Teodor Stanca

…on Christmas Eve they put together a train, with a few of these wagons, which were special prison-van wagons, for Gherla. I can’t remember exactly how long the journey took, I think it was a day, or at least a day and a night we were in that wagon. Us, the ones with the longest sentences, Muțiu, Baghiu and myself, they put inside a storeroom in the wagon, like an isolation cell, very small and narrow, so that we could barely breathe or move our legs. When we reached Gherla our legs had swollen up from not being able to move. Out of our group we were probably seen as the most dangerous and they paid us special attention. I know that we talked about that on the date of our departure. From the Penitentiary here they loaded us into vans used for transporting prisoners and we were taken to the Northern Station, to a siding there, where they were waiting for the wagons that were to transport us to be repaired. At one point, a manoeuvre was made, there was confusion, and contact was lost between the column of prisoners and the guards, and later we reproached ourselves for not having taken the opportunity to escape. In time, however, after a few years in prison, we realised it would have been a mistake, because in that period it was almost impossible to hide or to find an opportunity to escape, you had to brave the frontier or swim across the Danube or who knows what other means… R: And you would have run the risk of a harsher sentence! I: I would have risked a much longer sentence and obviously the punishments that applied to other attempted escapes. But we talked about that moment a lot, especially Muțiu, who was quite… at that age, because we were quite young, rather adventurous, dynamic. He said: “Lord, how stupid we were for not taking that chance.” But let us leave that aside. So, on Christmas Eve, we arrived at Gherla.

…if they caught you with a piece of soap or a bit of wood on which you had scraped words… in a language… in a foreign language, to memorise them and then re-use the material, if they discovered you with something like that, something completely innocent, banal in a way, but which they treated as disobedience, as breaking the rules, they put you in isolation, usually for a week. What did isolation mean? Even if it was in winter, they threw you in an unheated cell, the bed didn’t have a mattress, just that iron mesh (that was in our period, because before that there were no beds, just bare wooden bunks). And they fed you every third day, and on the other days they just gave you a lukewarm mug of salty water. And they kept you there for days, for weeks, because it seemed to them you had disobeyed the prison rules.

The first reaction to the events, particularly the massive arrests on the evening of Tuesday, 30 October, was a spontaneous attempt on the part of students to enter the Mechanics and other faculties to gain information. Other students, arriving for lectures, were surprised to find that their faculties had been closed and that they were not allowed to enter the buildings, which were surrounded by troops. Likewise, they were surprised to find that military units and even tanks and armoured cars were patrolling the streets of Timișoara. In response to these measures and the events of the previous day, a large group of students gathered at the former Agronomy Faculty, which was located by the Maria Bridge on the Tudor Vladimirescu Embankment, opposite the Romanian Railways Hospital (now part of the Medical Institute). Agronomy students as well as other students in search of information, gathered there in order find out about the situation and as the archives say, as we have discovered from the archives, the watchword of students in the town was “eleven o’ clock, Agronomy Faculty”. Indeed, at the Agronomy Faculty around 800 to 1,000 students gathered, who then formed a column and marched towards the city centre, the end point being the student hall of resident above the current or former Polytechnic Club, next to the Express Buffet, therefore opposite the Cathedral. They’d found out that the female students were sequestered in the hall of residence, they weren’t allowed to go outside, and there were bunches of them at the windows, talking to the soldiers, quite a large number of whom were surrounding the hall of residence. So, the large column of students arrived intending to break through the military cordon, to release the female students, to form a protest group and to demand the release of the students arrested the evening before.