Exhumation and reburials of some anticommunist partisans in county of Cluj, Romania, 2009-2010

Abstract

After the Second World War, Romania entered under the USSR political and military sphere of influence, which led to the installation of the communist government. In years that followed many Romanian citizens who didn’t agree with the new regime or its ideology were subjected to terror and repression. Any person suspected of being an enemy of the people would end up in political jails or put to death through collective executions. But there were also people who stood up against the regime. Groups of partisans emerged, groups that endured in forests and mountains for many years, standing up to the Securitatea, the repressive instrument of the state. After the fall of the communist regime, the former “enemies of the people”, victims of repression, benefited from reconsideration and rehabilitation that transformed them into anticommunist heroes. A series of commemorative actions that initiated a new post-communist tradition constitute part of a process called the politics of memory. The processes of unearthing and identification of the victims’ served to map out the magnitude of the crimes, and inventory evidence against the perpetrators. The factual data gathered will be used as incriminating evidence which will help with convicting the executioners. At the same time, the commemorative actions of a large number of victims may, through the representative voices of the survivors’ descendants, symbolically reopen the wounds, cultivate trauma, demonize the Other, identify the Scapegoat. My research aims to show how these theories and mechanisms remain valid and apply to the case of people who were victims of communist repression through isolated and almost anonymous executions. The murder was committed in silence and the murdered is condemned to being forgotten. The exhumation and reburial also remain events with local reverberations.