The Pigs' Slaughter

by Florin Grancea

  “With pigs it's easy”, Uncle Gheorghe used to say, “but people die very hard”. “What you see in the movies (and he was referring to the Soviet movies about WWII) is nothing but lies”. “People are not like pigs. You can sometimes put your knife a dozen times into a body and that body will still fight back” he used to warn us, the kids sitting around him. Then he would show us his wounds, his knife wounds, and he would point out which ones he got from Germans and which from Russians, only he could tell them apart.

  Years later, Uncle Gheorghe died, but when he did he was still amazed at the news that 22 soldiers were killed almost instantly in those trucks.

  “Surely they were hit by dozens of bullets each” he said and he cried. For him that was not the definition of friendly fire, but the definition of a well-organized firing squad. “They were like Ilie”, and Ilie, his son, came back in one piece from his army time, married and had a daughter, unlike those 22 killed suddenly, sprayed with bullets, after their trucks were cleared at the checkpoint.

  That morning I woke up at six and got out of my bed quickly to go to the toilet downstairs. At exactly the same time the survivors got out of their trucks and took cover behind them or ran towards the forest.

  “Don’t shoot! Stop shooting!” the screams were heard in perfect Romanian. But they were being shot at from three different points in that ambush and if one started to shoot, the others followed suit.

  “We surrender!”

  “We surrender!”

  “We surrender!”

  “We surrender!”

  “We surrender!”

  “We surrender!”

  But nobody cared. Those defending the airport had orders to kill. It was strange because the airport wasn’t even closed. Taxis were coming and going, people were arriving for work in buses. A bus came into view minutes after those first 22 had already been slaughtered and it, too, entered the kill zone. The machine guns rattled and 8 civilians got killed in an instant, “how was that possible?” Uncle Gheorghe wandered again, questioning not the killing but their instant deaths. “People don’t die like pigs. They need more time”, he used to say to me, and he took his time. On his death bed he took his time, and it was painful for Aunt Parachiva to watch and for Ilie, too, just like it was painful for Uncle Gheorghe to watch those Germans and Russians dying and not being able to comfort them in a language they understood.

  Twenty years and two months after that bus entered the kill zone, the survivors and the killers alike claim that the people in it were lucky. Twisted, isn't it? Of course, they had bad karma that day. They got up on time, they showed up to the bus station on time and despite there being a Revolution, the bus got there and picked them up, on time. Now that’s bad karma. On the other hand, the bus driver wasn’t killed and put the bus into reverse and drove as fast as he could, blood spilling from the closed doors, the cold wind rushing in through the shattered windows, until he and his bus were out of range.

  He must have asked himself, "What the hell were the soldiers defending the airport thinking?". And they must have been thinking the same thing, too, because the surviving soldiers started to hear orders that made sense:

  “Drop your weapons”.

  Now that was useless. They had dropped their weapons well before that, without having fired them.

  “Stand up. Hands up”.

  Reluctantly, with fear mixed with hope, they did as they were told.

  “Start walking towards the airport”.

  Which they did. 61 survivors and that Ionescu, the one uniform that had joined them on their deadly ride started to march, to follow the orders. They got closer. Closer. They could see the faces of their friends' killers. The killers could see that they were just a bunch of kids, thin and scared in Romanian Army uniforms. Unarmed. Not dangerous at all.

  Ra,ta,ta,ta,ta,ta,ta...

  The professional soldiers defending the airport opened fire again. And 17 were killed again, to Uncle’s Gheorghe's disbelief, instantly. 12 others were wounded. They were the ones that confirmed my uncle’s theory, they didn’t die quickly. 11 of them pulled through.

  Private Vasile Buta wanted to pull through, too, but his karma was particularly bad. His family name, Buta, is the Japanese for “pig”, but he didn’t know that. Yet. I hadn’t that particular knowledge, either, despite the fact that 20 years after those events I was fluent in Japanese.

  Private Buta was wounded in both legs. Paul Bustiuc, formerly Private Paul Bustiuc, was his friend. “They took us prisoners and they forbade us to help the wounded” he recalls in a hushed voice. “He could have lived. He might have lost a leg, or both, but not his life” he speaks to journalists, angry. And I was a journalist in 1996 because my father had died, too, and I needed money to stay in college in Bucharest.

  Out of all the people slaughtered that day, private Buta died a pig's death. He was left to bleed “like a pig" recalls Paul, until his 5 liters of blood drained from his body, which, opened for the autopsy a few days later, looked cleaner than the bodies of people who die with their blood still in them.

  At six in the morning, two pots on the fire, my mom was in the kitchen where she would be all day long making lard.

  “Before washing, go start the willow smoke under the sausages”, she said, and I read the accusation in her voice, her shame that I was already 14 and I constantly refused to do chores, favoring my reading. The revolution and its broadcast on television were, for my mom, the worst things to happen that year. Not that she didn’t welcome the change, she did, but all that TV broadcasting made it difficult for her to ask for our help in the kitchen.

  Traditional fruitcakes had to be made that December 23rd, other cakes and biscuits, too, and everything had to be done before the sun went down. Next day, on Christmas Eve, people would flock to our door and kids would sing carols and she would serve everyone fruitcake and cookies and home made biscuits. The kids would get tea and the adults red wine. And the wine was another problem. My dad had no time to take care of it so I had to go down to the basement and fill 10 or so bottles of wine from the huge 50 liter glass vat. In that vat the grape juice turned into wine in late autumn, and I put the wine-filled bottles in the pantry ready to be emptied by the thirsty carol singers.

  Kids in the morning, youngsters in the evening and adults at night. I rushed outside into the cold, holding a newspaper and matchsticks for lighting the fire, under the sausages, then covering it with sawdust, wondering if carol singers would come.

  I usually sang carols with my sister at Auntie Anişoara and Uncle Lulu's house, but not that year, I understood it wasn’t allowed. Their house was across the street from the Town Hall, the place where Avrig's own Revolution continued, with Mr. Tatu as leader, and my father starting to make himself useful with his radio on which he spoke with the military operators in Sibiu.

  As the willow smoke engulfed the meats, I returned to the kitchen only to discover my father packing a sandwich for work and my mom weighting flour. The kitchen scale was set to 3 kilograms and I knew that she was preparing to make the fruitcakes.

  “Lucky you, Dad!” I said and he replied:

  “Some day this'll be you!”, and he smiled. He was lucky indeed. Although I didn’t know why, the whole situation was funny for my mom too. She smiled while pointing to a bag full of nuts.

  “I need them before noon”. It was decided. No arguments, and as I saw my father leaving for the Town Hall, in his navy blue raincoat, one size bigger than mine, which I got the same time as his, I fixed my breakfast from last night’s leftovers, sat at the table and started to devour it, mouth open, making noises to piss my mom off - my revenge for the bag of nuts.

  After breakfast I had to wash the dishes my father and I had used. I needed the sink for the nuts. In the Romania of 1989 nuts for traditional fruitcakes didn’t come from supermarkets in sealed plastic bags, but straight from the trees. We had a nut tree at the end of the garden.

  “This tree grows tall and it makes a shade. I sh
all put it here”, my grandfather had said, “to let our neighbors enjoy its nuts too”, and he planted it so we could get only a quarter of all the nuts it produced, while the two neighboring gardens would get the rest of them. They were good nuts, bigger than the Kiku’s, a neighbouring family.

  The nuts rolled into the sink and I turned on the hot water tap. The gas boiler came to life and I could feel the water getting hotter and hotter. Then, I turned the boiler’s dial to the hottest setting and with a wooden spoon I started to mix the nuts. Steam and their characteristic perfume spread throughout the house. I waited and after several minutes when they were well soaked I turned off the water.

  My mom handed me an empty plastic bucket which I filled with the nuts. Soaked in hot water they would be easier to crack and clean. This was not an easy job and I wanted to do whatever I could to lessen my pain.

  To crack nuts, people from the "civilized world" would use a nutcracker. I knew that there were nutcrackers in the world. I had once seen a ballet by Tchaikovsky with that name. But I had no idea what a nutcracker looked like. Nobody in my town did. All my friends cracked their nuts for their fruitcakes the same way I did: With a hammer and anvil.

  So I had to set up my work space, and I took a small anvil that we always used from the kitchen and a common midsized hammer upstairs together with an old tablecloth. Since the dining table was still in my room, I wanted to work there and watch the Revolution while cracking the nuts.

  First I woke up my sister and asked her to go downstairs to have her breakfast. During holidays we almost never had breakfast together but my mom did not care. We did have to eat lunch and supper together. Our parents always had breakfast without us, at 6 am, one hour before we would wake up. Their jobs started at 7 am so they had to wake up early every day. With Felicia gone, I turned on the TV and it was like the TV hadn't been turned off at all. It was like watching a rented videotape from the position you left it the previous night.

  The same people were still there on the same screen, more tired than when they first entered the studio, but still the same. It was like they were afraid that they would lose their share of the new power if they left. Still, seeing them was comforting. It meant that Ceauşescu wasn’t back and we were still fighting him. It also meant that the Arab terrorists trained by Ceauşescu weren’t as powerful as everyone had feared. That morning I thought that despite seeing that the shooting was still going on we were about to win our freedom at last.

  Did German kids crack nuts for their fruitcakes? I doubted it. I once saw in a German magazine a picture with fruitcakes that looked so much like ours, and I imagined how delicious they were and how easy to get from the stores. Instead, I had to work for mine, and I wasn’t so happy about that.

  I took a blanket and spread it on the dining table. On it I put the old table cloth and while sitting down I placed the anvil in front of me. The blanket was to protect the dining table but also to deaden the sound. If I wanted to watch TV the nut cracking had to be as quiet as possible.

  Bang, bang. The hammer would hit the nut first lightly and then decisively. Bang, bang. Minding not to hit my fingers, bang, bang. I would continue until a pile of cracked nuts had accumulated and then stop and take the nuts out of their shells.

  My sister came in and began to help me which I was grateful for. I got on with smashing and cracking the nuts while she took on the job of cleaning the nuts from the smashed shells. We were such a good team.

  It was then that we heard that the Otopeni airport had been attacked by terrorists and the brave soldiers defending the building were fighting back. And we cheered. Me, especially, I was so proud of our great Army. So proud.

  Proud also were the soldiers who opened fire on the three trucks and the civilian bus that came to attack them.

  They were proud but they weren't free. They were nothing like private Radutoiu. Back in 1944 he was as young as they were when, as a private, he was parachuted into the war near Odessa, on the Eastern Front where Romanians and Germans were fighting a lost battle against the Soviet Red Army. When he left the plane he had two items with him: an assault rifle and a Bible. Before reaching the ground he had already dropped his rifle. "Why?" was my question when he told me that story the very first time. "Because written in my Bible was THOU SHALT NOT KILL. It was my choice," he said, and he didn't realize it but he was giving me the same definition of freedom that that French guy called Sartre coined after WWII was over. Private Radutoiu started to walk home, a small village in Oltenia, the very moment his feet touched the ground. And turning his back on the war he choose to be free.

  "What happened next, did you make it home?" I asked.

  "Yes, of course. God was with me. The next day I ran into some Russians. There I was, Bible in hand, looking for plants or fruits I could eat when I saw, not more than 50m away in a ravine, a tank. A T34. Waiting. They saw me, too, because the tank started to turn slowly in my direction. Boom, boom, boom. They were firing a heavy machine gun, but I'm not sure they really wanted to hit me because I wasn't hit. So I started to run, and ran under a tree. See, there were almost no trees in Odessa, except the huge one I was running towards, and the Russians behind me were boom, boom, boom. I prayed to God and got behind the tree and the tree was shaking. Boom, boom, boom. And I heard the tank moving, getting closer but I stayed there and didn't move. And the tank got so close I could hear them laughing and then it stopped and someone shouted something at me so I came out from behind the tree. Bible in hand. And we looked at each other. They were no younger nor older than I. Just like me, but dressed different. And then the tank started to move, turning away and I was left alone. I guessed that it was a good idea I dropped my rifle", he smiled, visibly satisfied with that outcome.

  "So, how did you get across all that land to Oltenia?" I asked him again, expecting more miracles, but he caught me by surprise when he said:

  "On my horse!"

  "Your horse? You had no horse, you jumped from a plane, Bible and assault rifle only, no horse", I said in disbelief.

  "Yes, I had my Bible. And I was getting close to the Dniester river. It's a huge river, you know. And there were other soldiers too. Maybe running home, like me, or retreating to other positions. I didn't ask. They didn't tell. But there was also a Wehrmacht officer. He was riding a superb horse, but he couldn't cross the river on it. So he set the horse free and jumped in the river and swam for half an hour to reach the other side. I was watching. And he got there and called the horse, but the horse didn't move. That was the moment I knew that horse was mine. God Himself was giving me a horse, and I called it as we called our horses back home, and the horse came. And I got on it and jumped in the river, and in less than 10 minutes we were already on the other side".

  "And the Wehrmacht officer?" I asked eagerly.

  "He came to me and said that that horse was his, but I answered in German 'You're wrong, Herr Officer. Your horse is on the other side of the river. This is my horse. If you want it we can swim back and you can bring it over'. He had a pistol, like all Wehrmacht officers, but I wasn't afraid. I was holding my dry Bible in my hand, and the officer saw it and smiled and asked me to take care of that horse...even now, after more than 50 years I pray for him and thank God he abandoned that beautiful horse...How proud I entered my village riding it" he said finishing his story.

  As I told you before, the killers at the Otopeni Airport were proud too. And the truth is they stayed proud until they went outside to kill what was left of their 'attackers'. “Take no prisoners”, was the order, and they were about to execute it when they saw that something was wrong. Terribly wrong. So they dropped the order and took prisoners. The terrorists were just a bunch of butchered kids, and they started to yell at and accuse them:

  “You are terrorists, you came here to kill us”, they yelled and they even hit them in the face with their AKM’s, and blood was spilled inside the airport building, but the 'terrorists' were afraid. They looked at them with abject terror in their young eyes,
so the brave Romanian soldiers who decimated half of them minutes before were not so proud anymore. Why did they shoot their guns? Nobody directly threatened their lives. Of course the orders were clear. The orders came from the top and they were classified. Three trucks full of terrorists dressed like army recruits were about to come and try to kill them. Nobody was to be taken alive but these were no terrorists. They were real recruits, they knew that but they were still angry. They had killed innocent people, so they continued to yell at them.

  Guns were cocked, adrenaline was flowing in their veins and still floating inside their heads was the doubt: what if that fucker Ceauşescu trained kids as terrorists, what if these were, as the intelligence they had gotten indicated, real terrorists bent on taking revenge? So they stopped them from helping the wounded and it was then that Private Buta died like a pig. Some of those that had survived despite being critically wounded were lucky that a taxi driver drove by, stopped and took them to the hospital, away from the killers inside the airport, away from the dying Private Buta.

  That taxi driver definitely had good karma. Snipers saw him picking up the bodies but they let him pick them up and drive away. He wasn’t aware of it, but someone at the top in the Ministry of Defense had decided some wounded soldiers, possibly dead soldiers, paraded in a taxi through the crowds and then in hospitals would show that terrorists existed and that the new power was fighting them off. So he drove away, speaking to the wounded soldiers like the father he was. But I didn’t know all that, and was still thinking about those German fruitcakes that I had only seen in photos. I was grateful for the job done by the Airport defenders.

  Now I know, that was how I was supposed to feel. That was how the new leadership had planned it, it was just like General Militaru had imagined it. So I looked at Iliescu and Roman with adulation, and I loved them and prayed for them and wished them all the strength and good luck they needed in their fight against Ceauşescu.

  How was I supposed to know that my prayers were already answered? How was I supposed to know Ceauşescu had been captured one day before when his capturers played with us and were pretending, on national television, that they were still hunting him down? How was I supposed to know there were no terrorists fighting for Ceauşescu but only brave soldiers fighting against invisible terrorists? And killing youngsters dressed in our country's wet uniforms?