From the University of Cluj and the Romanian Academy to Communist Prisons
From the University of Cluj and the Romanian Academy to Communist Prisons

The Arrest (5–6 May 1950) and Incarceration (May 1950 – July 1955) of Historian Ioan Lupaș (1880–1967)

Summary/Abstract: In the night of 5 to 6 May 1950, the repressive organs of the communist regime in Romania arrested and interrogated 69 former dignitaries of the Romanian governments from the interwar period and the Second World War. Their number increased in the next day to around 150 persons, who held the office of a prime minister, minister, secretary and vice secretary of state during 1919 and 1945. Together with other representatives of the old regime and monarchists, without any trial, they were sent hidden in the cars of the Securitate to the penitentiary inSighet, in the county of Maramureș, near the border with the Soviet Union. Some of them, such as Iuliu Maniu and Gheorghe Brătianu, died in that prison in Sighet and were buried in complete anonymity in the cemetery of the poor without any cross or sign marking their tomb. Others resisted and managed to come out alive, being released in 1955 or 1956. Among them was Ioan Lupaș, retired university professor in Sibiu, one of the most renowned historians and academic figures of interwar Romania. Arrested in the middle of the night of 5th May 1950, Ioan Lupaș was driven to the Securitate headquarters in Sibiu, interrogated during the whole night and obliged to write three statements about his life and about his public, political and academic activity. The documents are preserved in the Archives of the National Council for the Study of Securitate Archives in Bucharest and represent the main topic of this paper. In the dawn of 6 May 1950, Lupaș was sent to Sighet and imprisoned until the summer of 1955, when he was released and returned home to Cluj, were his son Semproniu lived, and then to Sibiu and Bucharest, were he lived the last years of his life together with his oldest daughter Marina Vlasiu Lupaș, until his death, on 3 July 1967.

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