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BRASOV, Romania (AP) — Incarcerated in gulags for anti-communist activities, Alexandru Salca is now on his deathbed. His last wish before he dies is for the world to know the inhumanity of Romania's brutal communist regime.
If he were well, Salca would testify at the trial of Col. Gheorghe Craciun, a former communist secret police officer, charged with the deaths of 216 prisoners as commander of the Aiud prison four decades ago.
It's the first time a senior communist official from the 1950s is being brought to justice, thanks to efforts by former political prisoners. Craciun denies the charges.
But the trial was postponed Tuesday because Craciun had no lawyer and refused to show up for the opening session. The Bucharest trial judge rescheduled the session for Dec. 5, ordered a defense attorney to be appointed and threatened to bring Craciun to the courtroom forcibly if he refuses to attend.
Six former political prisoners who formed Romania's resistance against communism came to the courtroom Tuesday.
Survivors say they are not seeking revenge or even punishment for Craciun, who ran Aiud from 1958 to 1964. They just want the truth to be told about the camp before they die. Located some 187 miles northwest of Bucharest, Aiud was one of Romania's harshest penitentiaries.
Some 100,000 peasants, intellectuals and members of the pre-communist government are believed to have perished in prison or while building the Black Sea Canal, a 50-mile long channel linking the sea to the Danube River.
Romania's leaders after the 1989 revolt that toppled and executed former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu themselves had belonged to the communist elite and punished only a few top communists.
"Craciun should have been charged 10 years ago, when communism ended,'' but officials' first concern was to protect the secret police, or Securitate, said Salca, a railway worker sentenced to 40 years in prison in 1957 because he was a member of Romania's resistance to the communists.
Now, "many victims are dead and those that are alive are ill,'' Salca said.
The 78-year-old lies in bed, his swollen liver and emaciated frame evident below a swaddle of blankets. He is suffering from cirrhosis he developed in Aiud, has diabetes, and has been discharged from Brasov hospital, which can do no more for him.
But Salca is lucid. His rasping voice is punctuated by agonizing bouts of coughing and breathlessness that bring color to his sallow face.
If he appeared in court, he said he would testify that prisoners were refused medicine, slept on wooden planks with no blankets, endured bitter winters and ate sheep's intestines or macaroni with worms. If they refused to recant their anti-communist beliefs, they were put in solitary confinement and beaten.
Salca prayed every night for strength. He was freed with other political detainees when a general amnesty was declared in 1964. Some 103,000 prisoners survived.
Craciun, 87, is unrepentant and said he is too sick to attend the trial. He claimed that no prisoner died when he was ran Aiud, and that he is being harassed.
Asked if he had any regrets, he said, "Yes, they should have raised a statue to me. ... I liberated 4,000 prisoners.''
But prisoners say he kept them locked up for as long as he could.
"He was a sadist,'' said former prisoner Constantin Iulian.
Salca, who has written three books on his experiences, said he would tell military prosecutors that the cruelest part was the Craciun jailers' attempts to break inmates' spirits.
Nuclear scientist George Manu, who suffered from tuberculosis, was offered medication that would have saved his life, in exchange for denouncing his beliefs. He refused and died, Salca and Iulian said.
Cells were secretly monitored and inmates were encouraged to inform on one another and denounce their belief in God, and their faith in their families, friends and cell mates. Those who did received medicine and better food, and were moved to more comfortable quarters.
Wives who were not imprisoned were forced to divorce their husbands and denounce them to find work. Salca's wife, Viorica, was kept in a cell with their 3-month-old baby and interrogated about her husband's activities.
She divorced him, but they were reunited after he left prison and remarried. She now looks after him in his final days.
Some fear the memory of that era is fading, even among those who suffered most.
"Some people are even beginning to thank Craciun for saving their lives,'' said Lucia Hossu Longhin, who directed the documentary series, "Memorial of Suffering.''
One who will never forget is Iulian, 71, an engineer who spent 14 years in communist prisons and also worked on the Black Sea Canal. "We are still fighting communism,'' he said.
We are still fighting communism
My recurring nightmare ... that I'm imprisoned with hungry atheists who have a philosophy of Selfishness and want more food and softer beds for themselves.
Salca, who has written three books on his experiences, said he would tell military prosecutors that the cruelest part was the Craciun jailers' attempts to break inmates' spirits.
Nuclear scientist George Manu, who suffered from tuberculosis, was offered medication that would have saved his life, in exchange for denouncing his beliefs. He refused and died, Salca and Iulian said.
Cells were secretly monitored and inmates were encouraged to inform on one another and denounce their belief in God, and their faith in their families, friends and cell mates. Those who did received medicine and better food, and were moved to more comfortable quarters.
My recurring nightmare is that I am trapped in a nation where the products of my labors are viewed as a communal asset of some kind and the fact that there are more of them than there are of me makes it ok for them to steal from me.
When I object to this practice, they tell me to go vote. When I listen to the candidates, both of them are talking about spending money which isn't theirs on things the Constitution doesn't authorize them to be spending money on in the first place.
Pinch me will you, I can't seem to wake up.
Regards,
L
My recurring nightmare ... that I'm imprisoned with hungry atheists who have a philosophy of Selfishness and want more food and softer beds for themselves.
Wait; let me guess...and then you wake up and find the dog sprawled all over the bed?
Does anyone here think Steven Speilberg will make a movie based
on this or is that only reserved for the Holocaust?
Note: liberals don't like to expose psycotic, communist tyrannies to the public. They've invested to much propaganda and time keeping the truth of them hidden from the world. Can't have socialism get a bad reputation. That would wreck their fantasy utopia they have in store for us.
On the rare occasions when an escape was made, the guards would put several hundred men into a wire pen with no food, water or shelter, and blame their condition on the escapees. When the escapees were caught they would be put into this pen of madmen and be torn to pices.
Communism!
HEY BUB ... Bush thinks the folks who pay the taxes should get a whole FOURTH of the so-called surplus. Quit yer bitchin or I most certainly WILL pinch you, and hard!
(My nightmare comment, of course, is particularly directed at Rebelstorm because of his venom toward believers -- including me -- which I think, given the constant reinforcing of the Selfishness Philosophy in which he engages -- will override the sort of teamwork necessary for folks like him AND me to work together to overcome and liquidate our oppressors.
To a great extent, one of the reasons such false ideas of altruism have taken such a hold is the Selfish-ism that's been rampant in this nation nearly my entire life. When the point is always to "find onself", especially in the gamut of irresponsible actions for which one is not only forgiven but often remunerated, the traditions, mores and religious precepts that might have precluded such moronic groupthink by the masses are obliterated. "Consciousness raising" seems to leave most with too little oxygen for their minds to function properly anymore.
It's a key point, actually, of the destruction from within that Gramsci advocates. You destroy the common sense of folks (the accent on every individual's "personal opinion" being key to effecting this) and it's a piece of cake to roll over and reshape an atomized society to one's specifications.
I just think that, for all of our commonly held principles, the truth will out on this score. Probably just one reason atheism/agnosticism's been such a vital aspect of the cultural maoism ongoing my entire life as the east devoured the west from the inside out.
Hey ... I said nothing about the bad breath of my cellmate.
Yea, Bush promised 1/4 of a surplus which doesn't even exist to taxpayers. In the next breath he promised 200 billion new Federal dollars for education.
What's wrong with selfishness anyway? Your bitch seems to be with collectivism which comes from envy. Our problems don't come from selfishness. Hell, if everyone was selfish, noone would be paying 40% of their income in tribute to that gang of thieves in Washington called Congress.
Our problems don't come from selfishness dear lady. Our problems come from envy.
L
HOLLYWOOD PARTY- Communism, Communists, and Cinema [Free Republic]
Well ... I agree in part.
I think that envy is a valuable tool in the hands of those who would use women to turn on men, blacks to turn on whites, the stupid to turn on the intelligent, the poor to turn on the rich.
I think collectivism is not so much this calculated use of envy as it is the purely rational utopian's idea of the ideal human community. Unfortunately, it's all too apparent that "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is now a familiar sentiment in our political arena. It's just another example of how a math problem that starts out wrong in the first line will never reach the right answer.
The right answer is that these difference (male and female, rich and poor, intelligent and stupid, strong and weak, beautiful and ugly) always will be a part of the human condition. Even the most advanced forms of population control and psychological conditioning will not overcome human nature because essential human nature does not itself evolve. The lives of individuals evidence clearly that some are triumphs of human nature and others utter failures but 19 or so plotlines for the human drama do not change much as each comedia or tragedy is played out.
I think the philosophy of selfishness is a warped virtue. It is one thing to herald a man's not being beholden or a burden to another but if he does not wish for his neighbor all that he has for himself, he is failing his obligations as part of the human family. The Selfish Man becomes a dead end of sorts and the philosophy, as it seeps through society, breaks us apart like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. We may not be envious, per se, of each other but we become distrustful and often every bit as alone and brooding as a dragon who sleeps on the jagged edges of his treasure each night in a dark cave safely removed from society.
I think that's inhuman too, really. I look at the gated communities, the bars, the alarms, the bolted doors of neighborhoods and feel like folks are choosing to put themselves under house arrest so that they may have belongings rather than any sort of belonging that might cause them to rethink the ways they spend their time and money.
Thanks for posting this.
These events have not (yet) occurred here in American because 1) we are armed, and 2) a large portion of the majority is still religious and moral, and 3) we had some very wise Founding Fathers who established limited gov't and the rule of law.
The Constitution is being diminished daily, and the percentage of moral people seems to be diminishing which increases the importance of being well-armed.
>I think the philosophy of selfishness is a warped >virtue. It is one thing to herald a man's not being >beholden or a burden to another but if he does not >wish for his neighbor all that he has for himself, he is >failing his obligations as part of the human family.
Egad!
. I look at the gated communities, the bars, the alarms, the bolted doors of neighborhoods and feel like folks are choosing to put themselves under house arrest so that they may have belongings rather than any sort of belonging that might cause them to rethink the ways they spend their time and money.
I have been thinking a lot about this recently. I think it has something to do with my accident last month.
Egad, what?
Are you going to insult my intelligence (and that of most saints and sinners) by insisting that true compassion for one's own human family is some sort of aberration?
If so, you have proved the collectivists and communists correct that such altruism must be forced and that, once we've cut enough rats' tails off at the nub, we'll grow some tailless rats.
"one's own human family" being all humanity, of course, starting with the stranger next to you.
Each one save one.
Only leftists (and sometimes professional social workers) think to scramble over the broken bodies and spirits of their immediate surroundings in order to "save the world".
>Are you going to insult my intelligence (and that of most >saints and sinners) by insisting that true compassion for >one's own human family is some sort of aberration?
No.
>If so, you have proved the collectivists and communists >correct that such altruism must be forced and that, once >we've cut enough rats' tails off at the nub, we'll grow >some tailless rats.
Make up your mind.
Do you wish to discuss
Each one is a different thing.
Mercy and charity are more like it, actually.
Although, I admit that trying to argue with you is like trying to grab and hold a handful of wet cornstarch. =)
I can do nothing for my fellow human beings without first providing for myself. Once I have my own needs met, I can then give charity to others.
L
I understand.
Most just get wrapped up in their wants, however, and then begrudge those (unfortunate through no fault of their own) the basics as if poverty or imperfection were some sort of means of marking the inferior humans.
A great example would be those who believe it's more charitable to prevent and terminate as many pregnancies as possible so that 'the world's [wanted] children' have plenty of natural resources and elbow room ... the richest, most nimble and educated nations being able to jockey for the maximum control over both resources and arable land.
But in a world where human life is methodically exterminated to selectively 'thin the herd' and speed up the 'survival of the fittest', just what sort of future will our progeny be enjoying in the first place?
>Although, I admit that trying to argue with you is like >trying to grab and hold a handful of wet cornstarch. =)
And you recall the Lernean Hydra.
Alas, I have no nephew.
Pinch me will you, I can't seem to wake up.
Reminds me of a line from an old Bob Dylan tune:
This ain't a dream no more, it's the REAL thing...
And another, more appropriate line from Dune:
Father! the Sleeper HAS awakened!
Lately, it seems to me that more and more folks are Getting It.
The Mother of all Evil is Pride.
L
Hey ... who you callin' a (still learnean) hydra?
You don't HAVE to have a nephew to test the property of wet cornstarch or jump in the leaves you just raked.
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