Absurdity and Pain in Secret Police File

Cora Motoc poses nearby the headquarters of the Romanian CNSAS (National Council for Study of the Securitate Archives) in Bucharest, Romania, Friday Aug. 17 2007. For more than half her life, Cora Motoc wondered how her beloved grandfather survived the Communist era. This week, she finally dug up some truths about him when she read his Securitate secret police file. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda) (Vadim Ghirda - AP)

BUCHAREST, Romania -- For more than half her life, Cora Motoc wondered how her beloved grandfather survived the communist era.

This week, she finally dug up some troubling truths when she read his file compiled by the Securitate secret police: Even the barber was spying on him.

And, it turns out, her grandfather was an informant himself.

Poring over the 214-page file on Dumitru Motoc _ school teacher and amateur theater director _ she discovered that snooping infiltrated nearly every corner of his life before he died.

There were comments from actors bitter about failing to land a role in one of his productions. Transcripts showed the police bugged the conversations of Motoc and other retirees playing chess at a social club. It held notes scribbled by the barber after shaving his beard.

Far more difficult to digest was learning that her grandfather had been an informant himself, one in an army of possibly millions of spies who kept tabs on a population of 23 million until communism collapsed in late 1989.

"I had a bitter taste that he had to do it," Motoc said. "I saw him as a person of high morals and principles. He would always have fights over principles."

The discovery changed the 29-year-old's view of the world.

A campaigner for democratic reform who came of age after communism fell, she had long despised communist-era informants. But the news that the grandfather she idolized as a child was a spy made her contemplate the treacherous moral waters that ordinary people had to navigate in the Soviet era _ and forced her to wonder what she would have done in his place.

"I was more radical before I read his file. I was ready to point fingers, but the situation is so complex and intricate," she said after spending four hours reading the file Wednesday.

"I can't really judge him because I don't know what I would have done," she said, adding that he had been "forced by circumstances."

The files were only recently opened to the public, years after other former Soviet bloc states released their own.