A political figurehead of the Romanian
\nanti-communist opposition, 88-year old Doina Cornea passed away in Cluj on May
\n4, 2018. In Romania but also in the European civic activism circles, Doina
\nCornea’s name needs no introduction. She was one the intellectuals who put up
\nthe staunchest opposition against the communist regime in the 1980s Romania.
\nDoina Cornea openly expressed her opinions in a country that at that time was
\nfearful because of the violence of the then communist regime and the long
\nperiod of time when rights and freedoms had been brutally trampled on.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n
<\/p>\n
Between 1945
\nand 1989, in Romania, women paid dearly because of the way the country had been
\nled immediately after the end of World War Two. Intellectuals or workers,
\ncountry girls or city dwellers, women in Romania fought and died in the armed
\nresistance, alongside their husbands, others had to do time in prison for a
\ngreat many years, with some of them even dying while serving their sentence.
\nFamous or unknown, such heroines as Marina Chirca, Ana Simion, Maria Plop,
\nArlette Coposu, Ecaterina B\u0103l\u0103cioiu proudly include the name of dissenter Doina
\nCornea among them. Those figure heads refused to be accomplices to the
\ninstatement of an utterly inhuman regime in Romania. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n
<\/p>\n
In 1982,
\n52-year old teacher Doina Cornea decided she could no longer go hush-hush about
\nwhat was going on in Romania at that time. She wrote a letter to Radio Free
\nEurope denouncing the abuse and the way the country was being led by the then
\ncommunist party. In 1996, Doina Cornea gave an interview to Radio Romania’s
\nOral History Center. Back then she recalled how her relationship with the
\ncommunist regime began. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n
<\/p>\n
Doina Cornea: The first text, titled ‘An open letter addressed to all those who have
\nnever stopped thinking’ primarily targeted teachers, whose moral obligation was
\nto always say the truth to those they educate. It was a great lesson l also
\nlearned during the Stalinist regime, from my former professor at the Faculty of
\nFrench Philology, Mr Henri Chaquier. I was very much impressed with that idea
\nhe tried to instill in our souls and our minds, since that was the age of the
\nmost horrendous Stalinist regime, it was in the 1950s, or thereabouts. All the
\ntime I felt there was something urging me to write it, even against my will.
\nBut I did not want to sign that letter. I wrote it, my daughter dispatched it,
\nshe came to the country for the first time after she had left, and I went
\nsomething like, ‘I am not going to sign the letter, they should present it just
\nas they want to.’ I drew a line at the end of the text, but, in order for them
\nto be certain it was an authentic text and not a ‘fabricated’ one, written on
\nsomebody else’s behalf, I wrote the following: ‘For Radio Free Europe, Doina
\nCornea, a teaching assistant with the Faculty of Philology’.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n
<\/p>\n
Doina Cornea
\nwas afraid to cry out her revolt, and she confessed so many times. Yet a new revelation of her existence was
\nhonor, which made Doina Cornea regain her strength, having heard her name on
\nair at the then most strongly blamed foreign radio station. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Doina Cornea: I was in Vama Veche with my husband, who
<\/p>\n
There followed the meeting, at the workplace, aimed to
<\/p>\n
Doina Cornea: It was a terrible meeting, I remember rector
<\/p>\n
Eventually, Doinea Cornea was fired, but she didn’t let
A political figurehead of the Romanian
anti-communist opposition, 88-year old Doina Cornea passed away in Cluj on May
4, 2018. In Romania but also in the European civic activism circles, Doina
Cornea’s name needs no introduction. She was one the intellectuals who put up
the staunchest opposition against the communist regime in the 1980s Romania.
[…]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":77516,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41141],"tags":[42787,32441,33490,35051],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-130395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-history-show","tag-anti-communist-opposition","tag-communism","tag-doina-cornea","tag-securitate"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\ndid not know anything about the text, neither that it was written nor that it
\nwas snail-mailed, and I brought my radio receiver with me. I didn’t listen to
\nFree Europe too often, but this time I insisted to take the receiver with me.
\n‘But what’s got into you?’ he asked. And I told him I wanted to listen to Free
\nEurope. There were two beds in those peasant rooms, I was sitting in the near
\nbed, my husband in the second one, and the radio receiver was on the window
\nsill. And when I heard the voice on the radio going ‘let’s just say
\nthan I was of the political repercussions. There followed a moment of silence,
\nand I was waiting for him to start shouting at me. But he did not say anything,
\nas if we could no longer breathe. And then I said: ‘What are we going to do
\nnow?’ And he grabbed my arm and said: let’s go for a walk.<\/p>\n
\n
<\/p>\n
\njudge and sentence her. Her colleagues, with just a very few exceptions, showed
\nno solidarity with her, although some of them tried to find ways to keep her
\naway from the rage of the regime. <\/p>\n
\n
<\/p>\n
\nVlad, whom I love dearly, he was my colleague, and I did not hate him. I
\nunderstood the way in which the system worked. Still, there was something else
\nthey could have done. But they wanted to hear self-criticism from me, at that
\nmeeting, and I did not do anything of the sort. They kept asking: ‘What is your
\nproblem with Mircea Eliade? Why are you saying that intellectuals are liars,
\nthat economists provide false statistics? I was telling students those things,
\nstressing that no society, even a socialist or communist one, cannot be built
\non lies. ‘Why do you say that intellectuals are cowards?’ they’d ask. ‘Because
\nthey are’, I would respond. At a certain time, I burst into tears, when the
\nhead of department told me to get a medical certificate and get hospitalized,
\nin the psychiatric ward. That’s all I need, to get hospitalized for mental
\nproblems! That offended me a lot. I cried then, but I said nothing that would
\nincriminate me.<\/p>\n
\n
<\/p>\n
\nthem beat her down. She kept writing letters to Free Europe and supported the
\nworkers’ strike in Brasov, in November 1987. In August 1988 she was placed under
\nhouse arrest, until December 1989, when she faced the bullets of the
\nrevolution. In 2016, Doina Cornea got one final struck from destiny: the death
\nof her daughter Ariadna Combes, who carried the words of her mother to the free
\nworld. <\/p>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
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\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"