Tag #123789 - Interview #78460 (Isac Tinichigiu)

But another incident that pushed me away from communism was that in 1962 I received a phone call from a former director of mine, who was a mentor to me, Dan Emeric: he had graduated from Economics in Hong Kong and from the Conservatory in Vienna. All his Sunday mornings were busy; he never came to work like others would, because he used to have some friends over and play chamber music. [Sunday was not a working day but what Isac refers to is that people in high positions occasionally went to work Sunday mornings to finish their work.] But that day he asked me to come see him in his office on Sunday morning.

He told me he was summoned for the next day to be questioned about the Patrascanu [14] case and that he wasn’t sure he would ever come back. Patrascanu had been sentenced to death under Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej [15] and executed. And all that happened because Dan Emeric used to be friends with a former lady-friend of Patrascanu. The Securitate [16] didn’t believe that the woman told him nothing of what Patrascanu was up to. So Dan first explained to me that what happened to Patrascanu was in fact a horrible murder, which took place because Dej was afraid of the competition. Patrascanu was a great intellectual who could have replaced him. He was accused of nationalism on the basis of one declaration he once made – ‘I am a Romanian first, and then a communist’ – and of many other false things, and sentenced to death. Dan asked me to reveal all this when the times would allow it, or at least to tell his children when they would be old enough to understand it, in case he never came back.