38 - Jilava Once More

Summary

After six months of zarcă I got taken to Jilava once again. This time they gave me cold food for the road: half a kilo of bread, fifty grams of fatback and fifty grams of marmalade. Right after I climbed on the coach at five in the afternoon, I started feasting, because I had once again lost weight in the zarcă. Later that morning I would be in Bucharest, I told myself, starving as I was. To my dismay, the coach turned from Deva to Petroşani to pick up more detainees. From Petroşani we returned to Sibiu through Deva, then Făgăraş, then Bucharest, which we reached only after three days and three nights. It was ten degrees below outside, but in the coach I had stripped down to my shirt, because it was filled with over 120 inmates, mostly nonpolitical, who had bread and fatback in their packages from home. Their head was a man around sixty, Zsigmond Baci, who was condemned to forced labor for life for a string of murders. With such a conviction, his authority was full and uncontested. Especially since he had a strong fist. He got food for me from the others, as if it was his.

“Eat, professor, you are weak,” he told me after he found out who I was. To keep me company, he told me stories of his life, which was the spitting image of Valjean's from Hugo's Les Miserables.

The Communist authorities, unlike the bourgeois ones, did not take pity on him and, as I found out later, he died in prison.

In Făgăraş, they put five policemen from the former regime into the coach. They were the only category of political prisoners who got parcels from home and cigarettes once a month. During the day they could sometimes leave their rooms. What was the reason for this difference in treatment? It was never known.