bucharest starting with the 1960s.


    With a view to researching the new field, Solomon Marcus therefore
    got support from some of the most influential mathematicians, like Grigore
    Moisil, and from philologists like Alexandru Rosetti. He therefore moved to
    implementing the new tendencies in university lectures and published articles.


    I was very lucky, because I remembered that Moisil and Rosetti
    worked together and militated for the introduction of mathematical linguistics
    activities in Romania. They also championed the creation of a mathematical linguistics
    university class, and Romania was one of the first countries in the world to
    have this discipline taught in universities. Emanuel Vasiliu and I, a
    mathematician and a linguist, we had a good start in the field. We also
    benefited from certain exchanges with our peers abroad. I had published a
    mathematical linguistics handbook at the University of Bucharest in 1963, and
    this allowed us to send our papers to various scholars abroad who were pursuing
    similar lines of research. The handbook was immediately translated in London,
    New York, Moscow, Paris and Prague.


    In 1966, Bucharest played host to the International Linguistics
    Congress, bringing together a number of prestigious scholars in the field. The
    event put Romania on the map of world science and turned computational
    linguistics into the most important science that would shape people’s way of
    life over the coming decades. (V. Palcu)



  • Railways and Exact Time in the Romanian Space

    Railways and Exact Time in the Romanian Space

    People
    nowadays have the exact time at their fingertips, so they are taking
    it for granted. We are surrounded by clocks of all kinds, and it is
    almost impossible to not know what time it is at any given moment.
    However, exact time has its own history. In this case, exact time is
    closely tied to the emergence of railways, and is as fascinating as
    any other major idea. We are influenced a lot by the most ordinary of
    ideas and objects without even realizing it. Exact time and railways
    were introduced alongside each other, around the mid-19th
    century. Trains
    appeared in 1830 in England, and Dorin Stanescu told us that this was
    England’s gift to the world:

    At
    the moment when railways appeared in England, the English found that
    they had a problem on their hands. We have to say very clearly that
    Europe discovered speed in the mid-19th century. When
    railways appeared, traffic was reduced, and railways had a single
    track. However, once traffic increased, it brought with it a big
    problem, that of synchronizing the clocks on trains, because the
    absence of that led to a lot of accidents with a lot of victims.

    Eventually,
    the English found a solution. Dorin Stanescu told us about it:


    The
    first solution was proposed in 1840 by English captain Basil Hall,
    who suggested that the entire country use the time in London. His
    idea was successful initially, but the postal services did not agree.
    However, railways proved to be a revolutionary institution in the
    19th century, and people quickly understood that this was
    the proper solution. The Great Western Railway company, starting in
    November 1840, introduced a uniform exact time for its trains. Their
    proposal was for the time in London, provided by the Greenwich
    observatory, to be used uniformly by railway companies.

    The
    Romanian space, in a mad rush to modernize and be more like Europe,
    adopted quickly everything coming from the West. Dorin Stanescu told
    us that the English model was adopted without reservations:

    By
    1896, railways became a common sight in the Romanian landscape. As
    happened everywhere in the world, it brought with it a single exact
    time all across the territory, along with a system to synchronize it.
    In Romania, they used the English model, setting everyone’s time by
    the time in Bucharest. Up until 1890, Romania had only a few tracks
    and trains every day, with little danger of accidents. After 1893,
    France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary unified their time system, which
    also started being adopted in Romania. Adopting the time in
    Bucharest, based on the Greenwich mean time, was achieved by two
    institutions: the Romanian Railroads and the Romanian Meteorological
    Institute. The father of unified time in Romania was Stefan Hepites,
    the head of the institute.

    Standardizing
    time telling was done at first in order to avoid tragedies, then came
    introducing standards in institutions. Here is Dorin Stanescu:


    In
    order to measure time, a special room with a telescope was built in
    1892, as in other countries. Stefan Hepites was sent by the
    government to Germany to study their system of standardizing time.
    One of the initial solutions proposed by Hepites was to announce
    standard time every day at noon with a cannon shot. This experiment
    was a failure. This happened in 1895. They gave up the practice,
    because the cannon could not be heard all across the city. The
    solution, introduced in September 1895, was a direct telegraph line
    was set up between Filaret Railway Station and the Meteorological
    Institute. Every day at noon the institute would transmit the exact
    time, which was then telegraphed to every railway stations in the
    country. After that, this mechanism was adopted by the postal service
    and other institutions of the state. By 1900, the entire country was
    tuned in to Bucharest time. This is the moment when they came up with
    the slogan: Railway time is the country’s time.

    We
    asked Dorin Stanescu how telling time with precision changed people’s
    lives and the way in which railways functioned:

    We
    find a lot of mentions about exact time and its impact on everyday
    life for Romanians in literature. In some of the first novels, Manoil
    and Elena by Bolintineanu, we find information about exact time. Then
    we go from Nicolae Filimon’s ‘Old and New Nouveau Riche’ to
    Caragiale’s sketches. In 1899, the latter wrote a sketch that centers
    on telling exact time.

    Railway
    stations started putting up clocks for the public, essential staff
    were given pocket watches, and trains and railways became a reference
    point. Up until 1950, the exact time was provided in the country by
    the national railway company, and after that, this mission was
    relegated to public radio.

  • Emil Cioran

    Emil Cioran

    Mircea Eliade, historian of religions, playwright Eugen Ionescu and philosopher Emil Cioran are three outstanding Romanian personalities that influenced Western culture after 1945. All three of them went into exile after the communists seized power in Romania in 1945. The youngest of them, Emil Cioran, was born 110 years ago, on April 8, 1991 in the village of Rasinari, Sibiu county, and died on June 20, 1995 in Paris, aged 84. His father was a Christian Orthodox priest and his mother was the daughter of a notary public who had received the title of baron. He attended the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the Bucharest University where he met Petre Tutea and Constantin Noica. The two philosophers would become his friends.



    Cioran was very interested in the works of Nietzsche, Balzac, Schopenhauer, and Dostoevsky. He became an agnostic, taking as an axiom the inconvenience of existence. While a university student he was influenced by Georg Simmel, Martin Heidegger and Lev Shestov. He started suffering from insomnia in his 20s. Insomnia is an important detail of his biography, that would reflect on his work. Cioran saw himself more of an essay writer than a philosopher. His writings present him as a pessimistic thinker, dominated by the presence of sufferance, decadence and death. In his first book, On the Heights of Despair, published when he was 23, Cioran reveals his morbid thoughts. His dark reflections on human conditions were further presented in his next four books, written in Romanian.



    In 1937 he went to France on a scholarship granted by the French Institute in Bucharest, which would be extended until 1944. He would never return to Romania. In Paris, he lived in the Latin Quarter, where he wrote nine more books. His first French book, A Short History of Decay, released in 1949, was awarded the Prix Rivarol in 1950 for the best book written by a non-French author. Cioran later refused every literary prize he was awarded. Obsessed with the issue of death and suffering, he was attracted to the idea of suicide, which he fully explored in his first book, On the Heights of Despair. He revisited suicide in depth in The New Gods, which contains a section of aphorisms devoted to the subject. Cioran’s works also include themes like the tragic sense of history, the original sin, the end of civilization, the obsession with the absolute and life as an expression of man’s metaphysical exile. He paid a lot of attention to the writing style and was regarded as one of the most important representatives of the French aesthetics in the second half of the 20th century.



    In 1990, philosopher Gabriel Liiceanu made one of the first filmed interviews about Emil Cioran, in the Romanian language. One of the questions he asked him was about his work. Emil Cioran: My work is something of an obsession. I have written all my books for medical, therapeutic reasons. The same obsession, of uselessness and death. Everything else is unimportant. Everything that is formulated, becomes tolerable. Expressing things is the cure. What is the purpose of confessing to a priest? It makes you feel liberated. Everything that is expressed, formulated, looses in intensity. This is therapeutic, is the purpose of therapy. Without any doubt, the depression moods I have been through in life could have led me to complete madness or, even worse, to becoming a looser. The fact that I put them in words was extremely efficient. Had I not written, I am sure things would have ended badly for me.



    Extreme personal experiences are the ones that guide our existence, Cioran believed. This extreme thing in his case was insomnia, which marked his life and made him write remarkable books. Cioran explained to Liiceanu the impact that the lack of sleep has on human existence. Emil Cioran: Before I experienced insomnia I was an almost normal human being. I had this revelation when I lost my sleep. I realized that sleep is an extraordinary thing and that life is bearable only because of it. In the morning, you start a new adventure or resume an adventure after a temporary interruption. Insomnia is an extraordinary revelation because it suppresses unconsciousness. This means you spend 24 hours a day being awake. But the human being is too weak to bear it. This makes it a heroic act, because every day is a battle. When I suffered from insomnia, I despised absolutely everybody. I considered them animals. The lack of sleep pushes people to the limit.



    In his young years, Cioran felt attracted to fascism, an attraction he denounced in the early 1940s. In the 1970s, he said in an interview that having adhered to fascism was the greatest insanity of his youth. His writings have inspired not only philosophers and writers, but also pop singers. In 1991, French singer songwriter Mylene Farmer wrote the lyrics of her song Disenchanted, inspired by On the Heights of Despair. In March 2021, Cioran became the character of a comic book by French artist Patrice Reytier. (EE)





  • Women in communist prisons

    Women in communist prisons

    The presence of women in history has long been neglected, but their importance has not been inferior to that of men. Women have gone through the most powerful experiences in history, just like men, and in the communist prisons they suffered as much and endured with the same courage. One of the most impressive stories is that of the teacher Iuliana Preduț from the family of Toma Arnăuțoiu, leader of the anti-communist partisans in the Făgăraș Mountains. In 1958, while she was at school, she was arrested and imprisoned along with her entire family on charges of supporting the resistance movement. At the time of her arrest, she was 6 months pregnant and the birth of her daughter in the Văcărești facility was part of her prison experience.

    Shortly after her arrest, Iuliana Preduț was transferred from the prison in Pitesti to Văcărești, in Bucharest, where she gave birth to the little girl Libertatea Justina. In 2001, the Oral History Center of the Romanian Broadcasting Corporation had the opportunity to interview the heroine.

    Here is how she recalled that terrible experience:

    They put me in cell 116 in the evening, and in order for my life to be a real ordeal, they left me alone in a Turkish toilet with 6 holes that could hardly be seen because they were full of faeces. The heavy smell there, the torturous road from the Securitate office in Pitesti to the dreaded prison in Văcăreşti had obviously accentuated my terrible pain mixed with a hunger hard to imagine. I was gradually losing all my strength. Eventually, I sat down in the urine floating on the cement floor of the toilet.

    Iuliana Preduț had to fight everything there, her fears, her fate, the infernal Communist torture machinery. She was all by herself in an awful cell, waiting to give birth. Iuliana Preduț:

    I tried to gather my strength and sit on a bed. I felt like I was being watched. After a while I looked around me and horror just stabbed my soul. The beds stacked against the ceiling were in astonishing disarray, as if after a thorough search. There were fresh traces of blood, dirty cotton wool, and faeces on the cold, muddy cement. I felt as in the horror scenes imagined only in novels, the presence of evil spirits approaching me. The fear was so great, especially that I was hearing strange sounds in the corridor. It sounded like a mixture of human moaning and the moaning of sheep, the howl of a wild beast pouring hard into the cell in which I had been locked up. I got suddenly terrified. The child was struggling so hard and hitting my belly as if she wanted to escape from the hell I had just entered. I burst into tears and I couldn’t stop for a long time.

    However, hope finally emerged from that pit of despair, as Iuliana Preduț recalls:

    Fear had become so excruciating that I started to pray to God to take me out of this land of suffering and darkness, even though I knew I was sinning because I had another life in me for which I had a duty to hope. Suddenly, from a corner of the cell, the holy figure of a grieving Mother appeared in a ray of blinding light and said to me: Why are you afraid? Can’t you see I’m with you? Then she disappeared on the same bright ray, leaving in my soul so much peace. The child calmed down, the tears miraculously stopped, and the cell suddenly looked different, just an ordinary prison cell in which hope had to overcome suffering. Overcoming my deplorable condition, I gathered the blankets full of blood and pus, I took the faecal remains in my hands and took them to a corner of the cell, thus making a little room for me.

    Iulianei Preduț’s mystical enthusiasm would materialize into a human being. A person who’d managed to maintain his humanity in that inferno:

    I wished I could wash my hands, but there was no water. I didn’t dare knock on the door because I knew the rules of detention, and especially because I knew they’d say no. But then a miracle happened. The tray slot opened, and a guard pushed a mug of water through it and then closed it. I washed my hands and I sat on the bed. Then a voice called me through the tray slot. He asked me to give him the mug and he poured a bit of milk in it. I hadn’t seen milk since they arrested me. He asked me in a very low voice what I had seen that calmed me like that. I think he was looking through the slot and saw me. I told him who it was: the Mother of Mercy. His eyes were full of compassion, at least that’s what I could see through that slot. I asked him, because I realized he was different from the other guards, where those terrible noises were coming from. He told me that all the cells in that wing were full of dying people.

    Iuliana Preduț lived. And she lived to also tell the story of awful times that would go down in the big encyclopaedia of barbaric practices in the 20th century. (MI)

  • WWII pilot Nadia Russo-Bossie (1901-1988)

    WWII pilot Nadia Russo-Bossie (1901-1988)


    Nadia Russo-Bossie was a female pilot, whose skill, knowledge and bravery helped save human lives during WWII. She was in fact born in Russia, but had emigrated to Romania in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution as part of a wave of so-called “white emigration”.



    In an exhibition staged by the National History Museum of Romania that pays tribute to the women who fought in the second world war, Nadia Russo-Bossie features alongside two legendary figures of Romanian aviation, Smaranda Brăescu and Mariana Drăgescu. The three of them were part of the Sanitary Squadron or the White Squadron, a unit of air ambulances piloted by women. Historian Cristina Păiușan-Nuică, who curated the exhibited, tells us more about Nadia Russo-Bossie, born Nadejda Evgenievna Brjozovska:



    “Nadia Russo-Bossie was of Russian origin. She was born in 1901 and fled the country after the Bolshevik revolution, both of her parents having died by then. She fled with her sister to Chișinău, where they had relatives, and settled in Bessarabia. She wanted to become an aviator after studying in Paris, at the School of Fine Arts. In 1936, she took flying lessons with the help of sponsors, because they were expensive, and got first a licence for women pilots and then a general licence. She was part of the sanitary squadron from the very beginning.”



    Life had not been very good to Nadia. Her mum died in 1912, when she was just 11 years old, and her dad 3 years later in the war. After she escaped to Romania with her sister, her life took a dramatic turn, says curator Cristina Păiușan-Nuică:



    “Nadia Russo had a difficult life. After fleeing Russia and before joining the sanitary squadron, she worked as a teacher and did various other jobs. She got married to a relatively wealthy man, Alexandru Russo. Being passionate about flying, she bought a plane through a public fund-raising campaign and with the help of the Romanian state. She acquired Romanian citizenship after she got married. Between 1940 and 1943 she was part of the sanitary squadron. In 1943 she had a nervous breakdown, and only flew sporadically until 1945.”



    Aviation remained Nadia Russo-Bossies passion until the end of her life. An aerobatics pilot who took part in competitions in Romania and abroad and a war hero, when the war ended, Nadia had to watch helplessly as the communist regime she had fled in her youth took hold of her adoptive country, not to mention that she ended up in prison herself. Cristina Păiușan-Nuică:



    “The tragedy of her life began in 1950 when she was arrested. In August that year she was accused of facilitating a meeting between British pilots from the Allied Control Commission and Romanian pilots. In 1951 she was convicted together with other pilots to 8 years in prison. She was released after five years, but was sentenced again to five years of enforced residence, being sent to live in Lățești, a village in the Bărăgan region, where she met her second husband, Gheorghe Bossie. The exhibition showcases a retirement order from 1969 where it is stated that she was to receive 325 lei per month. After writing to the Securitate asking that her five years of enforced residence be recognised as work, she received another 79 lei. Her pension now amounted to 400 lei, which was very little.”



    Nadia Russo-Bossie was rediscovered after the fall of communism in Romania, in 1989. Cristina Păiușan-Nuică, who curated the exhibition of the National Museum of History about women pilots in WWII, says on display are objects that used to belong to Nadia:



    “On display is a photo album containing several hundred photographs which came into the possession of the National Museum of History through a series of fortunate circumstances. We also have some of her notes from May 1981 when she turned 80 and celebrated 45 years since she got her pilots licence. The authorities of the day organised an event and asked her to make a presentation about what it was like to be a woman pilot 45 years earlier. Unfortunately, she died before 1990, her merits were not recognised while she was still alive and she never had a pension that would have allowed her a decent standard of living.”



    Nadia Russo-Bossie died in Bucharest in 1988, aged 87. Today, her legacy is recognised and her memory celebrated in Romania.




  • The Bombing Raids in Ploiesti

    The Bombing Raids in Ploiesti

    The city of Ploiesti lies 60 km north of Bucharest, and in practical terms is considered an extension of the capital city. It is the seat of Prahova County, and the most important resource there are the oil fields, which was the driver of development there since mid-19th century. When Romania joined the Axis in WWII, it relied a lot on its oil resources in support of the war effort. As a German ally, Romania found itself at war with countries that had previously been friendly, such as the United States and Great Britain.




    During the war, the precious oil in Prahova County put a target on it for enemy bombers. Starting in 1941, when the USSR was the main aim, Soviet aircraft made the first attempts at bombing the refineries in Ploiesti. Historian Lucian Vasile is the author of a monograph about Ploiesti, analyzing the impact of bombings there between 1941 and 1944. Vasile says that Soviet bombing raids had an insignificant impact:


    “Soviet attacks could not compare to the later American raids. They were minor in terms of destruction. There were a few dozen rudimentary plains, if we are to compare with a few years later, when hundreds of American bombers arrived, with fighter escort. The Soviet bombings of 1941 were like a scratch for the city of Ploiesti. A few dozen bombs fell in the city, causing a few civilian victims, causing minor damage to some refineries. They were short lived, a few weeks, then the frontline got pushed further, and Ploiesti was out of range for Soviet planes.”




    In December 1941, after Pearl Harbor, Romania declared war to the US, and the Americans turned their attention on cutting off the fuel supply to Germany and its allies. The first American raid on Ploiesti was launched in June 1942, with the planes taking off from Benghazi, Libya. Lucian Vasile told us about the first encounter between the American air forces and the defenses in Ploiesti:


    “The first American raid, in 1942, was a daytime raid. The Americans came during the day because they preferred taking an additional risk bombing during daytime in order to have higher accuracy in their attacks. This was a tactic that was diametrically opposed to the British one. The British attacked at night, even though they had lower accuracy then running the raids during daytime.”




    The Germans built a strong ring of defense around the city, with hundreds of AAA artillery pieces and a few dozen fighter planes. Operation Tidal Wave of August 1943 involved 170 B-24 Liberator heavy bombers, keen on wiping out the refineries. The mission was a failure, as the Romanian-German defenses brought down 53 attacking aircraft, with 440 American airmen killed and 220 taken prisoner. Tidal Wave is considered one of the worst failures of American aviation in the war. However, in the spring of 1944, the US air forces would exact their revenge. Here is Lucian Vasile:


    “The bombings of 1944 leveled the city. The entire industry was gravely affected, and the residential areas bore the brunt. One out of eight buildings were wiped out, and one out of three were sorely damaged. The center of the city was the target, at least in May 1944. That bombing was meant to spread terror, sapping the morale of the citizens, in the hope of pushing them to rebel or sabotage the ability of the Romanian-German authorities to defend the city.”




    As always during war, it is not all heroics, there are all sorts of errors as well, and Ploiesti proved to have one major vulnerability. That was the neighborhood called Mimiu, inhabited mostly by a Rroma population, living in extreme poverty. The bombings hit there the worst, but not with any intention. Lucian Vasile told us why:


    “Mimiu was a suburbia of the city. It was not a target as such, but was a major vulnerability for the city defenses early in the war. A great part of passive preparations, meaning preparing the citizens for bombings, was aimed at defending at night. Early in the war, the people of Ploiesti were preparing for night raids. The entire city was blacked out at night, all lights were off, and the refinery installations were camouflaged. In the winter of 1941-1942, an analysis of the city indicated that it was completely dark at night. However, the Mimiu neighborhood was highly visible from the sky. The population there, lacking means of heating their homes, used soil soaked in oil residues and byproducts, which burned bright and belched heavy smoke. The entire city was in pitch darkness, but the neighborhood of Mimiu was burning bright. It was all for nought.”





    On August 23, 1944, Romania broke its alliance with Germany, and bombing raids against Ploiesti ceases. The oil industry started rebuilding, and people regained hope in the ending of a war that had brought such destruction and sorrow in their lives.

  • Fake Maps

    Fake Maps

    The communist regime used all possible means to silence its opponents. The passive ones, who, exasperated, were trying to leave and settle in the western free world, were also discouraged in every possible way: from being shot on the spot, to receiving life sentences and being manipulated and blackmailed. The communist border, symbolised by the Berlin wall, literally killed people, in cold blood. But besides the border as such, another means was used, subtler than physical violence: the fake map.

    In September 1964, at a consultative conference of the Socialist states, held in Moscow, a decision was made for those countries’ maps to be falsified, distorted and printed inaccurately. The regime thought that tricking those who wanted to flee by having them use fake maps, which would take them straight into the arms of the repressive apparatus, was preferable to physical liquidation. East Germany was in direst need of such maps. And taking care of that particular aspect was the job of the dreaded intelligence service, the Stasi. The Romanian political police, the Securitate, liked the method and took it over.

    The German Cultural Centre in Bucharest has organizedan exhibition titled Fake Maps, bringing together maps from the Stasi and Securitate archives. Facsimile of the fake maps used by the former German Democratic Republic and the former Socialist Republic of Romania were exhibited to show visitors one of the methods used by the communists to hinder any attempt at fleeing the country by those who could no longer endure the oppression of the regime.

    Curator Adrian Buga was the one that organized the exhibition. As he told us, a fake map drawn up before 1989 was aimed first and foremost at depriving people of the freedom of movement:

    I would put the sign of equality between a map and knowledge. Once you reach a new territory, whether we are talking about this planet or an extraterrestrial space, that knowledge can be used. And then, who has that knowledge, who has that plan, who has that map is also in control. At the same time, if you know how to control that information and you don’t want it to fall into the hands of your enemies, you falsify it. Another aspect of fake maps is that they are misleading when you want to escape from a space and need guidance. A map equals orientation, the information must come from a source that we consider credible. But in this case, that source we trust is falsified and used to our detriment.

    The fake map of the regime had to change the inner map of the individual. It falsified not only topography but also perceptions and beliefs about the outside world.

    Adrian Buga: From certain points of view we can say that the falsified map is specific to closed, totalitarian regimes. Once the regime controls and wants to oppress and pressure the citizens in a certain place, it must falsify the borders and it must falsify the way people perceive the place and other places from the outside. The information must be falsified to show how bad it is outside the matrix in which the regime wants to keep people and how good it is inside the matrix.

    What was the mechanism by which a map was faked? Adrian Buga says that the fake map was a deliberate alteration of an accurately drawn map.

    There were standard maps, topographic maps, providing information about cities, buildings, streets, about the type of soil, about rivers and so on. The standard maps were secret, no one had access to them except with certain approvals that were quite difficult to obtain. In the public space there were only tourist maps, on which certain places had been deleted or falsified. So, one would arrive at a place with the map in hand and discover that the place was completely different: either there were areas of uneven ground that did not appear on the map, or the rivers had been drawn differently in case a foreign army would want invade the territory, or just to make it difficult for the people who would try to escape and flee the country.

    The Romanian security did not draw up fake maps in the true sense of the word but resorted to something much simpler: interrogations of those captured.

    Adrian Buga explains: We do not have fake maps but the maps with the routes used by people to flee Romania. Those caught had to draw exactly the place where they had attempted to escape. The Securitate had to know the topography very well, mislead and discourage escape attempts. We are talking about the western border, the border with Hungary and the Yugoslav border on the Danube. There were many places there used by people to escape. There are many testimonies, and I am thinking of the book about the famous gymnast Nadia Comăneci and the Securitate. It is very interesting how Nadia describes that route and that guide, a shepherd of the place, who did not know the topography of the place.

    Researching the archives revealed, in addition to fake topographic maps, another type of map: the personal map of the individual and his private space. Tens of thousands of opponents were tracked with the help of sketch maps, which included everything, from domicile to the routine of every member of the family and visitors. (MI)