It’s a cold and rainy, overcast day here in Romania which seems appropriate because a man I’ve had the privilege to know has died.
Tomorrow I will go to his funeral in a small village near here so we can lay him to rest. But here today I’d like to celebrate his life.
It’s not his real name but for personal reasons I am going to call him Mr. Lazarescu.
He was born just over 94 years ago in that village, which today is in the “county” of Cluj, part of the historic region known in English as Transylvania. At the time of his birth, the country of Romania did not even exist.
The majority of the inhabitants of Transylvania were ethnic Romanians but the government was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with its capital in Vienna. A German speaking monarch named Franz Joseph made decisions for millions of people and a small village in a minor backwater was of little concern.
Transylvania had been ruled by the minority ethnic Hungarians in one form or another for about 250 years after several wars with the (Turkish) Ottoman Empire. The Hungarians formed the local nobility and government. Ethnic Romanians, such as Mr. Lazarescu were born to be peasants to work the land, having no vote and no representation in government.
To the east and south of Transylvania, other majority-Romanian regions had combined to form the kingdom of Romania. Elsewhere in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, nationalistic uprisings were stretching its resources to the limit.
3 years after Mr. Lazarescu was born, the Austro-Hungarian Emperor’s son, known in English as Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo, thus touching off World War 1. While the fighting and dying was concentrated in France and Germany, all of eastern Europe was embroiled in the struggle. Romanian troops, including some of Mr. Lazarescu’s neighbors, fought in the Second Balkan War, a subset of the “greater” war.
For four years, Mr. Lazarescu and his family managed to scrape out a living amidst the destruction of war and collapse of the monarchy and government.
In 1918 on December 1, ethnic Romanians in both the Kingdom of Romania as well as Transylvania declared their independence. Russia had undergone its Bolshevik Revolution a year earlier, transforming into a Communist entity. A year later, directly to the west of Transylvania, a man named Bela Kun transformed Hungary into the world’s second Communist nation. While “short lived”, several battles were fought between Hungarian Communist forces and Romanian Transylvania forces.
By the time Mr. Lazarescu was 9, he had lived through 5 years of war and seen his small village go from being ruled by Hungarian nobility to one ruled by Romanian nobility. Romania was now a sovereign nation with its own king, albeit he was an ethnic German who spoke no Romanian at all.
Although now sovereign, there was tremendous instability in Romania. The king died in 1927 and his son was prevented from taking the throne because of his marital infidelities, including one especially contentious liaison with a half-Jewish woman (an unforgivable scandal in those days). Between 1930 and 1940 the legislature was formed and dissolved 25 different times.
When Mr. Lazarescu was 18, the Great Depression hit the United States and this affected Romania as well. Unemployment was high and there were several strikes that were violently suppressed by the government. For a brief period to try to make ends meet, Mr. Lazarescu was employed as a kind of “custodian” or “janitor” in the palace of the king.
A strongly nationalistic and fascist movement known as the “Iron Guard” began to grow in power. By 1938, they were in contention with the king for who would rule Romania.
When Mr. Lazarescu was 28 years old, another war swept across Europe, beginning with Germany’s attack on Poland. An ascendant Nazi Germany in 1940 forced Romania to cede parts of Transylvania back to Hungary. Mr. Lazarescu’s home village was now back under Hungarian control for the next 5 years.
Also in 1940, a man named Ion Antonescu led a military coup and deposed the king of Romania and installed himself as “absolute ruler”. He threw Romania’s lot in with the “Axis Powers” and forced many Romanians to fight for the Germans, including Mr. Lazarescu.
Mr. Lazarescu was forced to fight on the Nazi side in the unspeakable horror known as the Battle of Stalingrad. I’ve asked him about that many times and to this day I can still remember him telling me with a single word what his strongest memory was – infometate, said in a low and quiet voice. The word in Romanian means “starvation”. Over 1.5 million people died in that battle but somehow Mr. Lazarescu survived.
Back at home, his wife and four children had to survive a Nazi occupation and widespread hunger. His wife passed on many years ago but I am privileged to know one of his daughters and she told me many incredible stories of the things they had to do to survive.
One of the most amazing was that Mr. Lazarescu’s wife dug a large underground hole where she kept a cow hidden from sight. Any and all livestock was appropriated by the Nazis simply as a casualty of war but the Lazarescu family needed that cow for its milk and butter to survive. To feed the cow, she would collect hay and drop it down a specially contrived hole. To keep from arousing the soldiers’ suspicions, she dug the hole near the church, therefore making it seem like she was an especially pious woman whose daily trips were to pray, not to feed a cow hidden underground to keep her family alive.
Starving and losing a battle he did not want to fight, Mr. Lazarescu himself went AWOL from the Battle of Stalingrad. Somehow, some way he actually walked all the way back to Romania in the midst of the war. I’ve asked him many times how in the world he actually did that but all he would ever do was chuckle and say it was something he had to do so he did it.
By 1944, the monarchy was restored and Antonescu overthrown. Romania switched sides and joined the Allies but by the end of World War 2, the Soviet Union and its troops were in control. By 1947 the local Communist party was strong enough to force the abdication of the king and to seize power.
At age 38, Mr. Lazarescu had now survived 11 years of warfare and five changes in sovereignty.
On paper, Romania was an independent nation but Soviet troops did not withdraw until 1958. A rising star of the Communist Party, Nicolae Ceaucescu seized absolute power by 1967 and Romania became once again a dictatorship. Mr. Lazarescu was now 56 years old.
For the next 32 years, Romania was under Ceausescu’s iron thumb. Agriculture was collectivized and many villages suffered. Thousands and thousands of people from the countryside were forced to move to cities in hideous apartment buildings that still exist today.
Ceausescu became the “darling” of the western powers, including the United States, because of his relative independence from the Soviet Union. This led to the west lending billions of dollars to Ceausescu’s Romania, which Ceausescu repaid by exporting most of Romania’s agricultural production. In Romania, Mr. Lazarescu suffered along with millions of Romanians due to widespread shortages and outright food rationing in the 1980’s.
In December 1989, Ceausescu was overthrown and executed. A shaky form of democracy was established. At age 78, Mr. Lazarescu and his family were finally free citizens in a free and sovereign nation.
Romania has blossomed since that time. Democracy has gotten a much firmer hold in the land. Mr. Lazarescu’s children now own their own homes and are mostly retired. Mr. Lazarescu’s grandchildren and great grandchildren are now citizens of the European Union and can and have traveled freely throughout Europe.
In his final years, Mr. Lazarescu had to leave his beloved village to be cared for in town by one of his daughters. This is where I met him and spent so many hours with him sitting in the garden, surrounded by the peace and tranquility that had been so rare in the rest of his life. His teeth were mostly gone and his voice hoarse but his mind was as sharp as ever, telling me jokes and chiding me for not starting a family of my own.
He told me that one of the brightest moments of his later years was when he met me. He’d hold my hand with almost tears in his eyes, unwilling to let go because to him it seemed a genuine miracle that a real, authentic American was there in his garden, in Romania. For more than 80 years of war, famine, strife and dictatorship the idea that democracy, freedom and liberty would ever come to his country seemed like a fool’s dream. And if one nation embodied those concepts, it was the United States.
It sounds like such a naive and stupid concept now, that America is the great shining example of freedom and liberty, but in those long, dark decades of empire, fascism and Communism, it was real. A couple of years ago two American friends of mine came to visit and we took a picture of Mr. Lazarescu with them. That photograph was framed and Mr. Lazarescu took it to his home village to show his fellow survivors that yes, after all these years, the Americans had truly come. You see, they used to laugh at him, saying he was an impossible dreamer.
His decline was rapid but peaceful. I hadn’t seen him in months but last weekend I felt a strong impulse to go visit with him again. He was completely bedridden and his voice was gone but he held my hand with that same, strong grip and his eyes were clear as he looked at me and listened to me speak to him in Romanian, an American come from across the seas and across the decades of time, using his own language.
Tomorrow I will go to that tiny village, unchanged and yet changed so much, and say one final goodbye to Mr. Lazarescu and walk with him on his ultimul drum, the last steps in the life of an amazing man who lived through and saw so much.
Rest in peace – odineste in pace.
