Nicolae Lițoiu

"I: So I was taken to Rahovei transit camp, here, next to Bucharest. I was held there until November 1982. On November 17, 1982, I was boarded on a coach - destination: Aiud. They tied me in so-called gypsy chains. You placed your foot on an anvil and they would fasten it, so with the foot in the shackles, they would rivet the shackles. Others had shackles with a safety-lock, so they used a key to lock them. They riveted mine so I would remember. You can imagine, no matter how relaxed your foot was, being barefoot, you could feel those strikes and the whole vibration running through your body. It was horrible. R: How long did it take to get to Aiud? I: To Aiud? We left from Basarab station at about 10 A.M. and arrived in the night, at about 11-12 P.M. They took us on a regional train. And until they made all the necessary maneuvers to get it out, they held us for several hours. It was enough. Just think about it, we had to jump out of the train with both feet at once. Railway stations and trains are more civilized nowadays. But back then, you had to jump over two feet (60-70 cm) from the last step to the platform. And you also had to take your bag, then jump. Most of us fell to the ground. They hit us with clubs so we would get up. They immediately got us in a van. They drove us in the night to Aiud prison and placed us in a special room, along with common criminals."

"The food was horrible. What do you mean by horrible? I mean in terms of calories... we used to joke about it: „This food has calories until it gets cold. After it gets cold it has no calories left." The food consisted in a thin soup, a lot of cabbage and sometimes a bit of beet or a handful of rice. Sometimes there was also a piece of bacon with hair on it floating in the soup. Beans were more nourishing. In the evening, we were usually given pearl barley, unsweetened, only with salt. There was also rice. Those who didn't work got about 1.3 pounds (600 g) of polenta, a cube of polenta made of unsifted corn flour. I think for each ten grains of corn flour, there were five grains of sand, because your teeth would crackle. It was terrible. Before, when I arrived, they gave us so-called turtoi (flat bread), which was a mixture of water and corn flour, baked in a greased pan, apparently, with grease or oil. The taste wasn't that bad, but it had a disastrous effect on the digestive tube. It was probably infested with salmonella or something, because of the unhygienic food handling (in my case, I started feeling the effects after about a week). Apart from that, we also had the so-called „ciric”: 125 grams of bread (0.27 lbs). It was basically a bread cut in eight. A bread weighing about 800 grams (1.76 lbs) or so. I don't know if the numbers are correct, but I don't think it was larger than 1 kg (2.20 lbs). It was rye bread. Well, that was like cake for us. You would eat it, drank water and then say you ate something delicious (laughing). Those of us who didn't work got packages once every three months. And only five kilograms (11 lbs). If you worked, you were allowed to receive a package every two months. The effects of the flat bread were disastrous in my case. At my height and weight of about 101-102 kg (223 lbs) now, just imagine how I looked weighing 65 kg (143 lbs) less."