Tag #129860 - Interview #89857 (Mira Tudor)

The youngest boy, Ion, is now 70-71. He went tot the military school, then they sent him to Leningrad, at about the same time when I was there. He attended a Communications Academy, as he was an officer. He married a Russian woman and brought her to Romania. He got promoted all the way to colonel. He was already a colonel when his son was born. An order then came: all the officers who were married to Russian women had to divorce them and send them back home. I believe it was still during the regime of Gheorghiu-Dej [12], but I can’t remember the year. He went to the general and said: ‘I will not divorce her. I have a child with this woman, and we love each other. I’ll give up the army and find a civilian job, because I’m an engineer.’ Many of them were cowardly enough to yield: they divorced and sent their women back to the USSR. That was a horrible thing to ask, but they did it because they were afraid. Iancu wasn’t afraid – we called him Iancu. It’s true, he relied on the fact that he came from a powerful family of communists and that they couldn’t touch him with anything else. He told them: ‘I am not getting a divorce, because I have a closely united family and no one in our family has ever got divorced. Why should I do it?