(FRANKS..)
Soon after my brother's birth in February 1983 my father, Ion Bugan, was faced with the biggest decision he ever had to make.
Should he and my mother continue secretly typing anti-communist manifestos on an illegally-owned typewriter and distributing them around Romania? Or should he go to Bucharest to take on Ceausescu all by himself, without telling anyone a word about it?
Thirty years on we still live with the legacy of my father's choice. And with the discovery of an intimate, horrifying story of our lives written by the secret police, the Securitate.
This was a Romania of food shortages, frequent power cuts, and ferocious reprisals for any form of dissent. The sounds of forbidden US radio stations - Voice of America and Radio Free Europe - woke us up and put us to bed every day, sending shivers up our spines as they merged with the noise from the kitchen. They gave my father hope that life could be better if only people stood up for themselves.
The Securitate was well acquainted with my parents. In early 1961 my father was in a bar with his best friend Petrica and a few others complaining about high tax rates and the collectivisation of farms. They came up with a plan to hijack an internal flight from Arad, in the west of Romania, and to fly it out of the country.
Petrica was a retired air force officer who in civilian life repaired radios like my dad. They had no idea that one of their friends was a Securitate informer.
All were captured before they had a chance to take control of the airplane and condemned to eight years of hard labour "for preparatory actions leading to fraudulent crossing of the border" (leaving the country without permission was illegal) and "plotting against public order".
My father, in his 20s, found himself in terrible prisons at Jilava and Deva and at the Great Island of Braila labour camp, where he met some of the political dissidents who were systematically tortured there.
Ion wore 45kg of chains in Jilava prison
In July 1964, my father and his friends were liberated in a
general amnesty but the Securitate followed his every move, looking for
any reason to discredit him and throw him back in prison. Suffocated and
intimidated, in February 1965 dad bought a compass, binoculars,
antibiotics, a few vials of caffeine, some cans of sardines, and a roll
of salami. He and Petrica made a heart-stopping escape from Romania in a
blizzard. Dodging police and hiding in haystacks, they made it all the
way to the Iron Curtain at the Bulgarian-Turkish border.
But, as dad puts it, there was an angel looking after him - he was transferred back to Aiud and freed in January 1969 as a result of changes to the penal code.
Dad now attempted to live a normal life. He married and had children. Things didn't seem so bad on the surface. We had summer holidays on the Black Sea and built a lovely house in our village, Draganesti, near Galati, in eastern Romania.
Loredana with father Ion
But behind the scenes the Securitate pushed him to breaking
point, following and spying on him. My mother, Mioara, was denied a
career in teaching because she married a "political agitator" and was
therefore likely to "pollute the minds of the younger generation". Told
to choose between job and husband, she opted for the marriage, and they
both began working in a grocer's shop. Before long, mum was running the
shop, and as dad had been banned from keeping the books at his TV/radio
repair workshop, she did that too. Dad worked on repairs when he wasn't
stacking shelves. My parents put up with their lot, and worked hard.
On 10 March 1983, about a month after my father and I visited the hospital with a bouquet of carnations to see my new-born brother, Catalin, my father took to the streets of Bucharest. On top of our red Dacia car, he mounted placards demanding human rights, and denouncing Ceausescu as a torturer who should be put on trial. Then he drove through the city centre, throwing leaflets from the window and blowing a whistle to attract attention.
The spies drew a map of Bugan's protest drive through Bucharest
He had said nothing to my mother. She was in the hospital with
Catalin, who was close to dying from an untreated lung infection. My
younger sister Loredana was away at gymnastics school and I was at home,
aged 12, with my grandmother. This marked the beginning of hell for us.
Catalin was born a few weeks before Ion's protest
Dad's protest landed him back in Aiud, condemned to 10 years of
hard labour for "propaganda against the socialist regime", punishable
under art. 166 line 2 of the penal code. My mother, my sister, my
brother and I were placed under close surveillance.
We became accustomed to travelling across the country for a yearly prison visit, letters sent but not always received, food packages returned to us because "the prisoner did not behave appropriately". Rotten fried chicken, softened apples and ulcer medication were sent back in the battered cardboard boxes in which we had placed them months before, hoping he'd receive them.
The Securitate had their own keys to our house and ordered us not to pull the curtains in the kitchen to make it easier for them to observe us. We later learned that my father had accumulated the codenames Andronic, Butnaru, Cazul Cocor, and Barbu, while Mum was codenamed Bela and Barbu. A school friend codenamed Cornelia was in charge of keeping a record of my feelings about dad for the Securitate.
When my father walked home in the night on 5 February 1988, secret microphones in the house "registered an atmosphere of joy coming from the children". My father "visited each room", "asked for his shaver" and looked "for his radio". He cradled Catalin in his arms, they noted. The transcripts of that first night say that "the family went to sleep at 03:45 in the morning. The Obj. [my father] complained of a pain in his heart."
The Securitate kept thousands of files on the Bugans
None of us remember all of these details, they are a gift from
the record-keeping Securitate, but I recall the smell of prison on dad's
clothes.
A couple of months after dad's return from prison, the secret police files note:
"At 01:32 in the morning, we could hear someone trying the door to the room equipped with listening devices. The door doesn't open. We hear the footsteps of someone walking away and the insistent barking of the dog as to a person who is a stranger to the house."
It is a transcript of the Securitate registering itself in the act of trying to come into the house to change the microphones. I read this file last August for the first time. It made me understand that when we heard noises in those years in Romania we weren't really crazy as we thought.
The Securitate records show how "concerned" they were about us and what might happen, as immigrants, to our sense of Romanian identity. They tried to dissuade my mother from going to the US - they told her that life in the West was a form of slavery to rich, lazy capitalists.
We waited 11 months for our passports, under house arrest. One record says that "after we have used every method to discourage the obj. [this time Mum] from leaving, we decided to expel her from the Communist Party". It was, even according to the Securitate's own file, a humiliation ceremony, where her friends were forced to hurl insults at her.
"Your girls will become prostitutes," the passport clerk yelled at my parents. "Our hand is long," they said, turning to my father, threatening us with death if we spoke about what had been done to us once in America. I now read my mother's declaration in the files "not to damage the image of our socialist regime by actions or words", and wonder how she must have felt to leave the country in her 40s with three children, a husband who had returned from the heart of evil, and no idea where we were going.
As we made our way to Michigan at the end of 1989, each carrying one suitcase in which we packed a lifetime, the Berlin Wall tumbled down behind us. The bloody Romanian Revolution followed at Christmas time.
We arrived as political refugees in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on 17 November 1989, travelling via Rome, and landing at night, in a snowstorm, not speaking a word of English.
The Bugan family arrived in the US with no English
In a refugee centre in Rome we had been taught that Americans,
when they ask "How are you?" don't really expect an answer; that they
all have chequebooks; that they value democracy and free speech; and
that all immigrants gain 8kg in the first year in the West because,
well, there is just a lot of food to eat and most of it is rather
different from our homemade soups. We couldn't have been more thrilled
with all of that.
We became eager to "assimilate" into Western life.
My sister and I would often ask the people in Grand Rapids we knew best: "Do I look American yet?"
At the same time we saw on a donated television how the Ceausescus were executed. My father said: "This is all wrong, now the world will never find out from him about his abuses." My mother cried: "They are just two old people, they should not have been killed." And all of us danced in the living room with joy that a revolution was happening in Romania.
The uprising brought turmoil to the streets of Bucharest
I wondered if my father's protest might have played some role
in bringing it about. My father wanted to return. We said firmly: "We
are staying here, and you are not abandoning us yet again."
Twenty years have passed. We cleaned nursing homes, churches, worked at Burger King, made golf clubs, Mum worked in a children's clothing factory, and we went to school. My father collected all of the discarded televisions we found, fixed them, and we had a TV in each room: "Such a waste," he'd say.
We became American citizens. My sister and I married. She and her husband bought a house in the suburbs. We became "Romanians by birth".
In 1999 Romania opened the archives of the secret police to people who had been subjected to surveillance during the communist years.
My father said: "I know who I am. I don't need to know what the Securitate said about me." But I disagreed and managed to find our records in 2010.
Now, it was one thing to experience the Securitate following and threatening us. But it is another thing to read the complete record of our daily lives, including the traps neatly laid out for us, to lure us into committing an offence, which we escaped simply by instinct or luck.
Carmen reading the files made about her family's life
So, when my mother was in the hospital with my brother, the
Securitate placed next to her a "patient" who also had a "sick child".
Nurses and doctors helped to stage it all. The woman who became Mum's
"friend" had a question scripted for her to help her spark the
conversation. She produced reports on what mum said about my father and
his dissidence.
There are records of dreams we recounted to each other in the mornings. The transcriber knew us so well, he or she was able to read and duly note our moods. Some even took sides in family arguments, noting on the margins of the transcripts who they thought was right. It's like having had a one-sided relationship with these invisible broadcasters of our tormented souls.
The family made a new life in the US
Needless to say, the documents have been sifted through, parts
have been blotted out in black ink, pages are missing. What I have is
what was given to me as publishable.
But we now have every letter that my father wrote to us from prison and we wrote to him. Half of the letters are direct transcripts—they were copied out by the censors - while half are paraphrases of what we wrote. There are not always quotation marks to indicate which of the words are ours, which are theirs. It is nearly impossible to detangle the self from the words of the Securitate. Some of the letters were not forwarded to us, so I read them for the first time last summer.
The question of what my father was thinking of when he drove away to Bucharest on 10 March 1983 has lost its painful intensity for us over the years. Yet in the files I see our daily recitation of blame and anger at the time.
That question would have remained unanswered if it hadn't been for a trip to Romania that we took as a family in October 2013. My father was by then 78, my mother 67, so it was a good time to make the journey back.
Continue reading the main story
Soon after my brother's birth in February 1983 my father, Ion Bugan, was faced with the biggest decision he ever had to make.
Should he and my mother continue secretly typing anti-communist manifestos on an illegally-owned typewriter and distributing them around Romania? Or should he go to Bucharest to take on Ceausescu all by himself, without telling anyone a word about it?
Thirty years on we still live with the legacy of my father's choice. And with the discovery of an intimate, horrifying story of our lives written by the secret police, the Securitate.
This was a Romania of food shortages, frequent power cuts, and ferocious reprisals for any form of dissent. The sounds of forbidden US radio stations - Voice of America and Radio Free Europe - woke us up and put us to bed every day, sending shivers up our spines as they merged with the noise from the kitchen. They gave my father hope that life could be better if only people stood up for themselves.
The Securitate was well acquainted with my parents. In early 1961 my father was in a bar with his best friend Petrica and a few others complaining about high tax rates and the collectivisation of farms. They came up with a plan to hijack an internal flight from Arad, in the west of Romania, and to fly it out of the country.
Petrica was a retired air force officer who in civilian life repaired radios like my dad. They had no idea that one of their friends was a Securitate informer.
All were captured before they had a chance to take control of the airplane and condemned to eight years of hard labour "for preparatory actions leading to fraudulent crossing of the border" (leaving the country without permission was illegal) and "plotting against public order".
My father, in his 20s, found himself in terrible prisons at Jilava and Deva and at the Great Island of Braila labour camp, where he met some of the political dissidents who were systematically tortured there.
Ion wore 45kg of chains in Jilava prison
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote
My mother, Mioara, was denied a career in teaching because she married a 'political agitator'”
On 2 March 1965 at 07:30 in the
morning, starved, weak and frozen, they rolled down a hill, jumped a
2m-high barbed-wire fence and nearly crossed into Turkey. The patrol
squad showered them with bullets in no-man's land, just 400m from
freedom, and sent them back to Romania. My father was sentenced to 11
years at the harshest prison of all, Aiud, for "fraudulent crossing of
the border, punishable with art. 267 of the penal code".
Part of the sentence was a five-month period of torture by
solitary confinement and starvation while wearing 45kg of chains day and
night, in the "special" wing of the prison at Alba Iulia. The prison
records say he was transferred to Alba Iulia "for judicial affairs"
which is true in a sense: my father was tortured there in order to
"admit" his supposed role as an "accomplice" in the theft of money that
had "disappeared" from his radio repair shop after he ran away to
Bulgaria. My father's own account of this period is hair-raising: he
was fed once every two days, and allowed to wash three times in the
entire period he was held there. But, as dad puts it, there was an angel looking after him - he was transferred back to Aiud and freed in January 1969 as a result of changes to the penal code.
Dad now attempted to live a normal life. He married and had children. Things didn't seem so bad on the surface. We had summer holidays on the Black Sea and built a lovely house in our village, Draganesti, near Galati, in eastern Romania.
Loredana with father Ion
Continue reading the main story
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By 1981, however, there were not
many groceries to sell. Hungry factory workers yelled at them: "What am
I going to put in my bag for lunch?" Evening bread queues often ended
in fist fights. When the doors closed for the day, my father's angry
outbursts at the back of the shop mingled with blasts of Radio Free
Europe. One day he told my mother: "I don't want to spend my life just
breathing air, and doing nothing."
They bought two typewriters, one of which they did not
register with the police, and began making anti-communist flyers
protesting against shortages and human rights abuses. They spent the
nights typing and driving all over the country to put them in people's
letterboxes, while my sister and I slept. The police kept coming to the
house to check the prints of the legal typewriter, and to see whether
they matched with the letters. On 10 March 1983, about a month after my father and I visited the hospital with a bouquet of carnations to see my new-born brother, Catalin, my father took to the streets of Bucharest. On top of our red Dacia car, he mounted placards demanding human rights, and denouncing Ceausescu as a torturer who should be put on trial. Then he drove through the city centre, throwing leaflets from the window and blowing a whistle to attract attention.
The spies drew a map of Bugan's protest drive through Bucharest
Catalin was born a few weeks before Ion's protest
We became accustomed to travelling across the country for a yearly prison visit, letters sent but not always received, food packages returned to us because "the prisoner did not behave appropriately". Rotten fried chicken, softened apples and ulcer medication were sent back in the battered cardboard boxes in which we had placed them months before, hoping he'd receive them.
The Securitate had their own keys to our house and ordered us not to pull the curtains in the kitchen to make it easier for them to observe us. We later learned that my father had accumulated the codenames Andronic, Butnaru, Cazul Cocor, and Barbu, while Mum was codenamed Bela and Barbu. A school friend codenamed Cornelia was in charge of keeping a record of my feelings about dad for the Securitate.
Continue reading the main story
Carmen Bugan is the author of memoir Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police
Burying the typewriter
In 1985 mum and dad were forced
to divorce. By 1987 I had become accustomed to children at school, and
one of the teachers, referring to me and my sister as "the criminal's
daughters".
On his birthday in 1988, Ceausescu proclaimed a general
amnesty. My mother quipped that history would remember him for his
compassion - having no idea that we would find her words transcribed 30
years later in government archives. When my father walked home in the night on 5 February 1988, secret microphones in the house "registered an atmosphere of joy coming from the children". My father "visited each room", "asked for his shaver" and looked "for his radio". He cradled Catalin in his arms, they noted. The transcripts of that first night say that "the family went to sleep at 03:45 in the morning. The Obj. [my father] complained of a pain in his heart."
The Securitate kept thousands of files on the Bugans
A couple of months after dad's return from prison, the secret police files note:
"At 01:32 in the morning, we could hear someone trying the door to the room equipped with listening devices. The door doesn't open. We hear the footsteps of someone walking away and the insistent barking of the dog as to a person who is a stranger to the house."
It is a transcript of the Securitate registering itself in the act of trying to come into the house to change the microphones. I read this file last August for the first time. It made me understand that when we heard noises in those years in Romania we weren't really crazy as we thought.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote
Ion Bugan on death of CeausescuThis is all wrong, now the world will never find out from him about his abuses.”
After receiving a series of
invitations from mysterious men to meet them in town, death threats on
the phone in the middle of the night, and even a call from a woman
offering sex to dad, we decided to seek political asylum in the US. It
was my turn to make a heart-stopping journey to the American Embassy
with my father's prison papers to give testimony on behalf of the
family.
I managed to get into the Consulate but I was promptly
arrested on the way out and interrogated for 45 minutes. I kept
repeating what I was told to say: "We are under American protection, you
can't do anything to me." They let me go and told me to never go back
there again.The Securitate records show how "concerned" they were about us and what might happen, as immigrants, to our sense of Romanian identity. They tried to dissuade my mother from going to the US - they told her that life in the West was a form of slavery to rich, lazy capitalists.
We waited 11 months for our passports, under house arrest. One record says that "after we have used every method to discourage the obj. [this time Mum] from leaving, we decided to expel her from the Communist Party". It was, even according to the Securitate's own file, a humiliation ceremony, where her friends were forced to hurl insults at her.
"Your girls will become prostitutes," the passport clerk yelled at my parents. "Our hand is long," they said, turning to my father, threatening us with death if we spoke about what had been done to us once in America. I now read my mother's declaration in the files "not to damage the image of our socialist regime by actions or words", and wonder how she must have felt to leave the country in her 40s with three children, a husband who had returned from the heart of evil, and no idea where we were going.
As we made our way to Michigan at the end of 1989, each carrying one suitcase in which we packed a lifetime, the Berlin Wall tumbled down behind us. The bloody Romanian Revolution followed at Christmas time.
We arrived as political refugees in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on 17 November 1989, travelling via Rome, and landing at night, in a snowstorm, not speaking a word of English.
The Bugan family arrived in the US with no English
We became eager to "assimilate" into Western life.
My sister and I would often ask the people in Grand Rapids we knew best: "Do I look American yet?"
At the same time we saw on a donated television how the Ceausescus were executed. My father said: "This is all wrong, now the world will never find out from him about his abuses." My mother cried: "They are just two old people, they should not have been killed." And all of us danced in the living room with joy that a revolution was happening in Romania.
The uprising brought turmoil to the streets of Bucharest
Twenty years have passed. We cleaned nursing homes, churches, worked at Burger King, made golf clubs, Mum worked in a children's clothing factory, and we went to school. My father collected all of the discarded televisions we found, fixed them, and we had a TV in each room: "Such a waste," he'd say.
We became American citizens. My sister and I married. She and her husband bought a house in the suburbs. We became "Romanians by birth".
In 1999 Romania opened the archives of the secret police to people who had been subjected to surveillance during the communist years.
My father said: "I know who I am. I don't need to know what the Securitate said about me." But I disagreed and managed to find our records in 2010.
Now, it was one thing to experience the Securitate following and threatening us. But it is another thing to read the complete record of our daily lives, including the traps neatly laid out for us, to lure us into committing an offence, which we escaped simply by instinct or luck.
Carmen reading the files made about her family's life
Continue reading the main story
Find out more
- You can find out more about Ion Bugan and his family, on BBC television and radio
- The Documentary was on BBC World television
- The Man Who Went Looking For Freedom was on BBC World Service radio
Another example is a "legend" (a
technical term used by the Securitate) by which an "Amnesty
International employee" came to ask mum about my father and whether we
were persecuted because of him. The officer was trained to have a German
accent, and to look nervous. He invited her to a hotel in town to talk
"out of the reach of the microphones".
This was a trap to throw my mother in prison for speaking
with foreigners about my father. Again, we now have the official record
against which we can test our own memory of that day when the man came
to the house. After he left, my mother said: "No-one is this worried
about us, I don't trust this stranger." It was a lack of trust that
saved her.There are records of dreams we recounted to each other in the mornings. The transcriber knew us so well, he or she was able to read and duly note our moods. Some even took sides in family arguments, noting on the margins of the transcripts who they thought was right. It's like having had a one-sided relationship with these invisible broadcasters of our tormented souls.
The family made a new life in the US
But we now have every letter that my father wrote to us from prison and we wrote to him. Half of the letters are direct transcripts—they were copied out by the censors - while half are paraphrases of what we wrote. There are not always quotation marks to indicate which of the words are ours, which are theirs. It is nearly impossible to detangle the self from the words of the Securitate. Some of the letters were not forwarded to us, so I read them for the first time last summer.
The question of what my father was thinking of when he drove away to Bucharest on 10 March 1983 has lost its painful intensity for us over the years. Yet in the files I see our daily recitation of blame and anger at the time.
That question would have remained unanswered if it hadn't been for a trip to Romania that we took as a family in October 2013. My father was by then 78, my mother 67, so it was a good time to make the journey back.
Continue reading the main story
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