Judit Gellérd

Growing up under political persecution

Communist dictatorships did not produce many martyrs, rather crippled anybody who rejected to collaborate. With an increasing terror, people have given up resistance and a certain level everybody compromised, whether in action or just deeply in their soul. Some, who did not, like my father became martyrs. And now symbols, examples for others to follow their vision for renewal, to do what is right. Almost nobody is free from wounds of fear, anger or guilt. My father's story is an illustration of the tragedy that has happened to people in Eastern Europe.

After the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 had been crushed by Soviet tanks, retaliation took many lives and political prisoners in Hungary. But few know that in Romania where no revolution took place, some 70,000 intellectuals had been imprisoned. The Romanian government decided to decapitate the nation by crushing its intelligentsia in order to prevent revolution. The best of the nation--writers, professors, students, priests, ministers, artists were facing so-called conceptual trials of a military court under a permanent Martial law. The essence of these trials was all the same. The person had to be denounced by someone to be arrested. After several months of intensive brainwashing techniques, the person was ready for the conceptual trial which had a precise script and the sentence preconceived.

One night of 1959 the Secret Police car stopped in front of our parish. That was the most feared moment for everybody. Nobody knew when it would be his or her turn. My father actually had a last minute information of his arrest that night and he managed to hide the manuscript of his dissertation and two novels in the attic of the parish. This is how the only copy of his priceless work has survived the house search and confiscation of his library and manuscripts.

He was kidnapped and disappeared for seven month in the basement of the Secret police, without any trial. We didn't even know whether he was alive. He was 39, a brilliant scholar, the great promise of the Transylvanian Unitarian Church.

The seven month "interrogation" of him consisted of not much beatings, but more sophisticated torture methods, from sleep deprivation to injections of psycho tropic drugs to crush his resistance and which gave him amnesia. These methods actually targeted three main goals:

First, to prepare him for his own trial; secondly, to force him to denounce further victims and thirdly, to eventually sign the agreement of becoming a secret police collaborator in the future. This was actually the main point. He was presented a list of seven of his colleagues assigned to him to inform against them. But he resisted and those people have escaped prison.

The person who denounced my father along with the greatest Seminary professors and majority of Seminary students was a church leader, who became the president of the Seminary as a reward from the state for his dark service.

My father was sentenced for 7 years of political prison and forced labor and an additional 5 years of deprivation from his civil rights. He lost his beloved congregation which he had made into the example church of Transylvanian Unitarianism.

He lost also his family. My mother was forced to divorce him, otherwise her two young children--my brother was 7, I was 10--would have been taken from her and put in an orphanage. She had to become the head of the family to be able to keep us and to find work. No minister's wife was given a state job. We were evicted from the parish by the church. Fortunately my mother was strong enough to face all the humiliation and eventually to continue her education and create a home for us, and give us, too, an education. After graduating from music conservatory, I went to Medical School. All those years I had to hide in a sense that I had to deny my father as if he didn't existed at all in order to escape political annihilation. My brother was also given education.

For twenty more years my mother continuously but secretly had been harassed by the secret police, trying to force her to become an informer. But neither of my parents have ever compromised.

Romania's political prisons were among the harshest in the world, a true Gulag. Even special psychological tortures were applied in addition to the incredible misery and near-starvation. In my father's case, the only "news" that reached him in a total isolation was, that my mother committed suicide after she had killed my brother and me. The person "witnessed" our funeral. Three more years my father had to survive.

In 1964 general amnesty was granted to all the political prisoners in Romania as a result of an international pressure. My father came home after 6 years of prison. He was unrecognizable, an old, broken man at 45. He was assigned to a church "beyond the reach of God". But he kept writing: hundreds of sermons, essays and a second dissertation, considered as a unique work on Unitarian intellectual history of 400 years. The doctorate was never awarded to him because of political reasons. The secret police never stopped harassing him.

Finally, cut off from influencing revitalization in his church, he did what so many remarkable Transylvanian writers did: following a new threat of arrest, he ended his life at his sixtieth birthday.