The more I understood the Romanian language and the more I assimilated into Romanian culture, the more I heard stories about life under Communism.
There were stories of persecution.
Murders made to look like accidents.
Since the village I worked in was right next to the Hungarian border, I heard many stories of people in the village who had escaped to Hungary, but who had come back later.
In those days, you could never be sure who was an “informer” for the regime. Many times, I would be walking down the streets with the teens and someone would pass by us, and the teens would say, “He was an informer.” You were marked forever if you had collaborated with the Communists. But all that was just speculation. You never really knew who the informer was.
During the Communist years, certain men in the village worked out codes to find out who was telling the police what.
One of the deacons in the Baptist church told me a way he had discovered who was informing the secret police. He had been close to the border of Hungary one day, so he told several of his neighbors several different stories. To one he told them that he was out there looking for a car. To another neighbor he said that he was working in the field. To another, that he was analyzing a field to maybe purchase later. And on and on. When the Securitate came to his house to question him, they said, “We heard that you were looking to purchase a field.” Immediately, because of the different stories he had told the different families, he knew which family had told the secret police. He would keep notes of who he had given information to and that is how they figured out who they could talk to and who they had to keep quiet around.
