A farmer's potatoes for the winter |
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!
From Vladimir P.: "Great article, Ileana. I think I knew one of the participants who delivered money, and even talk with him on the phone where he agreed to meet. Unfortunately, our meeting have never happened.
ReplyDeleteIf you know, Soviets, when they allowed first Jewish emigration, also charged a steep price from every potential Jewish emigrant who graduated any college or university. It was called "reimbursement for free education", but after outcry from wide array of world politicians removed it."