Turned In For Salt Wagons

Thousands of people faced death while trying to escape Romania to freedom, during the communist regime. Many did not make it on the other bank of the River Danube. Jurnalul National invited those that were successful in their escape to tell their stories. Today you have the story of Claudio Maracineanu.

The River Danube never gave back many of the bodies of those that braved its waters to find freedom

Claudio Maracineanu, Sweden: It is commendable the newspaper’s initiative to address a topic and the plight of people that were not covered yet by the Romanian media, since I fled the country 20 years ago. During [Nicolae] Balcescu’s time [a revolutionary of the 1848 Revolution in Romania] the exile was a punishment tantamount to the death penalty. In the 80s Romanians risked their lives to escape the communist regime. Any delay was equal to yet another moment spent in Dante’s Inferno.

Could it be true that Romanians are unable to honor their dead [as a previous article in Jurnalul National showed]? It would not be the first time, given the treatment the victims of the [1989] Revolution got, as well as those of miners’ violent descent on Bucharest.

I am one of the lucky ones, which managed to escape both the turbulent waters of the Danube and the collusion of the Yugoslav and Romanian communist governments. For each Romanian fleeing the country Yugoslavia received a wagon full of salt.

The salt mines, which now are collapsing, were once those exploited to the fullest to have "the currency" for bringing back the fugitives from the communist camp.

The ship that made the regular trip from Orsova to Moldova Noua was followed, a few hundred meters behind, by a boat of the border guards. When a passenger jumped into the river to swim to the Yugoslav bank the border guards did not bother to apprehend him but speared him with the hooks or turned the boat around so that the propeller would chop them into pieces. A whole cemetery in Kladovo is filled with such body parts taken out from the straining grills at the Yugoslav side of the electric power plant Portile de Fier I.

Ceausescu made a visit to Yugoslavia in 1984, and got the Yugoslav authorities to return to Romania, against their will, some 3,000 Romanians which were registered as refugees with the UN Commission for Refugees in Belgrade. So, the people in the camp of Padinska Skela and in hotels around Belgrade and other Yugoslav cities were rounded up by police during one night and were shipped back to Romania via busses.

In December 1985 Ceausescu paid another visit to Belgrade only that this time the American authorities were warned and the US Secretary of State stopped short his visit to the Federal Republic of Germany to come to Belgrade and warn the Yugoslav authorities against repeating their actions of one year before. This is why Ceausescu turned back home empty handed and why I made it [to Sweden] eventually.

During this visit of Ceausescu to Yugoslavia I was hosted in the refugee camp of Banja Koviljaca, a small locality on the bank of river Drina, which separated Serbia from Bosnia. For fear of being rounded up and sent back home during night time, I and a friend of mine sneaked out of the hotel for five days, and spent the nights in tree on the bank of Drina river.

In the morning we both came back in front of the restaurant we had our meals in and looked for the others Romanians. This was the price we had to pay, all those protesting in our own silent way against a paranoid dictator. I do not regret for a moment the move that I made and I could go back in time I will do it again with no regrets.