Carmen
Bugan, “How the secret police tracked my childhood”, BBC 1/4/2014
Fighting the system used to be dangerous anywhere in Eastern Europe. For
one protester from a small Romanian village it was disastrous - and also for
his family, whose every word was recorded by the secret police. Carmen Bugan,
who found the transcript of her childhood, tells their story.
Soon after my brother's birth in February 1983 my father, Ion Bugan, was
faced with the biggest decision he ever had to make.
Should he and my mother continue secretly typing anti-communist manifestos
on an illegally-owned typewriter and distributing them around Romania? Or
should he go to Bucharest to take on Ceausescu all by himself, without telling
anyone a word about it?
Thirty years on we still live with the legacy of my father's choice. And
with the discovery of an intimate, horrifying story of our lives written by the
secret police, the Securitate.
This was a Romania of food shortages, frequent power cuts, and ferocious
reprisals for any form of dissent. The sounds of forbidden US radio stations -
Voice of America and Radio Free Europe - woke us up and put us to bed every
day, sending shivers up our spines as they merged with the noise from the
kitchen. They gave my father hope that life could be better if only people
stood up for themselves.
The Securitate was well acquainted with my parents. In early 1961 my father
was in a bar with his best friend Petrica and a few others complaining about
high tax rates and the collectivisation of farms. They came up with a plan to
hijack an internal flight from Arad, in the west of Romania, and to fly it out
of the country.
Petrica was a retired air force officer who in civilian life repaired
radios like my dad. They had no idea that one of their friends was a Securitate
informer.
All were captured before they had a chance to take control of the plane and
condemned to eight years of hard labour "for preparatory actions leading
to fraudulent crossing of the border" (leaving the country without
permission was illegal) and "plotting against public order".
My father, in his 20s, found himself in terrible prisons at Jilava and Deva
and at the Great Island of Braila labour camp, where he met some of the
political dissidents who were systematically tortured there.
In July 1964, my father and his friends were liberated in a general amnesty
but the Securitate followed his every move, looking for any reason to discredit
him and throw him back in prison. Suffocated and intimidated, in February 1965
dad bought a compass, binoculars, antibiotics, a few vials of caffeine, some
cans of sardines, and a roll of salami. He and Petrica made a heart-stopping
escape from Romania in a blizzard. Dodging police and hiding in haystacks, they
made it all the way to the Iron Curtain at the Bulgarian-Turkish border.
On 2 March 1965 at 07:30 in the morning, starved, weak and frozen, they
rolled down a hill, jumped a 2m-high barbed-wire fence and nearly crossed into
Turkey. The patrol squad showered them with bullets in no-man's land, just 400m
from freedom, and sent them back to Romania. My father was sentenced to 11
years at the harshest prison of all, Aiud, for "fraudulent crossing of the
border, punishable with art. 267 of the penal code".
Part of the sentence was a five-month period of torture by solitary
confinement and starvation while wearing 45kg of chains day and night, in the
"special" wing of the prison at Alba Iulia. The prison records say he
was transferred to Alba Iulia "for judicial affairs" which is true in
a sense: my father was tortured there in order to "admit" his
supposed role as an "accomplice" in the theft of money that had
"disappeared" from his radio repair shop after he ran away to
Bulgaria. My father's own account of this period is hair-raising: he was fed
once every two days, and allowed to wash three times in the entire period he
was held there.
But, as dad puts it, there was an angel looking after him - he was
transferred back to Aiud and freed in January 1969 as a result of changes to
the penal code.
Dad now attempted to live a normal life. He married and had children.
Things didn't seem so bad on the surface. We had summer holidays on the Black
Sea and built a lovely house in our village, Draganesti, near Galati, in
eastern Romania.
But behind the scenes the Securitate pushed him to breaking point,
following and spying on him. My mother, Mioara, was denied a career in teaching
because she married a "political agitator" and was therefore likely
to "pollute the minds of the younger generation". Told to choose
between job and husband, she opted for the marriage, and they both began
working in a grocer's shop. Before long, mum was running the shop, and as dad
had been banned from keeping the books at his TV/radio repair workshop, she did
that too. Dad worked on repairs when he wasn't stacking shelves. My parents put
up with their lot, and worked hard.
Whether it's freedom from surveillance or freedom to be single, the BBC is
investigating what freedom means in the modern world.
By 1981, however, there were not many groceries to sell. Hungry factory
workers yelled at them: "What am I going to put in my bag for lunch?"
Evening bread queues often ended in fist fights. When the doors closed for the
day, my father's angry outbursts at the back of the shop mingled with blasts of
Radio Free Europe. One day he told my mother: "I don't want to spend my
life just breathing air, and doing nothing."
They bought two typewriters, one of which they did not register with the
police, and began making anti-communist flyers protesting against shortages and
human rights abuses. They spent the nights typing and driving all over the
country to put them in people's letterboxes, while my sister and I slept. The
police kept coming to the house to check the prints of the legal typewriter,
and to see whether they matched with the letters.
On 10 March 1983, about a month after my father and I visited the hospital
with a bouquet of carnations to see my new-born brother, Catalin, my father
took to the streets of Bucharest. On top of our red Dacia car, he mounted
placards demanding human rights, and denouncing Ceausescu as a torturer who
should be put on trial. Then he drove through the city centre, throwing
leaflets from the window and blowing a whistle to attract attention.
He had said nothing to my mother. She was in the hospital with Catalin, who
was close to dying from an untreated lung infection. My younger sister Loredana
was away at gymnastics school and I was at home, aged 12, with my grandmother.
This marked the beginning of hell for us.
Dad's protest landed him back in Aiud, condemned to 10 years of hard labour
for "propaganda against the socialist regime", punishable under art.
166 line 2 of the penal code. My mother, my sister, my brother and I were
placed under close surveillance.
We became accustomed to travelling across the country for a yearly prison
visit, letters sent but not always received, food packages returned to us
because "the prisoner did not behave appropriately". Rotten fried
chicken, softened apples and ulcer medication were sent back in the battered
cardboard boxes in which we had placed them months before, hoping he'd receive
them.
The Securitate had their own keys to our house and ordered us not to pull
the curtains in the kitchen to make it easier for them to observe us. We later
learned that my father had accumulated the codenames Andronic, Butnaru, Cazul
Cocor, and Barbu, while Mum was codenamed Bela and Barbu. A school friend
codenamed Cornelia was in charge of keeping a record of my feelings about dad
for the Securitate.
Carmen Bugan is the author of memoir Burying the Typewriter: Childhood
Under the Eye of the Secret Police
In 1985 mum and dad were forced to divorce. By 1987 I had become accustomed
to children at school, and one of the teachers, referring to me and my sister
as "the criminal's daughters".
On his birthday in 1988, Ceausescu proclaimed a general amnesty. My mother
quipped that history would remember him for his compassion - having no idea
that we would find her words transcribed 30 years later in government archives.
When my father walked home in the night on 5 February 1988, secret
microphones in the house "registered an atmosphere of joy coming from the
children". My father "visited each room", "asked for his
shaver" and looked "for his radio". He cradled Catalin in his
arms, they noted. The transcripts of that first night say that "the family
went to sleep at 03:45 in the morning. The Obj. [my father] complained of a
pain in his heart."
None of us remember all of these details, they are a gift from the
record-keeping Securitate, but I recall the smell of prison on dad's clothes.
A couple of months after dad's return from prison, the secret police files
note:
"At 01:32 in the morning, we could hear someone trying the door to the
room equipped with listening devices. The door doesn't open. We hear the
footsteps of someone walking away and the insistent barking of the dog as to a
person who is a stranger to the house."
It is a transcript of the Securitate registering itself in the act of
trying to come into the house to change the microphones. I read this file last
August for the first time. It made me understand that when we heard noises in
those years in Romania we weren't really crazy as we thought.
After receiving a series of invitations from mysterious men to meet them in
town, death threats on the phone in the middle of the night, and even a call
from a woman offering sex to dad, we decided to seek political asylum in the
US. It was my turn to make a heart-stopping journey to the American Embassy
with my father's prison papers to give testimony on behalf of the family.
I managed to get into the Consulate but I was promptly arrested on the way
out and interrogated for 45 minutes. I kept repeating what I was told to say:
"We are under American protection, you can't do anything to me." They
let me go and told me to never go back there again.
The Securitate records show how "concerned" they were about us
and what might happen, as immigrants, to our sense of Romanian identity. They
tried to dissuade my mother from going to the US - they told her that life in
the West was a form of slavery to rich, lazy capitalists.
We waited 11 months for our passports, under house arrest. One record says
that "after we have used every method to discourage the obj. [this time
Mum] from leaving, we decided to expel her from the Communist Party". It
was, even according to the Securitate's own file, a humiliation ceremony, where
her friends were forced to hurl insults at her.
"Your girls will become prostitutes," the passport clerk yelled
at my parents. "Our hand is long," they said, turning to my father,
threatening us with death if we spoke about what had been done to us once in
America. I now read my mother's declaration in the files "not to damage
the image of our socialist regime by actions or words", and wonder how she
must have felt to leave the country in her 40s with three children, a husband
who had returned from the heart of evil, and no idea where we were going.
As we made our way to Michigan at the end of 1989, each carrying one
suitcase in which we packed a lifetime, the Berlin Wall tumbled down behind us.
The bloody Romanian Revolution followed at Christmas time.
We arrived as political refugees in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on 17 November
1989, travelling via Rome, and landing at night, in a snowstorm, not speaking a
word of English.
In a refugee centre in Rome we had been taught that Americans, when they
ask "How are you?" don't really expect an answer; that they all have
chequebooks; that they value democracy and free speech; and that all immigrants
gain 8kg in the first year in the West because, well, there is just a lot of
food to eat and most of it is rather different from our homemade soups. We
couldn't have been more thrilled with all of that.
We became eager to "assimilate" into Western life.
My sister and I would often ask the people in Grand Rapids we knew best:
"Do I look American yet?"
At the same time we saw on a donated television how the Ceausescus were
executed. My father said: "This is all wrong, now the world will never
find out from him about his abuses." My mother cried: "They are just
two old people, they should not have been killed." And all of us danced in
the living room with joy that a revolution was happening in Romania.
I wondered if my father's protest might have played some role in bringing
it about. My father wanted to return. We said firmly: "We are staying
here, and you are not abandoning us yet again."
Twenty years have passed. We cleaned nursing homes, churches, worked at
Burger King, made golf clubs, Mum worked in a children's clothing factory, and
we went to school. My father collected all of the discarded televisions we
found, fixed them, and we had a TV in each room: "Such a waste," he'd
say.
We became American citizens. My sister and I married. She and her husband
bought a house in the suburbs. We became "Romanians by birth".
In 1999 Romania opened the archives of the secret police to people who had
been subjected to surveillance during the communist years.
My father said: "I know who I am. I don't need to know what the
Securitate said about me." But I disagreed and managed to find our records
in 2010.
Now, it was one thing to experience the Securitate following and
threatening us. But it is another thing to read the complete record of our
daily lives, including the traps neatly laid out for us, to lure us into
committing an offence, which we escaped simply by instinct or luck.
So, when my mother was in the hospital with my brother, the Securitate
placed next to her a "patient" who also had a "sick child".
Nurses and doctors helped to stage it all. The woman who became Mum's
"friend" had a question scripted for her to help her spark the
conversation. She produced reports on what mum said about my father and his
dissidence.
Another example is a "legend" (a technical term used by the
Securitate) by which an "Amnesty International employee" came to ask
mum about my father and whether we were persecuted because of him. The officer
was trained to have a German accent, and to look nervous. He invited her to a
hotel in town to talk "out of the reach of the microphones".
This was a trap to throw my mother in prison for speaking with foreigners
about my father. Again, we now have the official record against which we can
test our own memory of that day when the man came to the house. After he left,
my mother said: "No-one is this worried about us, I don't trust this
stranger." It was a lack of trust that saved her.
There are records of dreams we recounted to each other in the mornings. The
transcriber knew us so well, he or she was able to read and duly note our
moods. Some even took sides in family arguments, noting on the margins of the
transcripts who they thought was right. It's like having had a one-sided
relationship with these invisible broadcasters of our tormented souls.
Needless to say, the documents have been sifted through, parts have been
blotted out in black ink, pages are missing. What I have is what was given to
me as publishable.
But we now have every letter that my father wrote to us from prison and we
wrote to him. Half of the letters are direct transcripts—they were copied out
by the censors - while half are paraphrases of what we wrote. There are not
always quotation marks to indicate which of the words are ours, which are
theirs. It is nearly impossible to detangle the self from the words of the
Securitate. Some of the letters were not forwarded to us, so I read them for
the first time last summer.
The question of what my father was thinking of when he drove away to
Bucharest on 10 March 1983 has lost its painful intensity for us over the
years. Yet in the files I see our daily recitation of blame and anger at the
time.
That question would have remained unanswered if it hadn't been for a trip
to Romania that we took as a family in October 2013. My father was by then 78,
my mother 67, so it was a good time to make the journey back.
Walking into my father's prisons, Jilava and Aiud, the cells completely
submerged in darkness and bone-chilling dampness, reading the records of his
admission to the prison infirmary with fractured ribs and "bruises from
hammer applied to fingers", I understood what I could not have understood
before.
When he left home, the car stuffed with placards and leaflets, my father
knew what he was returning to. Yet he had no choice. For him the family was his
country and the country was his family. If he did not fight for everyone else,
he could not have hoped to put food on our own table. Or a shred of dignity in
our lives. He left us out of desperation and moral conviction.
He protected us by saying nothing to us. But you can only understand this
by going into the prison rooms where he suffered. And by standing next to him
while he shouts that he has no memory of receiving beatings that fractured his
ribs, even though you face him, with the radiography record trembling in your
hands. This is the side of heroism no-one likes to talk about, not even him.
But it is the face of heroism that now makes me proud.
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