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)

Now a growing tide of Romanians is plunging into the past to find out what neighbors, friends and even family whispered about them to authorities.

The files' release has brought wrenching questions: Do Romanians really want to expose spouses and children to rumors fed to authorities over a lifetime? Is the information reliable? Even if it is, is learning the truth about those one trusted worth the anguish that can result?

Revelations have already torn families apart and destroyed friendships, a measure of the trauma held in the 1.3 million Securitate files.

Dumitru Motoc's file is No. 1161919.

Information in it begins with 1942. Seven years later, he was arrested and sent to prison for allegedly having belonged to Romania's fascist Iron Guard, based on the testimony of an informant. The file's last entry was made a few months before his death in 1985.

He was one of millions of Romanians who spied and were spied on by the communist regime, creating an atmosphere of fear and distrust. The Securitate was created on the model of the Soviet Union's NKVD secret service, the predecessor of the KGB.

Motoc believes her grandfather was recruited as an informant after being incarcerated in 1949 as a political prisoner. The 6-foot-tall teacher came out of prison eight months later weighing just 99 pounds.

Political prisoners often agreed to become informants in exchange for early release. Those who didn't were kept in prison for years _ if they didn't die in the harsh conditions.

The informant's pledge stood until death, and the spies themselves were kept under surveillance. At one point, one in four of Romanians was believed to have been an informer.

"It was insidious, absurd," Motoc said. "The scale of it was nationwide. Everyone was spying on everyone. They were reporting on the most petty stuff. It's like listening to gossip and putting it in a diary."

There were several informants in her grandfather's file, including one called "Teddy" who spied on him for decades. Motoc said she discovered little in the file about her grandfather's own spying activities.

The absurdities of the system become apparent in the reports from the barber, a frustrated poet who was trying to persuade Motoc's grandfather to take his writing seriously even though he misspelled words and was erratic in punctuation.

A police officer noted in the margin that the barber's "mental facilities may be called into question" and suggested he be dropped. A superior vetoed that idea, writing in red ink: "Even so, keep watching his poetry."

Motoc feels relief at learning the truth about her grandfather more than a year after applying to read the file, one of 2 million kept at the Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives.

But the overriding feeling is contempt for the Kafkaesque system.

"It's the pettiness of it all. I can't believe that the Securitate were spying on a bunch of old retirees playing chess at a club because they were alleged to have had links with the Iron Guard," said Motoc, who coordinates a democracy and justice reform program for a German non-governmental organization.

More than 20 other people crammed into a room in the Securitate Archives with Motoc and her husband Wednesday, most of them elderly. One left muttering: "I don't want to read such garbage about friends informing on me."

Motoc prefers her own recollections of her grandfather as a kindly patriarch.

"In the end what matters are my memories about my grandfather. I can truly rely on those," she said.