Doina Cornea – the death of a symbol
Only half a year after the passing away of its last sovereign, King Michael I, Romania now loses one of its few remaining moral authorities
Bogdan Matei, 04.05.2018, 13:40
The teacher, writer, translator and anti-communist dissident Doina Cornea has passed away at almost 89 years of age, after a terrible illness. She was born on 30th May, 1929 in Brasov, in the centre, into a Greek-Catholic family. She was raised in the spirit of the moral and religious values of resistance, both against the Hungarian rule over part of Transylvania during WWII, and the communist regime brought to power after the war by the occupying Soviet troops. As a French teacher at the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj Napoca, in the west, she became famous for her public criticism of Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime.
Her public letters, which criticised the absurdity and horrors of dictatorship and which began to be aired in 1982 by western radio stations, gave Romanians some hope but were naturally met with fury by the communist authorities. In 1987, together with her son Leontin Iuhas, Doina Cornea distributed letters of solidarity with the workers who were going on strike in Brasov, and both were arrested as a result. Doina Cornea was fired from her university job, submitted to brutal investigations, placed on home arrest and beaten up by the agents of the communist political police, the Securitate. During the anti-communist revolution of 1989, demonstrators in Cluj also voiced their solidarity with Doina Cornea, chanting her name and chasing away the Securitate agents who were watching her home. Here’s Doina Cornea in a Radio Romania archive recording:
“I don’t know if December 21st is about me. It’s more about a state of mind that existed across the country. I simply fell into line, I did what everybody else did. First my son went out into the street, where they were shooting at people and someone got hit right next to him. He came home and could only say: ‘Slaughter, slaughter!’ That’s all he could say, he was petrified. I was afraid, too, when I went out into the street. Honestly, I was.”
Co-opted into the new power structure, the National Salvation Front, a rather toxic mixture of authentic revolutionaries and second-tier communists, Doina Cornea quickly separated herself from the way in which they were running the country and became an equally biting critic of the new left-wing president, the former Ceausescu-era minister Ion Iliescu. She was one of the founders of the Anti-totalitarian Democratic Forum in Romania, the Group for Social Dialogue, the Civic Alliance and the Memoria Cultural Foundation, all of which promoted the democratic process in Romania and the country’s European and Euro-Atlantic integration.
She was close to the Christian-Democrat leader Corneliu Coposu, himself an unparalleled symbol of anti-communist resistance who survived 17 years as a political prisoner without abandoning his cause. Doina Cornea was awarded the Order of St. Gregory the Great by Pope John Paul II and the Royal Decoration of the Cross of the Romanian Royal House of Romania by King Michael I, as well as the Order of the Star of Romania and the French National Order of the Legion of Honour.
(Translated by C. Mateescu)
