Cartea despre demnitate

The articles were put together in a book, and this proved to be an attempt full of surprises and emotions. Because their being published in a chronological order made this blog a kind of diary. As I was collecting the information, I wrote, I commented and I incited the people to live the same emotions as I was living. I did not intend to exhaust the subject of anticommunist resistance, on the contrary: I wanted to boost the curiosity of those who were ignoring the subject; it is only a starting point for those who want to know more and here they can find an opinion, I think a good and balanced one. 23 years ago, an anonymous wrote on a wall of Bucharest: "For Christmas, we had our ration of freedom!" a very emotionally charged message, which was later used in the media or in the street protests for democracy, over and over, without getting trivialized, at least not for those who had lived the era of food rations. This year, on Christmas too, me, another anonymous, I will write on a virtual wall some hundreds of virtual pages, which will never have the impact of the eight real words I had mentioned above. But I feel I am the direct beneficiary of those words, as I think that, maybe, it is the first time I have used my "ration" properly. This year, for Christmas, The Book about Dignity is the present made by this blog to all those willing to receive it.

When all I had written was put together in the pages of a volume, I had to structure the information, which acquired a different consistency. I will briefly explain what this means.

The book has three parts, marked by the image of three trees, in a triptych of symbols: the tree of suffering, the tree of death and the tree of oblivion.

A very small segment of the population of Romania, generally composed of simple people, with no knowledge of the philosophy of politics, but with a lot of common sense, opposed communization. The incidents were mainly produced by the abuses of the new authority in place after 1945, and these people reacted based on their own strength and conscience, not on the law. They left for the mountains and they suffered terribly, but they might have been the only free people around the country. Their suffering is almost unknown to the general public; and so is their freedom. This is the tree of suffering.

The repression these free people had to suffer was like in the Middle Ages, in most cases accompanied by death. The human hunting ended with brief executions, or with pathetic preys, killed later in captivity. This is the tree of death, to be found not only in Romania, but also in other East European countries.

Finally, we forget even more easily what we do not know very well, and this happens already with the haidouks in the Romanian mountains. There are many books about them, with extremely valuable information, I can say from my own experience that the files from Securitate are hard to read, the obstacles set by the doublespeak of the semi-illiterate officers, by the official vision inevitably hideously distorted, are not meant to draw the public towards a real penitence of the reading. This is the tree of oblivion.

Dettagli