Corina L. Petrescu
Files produced by the secret police forces of former Eastern Bloc countries are complex documents, not completely reliable and yet not fully untrustworthy either—or as the British historian Timothy Garton Ash has remarked, “There is a truth that can be found [in a secret police file]. Not a single, absolute Truth with a capital T but still a real and important one” (2002, 282). As historical documents—texts anchored in a time and place and resulting from specific circumstances—files in general “supplement or rework ‘reality’” and are never “mere sources that divulge facts about ‘reality’” (LaCapra 1985, 11). In thinking with Paul Ricoeur, secret police files prefigure meaning—that is to say, they provide a network of everyday life occurrences and their interpretation through the eyes of the people and institutions that produce them, which call forth narrative and make storytelling possible (1984, 54–64). They bear the quality of “as yet untold stories . . . that constitute . . . the living imbrication from which [a] told story emerges” (75–76), as they amass documents verified by the various people who wrote, commented, approved, or reviewed the information therein. This leaves researchers who turn their attention to them regardless of their field of expertise in need of organizing, analyzing, and making sense of this information, which can only come about through critical engagement with the material at hand and its proper contextualization. After all, as Cornelia Vismann has shown, “when files are opened to reveal their contents, they are not simply read. Files are processed” (2008, xi). Thus researchers configure meaning through emplotment: they sow the information in the files into a story with characters, events, and settings that depicts a time and place. Emplotment has a mediating function, as it renders these elements meaningful in the context of a larger whole, and by so doing it creates a unity that has a narrative and temporal structure that endows the constitutive elements with an explanatory role. This allows any reader of the researchers’ story to follow and refigure it in the act of reading, by extracting it from an abstract, hypothetical time and integrating it into a lived, real one. The reader can bring to light uneffected links between circumstances, agents, actors, or motives by drawing connections between the researchers’ story and a reader’s own knowledge of events that have occurred since and given the story another angle. In this sense and returning once more to Ricoeur, the reader enters the world of the narrative and completes the story, which becomes a “joint work of the [researchers’] text and [the] reader” (1984, 76).
According to Valentina Glajar, a productive method for literary scholars to process and configure files is to unearth the “file story” encapsulated in each file (2016, 57). She defines the term as “a multilayered and polyphonic biographical act” that combines the pieces of information offered by the files with the gaps equally present in them. This collage is “precarious” and “capricious” as “any overlooked or missing detail [in a file] has the potential of disturbing or rearranging the life fragments” captured between the covers of the file (this volume, 31). In my analysis of Securitate files, I build on Glajar’s work and suggest that file stories unveil an identity of the surveilled that the secret police have constructed, which is that of a “target” (obiectiv).1 Consequently, when configuring a file story from the porous material in a file, one can primarily unveil a surveilled person’s target identity—the distinguishing traits of character and behavioral patterns that stirred the Securitate’s interest and motivated the person’s shadowing. As it reflects a secret police’s take on the surveilled at a given time and in a specific context, this target identity does not necessarily correspond to reality nor does it have to. Ultimately, it serves the secret police’s intention vis-à-vis an individual deemed suspicious, which is to police and discipline her or him. The closest expression of a surveilled’s own views comes in her or his filed intercepted correspondence, even though the voice behind the letters can be equivocated by self-censorship or code talk, if the person has suspected surveillance. When the surveilled’s own voice comes to life in wiretapped conversations, it is also distorted and feeds into the individual’s target identity. No recordings of wiretaps have been found in the archives of the former Securitate, so only transcripts of conversations are available. Whether penned verbatim or in summary, they are mediated through the Securitate employees who transcribed or summarized them for their superiors. The employee’s voice thus blurs the surveilled’s by determining which aspects of the conversations to stress.
Indispensable to the construction of a target identity are the informative notes and reports that sources produced for their case officers. During Romania’s years of Communism, “source” was a general term designating “a person . . . through which [the Securitate] could collect information” irrespective of her or his specific capacity in the hierarchy of the secret police’s informative services, which included the support person, the agent, the collaborator, the informant, the resident, and the party member (Albu 2008, 13).2 The materials that sources provided expressed not only what they knew or learned about the individual under surveillance but also their sentiments about the person on whom they spied. Depending on their attitudes toward the surveilled, the reports could seem harmless or hurtful, apologetic or damning, but in any case, they were a breach of trust and a betrayal.
In this chapter I examine how two Securitate sources, “Magda” and “Karl Fischer,” helped shape the target identity of playwright and novelist Ana Novac (1924–2010).3 Their informative notes are included in Novac’s own surveillance file I 264513 (February 28 to November 29, 1963) and in the file of her former husband, Paul Schuster (I 184937, vol. 1, September 1961 to January 1963).4 What emerges from them is not the complex personality of a female playwright and Shoah survivor but an objectified Securitate target. Both sources portray Novac as a subversive element and an enemy of the state, a deviant with a bourgeois lifestyle, and an open and vocal critic of Romania’s Communist regime. She is said to have ties to foreigners who helped her smuggle her work out of Romania and, eventually, emigrate herself. To anchor the file story into Novac’s existence prior to her surveillance, I reconstruct her life story—in the absence of an “Ana Novac Nachlass” anywhere—based on Novac’s own statements in the preface to her first publication in a Western country in 1967, on research in the Paul Schuster Nachlass in Munich, and on Novac’s last two interviews before her death in 2010.5 Also, to explain Novac’s fall from grace with the Communist regime, without which her file story is incomprehensible, I re-create that context based on articles published about Novac in the magazine Teatrul (The theater) between 1956 and 1958. This was the main theater publication at the time and articulated the official discourse of the Romanian state with respect to dramatic art.
Ana Novac was the pen name of Zimra Harsányi, now a forgotten writer, who lived in Romania until 1963, when she immigrated to Budapest, then West Berlin, finally arriving in Paris in 1965. In Romania she wrote socialist realist plays in her mother tongue, Hungarian, which were also translated into Romanian and Yiddish and performed to great acclaim. In France Novac wrote mostly autobiographical plays and novels in French and Romanian; the latter she then translated into French either by herself or with the help of friends such as the writer, translator, and Russian Studies scholar Luba Jurgenson. Even though she had longed to live in Paris, life in the French capital seems to have disappointed her badly: in one of her last interviews for a German newspaper she declared, “French became my homeland but never France” (Das Französische ist meine Heimat geworden, das Land nie; Herwig 2009). She voiced her disillusionment also when she declared that Auschwitz had proven a disaster for her literary work, since it had turned her into a “survivor” (Überlebende) and thus had denied her the status of a “living being” (Lebende) and implicitly a life, no matter where she dwelled (Novac quoted in Hoch 2009). Novac’s life story is worth knowing because it showcases the tragic fate of an East European Jew during the twentieth century, when first nationalism and fascism and later Communism uprooted and almost decimated the Jewish community in Transylvania.
Born into a low-middle class Jewish family in Northern Transylvania in 1924, Zimra Harsányi was by law a Romanian citizen, but her family followed the traditional way of Transylvanian Jewry, which was “Hungarian by mother tongue and culture” (Tibori Szabó 2004).6 In view of Transylvania’s complex history, this was a common situation. Until the demise of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in 1918, this province had belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary, where Jews had been emancipated in 1867, and as a result, in the 1890 census 63.7 percent of the Jewish population was recorded as ethnic Hungarian by mother tongue, 33 percent as German, and 3.3 percent as other (Silber 2017). After World War I Transylvania became part of the Romanian kingdom and remained a Romanian territory until 1940, when, per the Second Vienna Dictate, the province’s northern part was returned to Hungary. Between May 16 and June 27, 1944, the Hungarian government of Regent Miklós Horthy had Northern Transylvanian Jews deported to Auschwitz (Shoah Resource Center 2017), and although on separate transports Novac and her family were among them. Only she survived, and after May 6, 1945, when the Soviet army freed Kratzau, the concentration camp to which she had been transferred (Novac 1967, 183), she returned to Northern Transylvania, which was again a part of the Romanian kingdom (Novac 1967, 5). She brought along a diary she had kept over the course of her year of imprisonment.7 By her own statements, Novac spent the next two years in the Jewish hospital in Cluj and in 1950 moved to Bucharest, where she lived until 1963, when she immigrated to Hungary by entering a marriage de complaisance with a Hungarian national (Novac 1965, 5–7).8 Of her previous three marriages, two had long-term consequences: her second husband was the mathematician Liviu Solomon, whom she divorced in 1956, but with whom she maintained contact her entire life.9 On June 21, 1958, she married the German Romanian writer Paul Schuster. Even though this relationship also ended in divorce in 1960, Novac and Schuster continued a close relationship until Schuster’s death in 2004.10 In the early 1950s in Bucharest, Zimra Harsányi became the writer Ana Novac and joined the Communist Party, as she sympathized with its ideals.11
By the mid-1950s Ana Novac was a promising playwright. Theater houses across the country performing in Romanian, Hungarian, and Yiddish successfully staged her plays since they were in line with the requirements of socialist realism.12 For example, Familia Kovacs (The Kovacs family) depicts the fate of an upper-middle-class ethnic-Hungarian family in Northern Transylvania between 1941 and 1943. Caught up in their bourgeois lifestyle, the parents do not notice the dangers of fascism until it is too late, and their own son joins the Nazis. Under the influence of a young Communist named Andras, the family’s daughter, Eva, overcomes her lighthearted and apolitical disposition and joins the antifascist struggle, because, as she explains, “When you listen [to the Communists] everything gains a different color, even the air brightens up. You feel like a better, stronger person; in any case, you would want to fight, to write, to speak, to do great, unusual things, as if happiness were only up to you and you only had to want it” (Novák 1955, 72). At the end of the fourth act, the father loses his mind, unable to process his social downfall, the son commits suicide as the German defeat at Stalingrad draws nearer, while the mother, the daughter, and her now-husband Andras are active members of the Communist underground. Thus the superior Communist cause triumphs over both fascism and bourgeois liberalism. Novac’s next play, Preludiu (Prelude), is equally embedded in socialist realism. In a provincial town, the Communists establish a theater school to train actors who can perform in accordance with the new principles of the so-called peoples’ democracy. They recruit new actors among people from various walks of life (workers, a former ballerina, a teacher, the descendent of a bourgeois family) and retrain old theater people (a diva and a theater director) to embrace their ideals. The play’s central theme is “we built socialism” (Novák 1955, 7 and 21), and it illustrates it by focusing on the trials and tribulations that transform a group of individuals into a collective between 1946 and 1949. In 1957 Novac received the State Prize, Third Class, for these two plays, which brought her not only official recognition and fame but also a substantial monetary reward of 15,000 lei.13
Novac’s next work completely changed her life: On December 24, 1957, the play Ce fel de om eşti tu? (What kind of a person are you?) opened in Bucharest at the Municipal Theater, where Lucia Sturdza-Bulandra, the grande dame of the Romanian stage at the time, was manager (Institutul Naţional al Patrimoniului n.d.).14 Shortly after the premier, Lucia Sturdza-Bulandra mentioned the play favorably in an article (1957, 17), while other critics praised it for its “partisan zeal” and “ideological pathos,” proclaiming it “an admirable drama,” even if a “failed” one, due to “confused formulations.”15 Yet in March 1958, in a review published anonymously under the title “Aşa arată oare o piesă de actualitate?” (Is this what a topical play looks like?) in the party journal Scînteia (The spark), its author reproached the playwright with having wrongly constructed her characters, whose problems she considered from “profoundly erroneous perspectives.” This led to a “false conception” of the play, which “absurdly oppose[d] the preoccupation and the efforts for the construction of the socialist economy to the concern for the improvement of the life conditions of the working people” and “grave ideological deficiency.” Other publications followed suit, and the play metamorphosed into “a work infused by a negative spirit, written from false ideological positions” (“Consfătuirea” 1958, 5), and Novac was admonished for not admitting her ideological deviation and performing self-criticism (Mira 1958, 50). It did not help that she defended her work in an article in the cultural publication Tribuna (The tribune) by invoking the autonomy of art and a writer’s right to artistic freedom.16 Consequently, she was excluded from the party in 1958 and the Writers Union in 1960 and was blacklisted, that is, while she was not officially banned from publishing or her plays from being performed, her works were neither printed nor staged ever again in Communist Romania.17
One would expect the Securitate to pay attention to such a high-profile artist gone astray, and it did, even though not at the height of Novac’s conflict with the cultural authorities in 1958. Indeed, the first surveillance file under the name “Novac, Ana” is only from 1960, and according to the decision to close it on November 25, 1960, Novac had been included in the file “Uniunea Scriitorilor” (Writers Union) by mistake (I 405789, 15). It is source “Magda’s” informative note from January 9, 1959, included in Schuster’s file (I 184937, vol. 1, 187–89) that brought Novac into the Securitate’s spotlight. “Magda” is a very elusive character in Novac’s file story. In a document from March 26, 1963, outlining her responsibilities vis-à-vis Schuster, she referred to herself as “H. P.” (I 184937 vol. 1, 111), and in a report from December 21, 1965, she indicated that she was the granddaughter of Michael Albert (I 211829, vol. 1, 93), a nineteenth-century Transylvanian Saxon writer and pedagogue (Theil 2013). Aside from this no other information about her is available. The reasons for her collaboration with the Securitate are not apparent from the files at hand, yet her habitus as an informant suggests that she might have been a vigilante.18 When she first wrote about Novac in January 1959, the playwright was a mere collateral target, as the Securitate was primarily interested in Schuster’s activities in Romania and his ties to the German Romanian émigrés in the Federal Republic of Germany. “Magda’s” main objective in producing intelligence about Novac appears to have been to show the Securitate Novac’s true colors. She titled her first informative note dedicated to Novac “The writer Ana Novac, an enemy of our regime” (I 184937, vol. 1, 186), when it was not customary for notes to have titles, and wrote, “This is the true face of the writer Ana Novak” in the note’s concluding paragraph (189). While accusing her of the worst crime against the Romanian state at the time when she labeled Novac “an enemy of [the] regime,” she also dutifully brought to the Securitate’s attention that Novac was working on her Auschwitz diary (187). She indicated that she had met Novac at the end of 1958, while working as Schuster’s dactylographer in her house. She described Novac as a woman in her thirties, slender, pale, with a fashionable short haircut, who did not wear makeup, walked around the house in pajamas and a robe, and worked on her diary mostly in bed. Such a routine hardly conformed to the expectations of a Communist state vis-à-vis its subjects, and “Magda’s” information put Novac in danger by presenting her as a deviant with a bourgeois lifestyle. Furthermore, “Magda” emphasized that Novac was congenial and smart but also an open and vocal critic of Romania’s political regime. She even went so far on one occasion as to call the East Germans “jackasses” (dobitoci) and criticize them for having fallen prey to the same proletarian zeal as the Romanians (188). According to “Magda,” Novac reproached the Romanian regime “disdainfully” for keeping people in chains and ordering them what to think (187). She was very proud of her lack of inhibition in expressing criticism and confided in “Magda” “with great satisfaction” that she had been excluded from the party (188). As if to validate her claims about Novac, “Magda” maintained that Novac had taken a liking to her from the start and talked to her freely, as though they had known each other for years. During one of their frank conversations, Novac supposedly declared that Anne Frank’s diary was “a trifle” (un fleac) and hers was a serious work, which was why she was working on it at the time (188). It is noteworthy that “Magda” initiated her reporting on Novac; she was even unsure whether the information would be of interest to her case officer as exemplified by her direct questions: “Does any [of this] interest you? Can I be of help in any matter?” toward the end of her informative note (189). She seems to have volunteered her services to the secret police after being faced with Novac’s ungratefulness vis-à-vis the Romanian regime: while Novac complained about her “miserable life,” the regime afforded her a ten-day writing retreat in the mountain resort of Sinaia, in which Novac partook happily (189). It comes as no surprise that “Magda’s” case officer, Lieutenant Major Aneta Roşianu, instructed her to deepen her relationship with Novac and keep informing on her, which “Magda” did diligently.
“Magda’s” subsequent informative notes leave no doubt about her rejection of Novac in terms of lifestyle and personality. On January 14, 1959, she reported on what she perceived to be tensions between Schuster and Novac, who, per “Magda,” thought herself to be “considerably superior” to her husband, whom she denigrated in front of “Magda” as an adventurous and undisciplined person (I 184937, vol. 1, 186). “Magda” portrayed Novac as a dissatisfied, nagging wife who nonetheless spent ten days in Sinaia working on her own writing, while her presumably irresponsible husband had to procure firewood for their house in Bucharest in order to be able to work there himself (186). The comparison between the two clearly favored Schuster even before “Magda” wrote: “Paul Schuster is a very kind man and he works with great enthusiasm, but he is constantly despised by his own wife, Ana Novak” (186). The juxtaposition passes judgment on Novac for her alleged disdain for a husband who, “Magda” suggested, was a dedicated homemaker. “Magda” cemented her portrayal of Novac as a parasite who took advantage of Schuster in the next available note she penned on September 17, 1962 (I 184937, vol. 1, 149–51).19 She informed her case officer that Schuster had approached her to type up Novac’s Auschwitz diary even though at that point Schuster and Novac were divorced and Schuster had remarried (149). Novac had tried to publish the diary in Romania, but it had been rejected, which left her only with the option to smuggle it out of Romania and find a publisher abroad. To this end, without his wife’s knowledge, Schuster helped Novac by editing and translating the diary into German (150). He is said to have considered it “a unique manuscript” and “an extremely valuable document” that “w[ould] bring great success” (149).
Schuster’s concern for Novac and her spinelessness are further emphasized in “Magda’s” next informative note from October 25, 1962, in which she related her attempts to get Schuster to talk about his progress on Novac’s diary (I 184937, vol. 1, 144–45). Claiming that he had not made the desired progress as he had translated only two-thirds of the diary by that time, Schuster also confessed to the source that he was apprehensive for Novac’s safety should her diary be smuggled out of Romania while she still lived there (144). Consequently, he wanted to wait until she had left the country, which, “Magda” asserted, he believed she would do with help from abroad (144). Again, in her writing “Magda” placed Novac outside the norms of socialist society, by bestowing on her a form of behavior incongruous with the state’s expectations, when she reported that Novac was unemployed yet received monthly financial support from her last two husbands, who paid her 300 lei each. Compared to the net average salary of 880 lei (Ministerul Muncii şi Justiţiei Sociale n.d., year 1962), Novac seems to have enjoyed a modestly comfortable income (600 lei) without participating herself in the country’s workforce.
Source “Karl Fischer” has a stronger presence in Novac’s file story, as he authored or provided his case officers with the information for nineteen informative notes, which cover the time span August 1961–October 1963.20 He was himself a writer and during those years the editor of the German-language newspaper Neuer Weg (New way).21 His reasons for spying on her are not apparent from his notes or reports, but his prolificacy left few aspects of her life untouched. He wrote about her tireless efforts to survive as a writer, about her troubled love life and frail health, about her complicated plans to find a way out of Romania, and about her Auschwitz diary. He provided details that flesh out Novac’s image that “Magda” had drawn of her. He informed about her frustration with the cultural authorities who had rejected two new plays she had written (I 264513, 102), documenting Novac’s persistence to have her works performed in Romania in spite of being blacklisted. He claimed that in a conversation with him, Novac rationalized from the state’s point of view her exclusion from the Writers Union and the subsequent impossibility to publish by admitting her inability to compromise, since she was “an enemy of any absolutist system” (I 264513, 87). On November 21, 1962, he mentioned for the first time the two aspects that became the focus of his reporting on Novac: her desire to emigrate and her Auschwitz diary (I 264513, 84–85).
While Schuster had alluded to “Magda” that Novac was exploring the possibility to emigrate with help from abroad, “Karl Fischer,” who enjoyed Novac’s trust, provided specific details about her plan: she wanted to marry a Hungarian national and relocate with him to Hungary (I 264513, 85). The source maintained that even though Novac had accepted a job as a pediatric medical consultant in a small town, which paid 500 lei per month and allowed her to live “like a tzar” (85), she had made up her mind to leave Romania because she needed to feel free to travel and move around, as this had become her obsession since Auschwitz (84–85).22 Novac’s goal-oriented matrimonial plans, while surely not uncommon even in Communist Romania, positioned her outside the proclaimed official moral norms of mainstream society and added promiscuity to her target identity. “Karl Fischer’s” note enhanced this aspect of her constructed personality even more when he indicated that Novac had confided in him that she was willing to abandon her emigration plans should she be able to rekindle her relationship with Schuster (85). Considering that Schuster was married to Edith Gross at the time, Novac’s desire attested to her deviant sexual propensity.
“Karl Fischer” brought further evidence of Novac’s questionable character in his note from January 4, 1963, when he claimed to reproduce the disapproving observations of Novac’s friend Magda Stroe, who had told him that “she did not know anymore what this woman [i.e., Novac] wanted. She [did] not get along with basic work discipline preferring a life without employment so as to work when she felt like it [and have] endless conversations until midnight, etc.” (I 264513, 77). This bohemian outlook on life was, so Stroe per “Karl Fischer,” further aggravated by Novac’s desire to be different from others and to stand out (78). This individualistic, selfish disposition, however, had to give way as Novac had “to finally learn some truths and rules of society, stop living on other people’s backs, and find out on her own that if you do not work, you do not eat” (78). “Karl Fischer’s” note thus strengthened Novac’s depraved reputation, which source “Magda” had helped establish. At the latest by January 28, 1962, when the source noted that Novac had taken vacation time followed by an unpaid leave of absence for an unspecified duration because she did not like either her work or her workplace, her standing as a parasite seems buttressed. In the same note, the source indicated that Novac was getting her papers ready for a marriage de complaisance with a fifty-year-old Hungarian because she continued to feel “confined in her creative mission” (76) in Romania. “Karl Fischer” also revealed to the Securitate that Novac shrewdly used not her well-known literary alias but her given name in those papers to avoid any difficulties with the Romanian authorities (76).
If the Securitate needed more proof of Novac’s debauched character, “Karl Fischer” produced it on May 8, 1963, when he included in his note Novac’s alleged description of her fourth husband: he was a sixty-year-old Hungarian national, a serious man and party activist, whom she did not love (I 264513, 65). Yet she was so desperate to leave Romania that for a passport, she was “willing to sell [her]self piece by piece” (65). She hoped her future husband did not love her either as that would only have complicated things. Consiliul de Stat (State Council) had approved their union, and she assumed that things had gone so fast because her trick had worked, and the authorities had not identified her under her given name, Zimra Harsányi. A comment in “Menţiuni” (Remarks) indicates that the authorities had indeed not connected Harsányi with Novac (I 264513, 68), despite “Karl Fischer’s” warning from January 1963. Furthermore, “Karl Fischer’s” note from May 8, 1963, also intimated that Novac did not hold Hungarians in high esteem despite her cultural background and marriage to a Hungarian. To the contrary she ostensibly described them as “chauvinistic, mean, savage, a kind of mixture between Prussians and Mongols” (66). Yet life in Hungary was considerably better than in Romania since people enjoyed more freedom and could travel freely to Western countries, which was her ultimate goal. Novac’s willingness to marry advantageously and even to live among a people she despised further revealed her egotistical nature and incriminated her with the Securitate. “Karl Fischer’s” note also added yet another dimension to Novac’s description as a parasite, when he maintained that in the West she planned to live off the reparation money to which she was entitled as an Auschwitz survivor and descendent of victims of National Socialism—purportedly Novac counted on $8,000 for herself and her deceased parents and sister (67).23 Thus Novac appeared willing and ready to profit even from her own family’s tragedy.
The extent of this tragedy from her own point of view Novac had recorded in her Auschwitz diary, to which “Karl Fischer” also dedicated his attention. Already in November 1962, he described the diary as “partly written in the camp and later edited” and claimed that Novac was having it translated into French for publication abroad, after having tried and failed to have it published in Romania (I 264513, 84). She was convinced that the publisher had rejected the work because of her controversial relation with Romania’s political regime, not due to lack of quality (84). This information supplements “Magda’s” from September 17 and October 25, 1962, that Paul Schuster was working on a German translation of the diary and investigating options for the diary to be smuggled outside Romania. A year later, on March 13, 1963, “Karl Fischer” specified that, while Novac had written the diary in Auschwitz at the age of nineteen, she estimated that she would never again write anything as good as that (I 264513, 73). After having read a quarter of it, he described it as “a well-written work, with novel images, depicting the tormented life of the inmates in the camp from Auschwitz. The author [was] filled with natural (and well described) hatred against the SS beasts and boundless feelings of revolt against acts of injustice and the permanent terror” (73). Yet he also criticized it, claiming, “This revolt [was] however the spontaneously human reaction of the helpless, of the inmates who ha[d] lost not only their hope but also their dignity, their drive to fight. One d[id] not learn anything about the numerous inmates, who, although at times discouraged, fought with determination; one d[id] not feel the presence of the Communists” (73). This take on Novac’s writing could suggest a reason for her failure to publish the diary in Romania: she would have had to alter it to fit the expectations of the regime, which meant somehow subordinate her survival to the Communist cause and present it as an ideological rather than an existential struggle. And she was not prepared to do so, as her critique of the regime’s infringement on artistic freedom as reported by both “Magda” and “Karl Fischer” proposed. Interestingly, at the time of “Karl Fischer’s” note, Novac’s diary was already outside Romania, namely, in her future home country by choice, Hungary. According to a source named “Kovacs Peter,” a Hungarian journalist identified as Adam Raffy had smuggled it into Hungary before October 1, 1962, when “Kovacs Peter” had informed his case officer about it (I 264513, 90–92). This event had also surprised the Securitate, which although warned about Novac’s intentions by both “Magda” and “Karl Fischer” had failed to prevent it from happening.24 Novac’s surveillance seems to have been poorly coordinated, or at least poorly carried out, since the various Securitate departments and offices involved in her shadowing did not connect the dots correctly or in time with respect both to the smuggling of her dairy in 1962 and, as already mentioned, to her application to marry a foreign national in 1963.25
Novac’s diary makes a last appearance in an informative note by “Karl Fischer” in August 1963 (I 264513, 25–27).26 In it he pointed out that the diary was already in France, where an unnamed publisher had read it in Romanian and had shown great interest in it. However, since Novac did not have a French translation of it yet, she held back its publication (26). Also, while still waiting for her permission to leave Romania and join her husband in Hungary, she did not want to risk being arrested because her diary had been published in France (26).
With this Novac’s file story concludes as inexplicably as it had begun when source “Magda” took an interest in Novac although she was only expected to focus on Schuster. Its conclusion is typical for the narrative endings that files impose on people’s lives. The narrative arc of her file story, though, tells us how precarious life was in Communist Romania in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when a bad review in the party’s journal was enough to destroy a writer’s career, and one’s reference in the informative note of a curious source could transform one into a target. Once Novac succeeded in having her diary smuggled out of Romania for publication abroad, the Securitate had a solid reason to act against her, and both Novac’s life and file story might have ended differently had she not thwarted the Securitate’s “plot” by deceiving the secret police and leaving the country.
Through the informative notes of sources “Magda” and “Karl Fischer,” who reported on her between 1959 and 1963, the target Ana Novac emerges as an enemy of the state. The two sources described her as erratic and capricious, as well as moody and constantly dissatisfied with her life in Romania. She was a parasite who did not lead a regular life in which she worked for an income but rather relied on her former husbands to support her. “Magda” and “Karl Fischer” also ascribed to her a preference for a bourgeois—even bohemian—lifestyle, in which the mores and social norms of the Communist state played no role. She emerges as a promiscuous woman, impelled by an adventurous spirit, which also drove her to leave Romania. Her decision to emigrate was thus not the result of the regime’s oppressive nature and inability to deal with criticism but a natural consequence of her carefree and thrill-seeking disposition. Consequently, the target Ana Novac was an ethnically unbound, psychologically volatile, and socially deviant cosmopolitan wanderer. Yet on October 11, 1963, a “Notă sinteză” (Synthesis note) concluded, “It does not follow that HARSANYI ZIMRA carries out a nationalistic activity organized against [Romania’s] socialist state. Some acts of discontent are of material nature, and others stem from her adventurous spirit, which possesses her to leave the country, something she has done already” (I 264513, 237). With this her file was closed, and the two sources concluded their activities involving her, at a time when Novac, under the name Zimra Mikó, had already departed from Romania on September 20, 1963 (244).
As a target Novac acquired a new identity, one that the Securitate configured based on its sources’ informative notes and reports and classified according to stock types of enemies of the state. She fit the type of the critical, bourgeois intellectual. Yet as an ethnically Jewish, culturally Hungarian Romanian citizen, Novac also eluded a linear configuration, which led the Securitate to oscillate between labeling her a Jew, a Hungarian, or a Romanian.27 This hybridity coupled with Novac’s critique of the regime enhanced the threat she could pose to the Romanian state. It is thus surprising that Novac escaped from Romania and was able to do so legally. Was it professional negligence on the part of the Securitate officers charged with her surveillance, considering that “Magda’s” and “Karl Fischer’s” notes incriminated her? Did the Securitate simply loose interest in her? Her file story ends anticlimactically without providing answers to these questions or any indications that Novac had escaped the Securitate’s gaze completely or for good. Another file harboring another file story set in a different time (1981–86) and place (Paris, France) speaks not only to Novac’s ongoing criticism of Romania’s Communist regime but also to the Securitate’s persistence in pursuing its targets even across time and space.
1. “Target—person, group of people, or institution under surveillance by the Securitate” (Obiectiv—persoană, grup de persoane sau instituţie în supravegherea informativă a Securităţii). See CNSAS n.d. Unless otherwise noted all translations are mine.
2. After the fall of Communism and particularly after Law 293/2008 was passed, “source” maintained its general meaning but in a different sense. Article 3, Paragraph b of the law stipulates that a collaborator is someone who “has supplied information regardless of its form, such as written notes and reports, verbal communications written down by employees of the Securitate, through which actions or attitudes were denounced that were hostile to the totalitarian Communist regime and aimed at limiting fundamental human rights and liberties” (in Monitorul Oficial al României [Official Monitor of Romania], part 1, no. 800 from November 28, 2008, emphasis added). The law also establishes that the two conditions must be fulfilled simultaneously and cumulatively. If none of the conditions are met, CNSAS issues a certificate of noncollaboration (Adeverinţă). If only one condition is met, CNSAS issues the same certificate of noncollaboration but with an addendum explaining which of the two conditions were met and in what context. Given the complex implications of the term “collaborator,” talking about “sources” has become much more productive and also safer for a researcher.
3. The name also appears spelled as Novak or Novák, which follows the Hungarian spelling. In the files the changes in spelling are aleatory. Novac published her two plays—Familia Kovacs (The Kovacs family, 1955) and Preludiu (Prelude, 1956)—in Romania also under the name Novák. Both publications indicate on their front pages that the works were translations from the Hungarian yet without mentioning the translator’s name.
4. The Securitate had two more surveillance files on Novac: one that covered the period March–November 1960 (ACNSAS I 405789) and another for the period September 1981–March 1986 (ACNSAS SIE 45862). Since neither includes reports by “Magda” or “Karl Fischer,” they are not of interest for this analysis. Paul Schuster (1930–2004) was a German Romanian writer. For more details on him and the Securitate’s interest in him, see Sienerth 2009.
5. I base my conclusion regarding the absence of an “Ana Novac Nachlass” on email correspondence (September 19, 2017, September 20, 2017, and September 6, 2018, respectively) between this author and Cécile Lauvergeon from the Mémorial de la Shoah, which holds only the original of her Auschwitz diary; Elisa Martos from the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine (IMEC), which has no records of her; and Adriana Vasilescu, niece of Novac’s second husband, Liviu Solomon. I am reconstructing Novac’s life story based on the following texts: “Lesenslauf statt eines Vorworts” (Curriculum vitae instead of a foreword) in Die schönen Tage meiner Jugend . . . (1967); Hoch 2009; and Herwig 2009; correspondence with Stéphanie Danneberg, researcher at the Institut für deutsche Kultur und Geschichte Südosteuropas an der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (IKGS Munich) in charge of cataloging the Paul Schuster Nachlass (April–July 2017); and correspondence with Vasilescu (September 2018).
6. Novac always claimed to have been born in 1929, which would have made her fourteen when she was in Auschwitz; see, for example, the 1982 French edition of her diary titled J’avais quatorze ans a Auschwitz. However, all documents from the archives of the Securitate list 1924 as her year of birth. Hence, I am using this year in my analysis. For a convincing explanation of why some Shoah survivors chose to alter particular aspects of their lives prior to or during the Shoah, see Hájková 2014.
7. Novac published her diary several times over the course of her life not just in different languages but also in more or less edited versions. The first edition appeared in Hungarian in 1966 as Harsányi Zimra, A téboly hétköznapjai: Egy diáklány naplójából (Daily life of madness: From the diary of a schoolgirl). Subsequent editions appeared under her pen name Ana Novac with a German translation by Barbara Frischmuth as the first in a language with a wide readership: Die schönen Tage meiner Jugend (1967). According to Kata Bohus (2017), Hungary’s Kádár regime had no problem publishing memorialistic accounts about the Shoah as long as they portrayed Jews as one group among others of victims and described the social conflict of the 1940s as a confrontation between fascist and antifascist forces. Novac’s diary could be co-opted to conform to these tenets.
8. Except for her first married name, Nirvai, which appears in Novac’s Securitate file from the 1980s, I have been unable to learn anything about this aspect of Novac’s life (“Hotarȋre de deschidere-ȋnchidere” [Decision to open-close (a file)], September 6, 1981, in ACNSAS SIE 45862, 1). Had she been married prior to her deportation and had her husband perished in the Shoah alongside Novac’s parents? Had she been married between her liberation from the camp and her arrival in Romania? I do not know. The cultural studies scholar Louise O. Vasvári, who researches Novac’s life and work as a Shoah survivor, could not answer any of these questions either. She explained to me, though, that it was not uncommon for female survivors to marry as soon as they recovered physically from their traumatic experiences in the camps, either to regain a sense of “normalcy” as soon as possible or as a means to an end: immigration to somewhere far from Europe (email exchange with this author, September 7, 2017).
9. Liviu Solomon was born in Romania in 1927 and in 1971 defected to France, where he taught mathematics at the Université de Poitiers until his death in 2013. Between 1945 and 1948, he studied mathematics at the University of Bucharest. He continued his studies by pursuing a doctoral degree in Moscow at the Institute for Mechanics of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union between 1950 and 1953. Upon his return to Bucharest, he became associate professor of mathematics at the local university. In this capacity he attended a conference in France in 1971 from where he refused to return to Romania (email exchange from May 12, 2017, and September 6, 2018, respectively, with Danneberg and Vasilescu).
10. Information based on email correspondence with Danneberg from April 18, 2017.
11. According to source “Karl Fischer,” Petru Dumitriu (1924–2002), who was a regime-friendly author till he escaped Romania in 1960, suggested to Harsányi that she use Ana Novac as her pen name (informative note from May 8, 1963, ACNSAS I 264513, 66).
12. For example, Familia Kovacs was performed in Romanian in Timişoara and Bucharest, in Hungarian in Sf. Gheorghe, and in Yiddish in Bucharest (see Teatrul, April 1956, 76–78; June 1956, 13; September 1957, 21; and December 1957, 21).
13. “Însemnări” 1957, 91. For purposes of comparison, according to Ministerul Muncii şi Justiţiei Sociale (Ministry for Work and Social Justice) the net average salary in 1957 was 619 lei, which equates Novac’s prize to twenty-four times the average income in the country. For details on the different categories of the State Prizes and the selection criteria, see Vasile 2011, 107–12.
14. Teatrul Municipal (Municipal Theater) is today Teatrul Lucia Sturdza-Bulandra. According to Mirela Ringheanu, librarian at the Library of the Romanian Academy of Arts and Sciences in Bucharest, the play was never published (email exchange with the author from June 29, 2017).
15. These positive reviews belong to critics Vicu Mȋndra and Radu Popescu and are quoted in Florin Tornea’s extensive analysis of the shortcoming of literary criticism in Romania at the time. Tornea (1958) rebukes them and admonishes their authors for their lack of vigilance in evaluating Novac’s work.
16. “To name everything you believe in or condemn, everything you hope for and dream about, here, now, is too great of a pleasure, [it is] a passion beyond prudence and calculations, it is according to me the very rationale of a writer’s existence” (A spune tot ce crezi sau condamni, tot ce speri şi visezi, aici, acum, e o plăcere prea mare, o pasiune deasupra prudenţei şi a calculelor, e după mine ȋnsăşi raţiunea existenţei pentru un scriitor) (Novac 1958, 11).
17. Regarding her exclusion from the party and the Writers Union, see “Stefan Dragomirescu’s” informative note from July 21, 1958, in ACNSAS I 405789, 14. Curiously, Novac’s exclusion does not appear in the records kept by the party about its excluded members either under the letter H or N (ANIC). Novac’s file from the Writers Union indicates her membership dates as June 1956 until April 1962 (AUSR). See also “Hotărȋre” (Decision) from November 25, 1960, in ACNSAS I 405789, 15, where she is said to still be a member of the Writers Union but not of the party. The information about her blacklisting comes from Vasilescu (September 6, 2018). According to historian Cristian Vasile, writers never received a formal letter prohibiting them from publishing when they fell from grace with the regime; the interdiction was implied in their new status as outsiders to the cultural apparatus. Hence, there is also no written evidence of Novac’s publishing ban (personal communication between Vasile and this author, May 2017).
18. My use of the term “habitus” follows Alison Lewis’s definition of the “habitus of collaborators” as a “set of dispositions, structured by external forces (class, income, milieu, and even generation)” that shaped an informant’s behaviors and actions (2016, 30).
19. The note is also included in Novac’s file, ACNSAS I 264513, 49–50.
20. The exact dates are August 22, 1961; May 17, 1962; October 19, 1962; November 21, 1962; December 15, 1962; January 4 and 28, 1963; March 13, 1963; April 19, 1963; May 8, 15, and 29, 1963; June 12 and 19, 1963; August 3, 10, and 16, 1963; September 9, 1963; and October 16, 1963, in ACNSAS I 264513.
21. “Karl Fischer’s” case officer, Lieutenant Major Ioan Wagner, who typed up the note, mentioned the source’s real name here and in the note from May 17. For privacy reasons that name cannot be revealed.
22. In his note from January 4, 1963, “Karl Fischer” indicated that Novac’s job was in Păclişa, Hunedoara County (ACNSAS I 264513, 77). The note from December 15, 1962, had erroneously indicated Păltiniş, which is in Sibiu County, as her location (ACNSAS I 264513, 82).
23. Novac had a brother, not a sister, who died during the Shoah
24. In Romania the attempt to smuggle something across the border bore serious consequences. For details, see Vasile 2011, 153–85.
25. At the time under scrutiny in this chapter, three directorates of the Securitate were involved in Novac’s surveillance: Direcţia a II-a (Second Directorate), the counter-espionage service; Direcţia a III-a (Third Directorate), which was the internal information service; and Direcţia a VII-a (Seventh Directorate) in charge of shadowing and investigations. People at the national and regional offices worked on her case for each directorate, which would not make it hard for details to fall between the cracks.
26. “Karl Fischer’s” other informative notes listed at the beginning of this article but not analyzed here contain details about Novac’s intimate life or medical history, which cannot be disclosed due to privacy concerns.
27. “Hotărȋre de deschidere a dosarului de verificare” (Decision to open a verification file) from February 28, 1963, in ACNSAS I 264513, 1–3; “Cerere de verificare la cartotecă” (Request to verify at the register) from October 18, 1961, in ACNSAS I 264513, 108–9; Writing from the Seventh to the Third Directorate of the Ministry of the Interior, from November 26, 1962, in ACNSAS I 264513, 105–6.
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