“I don’t hear well but my eyesight is good and everything else works,” said Iona. Not bad for someone born in 1923 and just turned 102. We were talking outside her hilltop house in Maramures, Romania, her home since childhood. She lives alone surrounded by woods and fields full of buttercups, daisies and other wild flowers. Once a month, with the aid of a walking stick, she goes down the hill to visit her grandson. “He's tried to persuade me to move down there, but I like it here,” she said. The grandson visits her at least once a day as does her son for whom she is full of praise. “I have the best son in the world. We drink schnapps together every morning,” she said.
Iona has clear memories of her childhood including her very short time at school. "I went only once,” she said. "I learned the Lord’s Prayer in one day so the teacher released me. In those days no-one checked that children went to school. Our families needed us to work.” That one day at school seems to have had a lifelong impact on her. Like many of the villagers, she is deeply religious. Images of various saints are displayed on the walls of her house and she frequently touches the wooden cross that hangs around her neck. Throughout our conversation she gave me blessings for a long and peaceful life, good health and freedom from war or hunger.
“You pity us but who will pity you?"
She also has darker memories. A century of life in this part of Europe has exposed her to major social and political upheavals as well as personal trauma. I knew that Maramures was once home to many Jews including the Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel. I asked her if she remembered them. “Yes, there were many Jews here,” she said. “They lived in nice houses beside the road. They bought lambs and sold the meat. They were taken away in carts, first to another village where they were put on trains. We watched them go. They never came back.” The deportation of the Jews of Maramures took place in 1944, when Iona would have been 20 or 21. She stopped speaking for a moment, summoning another part of the story from her memory. “Someone told me that as they were taken away one of them said: ‘You pity us, but who will pity you?’” and then added, "One man escaped somehow and was later baptised in Sighet (the nearest major town).”
Iona is not the only villager who remembers the Jews. Calina, aged 96 also spoke about them: “Some of them were shopkeepers. One had a shop selling exercise books, pencils, things for school. I remember there was a bell that rang when you opened the shop door. There were maybe four Jewish children in my class. I remember some of the family names - Appel and Wilder. We spoke, but we were not friends. We all kept to our own.” I asked her if she remembered the deportation and who it was that took the Jews away. “I was 14 when they took them away. There were terrible screams,” she said, “I didn’t see who took them. Maybe it was the police. It was in the Hungarian time. The police wore a feather in their hat then.”
Maramures had become part of Hungary in 1940 and the deportation took place four years later during the spring and summer when most of the deportees were sent to Auschwitz. Very few returned. Both Calina and Stefan, a resident of a neighbouring village, recalled learning Hungarian in school and could still remember a few simple words of the language. Stefan also recalled that many Jews lived in his village. “They were clever people. Some of them made hats. Others bought rams and charged for mating them,” he said. No Jews live in the village now, the only physical evidence of their long history there being a cemetery. There was once a synagogue, but Calina said: “After they were taken away it was destroyed and the materials used to build a new school.”
“Such cruel, terrible things happened"
Unprovoked Iona began to talk about the period immediately after the war. “When the war was over the Russians came. Don’t ask about them. Such cruel, terrible things happened. They came into the house and took things too,” she said. In 1947, the Romanian monarchy was abolished and the People’s Republic declared, consolidating communist power in the country. Iona spoke about how this affected her village. “The Communists took a census of all the animals. They claimed all the wool - except that from the legs and tails of the sheep - the poorest quality wool. We were allowed to keep that. They were not meant to include rams in the census, but one of the local communists was very spiteful and included them too. There was also a famine after the war. We were always hungry. We would sometimes take bark from the beech tree, boil it and use it as food. They were very bad times,” she said.
We sat in silence for a few minutes and I worried that perhaps talking about the past had upset her or made her tired. I prepared to leave but she asked me to stay a little longer and began talking about how her family established their home in the village. “When we moved here we started from scratch. We had to bring soil from elsewhere as what was here was not good. We had to make a garden - if you didn’t have one people would judge you,” she said. “We planted many trees. There was no road, only a track. We had poor relations with the neighbours and they wouldn’t allow us to make a road so we had to carry everything on our backs.”
“Now is the best time to be alive, it’s all good now"
I asked her if she had ever left the village. She laughed and said: “I’ve only been to Cluj (a city about two hours drive away), and like school, I only went for one day.” I pondered over the fact that despite having only spent one day outside her village and one day at school, this woman had lived through, been impacted by, and had memories of, the major events of the twentieth century. As I left, she said: “Now is the best time to be alive, it’s all good now,” before giving me one more blessing, “Good wishes always, peace, health, no pain."
What a wonderful lady and a wonderful experience to have met her Adrian
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