The young men that sang to them their last ‘Joseph and Mary’ went deep into the forest and cut a huge pine tree. It wasn’t a Christmas tree but a tree with which the boy that died that night would be married during the funeral for the afterlife. We always planted pines on the graves of unmarried boys, but nobody wished to plant one that particular Christmas. The people hated communism but cried when they took the three bodies to the graveyard. Comrade Stoica was a good communist and he had only friends. No enemies.
With grandmother gone mourning and our games canceled because of the sad news, time was passing slowly. For me, for my family, but not for Ceauşescu. Or for his soon-to-be killers. The trial started at 1:20 pm not long after Nicolae and his wife had had their meal. Should they have known that would be their last one, maybe they would have appreciated it, despite the fact that it was meager. Not that Ceauşescu ate only French cuisine every day. He ate French cuisine on occasion but he was still a peasant’s son, so he often ate like farmers, white bread with cheese and tomatoes. Except the bread and tomatoes he used to eat were fresh, and the cheese was handmade and didn’t have that metallic taste added to it when it was processed by the state owned dairy industry.
Now, there’s a big chance you saw this trial on TV. With subtitles. Ceauşescu didn’t take it seriously. How could he? He was accused of killing 60,000 people in Timişoara, of destroying and damaging buildings with explosions in cities, the destruction of the Romanian economy, and attempting to escape from Romania with more than one billion dollars in foreign bank accounts. That trial was insane. Senile as he was, he had been loosing it in his final years, he definitely thought it was a joke. It had to be. If his army killed 60,000 as his wife Elena had ordered, then he was supposed to be enjoying lunch at his office, as usual, not detained for the last three days. And by who? By Iliescu. He knew that Iliescu had been eyeing the role of Romania’s Gorbachev, but he had believed that wasn’t going to happen. And the things about the economy they had said. Romania was the only country in the world with no foreign debt. Romania was poor but independent and he had just been pressuring Iran and Libia to finance, with their oil, a new International Monetary Fund for poor countries.
That trial was a joke. At least when he was arrested by the king’s police before Romania turned into a communist state, his defenders did their job and defended him. Now, at his second trial more than 40 years later his defense, a man called Lucescu and another called Teodorescu, were accusing him as much as the prosecutors. What the fuck?! He was nervous. He could feel his wife was nervous too. There had to be a way to solve this civilly, like the people in East Germany or in Czeckhoslovakia had. He was trying to think of what he could offer in exchange for his freedom, when his trial ended, as suddenly as it had started. It was 2:40 pm. The trial had lasted only an hour and 20 minutes.
The judges left to deliberate but even that deliberation was a joke. They hadn’t even finished their smokes properly when they were ordered back inside to read the verdict.
Death by execution! It was 2:45 pm. The sentence was to be executed immediately, they said. Not even in Ceauşescu’s Romania was it possible to kill people so easily. Romania, a dictatorship as it was, still had laws. People respected them and, when they didn’t there were trials. But even mock trials lasted longer. And the accused had the right to appeal. Not since the end of WWII and the communist purges had people been shot like animals.
Twenty years later I am happy for the Iraqi people. They had the chance to send Saddam to hell in an organized way. There was a trial and the trial didn’t finish in 80 minutes. And Saddam, if compared with Ceauşescu, was indeed a criminal. The genocides he was accused of were real. But in Romania more people died after Ceauşescu was captured than when he was in power.
I know now, twenty years on, that not one of those who ordered people killed in Bucharest, at Universitate Square or at the airport or at the Ministry of Defense, were prosecuted. Nobody ended up behind bars. General Stănculescu got a prison term, but only 18 years later, and he was out in almost no time.
“What are you doing here, General?”, he was asked when he was found in a casino by the media. “Killing time”, was his answer. After being sentenced to death, Ceauşescu didn’t have any time left to kill. Or to think. He was taken and despite his protests his hands were tied behind his back. He wanted to go in a dignified way.
“You’re hurting me! I raised you as I raised my own kids”, Elena was screaming at the soldiers who were ordered to tie her hands, but they didn’t care. Everybody felt it was about time to end it all and looked forward to the promised freedom. Ceauşescu and Elena were dragged out of that room and a few meters away put against a wall.
“He’s first, then you!”, somebody informed Elena. “No way! We fought together, we die together!” she said and she showed more dignity than all the men in uniform in Targoviste’s military base.
Ceauşescu started to sing the The Internationale (the communist anthem), but when he heard the AKM’s being armed he shouted:
“Long live the free and independent Socialist Republic of Romania”. And then he died. It was 2:50 pm. Nobody organized a firing squad, nobody gave the order to fire! The soldiers started to shoot and nobody could tell who was first. They fell on their backs, eyes wide open gazing at the sky. At least they were able to refuse the black blindfolds.
The fact is that the execution was so poorly organized that the cameraman brought especially from Romanian National Television by Gelu Voican Voiculescu didn’t record it! He was about to change the batteries when Ceauşescu was sent to meet the white dove my grandmother’s sister saw on her death bed. He got closer when the firing stopped and filmed the face that every single Romanian wanted to see that Christmas Day, their dead Ceauşescu, but there was not much to film. Blood was coming out of his nose and just he looked like all dead people usually look. My father didn’t look much better when he died, five years and four months later in 1995.
It was a nice spring day but he didn’t feel so good and went home. He said to my mom that he would lie down for an hour or so, but when she checked on him he was unresponsive. Dr. Rogojan, the same old doctor that we asked to come in the middle of the night and paid a 100 lei came, and he simply announced, “Coma!”. Did nothing to my father, took his pay, doubled many times by the skyrocketing inflation of those years and called the ambulance. After he called it he went on his way, and my sister called me.
I cannot say whether I was lucky or unlucky. I was living in Bucharest then, studying Journalism at the University and experiencing first love in the arms of Cosmina, a girl that wanted to be a babe, from my high school in Sibiu. I had no phone, no mobile phone, no pager. So my sister called Ms. Jenny, a 60 year old widow living next door, and she came and knocked on my door and I was there.
“Come immediately, father is unconscious, we’re waiting for the ambulance to take him to Sibiu”, she said, and I started to run and I went into the subway without paying. I had no money to spare. I was only hoping the train prices hadn’t changed since the week before when I visited my family and didn’t say “I love you!” to my father, as I have should have.
But I was quite lucky that day to get the afternoon train.