Daily life during the war
Refuge
Click for transcribed interview!
Mirosloveşti. A beautiful and peaceful village from the heart of Moldavia that still bears the mark of a tragic past. The ones who will unveil a brief part from the history of this place are named: Gheorghe Costache Pădurariu, born in 1927, August 17th and Maria Pădurariu, born in 1932, May 2nd. They are my great grandparents.
How long were you refuged and how was life back then?
They refuged us away, the children of Mirosloveşti, where I was born, in case the Russians come, they won't take us prisoners. And they refuged us during the mounth of March or April in the year 1944.
But before that, starting in the autumn of '43 until '44, they trained us so we could walk a long distance in order to be evacuated. And so they did that but throught God's will, during the Great Fast came a violent wind which lasted three days, thefore we had to find shelter at the people who could receive us back then because we were, how to tell you... under the command campaign, by ourselves. When the weather passed, they evacuated us.
When i heard the guns shooting at Moţca, because they arrived there, they refugiated us near the river Moldova. We built a tent in which we stayed until the Russians came, I dont remember the date. They came in 44 when the front line was broken. When I heard that by tonight the Russians will be here we ran home from that place. When we got home we didn't know what to do therefore we decided to all go in a place where only destiny will decide who lives and who dies. So we went at one of the elders in the village. However when we got there, they told us to go somewhere else. At Ipati Costache. He had built a shelter under the floor which was concealed so the Russians won't descover it. So we took the cart, the cow, the horse and went in that place. In the morning the Russian soldiers came. Our hearts stopped. They saw the horse which they took and by the time we realised it, the soldiers were gone. We were crying so hard, they took all that we had, but they didn't do anything to us, they were looking for meat. A uncle of mine, a brother of my mother from Verşeni, Lăcrămioara, tried to prevent them from taking everything and was shot on the spot. Yes, they shot him. When we came back home from that place, in our stable were three wounded soldiers with army badges who couldn't walk. Yes they were officers in the military. Shortly, three strong and powerful Russians came and dragged one of them out in the garden to the end of it where there is a cliff. The soldier didn't know what was about to happen. They made him look down and shot him instanly, then the dead body fell rolling into the valley. The same thing happend with the others,they were all shot. A soldier took his documents out of his pocket and threw them away. So that no one would know who he was. After he threw them away, we took them and discovered he was from a town not far away. All of those soldiers were romanians. Another one, the most clever of all, came to my grandmother and told her to give him a shirt because he wanted to go home. Even through scared, she brought him the shirt. When she gave him the shirt, he took everything off him and put that on, found a rope and tied it around him, took a rake, which I still wonder how he saw and went home. After a few months, when the war ended, he returned to thank my grandmother if she was still alive because of her he could return safe from the war.
An interview by Teodora Vieru
Date: 1st of December 2013
Click for summary!
In the distance, the Russian troops could be seen coming closer, and with their arrival, both fear and our desire to flee from war, fights, bombs and weapons were increasing. But we were not given to escape unharmed from this nightmare: seeing how someone is killed in cold blood in front of their eyes, knowing that one's father died far away from his homeland; there things leave deep wounds which will last an eternity.
However, there were people who kept their reason untainted and were able to choose what is most important in life. Their own stories about how they managed to avoid the sentence to death, fascinates even after the passing of so many decades.
In fact, this would be the definition of war, as people do not go through it, but the war goes through people, through each one of us.
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Click for summary! - Diana Grigoras
Interviewer: Diana Grigoras
Interviewed: Stefan Cotovanu
Interviewing my grandfather, Stefan Cotovanu, I had the chance to discover a lot of information about the Second World War. Listening to those charming stories, I managed to understand the war from the point of view of an ordinary man living in a village, who always obeyed his superiors. Being almost 8 years old in 1944, my grandfather had to deal with very difficult conditions for life: leaving home, hiding from the enemies, losing some relatives and some friends that passed away etc. All these made me think about some really thought-provoking things, such as the way today's society should appreciate peace, that peace often regarded, unfortunately, as something people deserve and receive without giving anything back, not as a true blessing.