Securitate

We're going to examine what happened after the Communists obtained power.

What happened to people who disagreed with the government? What happened to priests and religious believers? What happened inside Romania's prisons and forced labor camps? What was the Securitate? And how did Nikolai Ceausescu eventually build one of the most restrictive dictatorships in Eastern Europe? There will be no humor in today's program.

The people we're discussing were real.

The suffering was real.

He inherited it.

Romania's communist repression began well before he became leader in 1965.

The communist government created the Securitate, its feared state security organization, in 1948.

The most intense periods of mass imprisonment occurred during the earlier communist leadership, particularly between 1948 and 1953, and again from the late 1950s into the early 1960s.

Um, there was a very big confusion, uh, but, uh, to me, uh, I would attribute the success of the revolution to the Romanian military because they decided to be with the people, and they fought against the private, um, um, mm, police, uh, factions of the, uh, private, uh, uh, Ceausescu's, uh, support.

You mean Securitate?

Securitate.

Uh, the security force.

Yes.

Security.

Securitate.

Well, there's more than security forces, and we talked about that.

Political opposition was suppressed.

The secret police, the Securitate, established in 1948, became one of the government's major instruments of surveillance and repression.

Romania would remain under communist rule for more than four decades.

Eventually, Nicolae Ceausescu became the country's dominant leader.

And in part two...

We're going inside communist Romania.

We'll talk about nationalization, collectivization, censorship, religious restrictions, the Securitate secret police, political prisoners, Nicolae Ceausescu, shortages in the daily life under the regime, and finally, December 1989, the revolution that brought communist rule to an end.

That's going to be quite a story.

Romania was for 45 years under communism.

And the Romanian KGB version was called Securitate, the security.

And they watched everything.

I was able to read everything.

What a great testimony God gave me because I obeyed him, and I shared the gospel, and I forgave my enemy.

Only in heaven we will see, and I will see how many of these Securitate, uh, government, communist government, uh, police beating me and hurting me, and sharing my love, Christ's love with them.

Maybe they accepted Christ without telling me.

God gives us a mission, each one of us, and sometimes we are hurt in our mission.

And he was so hated.

that the revolution happened right before christmas and they shot him and his wife on christmas day so that's how loved he was you know wow and he he had a out at like snag off which was in the middle of the lake is the monastery where presumably vlad the impaler was buried and around the lake itself were all the kind of villas of the security of the Securitate the secret police kind of people who were kind of behind his government and at one end of the Lake was Ceausescu's like summer palace where, you know, there were like 12 kind of hotel rooms and a little restaurant and a big, big like meeting hall, conference hall, you know, very ornate place guarded by soldiers day and night.

And somehow they put me up alone before anybody else had arrived from the States, put me up there, which was kind of across the lake from Jan Ionescu, who was like the Romanian producer who had convinced Charlie that he could produce this film.

And so, yeah, I was staying there all by myself.

You started a career as an English teacher in a small mountain town, I think.

But then, you know, life is not easy in 1980s Romania, so you had some run-ins with the Securitate, the secret police of the Ceausescu regime, and long story short, you moved to Germany in 1985.

You are now a German citizen, a child of Europe, as you said, a collection of poetry that you translated, actually, from Romanian to English.

You've worked for a long time at the BBC for 25 years.