Meat Production Export and Emigration Visas

A farmer's potatoes for the winter

Living imprisoned inside the borders of a socialist republic run by the Communist Party was not easy – I know from personal experience. One had to get used to the many affronts to liberty and daily survival, including food and amenities the western world had taken for granted for decades and still do. Deep down most people wanted to flee, defect during a hard to obtain legal trip, or to disappear across the highly guarded border during the middle of the night.

Jewish citizens had more options; their freedoms could be bought with hard currency, the universally accepted (at the time) U.S. dollar. The currency was accepted by all because they had trust in the U.S. government. But faith and trust in the U.S. government is fading, in the same direction as the faith in the U.S. dollar.

Jewish emigration had one escape that the rest of the country did not have. Ceausescu used to say, according to Lt. Gen Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking defector from a communist country,” Oil, Jews, and Germans are our most important export commodities.” Ceausescu had mastered the art of milking money from the west, specifically Israel and West Germany.

A spy named Henry was the intermediary in a trade that involved paying a certain amount of U.S. dollars to the dear leader’s personal account for each Jew allowed to emigrate. According to Pacepa, Henry negotiated a deal whereby 500 Jewish families would be allowed to leave if an automated chicken plant were to be built free of charge at Peris. The communist president at the time was Gheorge Gheorghiu-Dej and he approved the project as “a onetime experiment.”

The plant was built at Peris, a small village on the northern side of Bucharest. That property was owned by the Ministry of Interior, no doubt confiscated from villagers, plot by plot. The dear leader liked the plant and ordered five more built, making the Ministry of Interior the largest meat producer in the country by 1964. The packaged meat, transported by refrigerated Mercedes trucks, was delivered to the west in exchange for hard currency which the commies at the top pocketed, while the citizens starved and spent their days standing in endless lines to find bones for soup. We considered ourselves lucky if we found pork’s feet in the butcher shops.

What did the Ministry of Interior own that made it the largest meat producer? “Chicken farms, turkey farms, pig farms, which produced tens of thousands of animals per year, several cattle farms, and other farms with some 100,000 head of sheep – all with automated slaughterhouses, refrigerated storehouses, and packing plants.” (Lt. Gen. Pacepa, p. 73)

Pacepa wrote in his book, Red Horizons, that Henry paid for everything in exchange for exit visas for Romanian Jews. They could go wherever they wanted to emigrate to the west.

Political prisoners staffed the packing plants. Often among them they found engineers and veterinarians who were forced to work to maintain the dear leader cash-cow enterprises.

When someone complained that they needed more men-power to run the ever-increasing farms and packing plants, Gheorghiu-Dej is alleged to have said, “If you cannot find the people you need in the jails, just arrest the ones you need and then use them.” Find the men needed and then create the crimes to put them in jail to use as free labor.

The production of these enterprises, eggs, chicken, turkey, pork, beef and even cornflakes from a cornflakes factory, was earmarked for export to the west only while the population starved. We had no idea what cornflakes were since we never saw such products on our markets, and we did not eat cereal for breakfast. Our breakfasts consisted of rye bread with butter, if we were lucky enough to find it in the store, and linden tea.

By 1965, Pacepa wrote, “Romania was producing 50,000 Landrace pigs a year, all exported to the West as bacon and ham.” We never saw such ham and bacon in the proletariat’s stores.

The Landrace piglets had been smuggled out of Denmark in diplomatic automobiles and trucks. Landrace piglets were the result of selective breeding in Denmark. They were forbidding their export for breeding, but the commies always found ingenious ways to steal from others.

When Ceausescu came to power after Gheorghiu-Dej died, he found the scheme outrageous to swap food production and farm animals for Jewish visas, not from a humanitarian standpoint but from a financial gain point of view.

He produced a new plan to levy a cash amount for every Jewish visa, based on age, education, profession, type of employment, and family status. The amount could be anywhere from $2,000 to $50,000 per person. Some people’s visa demand was $250,000.

Bolstered by the millions of dollars obtained from these visas, Ceausescu decided to sell such visas for ethnic Germans too; Romania had almost a million of them. The awful sale of Romanians of Jewish and German descent padded Ceausescu’s numerous foreign bank accounts with credits and his secret cash stashes with daily suitcases filled with dollars delivered by planes.

At some point Ceausescu decided that those given visas should also become secret agents. He ordered, “No Romanian citizen of Jewish or German descent, should be given an emigration visa unless he has signed a secret agreement with the security forces and has agreed to act as an intelligence agent abroad.” This unique type of tyranny has been emulated by other communist countries who allow their citizens to emigrate to the U.S.  They are loyal first to the country they left.

Who knew that animal husbandry, meat packing, and the sale of emigration visas could be so profitable to communist tyrants!