Gheorghe Cotorbai

So, we worked in the garden and cotton-picking. They took us out of school, they gave us a sack, it looked huge to me, because I was just little, and I dragged it along and it refused to fill up! And the cotton – I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen it – the cotton bud splits into four, the flower opens, a shell forms, a woody sheathe in which the cotton forms. And when it’s ripe, it opens and grows. But at each tip of the four pods there are hard spine and when you pick the cotton from them… Your hands were full of wounds, of holes. They took us out of school, lined us up, gave us each a sack and made us pick cotton. By the end of the day we had to have filled a sack with cotton: the plantation was near the Amara resort. It was nice for us little ones to be able to see the sea – my sister, for example – because they lined us up and they sang as they went to work [ironically]. They marched in a line to the plantation and sang the patriotic songs the teachers had taught them and which were obligatory back then. R: That was patriotic labour, at school? I: Yes, it was patriotic labour: cotton-picking mainly.

Mother was a housewife, she looked after the house, did the washing for us three children and my father. She also had to cook. On the subject of cooking, let’s return to the subject of food. In the first phase, after the supplies ran out, mother made us soup from lucerne tips. She broke off the tips of the lucerne, which were more tender, in the garden, and she made soup from the lucerne, and the second course was tomato broth mixed with water and oil. I can’t remember whether she fried it or boiled it, but it was very tasty with maize porridge. How we ate! And when there was no tomato broth, there was marmalade diluted with water served with maize porridge. And when I had hepatitis, my mother made saw wort, as they called it back then.

R: What exactly happened that day? I: One day, I no longer know the date, it was in the summer of 1951, in June, around mid-June, one evening a soldier turned up at our gate with some other men with peaked caps, I don’t know what they were, officers or sub-officers, because I couldn’t tell at that age, and they were with two civilians, they made an inventory of everything in the house and gave instructions as to what we were each allowed to take. They told us to collect our things, to get ready, because the next day we were being moved. Obviously we didn’t know what was going on, my mother was very distressed, she was crying. We asked them why and they just said: “Orders!” and that was that. There was no arguing with them. And we were forbidden to leave our yard until the next morning. Before that there had been soldiers patrolling the streets, about a week before it all began, as far as I remember. They were armed, wearing helmets, carrying backpacks. I don’t know why. And we, being children, we asked, we had to ask, but they didn’t give us any explanation.