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Photo courtesy of
Dr. Aurel Emilian Mircea
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Dr. Aurel Emilian Mircea’s medical journey started in 1961
Socialist
Republic of Romania and took “20,000 miles and 50 years to complete.” He
crossed numerous countries and three continents. He should be in the
Guinness
Book of World Records as the only Romanian licensed doctor who had
practiced medicine on three continents, Europe, Africa, and North America and in
four countries, Romania, Poland, South Africa, and the United States.
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
