John Craciun: something about me by me

Craciun, Craciunescu, Craciunoiu and Craciuneanu are Romanian names. The most popular is Craciun which means ‘Christmas’ in English giving the name a celebratory meaning. Just like everybody else unable to choose where to be born, I first saw the light of day in Romania, one of Russia’s satellite countries, in 1952.

My family and myself had to suffer because of a deadly virus from Russia: socialism.
My aunt, grandfather and grandmother from my father’s side have been picked up by soldiers in the wee hours of an ill-fated day in June 1951 with just the clothes on their backs, and, together with thousands of other Romanians, have been deported to uninhabited areas of Baragan.
Their guilt? As the only store owners in the village, they were rich. Rich men under socialism were frowned upon as anti working class.

Dubbed as Europe’s breadbasket before World War II, Baragan is a vast, fertile land in southeast Romania that needed lots of workers for increased crops to be produced (the Romanian version of the Soviet Union’s gulag).
What better way to colonize the area was there in the head of new leaders at that time if not with rich individuals who could be forcibly exiled and from whom assets could easily be confiscated? Top achievers from the country’s former capitalism regime had to be penalized for their success under the new rulers not only to frighten the masses into seeing what will happen to them if they oppose the new socialist ideas, but also to bully them into adopting those ideas faster.

In the meantime, socialists and communists dreamed of enriching themselves first by punishing or worse, getting rid of, the rich, hardworking individuals and second by abusing their own fellow countrymen with antihuman laws. The tragedy is that, with Romanian socialism having lasted for 45 years (1944 - 1989), such parasites actually succeeded in doing just that: triumph of lies over truth, and victory of laziness and frugality over enthusiasm and permanent values.

My family has been allowed to return to their village of Mercina, comuna Varadia on the border with Yugoslavia in 1957 (Google Maps “Mercina, Caras-Severin, Romania”). My grandmother died in bitterness shortly thereafter and so did my grandfather a few years later.

Under the totalitarian regime of socialism-craving-to-become-communism, the mind and soul of twenty million Romanians has been under daily attack between loathingly obeying the absurd rules imposed on them and the right thing to do. All of us Romanians contributed to the demise of the system one way or another, including the Communist Party members who, ironically, by acting the way they did, were in fact showing to the rest of us how not to be and what not to do. The artificial society we lived in forced us to do things which few citizens in a free country do, meaning that all of us sabotaged the draconic system in countless ways until the system collapsed from within, culminating with the well-deserved, long overdue summary trial and execution of the country’s leading couple by firing squad on Christmas day in 1989.
The destiny of Christmas as the harbinger of hope, renewal and festivities has been fulfilled for a whole country sickened by false ideologies. (Remember Craciun? Not every living soul can help and bring huge, positive changes to everybody …)
YouTube.com has lots of videos on the sudden end of Romanian socialism.

After the Iron Curtain fell, a group defending the rights to memory of Romanians who have been punished for their hard work and wealth, and who perished without seeing the removal of the social cancer that communism was, has been created: the Association of the Former Deportees in Baragan. The group has the full list of persecuted persons, including members of my family.

You can also read a bit more about this dark chapter in Romania’s 2,000-year history by running a search for “Baragan deportations” at Wikipedia’s web site.