39 - The Piteşti Penitentiary

Summary

After my civil trial in Bucharest was over, months passed, but I wasn't taken to Aiud. I wasn't sorry, even if the living conditions in Jilava were much worse. However, we had new detainees coming in almost daily. A prisoner doesn't live only on the wretched food he gets but also on the news from the outside, which make him feel less trapped. Without such scraps of news, the jails became veritable graves, where the feeling of belonging to the outside world was killed.

Toward the end of summer, a group of us detainees was taken out of our rooms. We had been convicted for high treason, and were taken to the penitentiary in Piteşti. Here we were welcomed with a lot of threats, but we weren't physically abused.

“A big shot needs to be shot, hit in the head, you need to drive a tank over him.” This enthusiastic person was Captain Mândreş, head of the jail, a former metal worker at the railroad workshops in Craiova. By his speech and gestures, though, he seemed more Gypsy than Oltenian. That night we slept on the cement in the room in the basement, which was our quarantine, not for proper sanitary measures, but in order to curb the enthusiasm we had come from Jilava with.

“This is my Academy,” Mândreş continued to clamor, “and you only leave it for the grave, you big shot bastards, ‘cause you’ve had a really good life until now. Hit ‘em over the head so they know where they are,” he told the guards who were searching us, not forgetting to check the place where the rectum evacuates.

Meanwhile, they were taking down our names and data, when the name of aviation Captain C. Agarici was heard. When he heard it, Mândreş started, left us alone, and headed toward him.

“Looky here! Agarici, who hunts Bolsheviks, you’ve made it to my academy?”

“The one with the song is my cousin, captain sir, it's not me,” said Costel Agarici, one of the gentlest and kindest men I’ve met.