Romanian Women in History: Anița Nandriș-Cudla, the Bukovinian peasant who chronicled her Gulag ordeal

Around age 70, in the quiet of her home in Mahala, Chernivtsi region, a Bukovinian peasant woman who had completed only three years of primary school began writing her memoirs under the title Memories from My Life. The manuscript, written neatly and without corrections – almost as though it had been dictated – was entrusted in 1982 to one of her grandsons, Gheorghe, with the request that her story be made known. This became possible shortly after the fall of communism, when it was published in 1991 as 20 Years in Siberia: A Bukovinian Destiny . A dispassionate account “Siberia is not merely a place on the map. Siberia is a merciless mother who takes everything you have and gives you nothing back except pain and silence,” Anița Nandriș-Cudla wrote. With a fluency that many a writer might envy, she recounted her deportation to Siberia together with her children, the extreme experiences she endured at the end of the world and, eventually, her return home. Her odyssey unfolds with an authenticity that compels the reader to finish it in a single sitting. Her innate talent and simplicity of spirit, which distils everything to its essence, produced a work that literary critic Dan C. Mihăilescu compared with Solzhenitsyn’s memoir writing and which Monica Lovinescu described as written in a paradisiacal language, “from before the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”. Monica Lovinescu’s observation applies not only to the language, but also to the tone and attitude conveyed by the writing: the narrative voice is entirely free of bitterness and neither judges nor condemns anyone. The book is the testimony of a person freed from resentment, looking at her life from God’s perspective. “I hated no one. Not even those who took us to Siberia. May God judge them. I only wanted to raise my children and not lose my soul,” she writes in a key passage revealing the source of a mother’s strength. The awareness that memory must be kept alive First page from Anita Nandriș-Cudla’s manuscript. Photo source: Muzeulfemeilorremarcabile.ro “I wrote with trembling hands, but with a courageous heart. Not for myself, but for all those lost in Siberia. Someone had to tell the truth,” the memoirist notes. “I was neither a writer nor an educated woman. I was simply a mother who did not give up. And who survived in order to tell the story,” Anița Nandriș-Cudla adds. “I began writing not for myself, but so that others would know. So that no one could say it had not happened.” Biography Anița Nandriș-Cudla in 1932, when she was 28, with Toader, her youngest son. Photo source: Muzeulfemeilorremarcabile.ro Anița Nandriș was a simple woman whose destiny might not have appeared extraordinary, except for the everyday heroism of womanhood and motherhood that defined it: agricultural labour, building a household, giving birth to and raising her children, and caring for her sick mother. She was born in 1904 in Mahala into a family of ten children. Three died in childhood, while two others died at the front in the merciless conflicts of the last century. At 17, she married Chirică Cudla. Through hard work, they established a household where they raised their children and cared for Anița’s mother, who had been left incapacitated after being beaten by the Soviet occupiers. Deportation and the Gulag One night in June 1941, Anița, Chirică and their three sons – Dumitru, aged 17, Vasile, 14, and Toader, 11 – were taken from their home without warning or trial and given only ten minutes to gather something from their household to take with them. “We were well-to-do householders, and that was our crime. Whoever had cows, land, or tools was an enemy,” she writes. The mother and children were separated from the head of the family during the journey, beginning the ordeal of a woman alone with three children amid Siberia’s tundra and frozen wilderness. They ate leaves, roots, and makeshift cakes made from flour shaken from inside bread sacks. They wore clothes made from spun dog hair and endured illnesses and oppression from which, in her understanding, only strength of character and the Protection of the Mother of God saved them. Anița’s family had been deported because of an error and a false denunciation. When her sons grew up and established good reputations at work, they travelled to Moscow and obtained the family’s rehabilitation. The four were then able to return to their village of Mahala, where Anița submitted persistent petitions to restore their rights. On 13 June 1961, exactly two decades after their deportation, the family regained possession of their home. The fate of her husband remains unknown to this day, but Anița Nandriș-Cudla decided to recount her own experience, putting her “memories from life” down on paper. She passed away before it was published 40 years ago, in 1986. The secret of love and a Siberian miracle The secret of their survival lay in the mother’s faith, sacrifice and complete self-denial. She managed to find almost miraculous resources for survival amid conditions of Siberian servitude, where the Soviet authorities provided them with virtually nothing. Alongside her prayers to God, which she repeatedly mentions in her memoirs, Anița Nandriș-Cudla attributes her own resilience and that of her children to the unity and love shared by the members of the family: “This love and affection within the family gave us strength through all our hardships, and we were able to endure and save our lives.” Yet she believed they could not have succeeded without God’s hand. She recounts an extraordinary experience in Siberia when she was close to death from typhus: “When I entered the hospital, I realised that things were very bad for me. I said nothing aloud; in my thoughts alone I prayed to God to have mercy on me, to let me remain with my children, so that they would not be left there as strangers, without father or mother, in those wastelands. So distressed was I, and with this thought in my mind, that the fever overcame me and for two weeks I knew nothing more. “Before I awoke, it seemed that someone said to me: You want so very much to go to your children. We shall let you. Take your body and go. It seemed that my body was separate from me. “Then I thought: When I was told, ‘Take your body and go’, how am I to know which body is mine, since there were several bodies and they all looked alike? “And immediately it seemed to come into my mind that I could easily recognise which was mine, because during those years I had lived in the ‘north’, either because of the hard labour or the cold, a lump had appeared on my left hand. By then it was as large as a hen’s egg. “And at that moment, when I was told that if I wept and longed so greatly for my children, I should take my body and return to them, I was filled with joy because it had occurred to me how I could recognise my body and return to my children. I awoke and saw that I was in hospital. For a very long time, I could not put this dream out of my mind.” The extraordinary episode also highlights the depersonalising effect that suffering had upon her: after years of deprivation and inhuman living conditions, Anița could no longer recognise herself when seeing herself from outside her own body. Peasant memoir writing as a school of character “After a book such as this, any inferiority complex we may have as a nation ought to disappear,” Monica Lovinescu wrote in 1992. “The time will come when schools will seek to form people of great character, that is, to rebuild the structure of resilience of our nation, when honesty, courage and dignity will regain the esteem they deserve. Then Anița’s book will become essential reading, indispensable on the shelves of school libraries,” Gheorghe Nandriș, the author’s grandson, wrote in the preface to the book’s second edition. Photo: Lumina Newspaper