Memories of Communist Romania: Madeleine Simon Interviews Ion Mihai Pacepa

By Roger L Simon/

 

What follows is not my writing. It is an interview conducted by my daughter Madeleine Simon with Ion Mihai Pacepa for Madeleine’s eighth grade Global Studies Class at her Los Angeles school. Her class assignment was to do a report on a particular foreign country and to interview someone from the country. Madeleine’s choice was Romania.

Normally, such an eighth grade assignment would not merit publication at PJ Media or anywhere other than, perhaps, the school paper. But the man Madeleine interviewed, through my help and others, is no ordinary Romanian. He is Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest ranking intelligence official ever to defect from the former Eastern bloc (also the author of many books, including the best-selling Red Horizons, and a contributor to PJ Media). Mr Pacepa defected from the Ceauşescu regime by walking into the American Embassy in Bonn, Germany, in July 1978.

As the reality of communism and what it was like begins to diminish from the public memory, I think you will understand why we have chosen to publish this remarkable interview here.

INTERVIEW WITH ION MIHAI PACEPA:

1. What effect does the prominent Gypsy population have on Romania as a country?

In my other life, in Romania, one of my best friends was Ion Voicu, a prominent violinist (a pupil of David Oistrakh), and at first I had no idea that he was a Gypsy. Even if I had known, I wouldn’t have cared. I had many thousands of people working for me, and all I cared about was what they could do. One day, however, I suspected that Voicu was a Gypsy. It happened in the mid 1960s, when I attended a superb rendition of Paganini’s “First Violin Concerto.” Voicu was recalled to the stage nine times, and the audience was still clapping frenetically when a dusky-skinned old lady wearing a flowery dress and hat jumped up from her seat in the front row and screamed with all her lungs: “Quiet! Quiet! Don’t scare him!” After pausing for a moment, she burst into tears: “He’s my only son.”

Voicu returned to the stage, closed his eyes when his bow touched the string, as he usually did, and kept them closed until the last note. To a faultless technique he added a warmth that engulfed my body — and the whole concert hall with it. When Voicu played the last note of “La Campanella,” the audience exploded again. Nobody remembered the dusky-skinned old lady. Soon after that, Voicu became director of the Romanian Philharmonic, and he transformed it into a major European orchestra. During those years, I never heard anyone even suggesting that Voicu might be a Gypsy. He was just the Grand Maestro. That remained the case, until Voicu’s best friend — that was me — broke with Communist Romania and began exposing its crimes. From one day to the next, the Romanian government suddenly remembered that Voicu was a Gypsy, and it began wielding that weapon of the emotions called racism, which had so successfully been used by Nazism and Communism. The Gypsy Voicu was replaced as director of the Romanian Philharmonic, and he disappeared into anonymity. After Communism collapsed in Romania, one of Voicu’s sons, Mădălin (also a musician), became a member of the Romanian Parliament and dedicated his life to defending Romania’s Gypsy community.

Romania always had a Gypsy minority, just as it had Jewish, German and Hungarian minorities, but no one cared. The Gypsies were all Romanians, just as American Jews and American Germans are all Americans. Things suddenly changed in 1939, when the Nazis took over Romania. Hundreds of thousands of Jews and Gypsies were sent to concentration camps, where most perished. After the Communists replaced the Nazis at the country’s helm, they began expelling the Jews, the Germans and the Gypsies — or even selling some of them for hard currency. (I suggest you glance through The Ransom of the Jews, written by a good friend of mine, Radu Ioanid, a director of the U.S. Holocaust Museum; I helped him document that book, and I wrote its Postface.)   More >>