Gheorghe Ursu
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Gheorghe Ursu (July 1, 1926 - November 17, 1985) was a Romanian construction engineer, poet, writer and dissident who was beaten to death while in the Securitate's custody.
Ursu was born in the city of Soroca, now in Moldova. His parents, both surgeons, were Vasile Ursu (of Galaţi) and Margareta (of Măgura Ilvei, Năsăud). Gheorghe attended primary school in Soroca from 1932 to 1936, and high school there until 1941, when his family moved to Galaţi. He continued his studies at Vasile Alecsandri National College, Galaţi, where he graduated in 1945. His maternal grandparents, along with ten other family members (who were Jews) were killed at Auschwitz.
Ursu and his wife Sorana had a daughter, Olga (m. Ştefan) and a son, Horia Andrei.
In 1944 he joined the Union of Communist Youth. From 1945 to 1950 he was a civil engineering student at the University Politehnica of Bucharest, joining the Romanian Communist Party during this time but being expelled in 1950. It was during his university years that Ursu began keeping a diary. From 1950 to 1985 he worked at the Design and Constructions Institute, designing a large number of buildings.
In 1970, Litera published a volume of his poetry, Mereu Doi (Often Two), with a preface by the poet Nina Cassian. After his diary was confiscated, his friend Cassian no longer wished to return to Romania and emigrated to the United States.
In 1984, two female subordinates denounced Ursu (already an annoyance for the Ceauşescu regime) to the Securitate for his diary. His home was searched and 61 notebooks covering daily entries from 1949 to 1984 were seized. Interrogations and an investigation followed. He was arrested on September 21, 1985, accused of hiding foreign currency; $16 were found in his house. On November 17 he was killed while being beaten in the Militia Jail on Calea Rahovei in Bucharest.
In October 2001, Serviciul Român de Informaţii (SRI - Romanian Information Service), in a press release, announced the existence of 50,000 manuscript pages confiscated before 1989. Among these were 811 pages of Ursu's diary.
In October 2003, former police colonels Tudor Stănică and Mihail Creangă were sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment for the murder of Gheorghe Ursu.
In December 2005, former SRI general Eugen Grigorescu was sentenced to three years' imprisonment for the disappearance of Ursu's diary. Ursu's son Andrei is trying to find the diary pages, which in the early 1990s were in the possession of Gabriela Adameşteanu, who published an excerpt of the diary in 22, in the archives of the National Council for Studying the Securitate's Archives. The manuscript remains lost.
