IN MEMORIAM GHEORGHE URSU - 75
(July 1st 1926 - November 17th 1985)

Had he lived today, the 1st of July 2001, the engineer Gheorghe Emil Ursu, whom his friends used to call Babu, would have been 75.
But, he was killed on the 17th of November 1985 at the hospital of Jilava prison, after being subjected to systematic death-causing beatings. His family, friends, the "Gheorghe Ursu" Foundation, who fight with might and main for the punishment of those responsible for Gheorghe Ursu's torture and death, know very well who the man was. For the other Romanians, today's citizens of this country, it is necessary to bring back his memory and martyrdom: Gheorghe Ursu, born on the 1st of July, 1926 in Soroca, was an engineer, a poet, a lover of the arts, of literature, music, theater, film and sports. For 40 years he kept a diary, in which he criticized and harshly satirized the communist regime. He was denounced and he paid for this diary with his life.
After 1990, a young film director, Cornel Mihalache, made a film-portrait (a documentary called "Babu") of this martyr killed in prison by the communist regime. The film won 2 awards. Neither the film nor the awards have brought about the changes in the course of the Gheorghe Ursu case, in the sense that to this day the officers responsible for Babu's torture and murder have still not been punished. On the contrary, they are free, well and thriving!
These few considerations aim at recalling and honoring an exemplary destiny of an ordinary man that gave a terrible testimony of our life, or our daily hell, before 1989.
Babu was a poet not only because he wrote poetry, or because he deeply loved culture and admired his contemporary cultural figures, but also because in verse and prose he exposed the horrors of our daily lives, and because he refused to betray his friends in order to save himself. His diary, which is even now kept in the ex-Securitate's vaults, would have incriminated well-known members of the Romanian intelligentsia: Nina Cassian, Geo Bogza, Lidia and Mirel Iliesiu, Stefan Augustin Doinas, Irinel Liciu, Vladimir Colin, Marcela Cordescu and probably many others. The actor Jorj Voicu, a friend of numerous seaside holidays spent together, along with poets Nina Cassian and Ali Stefanescu, in "Grandma's" courtyard at 2 Mai, believes that his name was also in the diary.
Today, when we talk and reminisce about Babu, his poem "Occurrences" could stand as a homage to his memory as well as a call to never forget him:
…
Sometimes you witness beauty's decline
Sometimes the most beautiful movie is booed by the audience
Sometimes you cannot take it any more Sometimes books lie and memories lie
Sometimes love dies
Sometimes a tram crushes a poet,
Dirty paws pull a perfidious trigger, a country buries its dream
Sometimes love dies".

Let Babu's memory forever show that he did not die in vain.
Mariana Spalas (Mariana Spalas broadcast this text on the 1st of July 2001, on Romanian News Radio program, Sunday, 6:30 A.M)