Gheorghe Cotorbai

R: What exactly happened that day? I: One day, I no longer know the date, it was in the summer of 1951, in June, around mid-June, one evening a soldier turned up at our gate with some other men with peaked caps, I don’t know what they were, officers or sub-officers, because I couldn’t tell at that age, and they were with two civilians, they made an inventory of everything in the house and gave instructions as to what we were each allowed to take. They told us to collect our things, to get ready, because the next day we were being moved. Obviously we didn’t know what was going on, my mother was very distressed, she was crying. We asked them why and they just said: “Orders!” and that was that. There was no arguing with them. And we were forbidden to leave our yard until the next morning. Before that there had been soldiers patrolling the streets, about a week before it all began, as far as I remember. They were armed, wearing helmets, carrying backpacks. I don’t know why. And we, being children, we asked, we had to ask, but they didn’t give us any explanation.

R: Was the hut below ground or on the surface? I: It was below ground. Only the roof was above ground. The roof was made of sticks about as long as this room, so that everything they had brought would fit: and it was about this big [points to the living room, which is approximately thirty metres square]. And the earth that was excavated was placed on top of the straw that served as a roof. And there was a plot of land downhill. Our hut was a little higher than my uncle’s, which was next door. And the floods came. I have a cousin who is now in Galați; she’s an economist and has a company. We had a chest in the hut, and my cousin slept on the chest. When the floods came they willed the hut with water – my parents were outside building a dyke – and they didn’t see that water was coming in down the stairs. And the hut filled with water and my cousin almost drowned, they pulled her out, they held her upside down, because she was already… She was smaller than me – how could a little child know how to swim? – and she slept there in the hut, on the chest. They found her, they got her out and they saved her. Those were the June rains, as I was saying, they caught us there in the hut.

So, we worked in the garden and cotton-picking. They took us out of school, they gave us a sack, it looked huge to me, because I was just little, and I dragged it along and it refused to fill up! And the cotton – I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen it – the cotton bud splits into four, the flower opens, a shell forms, a woody sheathe in which the cotton forms. And when it’s ripe, it opens and grows. But at each tip of the four pods there are hard spine and when you pick the cotton from them… Your hands were full of wounds, of holes. They took us out of school, lined us up, gave us each a sack and made us pick cotton. By the end of the day we had to have filled a sack with cotton: the plantation was near the Amara resort. It was nice for us little ones to be able to see the sea – my sister, for example – because they lined us up and they sang as they went to work [ironically]. They marched in a line to the plantation and sang the patriotic songs the teachers had taught them and which were obligatory back then. R: That was patriotic labour, at school? I: Yes, it was patriotic labour: cotton-picking mainly.