Tag #136002 - Interview #78511 (Vasile Grunea)

There was no anti-Semitism directed against me at the radio either. Of course, one could hear whispers about why two Jews were the heads of the radio, because Lajos Racz was also Jewish. Lajos Racz Romanianized his name to Ludovic Ratiu, he had been an illegal communist. He was a doctor by profession but he had always worked in politics, he was a party activist here in Kolozsvar after 1944. At first he was working in the radio studio of Bucharest, but then in 1952 he was appointed editor-in-chief in Kolozsvar and was the director of the radio in Kolozsvar. Later he was transferred to the central radio in Bucharest. One could hear such voices but no one came up to me to say, ‘You stinking Jew, how come that you are the deputy editor-in-chief of the radio?', but we were working in an atmosphere where some people were wondering why this or that person was in a certain position. Or there were some colleagues who made statistics of how many people were Romanian, Jewish and Hungarian in the staff and how many of them were in the management. So there were such manifestations in the background, but no one complained openly, you couldn't say things openly, like today. So, I can't say that there was no anti-Semitism, but communist ethics and morality rejected this in theory. And there was a law on national minorities, which condemned any manifestation of chauvinism, xenophobia and nationalism and imprisoned people for it; this law is still in force but no one keeps it any more.