The Memory Prisoner

Author : Cornel GOIA
Publisher : Goia Cornel
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 95 pages
Book Rating : 4./5 ( download)

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Download or read book The memories of an Anonymous political prisoner written by Cornel GOIA and published by Goia Cornel. This book was released on with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is not an adventure or horror novel, it is an account, as simple as the author of the memoirs. Personal events and experiences are written spontaneously and directly, the hero narrating the ordeal of the years spent in jail as if talking to his next door neighbour . The exceptions from the morphology and syntax rules only add to the authenticity of the story. As the reading of the text advances, a question arises, grows, then becomes overwhelming. How was it possible? How could these creatures thrust such suffering in the flesh and the spirit of a human being, a multiplied suffering, amplified on the scale of millions of people? The hero sees himself thrust in a moment in the hell of the Romanian political prisons and consequently treated as a political prisoner, with all the dark connotations that this title hides in its fatal folds. It is the "right" to be beaten up to the loss of conscience, the "right" to torment his comrades of suffering, only to escape torture himself, "the right" to starvation up to the point of dehumanization, the "right" to work over your powers , the "right" to die, or the "right" to find desperately that you have become a beast. And yet how close they were to success! They had crossed unnoticed the ploughed strip of the border separating them from freedom, or at least so they believed. Being in Yugoslavia they also dreamt of getting to America. But what disappointment and fear! A group of Serbian border guards cuts their way, arrests them, handcuffs them, and after an investigation they deliver them to the Romanian border guards; and the ordeal continues, or it has just begun. The horror of the story, which risks to slip the reader's attention, is that Popică is not a political criminal. His only "fault" is that he wanted to live in America. The communist authorities had declared the illegal border crossing to be a political offense. Popică did not even know the fact that the Yugoslav authorities extradited the Romanians they captured crossing the border. Even if he had known it, Popică, honest, simple-minded and God-fearing as he was, could not have understood how it was possible for a free people like the Serbs whom their leader, Tito, let leave and return to their country anytime, to extradite the Romanian fugitives seeking freedom. A Romanian curse seemed to let Romania have no common border with any free country in Europe. Popică's first story contains the escape, the crossing of the ploughed strip of land, the great flashing joy of success, followed by the most bitter disappointment of their being captured by the Yugoslav border guards. The story, until crossing the border, seems trivial, because all over the world tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people cross borders illegally, determined by political, social or economic injustices in their country, by unbearable climate changes, by war, or simply in the hope of a better life. The area of ​​the Great Lakes in the United States is to this day full of the descendants of the 1920s Romanian emigrants , whom no one asked why they left, why they returned, whether they returned or why they stayed. These emigrants were not arrested by anyone on the border to be accused of intending to betray their homeland. From now on, Popică's story turns into a tragedy. As in a horror film, the action takes a dramatic, unreal turn, it turns into a nightmare, into a long and unbearable suffering that will chase him and which he will try to escape from with a wounded animal roar. This roar will be the present book. In other words, telling his suffering, he could wake up from the nightmare. Confessing his suffering, the book becomes the confession of a martyr. By telling it to everyone, the author hopes to get rid of it, or at least to alleviate it. Without Franz Kafka, the writer's talent, Popică manages to thrill us, making us plunge into the kafkian universe: van-wagons with metallic structures heated mercilessly by the burning sun of triage stations; wagons packed to capacity with detainees, some of them sick and suffocating, screaming for lack of air, feeling like dying; the cells at Jilava, overcrowded with detainees, even sleeping under the overlapped beds; buckets full of fetid human waste, placed near the pots of drinking water; that transport of old detainees who are simply overturned in the mud at the gate of the camp and who can no longer rise up from the mud because of exhaustion to the amusement of the guards, sinister onlookers in security guard uniforms watching the spectacle of human humiliation. Popică with his story opens up the gates of the hell built in Romania by the Romanian Security at Stalin's order and executed by his loyal servants from the Central Committee of the Romanian Workers' Party. Popică understood that Dumitrache had already been dead when they brought him the bread roll and the kettle with water, but he played the innocent for fear of punishment. He understood that he had to play the role all the way, thus facilitating the scenario of Dumitrache's escape attempt. Up to the moment of Dumitrache's attempt to escape, the destiny of the memoirs’ author resembled that of Dumitrache’s. Both of them had been arrested, investigated, beaten and then sent to the Peninsula or the Poarta Albă to die of cold, starvation and working rules impossible to accomplish. Here the likeness of the two destinies ceases. Popică had remained "inside" while Ion Dumitrache had dared to go "outside" and had become a victim of the temptation to correct his destiny. He fell into the hands of the security guards who beat him to death, then they hung him with wires at the corner of the barracks and left him there as an example to scare the other prisoners. Dumitrache's figure, hanging from the pillar, his fallen head and his bruised face, impressed him strongly. Dumitrache looked there, on the pillar, like Christ crucified on the cross. This likeness shook him to non-oblivion. The emotional shock he lived through made him write this testimony over the years. Certainly Popică did not notice the directorial talent of the security guards who staged the great misfortune. Indeed, in the forced labor colony where the drama happened, no other escape attempts were reported. The questions that have arisen, deeply human questions, are: "Who has "triumphed" in the Dumitrache case? The security guards who tortured and killed Dumitrache? Isn’t it Dumitrache the real winner, who succeeded by his death to exchange the ordeal of detention with eternity !? Is it Popică the winner who endured the ordeal to the end and confessed it by writing these memoirs?" The answer to these questions is personal, it is the answer that every reader will whisper to himself/herself. Post scriptum: I cannot put an end to this warning without expressing my profound sense of admiration to professor Cornel Goia for his tireless work as a chronicler of these incredible sufferings undergone in the Romanian political prisons to keep them away from this dreadful death that is OBLIVION.