Wherever the anti-communist groups operated, throughout the entire extent of the Făgăraș Mountains, informants also operated, from Olt to Zărnești, in the nearby forests and villages to the area of Rupea, Sighișoara, Agnita and Hârtibaciu. Informants knowingly helped the Securitate and sent innocent young people to death, and their supporters to camps and prisons. „I declare that I will never be able to sell Metea and Gavrila, who are dear to me, like my children,” declared priestess Valeria Raita from Săscori to the Securitate. The Securitate also tried to turn Victoria Nicapopii from Lisa into an informant and even gave her money for such a service. However, Victoria took the money, put it in her bag and went straight to the mountains to meet the fighters. „They gave me money to hand you over to them, but I took it, I didn’t even look at it and I brought it to you to use,” Victoria Nicapopii from Lisa told the partisans. Rivers of ink flowed during the period 1948-1964, but also in the years that followed, through which the names of anti-communist fighters and their actions reached the Securitate and Militia commanders who ordered the harshest measures, which far exceeded our imagination, to transform them into tools of the new regime. Those who continued to oppose ended up in front of firing squads and between the walls of prison cells or in exhausting labor at the Canal or in the camps in the Danube Delta.
The confrontation in the house of teacher Ion Pridon, when Marcel Cornea was killed
„Whenever his face comes to mind, (a.k.a. Marcel Cornea) Eminescu’s verses join me, because even today, after 40 years, I cannot imagine him dead. I knew him as a child, from the „Radu Negru” High School in Făgăraş. I – in the 5th grade, assigned as an instructor in the guardhouse, in the 2nd grade, where I became emotionally attached to a number of children. I – for 15 years, they – for 12 years. They were: Victor Florea, Nuţu Leonte, Drăghici Horia, Cornea Marcel, Gheorghe Peptea and Bulgăr. We became friends and grew up together in the high school’s cross brotherhood between 1938-1941. It seems like from then on they called me „Moşu”. I met Macel again in 1947 as a pharmacy student in Cluj… We parted ways in Părău and I had asked him to keep an eye on Gicu and Stanciu (aka Nicolae Stanciu and Gheorghe Duminecă). On the evening of November 6th to 7th, Marcel and the student Gilu Radeş were in the house of teacher Pridon. Marcel initiated Gilu into the secrets of the place, they prayed in their room at the end of the corridor, they told some more stories, they placed their weapons at their heads (Gilu had a ZB rifle, and Marcel a submachine gun). The doors to the corridor were locked. Teacher Pridon didn’t even want to hear that he was sleeping in bed and his guest was sleeping on straw outside. That evening, teacher Pridon was at a vigil with his family. The door opened and the security guards, certainly led by someone who knew the place and the customs of the house, rushed to the bed to immobilize Marcel. As the fight unfolded, it turns out that the security guards knew that there was only one man in the room. Gilu Radeş was thrown to the floor, struggling with a broken hand and hit in the head with the boots, losing consciousness. Awakened from sleep, Marcel grabbed the gun from his head, firing towards the open door at the security guards who were in the room and in the corridor. Finishing the magazine, the security guards dared and turned to fire. Then Marcel took a boot from the bed and continued to fight, hitting with it. He fell in blood with the boot in his hand. Hit and trampled, they were thrown into a truck and taken to Făgăraş. On the way, Marcel died. He was dead and the Securitate continued to beat him. They left Gilu Radeş alive, so that he could start the torture of the Securitate again by revealing his comrades. In 1951, in July, he would be sentenced to 25 years of hard labor. On the edge of the cemetery in Făgăraş there were some ditches on which a thicket of acacias had grown. Marcel was thrown into such a ditch. He was the beginning of a cemetery without crosses and without a name, whose place no one knows where it is,” Ion Gavrilă Ogoranu recounted the confrontation in the house of the teacher Pridon when Marcel Cornea was killed and Gilu Radeş wounded.
Pharmacist Iacob Cornea from Şinca Veche committed suicide after his son was killed by the security forces
„,, Iacob Cornea returned from the front in 1918. He had set up a pharmacy in the village where he was also a doctor, in Şinca Veche. The sick from the surrounding villages would come and, with manufactured medicines and herbs, he sought to ease people’s pain. He had married and had four children, two boys and two girls. His pride was Marcel, he was going to take his place in the pharmacy. But the pharmacy had been taken from him, then the news reached him that one of his sons-in-law, Milea, had been killed by the communists in Galaţi, where he was an agronomist engineer. Marcel’s flight and pursuit followed. He was taken and taken to the security and hung by his feet on hooks and beaten like a sandbag. His bones, crushed in the beatings, ached and sometimes he lost consciousness. When in the middle of the night he was taken away by the security car, he expected to be beaten as usual. But when he was put in front of his son’s corpse, in a security cellar, to recognize him, he could not say anything. His mind went dark. He could not remember anything, not even how he got home. It was as if he was no longer him. Covered with a beret, on the table was a pistol. How much Marcel had begged him to give it to him! Laughing, he pushed the beret aside, picked it up, pulled the trigger, „Ion Gavrilă Ogoranu recounted the drama of the family of the pharmacist Cornea from Şinca Veche.
