It was eight o’clock. A shop opened. Kind of weird to have your coffee served in a shop, for us, the … starved ones. The warmth of the coffees unfreezes our noses. It was for the first time for me, when the city of Cluj was so unfriendly and for the first time when you could not have a coffee in a restaurant, a coffee shop, or this one was in a … normal shop.
After “the view” of Cluj and the effects of “the battles” from a single side and the lies that tried to “inform” us about the truth, left me with a sour taste and with emptiness in my soul. What I was wishing for and what I got! And most of all, who had … received. Honestly, I probably “got a little worked out” at this issue but, most of the times when I tell this stories, in my mind it gets shape, with more clarity, that this revolution was a movement started and sustained buy young people only, but others have gained after their elevation and sacrifice, about whom they say that by taking over the ribbons of power became worse than some occupants. That’s why I believe that in this chapter of life, on Romanians souls, there is a hard stone and a big tribute in the contributor’s pocket, but I believe I will never talk again about this facts, my friend ends.

From talk to talk, the stories were going on with no previous invitation. A villager, a little older than us, started the telling of a story in which it seemed he retraced his memories. After the way he was relating the stories, you could feel he was reliving what he was saying, “re-entering” again in the past. He was saying: “Nobody can define or measure the situation from “Ardeal”, after the Diktat. I had nowhere to retire. The bones of my near ones have whitened in this ground, in the holy land of Transylvania. My family was here. How could I leave? Where could I go? I thought to my self that in the way that others will live, I will also live or I will die. That’s how I thought then, until I arouse with an appeal mandate. The weird thing was that the mine diggers were always mobilized outright. Seeing also others that received the appeal mandate, fellows that I met at the exposure place, almost all were buddies of mine. It so seemed, that it was an intensive and well guided action of Romanians from “Ardeal” depopulation. They sent the Jewish in Germany; the Romanians on the Russian front, the gypsies were after the Jewish to the extermination camp or in the Russian steppe. The ones that left home were: women, children and the helpless.

We, the incorporated one, received the first mission from “Dobrogea” to the “Basarabia” depressions and on the waterside of Black Sea. Like any other reservist, the “wasp-wasted” left us too. We were all of us, all kinds of size. The types of wind from the steppe during winter were very strong and cold. We, the Transylvanians, few knew about what a wind was and specially one of a steppe. Then we put things straight. The small and raw-boned ones, the wind carried them up side down and the weird thing was that it was blowing them backwards not forward, having to recuperate the “walking” distances. On the ones that something has “deposited”, it was simply choking them, probably dying from heart attack. All this I remember from that “movement” with the cold wind in my face, as to the place of billet. Between us there wasn’t any soldier at least fat. They all “remained” on the way. From how many we were, the ones that we left, we got to that place of billet, because we hanged on close to each other, by hand, clothes or equipment. There I have seen images that a human cannot imagine. The frostbites were of all kind and in all the places. The clay fleshed from the bones from places that you would have never thought. The frozen ones remained with the bones uncovered in those places. A lot were crippled from the coldness, and then they were sent … home … if they could make it. About drugs … there was nothing to say. Through them I found one of my villagers that was telling me: maybe the way I see him know I think of him as a human rest, but if I would go in line, I will have the chance to see of what the “united armies” are capable of when it comes to the native population from Russia. I would consider myself lucky if I will end as close as he was now. I was completely out of place thinking of what this warlike will take me next.

Until we have made the Diktat I have vowed for the king and for the country. I came here for the “country’s defense”, but from here it seem we were under the command of the German – Hungarian tropes. The stories of this “remnant” villager have simply horrified me. The captains, having a feeling of the deplorable moral state that caught us, called for our embarkation at midnight, in wagons: boxcar, on an opened line. They were “pushing” us to the East, to the “heart” of Russia. The train was going on for six hours. It was a winter with short days and in which the wind was snow blasting continuously. It seemed that the night was endless. The air from the carriage, although it was getting through the board as if it was perforating you, because of the “over-population” of the carriage, was unbearable to breath. I pushed the door of the carriage a little so that we could “aerate”. The soldiers that were sitting down in the carriage started to howl that they were cold, the ones that were standing up, bawled at them approving what I was doing. In fact we were so overwrought that if we could, we would have started a fight from anything. That’s how it happened now. Someone has started a concourse that you could not figure out what was happening in that carriage. I believe we started to cross over the “Nistru” River. You could see outside a frozen expanse and from place to place a bit of jungle. I believed it was a swamp and in a full agitation, as if someone had pushed me, “I felt” in the swamp. The ones that have seen this, started to hoot, after this I heard how they throw their personal effects and even the weapon, after me. You could still hear the train but only as an echo. The ice over which I jumped broke getting into the swamp till my armhole. I rest in the swamp for a few hours necessary both for the orientation and for not breaking more ice, a thing that could be noticed from the trains that were leaving for the front. In the evening with the few things and any food I started to make the first steps to the country. The wolves “choirs” guided me everywhere, but it seemed they had enough corpses that they didn’t “annoy me”. Just one thought guided me: to move forward continuously. Where there was no danger I was walking by foot, otherwise I was crawling. At the beginning the wolves pack had frightened me, after that when I was hearing them I was glad, I was sure there were no troupes around, they brought me peace. In my hunted back-down, going through the places where the troupes have been through, other fighting, other just getting to the front line, an image that for a human being was incredible presented to me. There were a lot of amputations made by the cannon shots, but it could not be compared with the crimes of the civilians committed by the occupation “forces”. With all the fear that guided me for years, I woke up, thinking: “God, where were you when those wicked people snapped these innocent people, children, mothers to which they have taken out their babies from their belly with the knife”.