Bassarabia in Gulag: the tragic memory of contemporary history

Serafim Saka (1935–2011), the Bassarabian writer, originally from Hotin County, left to the posterity not only for emblematic fiction texts for the 60s (the novels Vamile, Linia de plutire, the novel-fact Pe mine mie reda-ma), also aimportant pages worth historical document. Being Bukovinean, Serafim Saka lived the vicissitudes of history. Like thousands of Bassarabians, he felt the force of the Soviet regime’s terror. The volume of confessions and dialogues recorded by Serafim Saka, Basarabia în GULAG (published in 1995), reveals, on the one hand, the tragic destinies of some families and personalities from Bassarabia, on the other hand, it reveals a terrifying and paranoid reality in which the population of the Romanian province managed to survive. Listening to the quirky stories of the detainees in the KGB camp, Serafim Saka took the place of a therapist with a double function: to „exorcise” and „cure” the wounds of the interviewed. Remembered by the Bassarabian ordeal and sang through the voices of those who passed through the ruthless imperial policy mixer, Serafim Saka strengthens in the memory of the reader the image of hundreds of thousands of human destinies crippled by the „red plague” machine. The national memory, the traumatic memory, with the characteristics of a historical document, brings together the lives of the different ethnic and social classes that have borne the stigma of the enemies of the Soviet people. The merit of Serafim Saka is to break, shortly after the empire’s disappearance, the silence set over the horrors of half a century. In addition to the factual material invoked the empathetic attitude and the writer’s skill to formulate the appropriate questions in order to highlight details, circumstances, replies, odious characters, everything that meant the Bassarabian ordeal subjected to re-education by the totalitarian system was noted