In school, one special course was reserved to indoctrination. Once, one of my colleagues had an ironic remark about the Comrade. The joke worked like a spark that caused quite an uproar, with everyone speaking up their sincere thoughts. The headmaster turned red, and tried to calm us down, but in vain. We had colleagues whose parents were high officials, members of the nomenclature. The small incident lasted for about a minute, and we did nothing but reproduce the things our parents said in earnest, at home. The scene happened in the autumn of 1989, when I was in the seventh grade. (69)

I don?t know what my party file contained. But I know for sure that it existed somewhere, at the party commission or the city council. All the statements one had to make as a party member went somewhere: the application for membership, the activity reports, the reports describing meetings with the foreigners. There were other ? materials? regarding ?the problems? that the party considered the respective person had: as far as I was concerned, the fact that my wife was the daughter of a former land-owner, that the uncle who had supported me had been imprisoned at a certain point. These reports were enclosed in the party file. In order to be professionally promoted there was a party representative in each county council to whom you could turn if you had any objection. I know, for instance, that there was a person in charge with the intellectual ?elite? inside the party in Bucharest. And all these interventions would be enclosed in the file. The ? problematic? persons had to write periodic autobiographies, because the repeated versions could finally betray possible incongruities, hunted by ?them?. (A. M., 9)

The last decade of communism found the priests? children- the mature ones- prepared. They had been through entrance examinations in schools and universities, where the file was the fundamental selection criterion. Then, at work they had to be content with the place they were given and to keep a low profile. Their effort was tenfold because when confronted with the prospect of a re-organization one could say: ? X is a priest?s son, but he works hard. ? This effort to make oneself useful was sometimes killing, one had to carry 5 or 6 idlers on one?s back and one was not allowed to retort.

The reorganizations were on a yearly basis and they were based on the files. At a certain point, between 1982-1983, the list of the ? drawbacks? contained 40-50 points. If one had the bad luck of having another flaw, like a relative abroad, or to come from Bessarabia, nothing else would count. (75)