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Photo courtesy of
Dr. Aurel Emilian Mircea
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On his journey, Dr. Mircea had pursued and finally reached in 1977 the American Dream through socialist country after socialist country until he found the state of Texas, in the land of the free and home of the brave, his last stop.
Now in his eighties, Dr. Mircea remembers his graduation in September 1961 from the Carol Davila College of Medicine in Bucharest, Romania. Forced by the socialist regime to practice medicine for three years in a village, as payment for the free socialist education he received, he joined the “rebellious Barefoot Doctors” brigade. Some of his colleagues refused the assignment and were forced to give up medicine, working as taxi drivers and waiters – the blue-collar salary was higher and much less responsibility.
But Dr. Mircea chose a double life – doctor by day and professional musician by night. Playing trumpet in a jazz band earned him more income than physicians earned and was able to be in contact with foreign tourists even though the socialists controlled by the Communist Party forbade any contact with foreign nationals.
As a teenager, his bleak life in a decaying apartment complex revolved around standing in long lines to find food and sneaking around the countrywide secret police that monitored every individual’s movement in public places, at home, at school, and controlling private life. Learning to function in whispering conversations, he was able to avoid operators listening on phone calls but not the full-time informers who reported on the comings and goings of everyone.
Ninety-five percent of the population was oppressed by five percent of the ruling class, party apparatchiks, and the unelected class of oligarchs. “The promotion of the utopian socialism, the daily school indoctrination with compulsory study of Russian language and Marxist ideology made us all an unwilling bunch of mind-numbed robots.”
Teenagers, upon reaching maturity, accepted their destiny and the demands made by the communist commissars. Resigned to their fate, all were forced to march from high school grounds to the Dear Leader’s parade grounds and shout slogans nobody believed to be true, enforcing the deep-seated hatred of communism. “The enormous risk of repercussions or incarceration, by manifesting any sign of disapproval with the regime, in public places held us into a submissive state of mind.”
The involuntary volunteerism that I was subjected to in high school twenty-five years later when we had to harvest crops, was much harder for Dr. Mircea. He had to work as forced volunteers on government construction sites from seventh grade until he graduated from high school in the summer of 1953. Students passed along bricks, from hand to hand, or were ordered to carry heavy buckets of mixed concrete up shaky scaffolding. There was no such thing as OSHA protection when the communists ran everything. Who was there to complain to or sue?
A young Aurel E. Mircea helped build the new and decrepit Soviet-style concrete apartments with poor electricity, bad drainage, unsafe passages, elevators that never worked, open walls, open electrical wiring, and unfinished balconies. Each resident was entitled to only 100 ft of living space, a miserable life in the new Socialist equality for all. Sadly, many historical buildings and Orthodox Churches had to be bulldozed in order to make room for the Soviet style apartment blocks made of crumbling concrete poured in a hurry with reinforcing iron bars.
During 1944-1950 Aurel Mircea’s family of five had to undergo six punishing reforms of equality for the collective good:
1.
The regime nationalized all private land and
homes, making the population subservient to the new communist regime.
2.
All firearms were confiscated, making
ownership of any weapon an offense punishable by prison.
3.
Gold, cameras, typewriters, sewing machines,
telephones, Bibles, and other valuables were confiscated.
4.
Gangs of secret police thugs invaded their home without
a warrant and took their family car.
5.
Old currency was canceled, new currency
was issued, each family was only allowed to have one month of income.
6.
The new living space law relocated their
family of five into one room, 400 square feet, sharing bathroom and kitchen
with two other families.
High schools were infiltrated by communist commissars tasked to spread the Marxist ideology. They were indoctrinated and had to study Russian, Darwinism, Soviet Union’s history, Scientific Socialism, and Marxism-Leninism. Any intellectual, professional, person of means with a nice apartment was labeled Enemy of the People.
Mircea never became Lenin and Stalin’s Useful Idiot, he unwashed his brain of Marxism-Leninism and Dialectic Materialism by reading prohibited books, and learning the truth about the world from his uncle Constantin who had served a long and heavy jail sentence for being the Forestry Minister under the royal government before the communists took power and for having visited America. The inhumane socialist dogma never took root in Mircea’s mind, thoughts of freedom resided there always. After all, his scrambled name, A. Mircea, was AMERICA.
The communists reduced education from twelve years to ten. “The communist goal was to produce less educated people and more subservient factory workers. It was the goal of the Proletarian Paradise to have a huge class of Useful Idiots, as Stalin defined them: subservient people who want handouts, free healthcare, cheap food and housing.”
Children of the proletariat class (blue collar workers) received ten full points on the social college admission score, a sort of “bourgeois is evil” type of Affirmative Action. The social score only awarded five points to applicants from intellectual families and ten points to applicants from a blue-collar family. However, Aurel, the son of intellectuals, still managed to earn a spot in medical school.
With good test scores, luck, and giving “baksheesh” (bribery) to an old professor of infectious diseases and admission screener, who changed his family data to read that he was the son of a carpenter, Aurel had beaten the odds and was now part of the freshman class at the new Faculty of Public Health and Hygiene in Bucharest, established by the communist regime as the fourth branch of the Carol Davila Medical School to train doctors for “urban cleanliness.”
Aurel thought the Marxist indoctrination would stop in college but he was wrong. Each medical student was assigned to a group of twenty which had an “invisible” informer to the Communist Party. Their specific informer was not so invisible. Comrade Ghiorghi, an older communist commissar, was almost twenty years older, hailing from a rural primary school, with seven years of basic education, no high school, and no college entrance exam.
Comrade Ghiorghi was a “persecuted peasant, a member of the Communist Party, a devout Stalinist, and a cripple. Both his hands had the fingertips amputated by a new, Soviet-made thresher machine.” He was reporting everything the other students in the group said and did.
Comrade Ghiorghi Preda, the medical student communist stooge, never showed up for exams during the six years of college, never took notes during class, never showed up for written or oral exams, always took a roll call, pacing the amphitheater during daily classes, the perfect spy for the Communist Party. He received a diploma just like everybody else, landed a bureaucratic job with the Ministry of Health, never touching a patient, received a free apartment and a personal car, a Dacia. Until his retirement, he remained an employee of the Healthcare department in Bucharest – taking full advantage of his communist activist privilege.
Comrade Ghiorghi was one of the many commissars, trained agitators at all universities in Bucharest, architecture, polytechnic, economic, medical schools, arresting students during the student protests when they pelted the invading Soviet tanks in 1957. During the Hungarian Uprising and the Spring Prague, these commissars devastated the student communities – thousands were arrested, and some were deported to the Siberian gulag, never showing up again for class and their families never knew where they disappeared.
Comrade Preda was so hated by his medical school colleagues that, when the Carol Davila School of Medicine and Pharmacy 50-year class reunion took place in the fall of 2011 in Bucharest, a few who still remembered him and hated his guts, grabbed him and threw him out into the corridor.
For the next six years the study of Marxism-Leninism, Russian language, Darwinism, Dialectic Materialism, Scientific Socialism and other useless indoctrinating subjects continued. Students learned how to cheat and pass these Useful Idiot-classes while concentrating on medicine and science.
A classmate, Valeria, a Jewish girl, had great aspirations to move to Tel Aviv, taking advantage of the Jewish Emigration from the Soviet Bloc. Each émigré was bought and relocated to the promised land by the Prime Minister at the time, Davin Ben-Gurion. Nobody knew exactly how much was paid to the communist state per émigré, but Dr. Mircea alleges that the sum of $10,000 was the ransom paid for each Jewish person, money which “went straight to a secret bank account in Switzerland, for the use of the Politburo members and their international terrorist organizations.”
Medical school commissars brought many medical students on stage in front of the entire student body and made them confess and renounce their religious affiliations, the right to protest (many labor camps were packed with students who participated in anti-Soviet protests, never to be seen again), or denounce their parents for their illicit commercial trading and bartering done out of the necessity to survive.
By his fourth year of medical school, filled with clinical and practical courses in major hospitals and clinics, Aurel became a professional jazz musician, playing the trumpet. Mixing with gypsies, Jewish artists, Hungarian musicians, Italian singers, and a few German musicians, Aurel had no trouble getting weekend gigs in “dancing bombs.”
Government-owned basements in high rise buildings which had been assigned as bomb shelters during the war became dancing halls, making money for the starving musicians and for the government. The dancing halls became known as “bombs.” Aurel made more money on weekends playing trumpet by ear than most doctors working in the communist system made in a month.
Summers were spent on the Black Sea Riviera, Eforie Nord, playing in dancing halls and nightclubs. The tips and the excellent payroll, three times the meager salary of a physician, made them enough money to last a year. They received free modest accommodations, food, and free bus and train transportation. Compared to communist egalitarian payroll standards, the six band players were doing well.
Maestro Joe, the bandleader, and the showbiz agent, Sahak Baichian, connected them with VIP guests and restaurant managers, a steppingstone in their dream to escape communist Romania “by hook or by crook.” Sahak Baichian would eventually escape to Paris, reunited with his Armenian family, after a rich cousin paid a hefty ransom to the Communist government.
Luck intervened again for Aurel when he found a convenient place to complete his summer internship requirements for medical school graduation. He was assigned to the director of the Astoria Hotel and Spa in Eforie Nord where he was making money with his trumpet at night and helping people four hours a day with their rheumatism and psoriasis. His boarding was free with his jazz band and the Dean’s office was more than happy to assign him where they did not have to provide accommodations.
TO BE CONTINUED
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