Tag #138713 - Interview #78499 (Bernat Sauber)

Socialism had beautiful ideals, only not the ones they applied. There were positive things, but also lots of bad things. We weren't allowed to comment any of the government's or the party's measures. We had to accept everything, there was no, alternative. There was pretty bad that I couldn't express my opinion. There was another awful thing, that everyone has to go weekly to Marxism class. They did it separately for each profession, separately for the prosecutors office and for the court, separately for the medics, and so on. They held it in our school, the Bolyai Farkas high school, or in the Papiu high school, or at the party headquarters. Weekly, on Monday afternoon, there were Marxism-Leninism classes. We had to recite, and at the end we had an exam. There wasn't anything more terrible than to study all that nonsense, who said what at each congress, especially what Ceausescu said. If the Party edited a congress material, we had to process it for several months. There were small booklets which described how many pigs we would produce in 1968, how many chickens or how many eggs, or how many oxes we should export - that was all included in the Party's material and we had to learn it. Usually everyone took the prescribed material and read out what was required. But every employee had to be there, from the simple workers to clerks. There was a time when every morning before starting to work we had to read out the editorial of the Scanteia [Spark in English, the Communist Party's journal] at the workplace. I was forced to buy the Scanteia and I had to read it to know what was written in it. There wasn't any other source of information. It was prohibited to listen to foreign radio stations. We had to watch them in the television two hours per day. We were totally in the dark.