His name is STAN (SORE) CODRESCU and is my father. He was born on November 16th, 1928, in the village of Maluri, in the Rumanian county of Ramincu Sarat. His mother and father were farmers. Two brothers were older than him, two younger.
"As soon as he was able to work he had to care for the baby lambs, and afterwards for the cattle. The elder brothers were at school and away from home. In 1939, when at the age of seven, and when the war was about to start, his father was struck with some kind of rheumatism and became paralyzed. From that time onwards Stan, as the eldest child at home, had to do his father's work.
"By agreement, and although Rumania was not in the war, his part of the country was taken over by the Russians in 1940. They came and plundered his parents' savings, the reward of fifteen to twenty years of hard work, were taken from my father’s parents.
"His father got worse. Stan, as a little boy who had to do the work of a grown-up, used to watch him sitting there in a "wheelchair, unable to move and praying to die.
"In 1941, when Rumania was brought into the war, they send papers to call my father. The village authorities returned them, but they came back again from the military with the order that he must present himself. Stan’s family loaded the Father into a car for the journey to the recruiting centre at Raminic. As the so-called man of the family Stan went along with him, as did my grandfather.
"There numerous doctors and military men examined his father. One officer finally told them to give him mud baths for his rheumatism, and told us where to take him. We took him there, and he recovered. When he returned home, the whole village assembled to witness this miracle.
"With his return, Stan had the opportunity to study for the first time, an opportunity which had been denied him because his father incapacity. So he went to elementary school, and at the age of eleven went to a vocational training school in Bucharest, learning mechanics. The next year, in the spring of 1944, he had to return home because of the bombing of Bucharest.
My father, Stan said : "That year, the Russians again occupied the province of Bessarabia, adjoining our district, just across the River Prut. Soon the Russians came to our village, taking horses, carts, private property, and destroying most of what they did not take with them.
One night four drunken Russians came into my home and called for vodka and women. Father told them he had neither, so they took out pistols and began to fire them off. Our neighbors were alarmed, and came to see what was happening. After that, we were rid of our visitors, and the world was rid of them, too….”
In November Stan had to return to Bucharest to continue his studies. There he was close to the political life of the country, and, although still a boy just twelve, he was very interested, and attended any anti-Communist meeting he could.
During the electoral campaign, like many other Rumanian boys, he was savagely beaten up by the Communists. It took him only two weeks to get on feet feet again, but the physical marks that were left on him will remain with him for the rest of his days.
Stan said that strangely, that experience gave him more courage rather than less, and he tried ardently to put himself again in their way, so that he might show his valor and strike a blow in return.
In the summer of 1946 Stan returned home. He found his parents in despair because all their cattle had been confiscated.
Stan was then fourteen and because he had to be, he was already a man. Stan talked things over with a friend, the son of a village teacher, and they agreed to do something about the things that were happening to them and to their people.
They kidnapped the Communist mayor of the village and gave him a rough time. They told him to stop persecuting the villagers. Of course, they were arrested and put on trial, but, because there were no witnesses, they were lucky to get away with only a fine.
Before Stan was aged sixteen, he was self-employed as a chauffeur. Then there came a decree nationalizing all private garages and he had to take a job with the Philips electrical firm in Bucharest, as a chauffeur. His chief was a Russian.
Every fortnight, he had to drive a truck-load of Communist factory workers into the country, where they made propaganda drives to force the peasants to join collective farms. More than once he returned with windscreen shattered and with 'passengers' who had had their heads broken after being pelted with stones.
At a date my father, Stan, cannot remember, but he knows it was in the spring of 1949, his Russian chief gave him orders to put a tarpaulin over the truck, as we had a special mission to perform. He was told to report in front of the factory at 8 p.m.
So they drove first to Communist Party headquarters, and then to a place near the Lagar Grammar School, where my father waited for two hours. At the end of this time the Russian came back with ten civilians and ten militiamen, and gave my father 5 coupons for twenty liters of petrol for the lorry. He was then ordered to drive towards Pitesti. On the way many other trucks joined him, to form a convoy.
About eighteen miles from Bucharest, Stan was ordered-to
leave the main road and turn left towards a village. There
a family was turned out of home at no notice. They were told
what little they could take with them. They were loaded on to my father’s lorry and then he had to drive back to Bucharest. There he dumped them in a street near the Gradina Icoanei, where already there were some 200 or 300 men, women and children. All were herded into a cordoned-off space, and were left to wonder what was going to be done with them.
My father saw for himself what he had already begun to know—that
terror was becoming an everyday occurrence.
After that, Stan discussed with a friend the possibility of escaping to Yugoslavia. Indeed, he couldn’t get a job without a Communist Party card, and, since he couldn’t get one of these legitimately, he acquired a false one….. Using that card, he got a job at the Red Star factory, the former Wolff factory, assembling the motors of concrete mixers for use on the proposed canal linking the Danube and the Black Sea. This was called the Canal of Death, because those who worked on it were all prisoners, mainly political, and conditions of their labor took a dreadful toll.
Two months later Stan was called for military service. He was asked if his parents were rich, asked if he had relatives abroad and many other things. He was told to report to the enlistment centre where he was again questioned. After two months in the army he was invited to become an officer. He was aged eighteen, but he had what they regarded as the best qualifications in that I was of healthy origin. By this they meant that his parents (my grandparents) were poor. He refused to become an officer and they did not like that.
Stan was hence sent to the border of Rumania and Yugoslavia, as a guard. Like the rest, he was issued with a new uniform and told to be vigilant and not forget the important duty we all have towards the People and their achievements…. Trained dogs went on patrol with them to defend the frontier against any enemy of the working class… (Paranoia)
Stan was stationed at the border post of Comoraste. The original strength of his guard unit had been augmented from twenty men to eighty. Each day they were on duty for twelve hours, then there were a further two hours of 'political training' and a further hour of theoretical and practical training which they called 'the Soldier's Hour”. In all, they had to be on duty for fifteen hours out of the twenty-four. So, like the others, when he was on night duty he sought the thickest bed of straw he could find, and hid there so that he would not be discovered a sleep by the inspectors who patrolled the frontier at all times.
Since our instructions were to remain hidden from the Yugoslav frontier guards, the fact that a sentry was not observed was not necessarily an offence.
It was the same whether one was on watch on the ground or in one of the tall towers from which the border guards survey the frontier across which so many people try to escape. One tower sentry slept while the other kept a lookout for the patrolling inspectors.
During what was called their “free time”, that is to say, after they had done their regulation fifteen hours of duty, they were required to help in the work of enlarging the barracks. This was necessary because of the big influx of border guards into the area and because civilian labor was not allowed into the zone. In fact, no civilians of any kind could enter— legally, of course….
My father said that one day he protested about the food they were given. To him, it was a small thing among so many, yet in fact it was the breaking point. The Political Assistant Commissar reported him and made him understand that he could expect serious troubles. He took his sub-machine-gun, his binoculars, and went to the border, which was some 300 meters from the barracks.
To reach the border one has to pass through the fields where the guards walk and watch, and where the towers are. The encouragement to the guards to be very alert was that they would be given fourteen days' leave any time they are going to catch a Rumanian trying to escape from the country. Otherwise they may remain in service there without a break for up to three years.
During this time, the guards are not allowed to visit even the nearest village, or to have any contact with anybody except their fellow-guards. Thus one was trained to be the human bloodhound, concentrating on nothing but the eternal surveillance of that frontier and of any figure that may move on the horizon.
Beyond those open fields there was a ploughed section of land to make it difficult for a fugitive to run when under fire. If he should pass by stealth, however, his footsteps are likely to show in the earth, which is constantly turned to make it fresh.
At any point in his journey the fugitive may run up against a rather ingenious Soviet invention, gratefully adopted by the Rumanian authorities appointed to command. This consisted of a rocket which fires when anyone walked against a wire. About two inches in diameter and about half a yard long, it had a spiked point, and was driven into the ground. As soon as the wire was touched, the rocket shooted into the air and bursted into a golden radiance which illuminates the spot where the wretched man, woman or child —or all three—was in process of leaving the homeland. It made them an easy target for the machine-gunners in the towers that dominate the area.
Beyond this there was a minefield, about thirty-five yards broad. Tread on one of these mines and it will either kill you or blow off your leg. In either case it will alert the guard. And there are obstacles still ahead.
The principal obstacle consisted of a barbed wire fence, about twice the height of a tall man with a V- formation at the top of it which made it difficult to surmount, since the wire points inwards towards the person who was climbing.
Beyond that, provided that the Yugoslav guards didn’t shoot you down, were spaced stones which marked the frontier — the frontier and freedom.
My father got as far as the ploughed field, and then laid down and scanned the area to see if anybody was about. As he saw nobody he rose and went over the furrowed ground and through the minefield and over the wire. He said being unable to explain how this was done.
Arriving on the other side, he discarded my sub-machine-gun and binoculars and headed for the nearest Yugoslav barracks. He went with hands up. The date was November 1950, and it was around my eighteenth birthday.
Taken into custody, he was escorted to a camp at Vrsac, and there he met Beldeanu and many other Rumanians, including Teodor Ciochina, the crippled chauffeur who was to drive us to the' attack on the Berne Legation.
