Ileana Mateescu (née Caraman)

…indeed it was hard, I can’t tell you that I had a childhood. That part of my life is absent, because I had responsibilities from a very young age. When we were little, my brother was two and a bit, we had to tend the animals in the yard, and by 1953, when my brother was born, I already had responsibilities, I had to be a nanny to my brother, although I was not much older than… R: Two... I: Yes. And I should say that my brother almost died because I wasn’t a mother, a responsible nanny. Mama left us his share of food and I remember that one day we started to play, my brother and I, and we completely forgot about my younger brother, we didn’t give him anything to eat. And in the evening, when we saw mama coming home and we knew his share of food was untouched, my brother and I rushed to give him it to eat so that mama wouldn’t see that we hadn’t done our duty. And then my brother, who was older, but still a child, said: “I’ll open his mouth and you stuff it in.” And we filled the whole of his buccal cavity with everything mama had left and we were lucky that… because he couldn’t breathe, we’d filled his mouth, and he couldn’t even breathe through his nose because it was blocked… we were lucky that mama came and unblocked his mouth and he recovered. If she’d come back a few minutes or even seconds later he would have died. And so I didn’t have a childhood. All the fun we had was playing on those endless plains. In summer we took the cows to the field, with children the same age as us and… children are infinitely inventive when it comes to inventing games, we discovered different ways of playing, without toys. In my life there did I ever have a Christmas tree or toys? We made them from whatever we could find. My brother would make a violin from corncobs or a bicycle from sunflower stalks, we would knot our skirts or clothes and find thick stalks of grass, we would make a kind of roof and crawl under it and play there, each imagining something different…

I: So, it was a Monday, after Whitsunday. In Mehedinți, on Whitsunday, there are lots of villages where they have a nedeie (summer fair) or I don’t know what they call it in other parts and for that reason, as it was a high holiday, almost all the villagers had noticed that trucks of soldiers kept passing. They couldn’t understand it. Something… They realised that something was happening, but they couldn’t understand what was going on. That Monday my parents arranged for twenty men from our village to do the second hoeing of the maize in our field. And mother woke up at four in the morning, so that she could make plenty of food. And just as she was cooking she thought to hear noises in the yard and so she decided to look. When she opened the door to go outside somebody pushed her back. That somebody had a gun, and it was with the gun that he pushed her and he entered the house. R: Did your parents have other children? I: Yes, my brother, two and a half years older than me, but just a little boy. And when that soldier – I couldn’t say whether he was an officer or a private – asked where the head of the family was, mama took him to the room where daddy was sleeping, they roused him in quite a rough way and he woke up, they demanded he sign a piece of paper, but they didn’t explain to him what it was about. They just said that he had to pack his bags in a few hours, to gather together the things he thought were essential, but not more than he would be able to carry on his own means of transport to the… R: Meaning a cart. I: A cart, yes… to the nearest station. In our case the nearest station was Strehaia, about 22 km from our village. For the moment, father, who had been in the war and couldn’t be easily intimidated, was overcome by surprise. He couldn’t believe that somebody could force him to abandon his home, especially as he’d never been in politics, he wasn’t guilty of anything and he thought that it was impossible for somebody to force you to leave. And so he didn’t pack anything. Mama was frantic, at first she began to weep and asked permission to go to her parents who lived next to the same yard as us. She wasn’t allowed to go even there. And by daybreak, they hadn’t packed anything, and nor had they even talked among themselves… They kept begging that officer to explain, to give details. R: They were in a state of shock. I: Yes. Yes. And as they didn’t receive any kind of explanation, as soon as it started to get light outside, mama saw through the window that across the street, at her cousins’, the same thing was happening. The house was… there were soldiers in the yard. And the same thing next door, where another of my mother’s cousins lived. And then they realised that it was no joke, that it wasn’t an attempt to intimidate or frighten them. And then mama was the first to gather a few things together and pack. My grandparents also woke up and they saw the commotion, they saw the army, they were frightened, too, and they tried to come. R: Your father’s parents? I: No, my mother’s. We lived with my mother’s parents. And so, they didn’t even allow them to come to us. We children were very close to grandfather and grandfather to us. And grandfather kept shouting at them to leave us… to leave at least the children, meaning us. They just ignored him for a time, after which daddy went into the yard and tried to see to the animals. They had… maybe this was also one of the reasons, as they had around two hundred sheep. He divided them up among the neighbours, after that he went to salt the cheese, he got on with his everyday chores. And the deadline was ten and the hour was approaching when we had to leave. They hadn’t packed very many things.