Eugeniu Chirca, the last survivor of Romania’s anti-communist resistance who was arrested during the Sovietization process of the Eastern European country that began in 1945 after the end of World War II and spent eight years in the filthy prisons of the time, He died at the age of 93 last Sunday in his home located in the town of Cosesti, in southern Romania, located 140 kilometers from Bucharest. The Romanian movement that opposed the installation of the communist leadership in power, which lasted from 1949 to 1958, stood out for being the longest in Eastern Europe, and Chirca, who was born in the humble village of Nucsoara, embedded in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, was part of this group that fought against the new leaders who immediately established a regime of terror and which ended with the execution of the satrap Nicolae Ceaușescu on Christmas Day 1989. He joined the movement when he was barely 19 years old. , along with his mother, his father and one of his brothers. At that time, only a few hundred communists gradually began to control the entire country, under the auspices of the Soviet Union, ruthlessly stifling any type of dissent.
His other younger brothers were taken out of school by the Securitate, the fearsome communist secret police that began to spread fear with the aim of forcefully stopping any opposition attempt – the spy service recruited more than half a million informants. — and moved them to an orphanage in the town of Campulung, condemning them to death. According to historians, it is estimated that some 20,000 children perished in orphanages during the communist period. Together with his father, Nel Chirca, “the one who knew Fagaras not only mountain by mountain, but also stone by stone,” explains historian Constantin Berevoianu, he built the first shelter for partisans in Izvorul Grosului, 10 kilometers from Nucşoara, a place difficult to access remote. He was captured by the Securitate in the fall of 1949, after six months of resistance. They took him to the town of Pitesti, interrogated him and beat him for several months. He was imprisoned as a political prisoner for eight years in the Jilava and Aiud prisons, the most feared in the country, and sentenced to hard labor in Periprava and Baia Sprie, where there were lead mines.
“How much did I suffer in Jilava? There were 140 inmates in one room. They took us all out, placed us in five rows, and made us surround what looked like a large mound of dirt. There were many old and miserable people… The guardians wanted us to run, while we had to run around that mound until we couldn’t run anymore. Some fell and didn’t get up,” Chirca said in an interview with the Romanian newspaper truth in 2016. “The most difficult was in Baia Sprie, where I worked in the lead mines, although I received the worst beatings in Pitesti,” he recalled. But what hurt him the most was losing his entire family. His parents died when he was in prison; His mother died in Mislea prison while his father was shot in the mountains.
When he left prison in 1957, at age 26, Chirca felt old, he confessed, and afraid of the Securitate, which seemed to be everywhere: “After I was released from prison, the political police asked me if I knew anything. about the brothers Arnăuţoiu”, Petre and Toma, leaders of the group Haiducii Muscelului (the outlaws of the hill), who had operated for 10 years in the Transylvanian mountains of Făgăraş and who were executed by the communist power on the night of July 18, 1959 in the Jilava penitentiary. “What could I know if he had just been released from prison? But the Securitate insisted and intimidated me at every step to find out his whereabouts,” said the combatant.
So far, only two directors of communist prisons have been convicted of “crimes against humanity”, an unprecedented sentence since the country regained democracy, having held many political detainees in inhumane conditions, in icy prisons and with hardly any food or supplies. medicines. Although his time in the terrible prisons and labor camps of dictator Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s communist Romania is documented, Chirca never received compensation, even after winning a trial in 2011. In June of that year, the Arges Court ruled that he be awarded compensation of 10,000 euros for the torture he suffered during the communist period, equivalent to three euros for each day of detention in prisons. However, nothing was received. He had sued for damages of two million euros.
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