October 30 marks the 7th anniversary of the national tragedy at the Kolectiv club. And I decided to write about it now, still in the midst of reading a fairy tale book: Diary 66. The night I burneda book written by Alexandra Fournea, a survivor and witness of a terrible event.

Honestly, I rarely read anything with my mouth open. And not only by mouth. With feelings, with guts, with all manner of empathy, horror and scattered anger. I didn’t expect Alexandra Fourney’s diary to be an easy read, but neither did I expect the ominous and necessary masterpiece I have in front of me. The indescribable cruelty is impressive only on the first ten pages, then the empathic pain that Alexandra’s book makes one experience becomes a harsh whisper that accompanies the entire reading. In the background, but no less important, you are struck by the precision and clarity with which the author goes beyond the pure empiricism of horror and peels away (painfully, like an epidermal peeling of the type described in the book) the invisible and effective patterns of metastatic and ubiquitous immorality that turned Romania into hell, a hell that hasn’t changed much since the Colectiv days. Without exaggerating in any way, I have not found a more convincing description of physical and moral hell in all the literature I have gone through so far. But, perhaps, the main merit of the book is that it managed to become the necessary document, at the same time meaningful and sometimes brilliant, convincing and harsh, which will forever record the horror of the Collective in our collective memory (what an irony!) . Alexandra Fournea’s book is not just any book. For Romanians, it must be necessary and impossible to ignore a historical document that, in my opinion, can easily stand next to the pages of Eugenia Ginzburg or Primo Levi. Every Romanian should read it at least once. At least twice if you’re an aspiring politician, health care professional, or teacher. According to Alexandra Fournea’s book, Romania must be different.

I don’t know how much that happened. I’m afraid, rather not. Which, of course, begs the question, why. How badly immune to facts our systems have become[i], what terrible blindness, what underground networks prevent us from leaping over this world upside down? Reading Journal 66, we suddenly find ourselves at the center of this interrogation.

Alexandra Fournea’s book was, at least for me, a unique and revealing document. Not only because I understood better what happened on the night of the fire and throughout the period after, but because I understood fundamental things about Romania and about people in general. Reading Alexandra’s text, my gaze was imbued (forever, I think) with a certain form of understanding, a liquid that colors, in the most correct sense, reality with smoke like evil, and evil like smoke, a kind of Gnostic. to translate every day of my life, every detail, every twist of reality into a new language, the language of clarity. Of course, I knew in advance about the permits granted on a shoestring, about the criminal and irresponsible superficiality of the Romanian institutions, about the medical and human misery in the hospitals, about the counter-selection and cynicism of disabled people who only want to maintain their power and privileges, and despite this , in Alexandra’s book he put all this into a new structure, forcing another level of understanding, an existential, qualitatively higher floor, where the mind illuminates the heart and the heart stimulates and gives depth to the intuition of the intellect. First of all, my attention was drawn to the question that Oleksandra puts at the center of her testimony: why? “I will never understand why God played with us like that. Why did they lie? Why did they torture me in the bathroom, refusing to give me stronger painkillers. Why did they torture me with that dirty catheter. Why didn’t they let Christina take me out of there. Why, probably, they embarrassed the doctors from Germany who came to help us. Why did they risk my life to hide the mess that prevents them from being real doctors, from being human. Why was retaining features more important? Who are they protecting by condemning us and condemning everyone who can get to them?”

This is a shocking sequence of questions with no shortage of hypotheses. Questions that are aimed at human nature and its Romanian avatar, but not being a mystery. Answering on a general-ethological level, I will say that often we are cowards, indulgent, unable, when it is convenient, to distinguish illusion from reality, we adapt and can convince ourselves that hell is a form of normality. , we are greedy for power, money and influence, obedient and with a short memory. On a more general level, but no less concrete, we are trapped, sociologically speaking, in the aquariums that are our reality, forced in Romania to strictly choose one of the following three states:

1) scoundrels among scoundrels who know the world of the powerful are ready to intercept their schemes and take advantage of them, becoming directly interested in perpetuating the customs, algorithms and culture of corruption;

2) survived among abominations, fatalistically choosing moral non-struggle, considering the ugliness and dystopian immorality of our world as a primordial and unchanging given. This category, I believe, includes the bulk of people, people who are happy that they have not been touched by the disease of meanness, who raise their children honestly and often dream that they will leave here forever. These are people who know, more or less transparently and analytically feel the scale of evil, but do not have the strength, will and motivation to fight against it. This is probably where you and I are, the readers of my text. Here are the average, rational people, the ones who choose, utilitarianly and completely humanely, not to waste their resources on the quixotic business of changing the deep culture of corruption and evil into which they were born and which they have no hope of ever seeing end. . Here are our parents, forced to compromise to raise us and give us a chance. These are the exceptional people that Aleksandra Furnia talks about in her book, those who refuse to surrender their kindness and humanity to the inhuman mixer of the Romanian reality every day. A nurse who cares about you, a school secretary who still knows how to smile and wants to help you, a teacher who makes time for the suffering and burdens of his students. Exceptional people define an existential niche and probably still hold the compass of (our) world. But they cannot interfere with the giant, their humble kindness cannot be translated into the power to attack evil from the root, eternal evil, always lively, energetic, strong, tireless. Alexander Fournea writes convincingly and decisively about exceptional people: “There are few good people here and they are forced to play by the dirty rules of those who manage the institution. After some time, in order to survive, they begin to believe that they are doing good. They need work, they like work, they like to help. At some point, I no longer clearly distinguish the line between lies and truth, between good and evil. How can they make a difference? They are small, very small. The mighty would crush them in an instant, and then they would lose everything. Also, when they speak, no one supports them. They all stuck their heads in the ground and are silent, although until recently they had a voice and an opinion. They are left alone, face to face with these torturers who tell them that everything is in their heads and that everything is going well.”[ii]

3) finally, the third category is what I dare to call “confessors”, those who call evil by name, taking upon themselves the existential, financial, psychological and social risks of this vertical act, located outside the boundaries of utilitarian calculation and purely personal interests. Among such as Alexandra Fournea, Emilia Sherkan and some others. Few, extremely few, are impressive in their moral courage and refusal to participate in the malignant general illusion. Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro