Interview with Ion Marcel (fragments) A debt incurred years ago makes you uncomfortable and clouds your judgment. And as a bitter statement: any wrong steps where money is concerned snowballs into something as disastrous as losing your home. I was born on November 22nd, 1971, in Bucharest. My father was a local, my mother was from Sibiu, I’m half-Transylvanian. Since 2001 I’ve been working as a teacher, because the factories where I used to work… the factories are closed or demolished and abandoned or turned into new blocks or flats. SC Danubiana was the first factory I ever worked in,…
Interview with FLORIAN VODĂ In 2001, at Creangă Theatre in Bucharest, I saw Vodă perform in the play Acasă [Home] (text by Ludmila Razumovskaia, directed by Radu Apostol), which revolutionized the Romanian theatre through its social and community-oriented approach and its solid poetic construction. Acasă marked the path for new theatrical practices, for profound aesthetic and political reflections upon extremely vulnerable realities, upon the world of fragile “undesirables” whose self-representation is usually shunned by the art with capital A. Acasă was created by director Radu Apostol together with a group of homeless children and two professional actresses, after six months…
In the spring of 2013, political scientist Vladimir Bortun conducted several interviews with clients of banks which gave out mortgage loans. The clients talk about their relationship with the banks, about the banks’ unilateral decisions and abusive clauses. How did your relationship with BCR begin? Well, I decided to stop paying rent and move with the family, we couldn’t fit in a one-bedroom flat anymore. And we thought we’d take out a loan. What year was this? Late 2007, early 2008. I went to several banks, I asked for several offers, and in the end I thought BCR gave me…
Interview with IULIA MERSOIU Iulia Mersoiu is my mother, she is 62 and more than 40 of them were spent working as a surgery and internal medicine nurse at the Prahova County Hospital in Ploiesti. She was assigned to work in Ploiesti in 1974 and rented a flat until she contracted a housing mortgage in 1978. First of all, please tell me when and how did you come to Ploiesti? I did my nursing studies in Ploiesti between 1972 and 1974, coming from Ramnicu Sarat, Buzau County. I was assigned by the state to work in the city after nursing…
By Ioana Florea, Isabela Panek, Jelena Steigerwald Between 1937 and 1945, more than 250.000 people from all over Europe, including Northern Transylvania, were imprisoned by the Nazi regime in Buchenwald concentration camp and its adjacent camps. Testimonies from this period were given by survivors in interviews taken in 1998, 2002, 2005 and during a discussion between Miklós/Nicolae Kallós, Ladislau/Vasile Nuszbaum, László Székely, the activists from “Third Generation Buchenwald” and researchers from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, which took place in Cluj in October 2014. We thank Andrea Julika Ghiță for facilitating this discussion. Most of the Romanian prisoners from Buchenwald…
Testimonies by LIVIU BERIS and ALEXANDRU ELIAS This material is the transcript of a discussion with Holocaust survivors Liviu Beris and Alexandru Elias during the conference/workshop Nationalism, Fascism and the Holocaust in Romanian History – A Critical Approach, organized by Third Generation Buchenwald during October 16-20 in Bucharest. Liviu Beris was evicted from Herta, his hometown, at the age of 13 and deported to Moghilev concentration camp in Transnistria/Pridnestrovie. Today he is the president of the Association of Romanian Jews Victims of the Holocaust. Alexandru Elias was deported to Tirgu-Jiu labor camp in 1942, at the age of 16, for…
By: Isabel Panek, Jelena Steigerwald In the last years, the Romanian authorities have officially recognise Roma as victims of the Holocaust. But still their suffering and loss is not firmly fixed in the memory culture. Different projects and initiatives exist to support Roma survivors to receive compensation and to give their story a voice, such as the film “Valley of Sighs” or the project “Helping Roma Survivors of Deportations to Transnistria”. On the 22nd of June 1941 Nazi-Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the war of destruction started. During the operation, which was called operation Barbarossa, more than four…