Word: timisoara
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...Christmas Eve in Timisoara, the border city where the uprising against Nicolae Ceausescu first bubbled up, a young woman stood in a field, rocking back and forth, crying softly. "Bloody, oh, how bloody," she crooned over the corpse of an old man. His hands had been cut off, his body disfigured by boiling water and acid. He had been her father...
Nothing could have prepared the mind for Timisoara and the tableau of horrors left by the regime's last and worst spasm of barbarity. In the same muddy field, laid out on white sheets, were two dozen other naked bodies, more victims of a massacre Dec. 16 and 17 by the Securitate, Ceausescu's secret police. These bodies too had been subjected to efforts to render them unrecognizable, an obvious attempt not only to spite those the victims left behind but also to intimidate them. The bodies bore various marks of torture: ankles entwined in barbed wire, stomachs crudely sewn...
Rumor swirled. Everyone had heard about one place or another where Ceausescu followers had suddenly appeared: "Last night we heard that paratroopers loyal to that murderer ((Ceausescu)) had been dropped outside the town," said Asofei Jorim, 21, a student who had survived the Timisoara massacre and joined the militia guarding the city. "We have even heard that Palestinian students who were being trained as terrorists here are also supporting the old regime...
More than a week after the rebellion erupted, Securitate snipers were still shooting at anything that moved, armed or unarmed, in the streets of Timisoara. Every intersection had a checkpoint manned by young and visibly frightened rebels. Whenever a car appeared, they flagged it down to search for weapons; even a stooped grandmother might join in the effort...
...country thick with informers, where the constant fear of betrayal to | the Securitate had destroyed people's ability to trust one another and work together, the newfound sense of common cause showed itself in other ways. Women rushed out to the army tanks rumbling along Timisoara's streets and passed baskets of bread and pails of tea through the hatches. One recalled another legacy of Ceausescu's -- the beggaring of Rumania -- when she explained, "We have nothing else to give the soldiers except bread...