I did not know that the teacher was the wife a very well known Securitate agent in town. The next day I asked my sister if the teacher had liked the composition. She answered yes and told me the teacher had kept the notebook to show it to other children from other classrooms. I began work at 22.30. At 23 10 some gentlemen came in, they showed their IDs and arrested me. The director of the hospital was informed and they brought another colleague to replace me.

            They did not talk to me and they took me to the most feared building in town, at Securitate. I entered a room where two gentlemen waited for me; I couldn?t see their faces because of the lamp. But in the light I saw my sister?s notebook. Then I understood.

The interrogation lasted for 4 hours and I was forced to give a statement as to what I had written and to declare I regretted those words, otherwise I would receive a certificate of schizophrenia and would be sacked. I had to declare these things because otherwise I would have been unemployed. I came to the hospital after two days, while my colleagues had waited for me impatiently; they knew what it meant to be picked up by Securitate.

            As a coincidence, the next year I witnessed a similar scene when I went to the premiere of the opera ? Ivan the terrible? where the resemblance between the action of the opera and the pain of the Romanians generated a wave of enthusiasm in the hall, filling the audience?s eyes with tears. The Securitate was among us; that?s why that was the only performance, the show being forbidden afterwards. (A. Bo., 4)

I?ve been a librarian for 25 years. I?ve had my share of problems. A man came to take a book, he brought back the next day. And so on. I thought he came for my sake, he was divorced. Then he became strange. He never came with flowers, candies, anything. But he asked me to give him the keys to the library, to come and read when I wasn?t there. He asked me who was reading what, what I was reading. I had started to be afraid. I had a cousin who was a Securitate agent, too. He, this reader of mine, had told me he was a teacher.  One day I told him I had a cousin, who was a teacher just like him, his name was such and such. He never came back since then. He probably found out about my cousin, who was an agent like him, he realized I had understood who he was and what he wanted from me. He wanted to put microphones in the library. But he did not come back. He left me alone. If I hadn?t had that cousin who was an agent, what would I have done? (A. G. I, 18)