Mihaela Ursa

Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Mihaela_ursa@yahoo.com

 

 

Women Imprisoned – History and (Her)story

 

 

Abstract: The present paper investigates some aspects that particularize women detention accounts of Romanian political prisons. Besides the four testimonies listed in the bibliography, that of Lena Constante, Elisabeta Rizea and Lucreţia Jurj, I have also included the account of Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla on her years of deportation to Siberia, because of the existing thematic and narrative similarities. My concern is both with analysing the motivations and mechanisms that made women resistance possible, and identifying – whenever accessible – gender-specific themes or narrative strategies. The central thesis of this study is that differences in educational and cultural backgrounds, religious belief and moral stance, of political affiliation or sympathy, of family or group cohesion leave an indelible mark on this particular kind of literature, which finds itself at the border of historical documentation and subjective memoirs.

Keywords: Romanian political prisons; gender-identity; women studies; partisans; detention literature; Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla; Lena Constante; Lucreţia Jurj; Elisabeta Rizea.

 

Under stress or under erasure

 

When associated with political detention, gender identity undergoes two major changes: on the one hand, it makes obvious the so-called “natural pre-conditions” of the two genders (in political prisons, female physiology, menstruation or child-bearing become insurmountable gender-specific problems). According to different witnesses[1], having small children who were left at home or being forbidden to housework[2] may represent a bigger issue for imprisoned women than for imprisoned men. Particular experiences such as homosexual love, the higher rate of sexual abuses from the guardians may also act as delimitation agents for the specificity of women political detention. On the other, the same detention places gender identity under erasure. Abusive confinement is accompanied by a various range of attacks meant to depersonalize and dehumanize the human individual, regardless of this being a man or a woman. It is certain that the second change – i.e. the erasure of gender identity under the pressure of dehumanizing torture methods – is prevalent, since political detention does not punish women for being women, but for being humans in search of liberty and human rights. However, the fact that, once held in political prisons, women encounter obstacles which are absent from the detention experiences of men in the same situation makes political incarceration a phenomenon worth examining in the light of women studies.

Testimonies of female victims of Romanian political imprisonment take two forms: either they are written retrospectively by the surviving victims themselves (i.e. Lena Constante on her detention years, or Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla on her deportation years in Siberia) or they are told by the survivors, but they are recorded and written by a secondary agent (such as the cases of Elisabeta Rizea’s or Lucreţia Jurj’s testimonies).

 

Retrospection and the closure of vision

 

Some technical aspects need to be taken into account: first of all, with no exceptions, the above mentioned detention literature is of a retrospective nature. The most important textual agent is, in all cases, memory. No matter how painful or graphic, the testimonies act out a definite separation from the immediacy of incarceration, as if textual practice created a buffer-zone between the identity of the tortured victim and the identity of the living witness, an absolutely necessary delimitation between the actual experience and its subjective confession. Narrative strategies such as anticipation (of someone’s ulterior role in a certain development), retrospection (of past happenings in the light of a recent ethic or generally human assertion), emotional breaks (laments or crying – in oral testimonies, mostly) function as distance-bearers, rendering the remembering and the discourse possible. Once more, in the case of the Gulag victims who lived to tell their story, violence, cruelty and death are delayed and confronted, as well as psychologically contained by their victims, by means of textual reproduction, of voicing again the excruciating truth. Once more, the story intervenes in the process of soul healing.

Secondly, there is a perceptible alteration of the usual memoirs pattern: most diarist writings – it has been noticed – rely heavily on visual perception: shapes, colours, forms, nuances, light and darkness, objects and portraits are the first and the clearest to be remembered. Unusually, prison-related memories seem to shut off vision almost completely, composing a chronicle of the blind or, if we take into account the speech interdiction, a chronicle of the blind-and-dumb and even a chronicle of the cripple: “I cannot swallow that. I cannot even see that. My eyes are closed. Only darkness under my eye-lids. I cannot feel my arms anymore. I cannot feel my legs. I am dissolving myself…” (Constante 1992: 5). Reduced by their aggressors to the status of sub-human entities, political prison victims lead their incarceration lives relying mostly on alternative perceptive senses: shut down to the outside world, they seem to switch on to a thanatic, underground mode of existence, where feeling and smelling prove to be the most important ways to appropriate their cell, and hearing a crucial key to surviving:

“Effortlessly, my ears adjusted to their new function. I only relied on their concentrated attention to ‘see’ the chief guardian, sitting in his chair.” (Constante 1992:35)

Also, replacing normal speech, a hidden speech develops, one memory-inscribed, which allows stories, poems, prayers or songs to be composed and perfectly conserved[3] until the senses are restored – if ever – to their natural mode. This very specific alteration of the senses explains how, after years from their detention, survivors still have a very accurate recollection of the details and facts that happened in a certain day, of the differences between their incarceration years, of the people (inmates or guardians) they met and of the particular phrases that marked their prison silence.

 

Speak for yourself, speak for the others

 

Thirdly, a discernable difference appears between self-written testimonies and recorded accounts at the level of the intimate input. However silent and invisible the recording agent may attempt to be, there is clearly a louder sense of community-shared history in the oral records than in those written directly by their. Once recorded, the eye witness knows she has to speak for a community, on behalf of an exponential individual, while in the self-written accounts, the authors seem to take time for insisting on how their experience is their own in the first place, or on more personal matters (individual feelings of deep sorrow, frustration, futility, etc., love affairs, judging character traits etc.).

In this perspective, the most appropriate example is the account of Lucreţia Jurj, a peasant, partisan herself in the Şuşman group between 1950 to 1954, subsequently serving a ten-year sentence in prison, before the coming in force of the decree in 1964, in the prisons of Oradea, Jilava, Mislea, Miercurea-Ciuc, Cluj and Văcăreşti. Quite a few pages introduce, in her oral account recorded by Cornel Jurju and Cosmin Budeancă, the contextual history – the histories of her family and her village, interconnected and related to the history of the Apuseni people[4]. A sense of group continuity and solidarity keeps the references together (“wherever they went, the people of Apuseni stuck to their customs and habits” – Jurju and Budeancă 2002:80) and builds up a feeling of belonging to a community that will practically dictate the overall tone of Lucreţia Jurj’s testimony. The end of her testimony makes her public intention explicit:

“My wish after the Revolution was to let everybody know who we were, those of the Şuşman group. I didn’t want to speak about me as much, I mostly felt it was my duty to let people know who the Şuşmans were, who those who died were.” (Jurju and Budeancă 2002: 262).

Unlike Lucreţia Jurj, Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla, who writes her own story of the twenty-year long deportation from Basarabia to Siberia, is more interested in making an individual mark, in making her own history and destiny matter in the bigger picture of human existence. Her account of the deportation at the age of 37 was originally written under the title “Life Memories” and starts under the sign of popular wisdom:

“human beings can go through so much and without even realizing it…” (Nandriş-Cudla 1991:11). She perceives her life story primarily as a probable lesson of life, and only in the second instance, and incidentally as a historical record. Instead, no matter how harsh the realities described, Lucreţia Jurj almost never expresses individual feelings or attitudes before her historical account is complete: although her first motivation to join the partisans in the mountains is completely personal – she wants to stay with her husband –, her entire account is directed to the greater good – i.e. speaking the collective truth. Intimate confession is reduced to a minimum: describing how she fell in love with her future husband, she simply states: “he was very glad I got back. And then, in ’48, we got married.” (Jurju and Budeancă 2002:98).

Also, when asked about Todor Şuşman, the handsome son of the leader of her partisans group, Lucreţia Jurj speaks only with discreet parsimony about him having many sweethearts in the neighbouring villages. By comparison, references to her place in the community, in the years prior to her resistance in the mountains, are so detailed and so richly described, that they sketch a Golden Age frame:

“my in-laws loved me so much, that they didn’t have me do any chores. I was young, recently married, I had everything I wanted and everybody loved me. There came tourists from Cluj, lawyers and doctors who slept over at our place, since we had a spare room. They came for fishing and gave me the fish to smoke, since we also had a room where we smoked trout. I was happy and I didn’t have to do almost anything in the world. Sometimes I would take long walks in the fields, alone or with Mihai. We would ride horses and take them to graze. We had two horses, Voitor and Suru, which I would ride without any saddle. Voitor was gentle, but I remember Suru having a big tail and proudly trotting along. He was so beautiful. But only Mihai could ride him. My husband wouldn’t let me do it, since that horse was too wild for me. And they would also have them pull the carriage, since they were so big. Those horses would also carry timber; this is how strong they were.” (Jurju and Budeancă 2002:101). The same Golden Age feeling is conveyed in her last shared memory of her husband. As if satisfied that she has completed her public work, Lucretia Jurj turns to herself in the end, where she uncharacteristically confesses her love for her first husband, whom she followed in the mountains and for whom she was ready to die. The images gain almost legendary proportions: “I was so happy climbing up the mountains with Mihai, where the people of Apuseni had their sheep and cattle. The girls would play the bucium and I felt so happy. I would be in the seventh heaven then. Wherever I went, the old women received me with milk, skimmed milk and balmos. Then they would bring us a two-or-three-pound cheese that I would put in the den and just slice loaves whenever we wanted. I did not even need any bread. I was so close to Mihai and our souls were connected” (264).

 

Love, testimony and telling the truth

 

The most personal moment in Lucreţia Jurj’s story is maybe the last page of her resistance-account, before the beginning of the last third of the book (containing her detention and return to society): in a few lines, she finds the crystal clear expression of her own motivation. Let us first take notice of the fact that the “public”, collective, political motivation of mountain resistance is stated several times in Lucreţia Jurj’s account, and it is the same as in other testimonies of the survivors of Romanian political prisons, men or women: “if the Americans should come, they [the partisans – m.n.] were ready to stir a riot, a revolution of some kind” (Jurju and Budeancă 2002:104), she tells her listeners, explaining why they left their village and how come so many people supported them with supplies[5]. “It meant everything to us [the supposed arrival of the Americans – m.n.]; on that account alone, we – and not only us – took on to living in the woods” (2002:111), she explains further on behalf of her group. But only after completing the entire story, after telling the whole truth to be known to everyone[6], after she feels she has finished her duty to the community, only then does she allow herself to grieve what happened to her and her loved ones. It is only now that she can speak about how she came to “no longer care” for life, how she chose her fate based on her strong belief in God, and how she “got happy” that God chose her from among her “brothers” to be the one who suffers all the pain and washes all her “family’s sins”. The same idea is recurrent in other testimonies and we shall discuss it later in connection to the witnesses’ belief in God. In Lucreţia Jurj’s case, the intimacy and personal feelings have to wait for the entire truth to be told first. Only in the end does she speak most intimately about her love and care for her husband. But even in here, the witness assumes an unknown collective guilt, expiating her family’s uncertain destiny or supposedly bad fate (“maybe my ancestors or who knows who from my family did something wrong” – 2002:178) and, even more, explicitly states her own censorship regarding one’s soul: “for it is impossible for someone to totally open one’s soul. Actually, I don’t think that they would believe them if one did. This is why one keeps some things to oneself and is even ashamed to tell what they have been through.” (178). Similarly enough, Lena Constante finds herself censored by her loss for worlds, by the impossibility of finding appropriate words to translate the experience: “A word made of flesh. A word made of blood. This word does not exist.” (Constante 1992:10).

 

When history becomes (her)story

 

A completely different text is articulates itself in the oral account of Elisabeta Rizea. Here, everything is personal, the larger, “big” history is entirely shadowed by a feminine “small” history, but the sense of speaking out a historical document still wins. A different mechanism is used here: instead of hiding one’s subjectivity, the witness permanently feels and expresses a self-imposed censorship for fear “they” will turn the history again against “our people”. Unlike Jurj’s account, quite narrative and chronologically ordered, Rizea’s is filled with oral marks: exclamations, sighs and bursts into tears are recorded along with interjections, interrogations to the interviewers, imprecations, all interrupting “history” to let “her-story” show. The self-censorship does not only have a subjective source (as in Jurj’s “opening of the soul” case), but also an exterior, more pragmatic one, given precisely by the witness’ taking the floor in front of an unpredictable public, with suspect reactions. Two times incarcerated, repeatedly beaten to near death, Elisabeta Rizea serves – until the decree in 1964 – part of her twenty-five year-long sentence, which also deprives her of her entire fortune, in the prisons of Câmpulung, Jilava, Arad, Piteşti, Miercurea-Ciuc, Mislea, where she meets the wives of Antonescu, Codreanu, Moţa among the inmates. She is reunited with her husband – also thrown in political prison – fifteen years later, “a lifetime”, she sadly comments. In 1992, she is being interviewed by Irina Nicolau and Theodor Nitu and, even after all these years, she is still afraid of being supervised by the Securitate. When meeting her two interviewers for the first time, she asks them whether they are members of the Securitate or not. “I’m afraid, I’m afraid” she keeps repeating throughout her account; “they must have got your plates number” (Nicolau and Nitu 1993:22), she warns her interviewers. In her case, the sense of loss is so strong and the fear of reliving the entire communist apocalypse so fierce, that she explains: “if I only knew our people get elected, I would say everything as it was, but I don’t know… and if I got out of the chains and the twelve years of ordeal, I wouldn’t have them kill me now. I don’t sleep here anymore. I have moved to the other room, for fear they’re going to shoot me right here, through the window” (Nicolau and Nitu 1993: 22). In her case, too, although the tone is completely different from that of Lucreţia Jurj, the evidence must be preserved, and people should know the truth, only this has to be delayed until it cannot hurt anymore. “I still have many secrets left to tell” – Elisabeta Rizea confesses, “but I will only share them on my deathbed. Then I shall send for my girls and I shall tell them, so that at least they know… “’Cause, look, you have no idea who you’re talking to and they hear you and shoot you dead” (1993:27-28). Her interviewers notice how her story is closer to a “prolonged lament” than a narrative. Her lack of narrative unity is undoubtedly due, among other things, to her constant self-censorship: “Let us keep silent. I shall speak some other time…” (1993:71), she interrupts a memory trend.

 

Living through the Apocalypse

 

The self-written testimonies of women of the Gulag tend to devote greater attention to the expression of subjective, inner history. Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla takes delight in providing a detailed account of her childhood and her married years: speaking about how she got married at the age of sixteen, she finds the perfect opportunity to rememorize the courting rituals, the family economical transactions and the starting of a new household, which acquires the dimensions of a whole new world. Writing about the rise of her own household, the author reaches the nostalgic notes of a founding prose. First, we see her house getting built and improved, than the cattle and poultry filling the courtyard, than the birth of her three sons giving existential meaning and valorization to it all; the life story is put together with natural narrative talent. Her well-individualized style is best recognizable in these fairytale-like lines: her husband decides, when they almost reach the Romanian border – in their attempt to escape the Russian army invading Basarabia –, a day before the Russian authorities sign their deportation to Siberia, that they should go back home, naively believing that they will be able to stick to their old life and customs. This is the moment where, in her story, Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla tells about the legend of the Argeş Monastery, drawing a comparative line between her destiny and the destiny of the protagonist: “but here I was: just like Manole’s wife, we did not go back, but we proceeded further on this wicked road, back home and back to our ‘fortune’, that my husband found too difficult to part with” (Nandriş-Cudla 1991:48). In Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla’s account an entire world comes crumbling down at the moment of her personal disaster or rather, her personal disaster narratively acts like the agent of an entire world’s collapse. Parallel to the legendary setting out of the story, the deportation moment (the 13-th of June, 1941) establishes an end of mythical proportions to Aniţa’s world: “it seemed like the end of the world”, she remembers.

“Voices of women were crying, as if mourning for the dead, children were shouting, different voices, some still suckling infants, other a bit older. Cows in their stables were lowing, as if knowing their owners were taken away from them, dogs were howling in their collar ties. Great horror and fear spread all over that night.” (Nandriş-Cudla 1991:54)

Taken from her crippled mother, whom she has to leave behind in the house, Anita loses track of her husband, until 20 years later, when she finds out he died in the Ural mountains. With her three boys, she is taken to Siberia in a cattle train, traveling for days and nights on end, watching some of her travelling companions black out, literally lose their mind or their lives, exchanging several temporary and primitive domiciles, working in the fields, in the woods, in constructions, in fishing, living in underground huts, fighting lice, dysentery, typhus, scorbutic disease, two almost-deaths, an incarceration near the Polar Circle, where she is taken by an Eskimo through the Polar night.

Her sole concern through this ordeal is to save her children’s lives and her own. Once again, her utmost aim is not the political protest or even finding the quickest escape, but surviving: “we got used to it, since you couldn’t have changed anything anyway.” (1991:128). The methods of political police lead Lena Constante to almost the same reaction: before the first arrest, she can hear the militia approaching and she can still escape, but she renounces when she realizes: “they would have haunted my every friend in the world. Nothing could have stopped them.” (Constante 1992: 7). For Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla changing her fate is not a possibility until much later, when all three boys are grown-ups and when she allows herself to yearn for home, she has them writing to the authorities for their rehabilitation: “you had to settle for that, but the thought of your home and the yearning for the places where you were born tormented you incessantly.” (Nandriş-Cudla 1991:131). They are entirely rehabilitated in 1958, when they are answered by the authorities that they were deported because of her husband being the mayor of the village – actual confusion, since it has her husband’s brother who was actually the mayor at the time.

 

Re-arranging one’s world for survival

 

The most impressive thing in Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla’s story is, besides the factual data surrounding her survival[7], her inventiveness and her pragmatic surviving prioritizing. Extremely rational and traditionally trained not to lose any time or energy over things that she cannot change[8], she mobilizes her entire being on very factual issues. For instance, at first she considers finding food to be the most important thing. She states: “our every muscle melted, till we were left skin and bone.” (1991:79), and she finds ways of supplementing the insufficient bread with little supplies from a neighbouring village, she sends her older son – and later the second one – on the fishing ships, where she knows he has “fat fish” to eat, and thus needs less bread, gathers berries from the woods to give them fresh fruit, has her sons install animal traps in the woods so that they can supplement their meat. Only then she worries about clothes and keeping warm and starts making clothes out of reused fisherman’s ropes and cereal sacks. Localizing her brothers and mother becomes urgent then, so she keeps writing letters until she does find them and finds out about her mother’s death on the 23-rd of December 1945. Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla’s account is necessity-driven and its lesson of sanity derives of a surviving pragmatics, of soundly putting primary matters first. “With lots of hard work, we were not left for peril.” (1991:134), she concludes. Still, the crucial motivational agent is explicitly stated as “love” and “family affection”. Her last entry makes clear once more that the first mobile of her enduring attitude was not making a stand or completing some kind of revenge but holding on to her love for her family: “This love and family affection gave us strength through all the hardships, so that we could carry on and save our lives.” (144).

One of the most consistent gender-marks of political prisoners’ discourse is discernible perhaps at the motivational level. Men are often incarcerated – when it is not for a completely unknown or absurd reason – for expressing their political beliefs, for taking an explicit or violent stand against communism, for their social status, for their befriending political outcasts or foreign citizens, in other words, for some sort of public action or position. The percentage of those who were incarcerated for their public attitude towards communism among women is much lower, a large majority ending up as “political detainees” for completely non-political reasons (once in prison, Lucretia Jurj notices: “we did not speak any politics” – Jurju and Budeancă 2002:209). A special case in point is that of Lena Constante, whose connections to Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu and the political world were immediately seen by the Securitate as reason enough for her condemnation. She also affirms – due to her higher education – an ideological position, distances from political poles or takes social sides.

Most of the witnesses whose testimonies I investigate here, such as Lucreţia Jurj, traditional women from traditional families, simply stood by their husbands, lovers, friends or families out of love and natural devotion, but that did not make them less “dangerous” to the regime or more cooperative to their torturers. Even when she goes on hunger strike, Lucretia does so with the only purpose of finding out where her husband – whom she believed still alive – was detained. Following the same traditional nurturing logic, when taken to court, she takes some of her husband’s blame on herself, so that he could get a smaller conviction and they could get back together[9]. None of the detention accounts of women are regretful of their option: all of them recurrently state their lack of remorse for their choice, in spite of the life-in-prison convictions of most. Even more, these women act as their husband’s sustainers: Lucreţia Jurj often speaks about her having to talk her husband out of his despair and maybe out of his suicidal intentions, Elisabeta Rizea tells about her hiding her fugitive husband and bringing him to shelter in a moment of panic paralysis. They do not think for a single moment of talking their husbands out of their going against the regime or even of telling them to play it safe. A slightly different attitude towards the husband appears in Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla’s story, where shreds of remorse and resentment towards the husband appear in her not speaking of him anymore once she loses track of him, except for the moment when her sons find out that he died in the Ural mountains. To be fair, her situation in completely different. In her case, the husband is the one responsible for their turning back from the road to escape to the road of torment. Through the story, Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla speaks of her husband with respect and affection and does not explicitly blame him, but she establishes her strongest bond with her crippled mother, her brothers and her three sons and wastes no time mourning for her husband.

 

Why they did it

 

For Elisabeta Rizea of Nucşoara, anti-communist resistance starts out of personal revenge, because in 1947 the communist kill her uncle, Gheorghe Suta, a wealthy local tradesman. From this moment on, her personal history relates to one of the most important group of anti-communist partisans, namely the Arnăuţoiu-Arsenescu group. Unlike Lucretia Jurj, who becomes a partisan herself, along with her husband, Elisabeta Rizea joins the partisan-supporters, she takes them food, warm clothes and messages from home until she herself is betrayed by a woman. Three of her brothers join the Arnăuţoiu group, one of them gives himself up and is imprisoned for years on end, but the other two die for the cause. Also, it is her account (as well as Lucreţia Jurj’s) where we find many details about the set out of the partisan-cell and about their pledge of honour (they swear on the Bible and on their weapons never to betray each other). Personal biography is detailed in flashes and its most particular aspect is the idea that, once the communist took the power, the order of the world got scrambled and upset. This very idea of troubling for good a supreme order appears in her daughter’s incidental intervention in Elisabeta Rizea’s oral account. Laurenţia says: “This is how we lived… and for so many generations… so many generations, I tell you. Very hard, very, very hard… to take back the world to the way it was. For they only lived like this and only saw this. They got used to this. And now you cannot trust anyone, they all say this and that, but they were raised during this regime and they cannot be straightened. Maybe the students…” (Nicolau and Nitu 1993:49). Once again the motivation for the resistance is only implicitly political, resting on the explicit level in this disapproval of communist destructing the ways of the world and, in the end, the world as we know it.

This is a point where the testimonies converge. In the cases of intellectual prisoners, the idea is enriched with philosophical or ideological arguments, but in the cases of victims with no special education the idea appears in the form of the opposition between a former Golden Age and a present-day Apocalypse. Specificities and details are sacrificed to convey the greater picture. One of the most encountered mechanisms of detail suppression is the use of a recurrent “all” for the designation of the people of the former world, a world of unity and harmony. “All of them were good women”, “they were all good men”, Lucreţia Jurj testifies about her fellow-partisans and their supporters, and then she creates a link between this world, peaceful and happy, and the prison years, as if all the “good men and women” have been moved in this unworthy context: “we lived in a real brotherhood in prison” (Jurju and Budeancă 2002:223). Elisabeta Rizea resonates with the same idea: “they were all such honest people, such good people in our part of the world…” (Nicolau and Nitu 1993:22).

 

How they did it

 

Once they have to speak about the actual detention, most survivors layer their accounts. Almost all of them start from the details of the body life: the visual interdiction, the beatings, the cold, the hunger, the lack of personal hygiene. Details about (lack of) food and food consistency are abundant, the one weekly shower (if ever) and toilet care mobilizes human attention and fills many pages of the body layer of the account. The soul layer is occupied with the dynamics of solitude or, in common cells, of common interaction, with nostalgia for their former life and projection of the future, with love affairs or stories of hatred. Finally, the spirit layer is mostly occupied with stories of praying or illicitly celebrating Christian holidays, but also with intellectual preoccupations: learning foreign languages or MORSE communication and inventing stories, songs or poems to tell the group. Since mere survival is the first issue, the body layer of the accounts seems to pervade and infuse the other two. More precisely, body language becomes a substitute not only for the usual language, but also for the language of the soul or spirit. An accomplice handshake, a pat on the back, a warm hug, or a fugitive touch on the hand not only show affection but carry crucial survival messages and speak out forbidden news (“The smallest gesture, the most evasive smile moved me” – Constante 1992:156). A particular feminine theme is the giving of gifts, on holidays or with no particular reason: these fiercely tortured women manage to find not only the human resources for affection and friendship, or even love and eroticism, but also the material resources to make this affection visible. They make each other clothes (Lucreţia Jurj gets a skirt made by her fellow inmates for her release, Lena Constante gets new socks made of thread ends by her former political enemies, a group of Legion members, Elisabeta Rizea is given panties and blouses for her daughters by Mrs. Antonescu, who knits them out of reused thread), make each other cakes for their birthdays (from saved up pieces of bread and jam), share preferential meals with each other (when on special diet for their illnesses, slightly better than the usual diet, the sufferers share it with the group).

Generally speaking, the testimonies lack details about physiological impediments, partly because these traditionally trained women find it impudent or prying to talk about these things. Of the accounts I analyze here, that of Lena Constante – the only intellectual among them – includes most of the details regarding the ultimate humiliation of the imprisoned body: the filth, the common use of the latrines, the acute constipation, having to urinate or defecate on the floor when the guardians wanted to keep you waiting, the handicap of having to wash publicly, in front of your fellows or in front of voyeurist guardian gazes, sexual advances and abuse from the guardians, the amenorrhoea following the exhaustion and deprivation, the menstrual hemorrhages, furuncles and pustules exploding all over the body, homoerotic love and jealousy[10].

 

Further prices to be paid

 

The anchoring in the immediate, this forcing of the body to speak for the soul, partly explains the survival of some of the victims. The deprivation of the spirit seemed to many of them easier than the deprivation of the body: “Books? Paper? Pens? Very few women missed them. Only manual labor had fulfilled their lives. In our prison we were not allowed to work. Time crawled by with great difficulty. In Mislea prison, the bitterness, sexual deprivation and all that were easier to suffer, because their hands were working. […] Handwork was a blessing that, most of the times, was forbidden to us.” (Constante 1992: 160). The repercussions are difficult to assess before the moment of liberation. When they have to readjust to the outside world (most of them in 1964), they notice an acute need for solitude and an even more acute need for silence and rejection of any human interaction, even from their beloved families. Lucretia Jurj confesses: “I did not want to speak, I did not want anyone to ask me anything… I needed to be alone… I felt like a stranger and something was missing… I had become a loner” (Jurju and Budeancă 2002:240-241). Once freed from prison, she feels unsettled and one can see the extent of the prison damage in order of her interactional life when she only regains her spirit when she is hospitalized in an institution –the Aiud sanatorium – where she feels “it was so beautiful” (2002:247). In her case, the depersonalization methods have succeeded to instill a great insecurity regarding her own choice, so that only an institutional mode can reassure her enough to bring her peace. Elisabeta Rizea is told, right when getting out: “turn your head away from your house, your things are not your things anymore” (Nicolau and Nitu 1993:103), and she cannot forgive the one who told her that because he proved to be right. Although she finally gets her house back, the sense of absolute and indelible loss stays with her for life. Lena Constante tells the story of the Journalist (Constante 1993:134-135), who not only does not find her house anymore, but has to deal with the fact that the man she used to love is no longer hers. Her second account, The Impossible Escape, also tells about many women who had to go home to a strange place and a cold family with whom they never really connected again. Quite the same way, Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla first comes from Siberia to visit her home in 1956, only to find her former home, in Mahala, near Cernăuţi, occupied and no longer hers. She gets back her household in 1961, exactly twenty years later from her deportation and cannot really relate to her neighbours and acquaintances any more. Lucretia Jurj even feels relieved when her second husband starts calling her Luci, giving her a new identity and the symbolic chance to a completely new start. The depersonalization finds its end in her choice of a new name and, consequently, a new destiny: “nobody called me Lucretia, they all knew me by the name of Luci. I was glad to get rid of…” (Jurju and Budeancă 2002:255).

 

Incarceration turned into escape

 

A more spiritual and philosophically problematizing testimony is written by Lena Constante in The Silent Escape and The Impossible Escape, the two books she writes on her incarceration with the group of Lucretiu Pătrăşcanu, whom she gets to know through his wife, who was Lena Constante’s colleague. It starts abruptly with a factual exhibition:

“I have been convicted to 12 years in prison. […] I have lived alone in my cell for 157 852 800 seconds of loneliness and fear. This is not something you say, but something you cry out! They condemn me to live another 220 838 400 seconds.” (Constante 1992:5).

Of all the testimonies analyzed here, this is the most expressive of the spiritual layer of life in prison. Not only are the memories commented and symbolically or metaphorically invested with greater generality-value, but also instead of a historical document, the narrative articulates a story of escape. Incarceration becomes for the author the catalyst to a different, hidden life, where the body is mortified and the spirit wins, wandering around freer than it could be imagined. This does not mean that the body is ignored, but that it is, in its turn, subordinated to the spirit. Physical discipline and hygiene become mirrors and props for the liberation of the spirit: “My body could be nowhere else. I could be anywhere.” (Constante 1992:12). To her, resisting prison regime and then living to tell the story primarily represents taking a stand, protesting: “Against absolute power. Against mind control. Against arbitrary detention. Against detention as means of conquering the power of thought. Against the absolute power of the investigation and the investigators. Against detention as punishment, prior to any conviction. Against torture. Against total isolation” (1992:19). Due to this supplementation of resistance, she gets to be confined in the “black one” (the solitary confinement) on a regular basis, to be left with the rats and blackmailed with threats to her family. To resist all that, Lena Constante mobilizes her body, soul and spirit: after holding on to a self imposed programme of hygiene, no matter how precarious, she does gymnastics – reduced to a few simple moves, and tries not to think about her family and tortures, but to keep projecting imaginary worlds in forms of stories or poems, to keep counting different items just in order to preserve some form of mental health[11].

However, when taken to a common cell in the Miercurea Ciuc prison, with fourteen other women, she realizes that she has partially lost her ability to speak and communicate, finding the interaction aggressive: “I had managed to escape a solitary cell. Shall I ever be able to escape these women. To sneak – and how – through the bars of talkative flesh” (Constante 1993: 23). Real stories and real women come to populate her world now and erase her old escapist solution. These realities make her use “the power of words” for a new purpose: helping the other escape their own rage and sorrow. This is how she becomes “the story-teller” for her colleagues and her spiritual and intellectual exercise becomes a collective one, shared with the less fortunate. Most of her second book, the one dedicated to her last years in prison, is therefore a gallery of portraits of the women she met in prison, whom she projects into eternity. Almost entirely, her story has left the larger picture of History and concentrates in the second book on the small (hi)stories around her.

 

Embracing suffering as a gift

 

Women enduring and surviving Romanian political prisons are quite a miracle. There are, however, some things to be understood. First of all, all the testimonies rest of a very strong ethic foundation. Not giving in under torture and not betraying the people they knew is primarily a question of moral impossibility for the witnesses: “how was I to tell about my godfather Drăgoi, or priest Constantinescu…” – Elisabeta Rizea questions – “The first married me, the other blessed me then, in the car, when I came back from prison.” (Nicolau and Nitu 1993:78). Out of the two possibilities: to collaborate with the communists or not to collaborate, the second one is seen as natural, effortless and in accordance with the unwritten laws of the world, while the first one is considered the deviation, the wicked exception.

Also, for most of them, the pain of losing everything and of being subjected to torture is somehow embraced as a price they willingly pay to protect their loved ones. Not only Lucreţia Jurj thinks that she was given the gift to bear the whole suffering for her entire family. Elisabeta Rizea also views suffering as some enduring destiny, implacable and worth all the pain. “But I had been resting for the last two years, they hadn’t beaten me for two years, and so I could take the pain again.” (Nicolau and Nitu 1993:78) – she genuinely narrates about the moment when the constant beating and torture restarted. In her turn, Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla is convinced that only the power of God kept them from dying: “And then I knew how big the power of God is and how he can help you.” (Nandriş-Cudla 1991:126). We have to consider the fact that both Lucreţia Jurj and Elisabeta Rizea, as well as Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla and other Romanian political prison-survivors have a deep faith in God and that they keep praying, fasting, celebrating Christmas and Easter and following Christian customs even during their resistance and incarceration. They strongly believe that justice and relief will be brought to them in due time by divine intervention. In this respect, their endurance is a matter of dislocating the aggressor. Instead of conceiving their aggressors as guilty against themselves, most of these survivors thought of them as guilty against God first and so they moved the whole idea of fighting back, judging and punishing them at a greater level. Very frequently, the witnesses are sure of the divine intervention in the punishment of their aggressors. The traitors who put her in prison are punished by God, Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla concludes when finding out how her supervisors got convicted for stealing; Elisabeta Rizea thinks the same about Ion Băncescu, who has despised her request of allowing her to use a certain storage place, and she calls for divine justice upon the heads of her wrongdoers, as her mother casts a terrible curse on the head of Cârnu, who almost kills her daughter. This particular aspect constitutes a very important part of women endurance in communist gaols, because the communists take – in their simple view and understanding of history – the place of earthly devils. Torturers are often characterized as brutes, but also as people who have lost their souls and are no longer human beings. In other words, not only a political regime is under attack here, but an entire world of good is being challenged by evil. Humans versus non-humans, life versus death, angels versus demons, Golden age versus Apocalypse – these are just a few of the possible contradictory pairs that symbolically attach themselves to understanding the communist abuse in these testimonies.

 

On angels and demons

 

Unlike the above-mentioned testimonies, in Lena Constante’s we are confronted with an atheistic point of view. She also feels the futility of her opposition: “the script had been written. The characters had to play their part. Mine was secondary.” (Constante 1992:69). But to her the collective “all”, from the testimonies of Elisabeta Rizea of Lucreţia Jurj has no meaning any more, overriding the strict delimitations between “angels” and “demons”: “my conscience went blind. […] I shall not be a hero. I said ‘yes’”. (1992: 69-70). It is here, in her account, where we find an insider’s input on the behavioral difference between incarcerated women and men. Most of the women (75 percents, she appreciates) Lena Constante meets in prison are – as she says – obedient to the aggressors’ rules (“out of fear, despair, mental apathy, lack of imagination, the wish to gain their executioners’ good will or simply to preserve a minimum of physical strength” (1992:128-129). Some of them are “the revolted ones, the disobedient” – of which most are members of the Legion. The third category she calls “the informers and the squealers” and she appreciates as “negligible” among the women, because of their lack of political implication: “most of the women I met were just as ‘political’ as I was” (1992:129). It is interesting to see how in her account about the penitentiary in Miercurea-Ciuc, Lena Constante is most critical or even cynical when looking at her fellow inmates, whom she sees as an amorphous, passive mob, but even so she admits to their solidarity. For her, however, Christian forgiveness is not a plausible answer to these crimes. The “religion of forgiving one’s wrongdoers” cannot have anything to do with the Gulag victims not being able to forgive their torturers: “all of us, the ones who have suffered in our flesh, heart and spirit, are very far – entirely legitimate – from forgiving our executioners” (Constante 1993:88).

Even at this level, most of the women testimonies differ in motivation from those of men: their suffering in prison, under the beating, the inhuman interrogatories and the tortures, is justified by most victims as a Christian response, and not as a political opposition or an ideological resistance. Unlike testimonies from the ’80-ies on Romanian communism, where very often the authors explicitly or implicitly convey the feeling that communism is here to stay forever, that Romania has lost any chance for redemption, that Romanians cannot save themselves and that no one will ever save them, in the accounts of these communist incarcerations the demise of communism is – to a certain extent – contemplated as natural projection in the near future. Of course, this hope gradually vanishes over the years, but in most of the accounts it is very much present and fuels the anti-communist position.

 

 

Bibliography

 

Excerpts were translated into English by the author. The following primary sources were used:

1992. Constante, Lena. Evadarea tăcută. 3000 de zile singură în închisorile din România. [The Silent Escape. 3000 days alone in Romanian prisons] In the author’s Romanian version. Bucharest: Humanitas

1993. Constante, Lena. Evadarea imposibilă. Penitenciarul politic de femei Miercurea-Ciuc 1957-1961 [The Impossible Escape. The Politic Penitentiary for Women in Miercurea-Ciuc 1957-1961]. Bucharest: Editura Fundaţiei Culturale Române.

1991. Nandriş-Cudla, Aniţa. 20 de ani în Siberia. Destin bucovinean [20 Years in Siberia. A Destiny of Bucovina]. Bucharest: Humanitas.

1993. Nicolau, Irina and Niţu, Theodor (eds.). Povestea Elisabetei Rizea din Nucşoara. Mărturia lui Cornel Drăgoi [The Story of Elisabeta Rizea of Nucsoara. The Testimony of Cornel Dragoi], collected and edited, with a preface by Gabriel Liiceanu. Bucureşti: Humanitas.

2002. Jurju, Cornel and Budeancă, Cosmin (eds.). “Suferinţa nu se dă la fraţi”. Mărturia Lucreţiei Jurj despre rezistenţa anticomunistă din Apuseni (1948-1958) [“You don’t trade suffering with your brothers and sisters”. Lucretia Jurj’s testimony on the anti-communist resistance in the Apuseni (1948-1958)]. Cluj: Editura Dacia. “Remember. Literatură şi totalitarism” series.

 

 

Notes