Ana Simion - a different Elisabeta Rizea (fragments)

Monday, 21 March, 2011

I am the remaining metal
        Of worlds turned into ash by crimes
        I am the forever healthy echo
        From worlds, from worlds that are gone.

       Toma Arnăuţoiu


      Ana Simion was born in 1920 in the village of Slatina, in the commune of Nucșoara, in a family of peasants, with hardworking parents who always worked their land assiduously. Apparently a simple girl who, like so many others before her, was going to fulfill the known destiny of life in the countryside - working the plot of land and raising animals in the summer, domestic activities such as weaving and knitting in the winter and, in the ancestral order of things - early marriage and raising children, then grandchildren... A life that fits the typical Romanian rural pattern, with nothing different in its main aspects compared to the lives of parents, grandparents or great-grandparents. But what could Ana or any other inhabitant of Nucșoara want more than to get caught up in thispattern and live as did so many others before them at these foothills? During her childhood years, there were events taking place in the East that would change not only her destiny, but also the destiny of the inhabitants of Nucșoara and of all Romanians. The idea of the new world, based on class struggle, was being kneaded in the Bolshevik mixer, the export of the proletarian revolution was considered and put into theories, abandoned and brought back to the forefront of Stalin's great goals.

In the hospital, in Domnești, with Dr. Floarea, in February 2010

     I met Ana Simion on a February day, in the hospital in Domnești, when she was 90 years old. A bronchial asthma brings her every month to a hospital room where she is cared for by her favorite doctor - Mrs. Floarea. Of course, she doesn't want to talk to just anyone, especially now that she is ill, but the influence of the same admirable doctor brings me in the immediate vicinity of history. This gentle little woman is living history to me. She is quietly sitting on the bed and looking at me, neither too curious nor too intrigued, as she has seen plenty of things in her life and is now resignedly waiting to be "investigated" yet again by someone else. From the very beginning, she tells me that many people came to see her and asked her all kinds of questions, some important people from Bucharest, others from around here. She puts me on guard with a brief account of an "important person" who, as they arrived at her home, no sooner had they said "hello" than they started with questions, just as they used to do during investigations back in the day! She would have kicked them out of the house, but they seemed 'well-read' and ... she was ashamed to do it. In my heart I was a little relieved, as I had greeted, I had introduced myself, I had explained the reason of my visit and that I was not in a hurry, and I do not even dare to ask for straightforward answers to my questionnaire. Having met these minimum requirements, I am therefore clumsily preparing to operate the recording device after asking her for permission to use it. The scene is ready, the main performer is patiently waiting to hear the gong, and the audience... Yes, it's expected to have an audience as well, right? Four ladies, patients and inhabitants of the same village, as I would later realize, are visibly looking forward to finding out or to listening again to Ana Simion's story. Out of habit or maybe because they didn't want to just sit and watch time go by, two of them keep crocheting. As I was focused on the subject, I didn't notice the ladies' initially distributive attention, who were listening so carefully, that any artist would have wanted them among their audience, and at the same time the hooks were performing their duty, weaving small things for the grandchildren. I would then realize that they were absorbing every word, they were sighing, as if they were suffering together with Ana, and they reacted, at times, with a whispered aversion, like an ancient Greek choir, as the tormented youth of the old lady was revealed to them in such tragic and painful detail.

Young Ana Simion

       Since I intend to be a thorough researcher (at least I promised that to myself), I start the interview with the well-established questions that are part of the Civic Academy Foundation's standard questionnaire for investigating oral history. It didn't take much experience to realize that this work tool could only be used partially, because memories come in waves and fail to respect the structure of the questionnaire, as well as the chronological structure. Besides, because I'm familiar with the subject, I intend to try to have a discussion. The first questions determine short answers, related to identification data, parents, school, marriage. As I expected, she was looking in her past, at her childhood and her family, with nostalgia and great love. Her parents were hardworking people, who minded their own business and who raised her to become a worthy woman and to settle down at the right time. 'I will be thankful to them even from beyond the grave', Ana tells me. Something in her voice reveals regret for not having pursued further education. She got an education from the person who set the village benchmark of intellectuality and morality, the primary school teacher Ion Arnăuțoiu, Toma and Petre's father. She and Toma used to be classmates, the latter being a very good student, of course... She has words of appreciation for her first teacher - 'he was a brilliant teacher, but I was also afraid of him, we shuddered' whenever he entered the classroom. His role did not end when walked out the school gate, but it continued, in another way - 'We would sometimes go to their house, we didn't have a doctor back then and we would ask them, he was smart, Arnăuțoiu was also like a doctor, he was a well-read man in our commune, not like the rest of us!'
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
        As in so many other cases, Ana Simion's fall was the result of betrayal. Judas was walking through the gardens of Nucșoara in plain sight. One day, as she was out in the fields, one of Chirca's boys, the one nicknamed the Deserter, was waving his arms to her, and she went toward him, scared, believing that something serious had perhaps happened to one of her parents. But when she got next to him, she was grabbed by some secret police officers and beaten with a pole in order to tell them where she had been hiding a fugitive, a certain Gheorghe Mămăligă. Indeed, he had been hiding in the hay attic, not at her house, but at her sister's, and she could not admit to anything, as she didn't want to bring Marinica into the hands of these butchers. Her testimony about that first contact with the secret police officers is staggering - 'They tortured me to tell them, but I didn't say anything. They took me into the woods, close by, beat me with a pole... to make me say where that Gheorghe Mămăligă was, because he had shot Chirca. How could I have said anything, if I had told them about someone, that someone would have told them about everyone else and they would have killed everyone because of me. I was better off dying by myself and not saying anything! But I wasn't as guilty as these people tortured me, no...' They took her to the headquarters of the secret police, probably to Câmpulung, where the ordeal continued - 'I was tortured beyond belief, I was lying on the table, and they beat me with rubber poles, the kind these cops have; there were four guys, two would be eating and the other two would be coming to beat me, they just wouldn't stop beating me, my hips are now broken, doctors can't give me injections. [...] God helped me, if I didn't tell on anyone. They promised me money, a job, because they had beaten me until I fell on the cement and they took me to a doctor.' They were probably scared they had exaggerated with the beating without learning anything and took her to a civilian physician to whom they lied about finding her lying on the street. But the detainee, "from the floor, numb", powerlessly whispered to the physician that she was under investigation, which triggered a reaction of indignation on his part - 'You pigs, you jerks, what did you do to her!" And to their argument that she said nothing of what she had done against the state, the doctor boldly replied, 'Well, it's a good thing she didn't, that would have destroyed the people she would have told on too. Congratulations!', and after that he gave her some pills that made her feel a bit better. The investigation went on, as she was then brought not to a cell, because there was no more room, but to the toilets! The investigators had information that she had hidden a partisan. 'So, they would say that the runaway was at my place, God, how they tortured me for that man, “where is Gheorghe, where is Gheorghe?"' And then how was I to tell them that he was in my sister's attic, she had three children. They would fire their guns from there and from there in the yard, but they didn't care the children could have died, they were the masters. And I didn't tell them! I told them 'I don't know' and 'I don't know' and so on! But they were certain, he had told them, he had told them and handed me over to them. Yes!' 'I was badly hurt, my back is killing me from all the rubber poles that I was beaten with as I was lying on that table. Four guys! Two would go and eat, the beating wouldn't stop. I myself wonder how I still exist. And I don't know, I don't know, I didn't tell them one word, they couldn’t make me! What do you mean you don't know? We've been told this and that. These were murderers, they were paid to beat people, I would have rather went to dig holes, I would have made holes so deep that I could have buried those guys in them, but I couldn't have beaten people and taken money and brought that money home and raised my children with torture money. They wouldn't just slap you once or twice, to interrogate you, no, they would kill you!’
         After almost two weeks during which there was no progress in the investigation and Ana did not give them any information, they changed the investigation procedure. The four torturers disappeared and their place was taken by a colonel, 'from Bucharest, a tall man' who appeared at around 12 o'clock one night, and  invited her to take a seat and expressed sympathy for the condition of the detainee, as 'her skin was all black with bruises, there was nowhere to stick a needle'. He took two pills out of his pocket and offered her one to feel a bit better. But Ana realized that there was something wrong with the pill and that it could make her admit to  something: 'I was no fool'. So she held the pill under the tongue and waited for the right moment to throw it away, but the colonel was, 'keeping a close eye on me as I am doing now with you'. Finally, she spit it out and told him she couldn't swallow it because she hadn't had anything to eat or drink in two weeks. The investigator then took out a pile of money and put it on the table, promising, at the same time, that he would get her a job in Bucharest, but she couldn't be budged from her initial statements that she didn't know nothing and she wasn't guilty of anything. 'I don't need the money, I stay here if you catch them, if he saw me after them, because I knew he wouldn't tell on me. When you catch them!' She was released and asked to report as soon as she learned anything about the partisans. Once she got home, her every step was being watched - 'well, secret police officers were constantly watching us from our garden, they even put some neighbors to watch us, some dumb neighbor, but he bloody died!' She must have failed to observe the instructions, as after a while she was again arrested and put under investigation at Câmpulung Muscel. Detention conditions are inhumane - the cellar was dark and there was water in it, I myself wonder how I still exist, the water was up to the knees and it was pitch-black, either you held your eyes open or... and a lock as if I had killed all the people in our village. I was alone in the cellar and still hadn't eaten anything'. The policeman taking her to the inquiry room and back to the cell was originally from Nucşoara and he would always say to her: 'Tell them, they know you know, tell them and end this, they will kill you!'. In the tortured woman's mind sprung the idea that it was the investigators themselves who had assigned him to convince her. But she stayed strong until the end, two hard weeks at the end of which she was released and accompanied to her sister who was living in the city. Ana couldn't be budged because 'I have stated from the start that I would die by myself, now tell me, if we had been all connected, when I would hear you... how would my soul have felt?' They would have given me a great reward, they would have given me everything, as I knew them and I could have told on everyone, but what would I have done with the money? I go to the Lord only with my soul!' 

                                                  Ana Simion during her first arrest, in 1950

         Her faith and belief that what she was doing was right and the Christian thing to do gave her strength throughout this entire period. She also has a strong opinion that sooner or later, God will repay everyone, depending on the good or the evil they have done. She sees now that Ion Chirca, the one who betrayed her, 'has been bedridden for years, but think of how long he made me suffer for him'. Ana is serene and expects that implacable divine justice to take place. She has seen plenty of things during her long life and she believes that, in a way, God has given her these years to watch how the wicked receive their reward. She briefly and significantly characterizes those who brutalized her as 'low-lives, how can they beat people and take money for it, couldn't they find another job?'. Among those, there are Captain Enache, captain Cârnu and a certain Ploscaru. "I mean I, a woman, have suffered, they broke my hips and my head, Captain Cârnu threw me against the stove and as I ricocheted back to him he slapped me, which occurred about 30 times; I myself wonder how I still exist, I'm as thin as a rake, but the Lord watched over me when I suffered and when they tortured us there!'. As in the case of Elisabeta Rizea, the investigators were unable to get her to talk. 'I'd rather suffer than tell on someone and know they're beating another person for me, that's what I thought. You tell on another person, that other person tells on another and I'm here and I hear them torturing them, those I told on! I die, only I die, no big deal, the soul gets out, what else can it do? Well, about 2-3 times they took me, the first one in the commune, there was nobody else taken to say who else knows and where those persons might be!' [...], I cried so much in that cell that I think blood came out of my eyes, when I saw myself alone in the cell for so many days, I wasn't given a mattress or anything, so I laid down on the iron, naked, on the iron bed like that, someone would come and give me food, sometimes I took it, other times I didn't. But to hell with them, they tortured us for nothing. But in my heart, I'm pleased that no one took a slap for me, with all their money and their job, may I live well and may they go to hell! Couldn't they find another job, other than beating and... killing people?'
       After escaping these two weeks of terror in Câmpulung, she was taken to her sister, who lived right in the city, and she stayed there for a while because her recovery was very difficult, given the ordeal she went through. 'We were tortured by these people just like Christ, they wouldn't have tortured us like that even if we had killed the entire country!'


( Oana Dinu, traducător, linkedin.com/in/oana-dinu)

                                         ( Ana Simion' s house in 2014)