Selected text
After graduating my first faculty I started working as an agronomy engineer. You received a mandatory repartition from the agriculture faculties, you didn’t simply choose where you wanted to be hired. And I received a repartition in Botosani, I could choose the facility in Roma – there is a locality called Roma in the county of Botosani, but it had nothing to do with Rome in Italy, except for the fact that it was placed on some hills, some hillocks –, the village of Roma includes three villages: Roma de Sus, Roma de Jos and Cotargaci. [Roma is located 14 km north-west of Botosani.] And I worked there for a year, the facility underwent a merger, I was young, so they requested me to move, and afterwards I worked for almost 5-6 years in another village, a village called Corni. [Corni is located 23 km south-west of Botosani.]
Work was very hard. We belonged to the generation of collectivization, of agricultural co-operatives [8] – we were a sacrifice generation, despite outside opinions or ideas that are not familiar with the specificity of the profession of agronomy engineers, and that portray us as tools of the communist party for implementing collectivization and for administering those communal farmsteads – later called Agricultural Production Co-operatives. I say that on the contrary, the largest percent of those working in this branch were cannon fodder, meaning that I had an inhumane work schedule, we had to work even Sundays – during those 40 years of work I had no idea what weekend meant, except from foreign motion pictures –, and during the years of collectivization [the late 1940’s and throughout the 1950’s], and even afterwards, the amount of work was enormous because, being the only engineer in an agricultural facility with more than 3,000 ha and 2 livestock breeding sectors, as the case was in Corni, in the county of Botosani, there was work to be done. If possible, I could have worked for 24 hours out of 24, and still it wouldn’t have been enough, as I was the only one in charge of making all the technical decisions, and on many occasions, not only the technical ones; the citizen in charge of the facility was a very decent person, we got along well, he respected me, but it was still he who used to tell me: ‘Listen, please, you take care of my problems as well, for I will go wherever you send me to oversee a work process, where work is being done, but you run this facility.
Work was very hard. We belonged to the generation of collectivization, of agricultural co-operatives [8] – we were a sacrifice generation, despite outside opinions or ideas that are not familiar with the specificity of the profession of agronomy engineers, and that portray us as tools of the communist party for implementing collectivization and for administering those communal farmsteads – later called Agricultural Production Co-operatives. I say that on the contrary, the largest percent of those working in this branch were cannon fodder, meaning that I had an inhumane work schedule, we had to work even Sundays – during those 40 years of work I had no idea what weekend meant, except from foreign motion pictures –, and during the years of collectivization [the late 1940’s and throughout the 1950’s], and even afterwards, the amount of work was enormous because, being the only engineer in an agricultural facility with more than 3,000 ha and 2 livestock breeding sectors, as the case was in Corni, in the county of Botosani, there was work to be done. If possible, I could have worked for 24 hours out of 24, and still it wouldn’t have been enough, as I was the only one in charge of making all the technical decisions, and on many occasions, not only the technical ones; the citizen in charge of the facility was a very decent person, we got along well, he respected me, but it was still he who used to tell me: ‘Listen, please, you take care of my problems as well, for I will go wherever you send me to oversee a work process, where work is being done, but you run this facility.
Period
Location
Corni
Romania
Interview
Simon Glasberg