Timisoara

At 3 a.m. on Sunday morning, December 17, Tőkés awoke to the sound of doors being broken down. Immediately he, his wife and their friends ran through the home to the back where there was a ladder that you could climb up that would get you up to the second floor and to the church. The first four at the ladder made it upstairs: Edith and László Tőkés, and two of their friends, Árpád Gazda and Pál Kiss.

The others didn’t make it. This is what they heard:

“Stai, că trag!” (“Stop or I shoot!”)

The five other friends of the Tőkéses who had stayed overnight were already being arrested by Securitate agents and police downstairs while the rest had now climbed through a window on the second floor and had entered the church.

Tőkés admitted naively that he thought that if he could get to the church altar the Securitate would recognize that as a refuge and not touch him. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to be in church law – and in certain romantic novels.

Having lost sight of the others, Tőkés and his friend Gazda had pulled up the ladder to the second floor where they now were so that the Securitate agents couldn’t climb up after them. But that probably only saved them seconds – there was always the regular staircase in the interior of the building that led up to the main entrance to the church for the Securitate to use. Gazda quickly felt his way in the dark to the church light switch, turned it on and then handed Tőkés his minister’s cloak which he immediately put on – also hoping that that might dissuade any heavy-handed actions by the Securitate officers.

Tőkés then called everyone to the altar to pray. And that’s when it happened.

“They had just broken the doors down,” explained Tőkés. “They came to us, to the altar.”

Gazda said he saw about fifteen officers storm in.

“I remember there was a plainclothes officer who was the head of things there,” recalled Gazda. “He had a rubber truncheon in his hand, and he kept slapping the palm of his other hand with it. He had a real sadistic look on his face.

“And then he said to Tőkés, ‘Roagă-te, pentru că o faci pentru ultima oară!’ (‘Go ahead and pray because it’s the last time you ever will!’)”

Gazda was the first to be overpowered by the Securitate forces. Then came the Tőkéses’ turn, and László, especially, was going to get “special’ treatment”:

“They started beating me,” said László, “and they continued hitting me as we went downstairs. I was already bleeding. They also really roughed up my wife and knocked her around.”

In fact, Gazda remembered Edith Tőkés yelling hysterically at the officers to stop beating her husband.

“Downstairs to my great surprise was the head of the Department of Cults, Ion Cumpanașu,” László Tőkés recalled. “He was the one who said they should stop beating me.”

Meanwhile, Gazda, Kiss and the five other friends of the Tőkéses’ who tried to act as bodyguards in the church (Attila Csöke and his father András, Ferenc Szabó, Krisztina Balaton and her husband Norbert Joszt) were then brought down to a police van where they were all beaten with cables.

The seven were then brought to Securitate headquarters where the beatings continued. In fact, about ten or twelve soldiers or Securitate officers – Gazda wasn’t sure anymore who they were when I interviewed him in 2009 – spent half-an-hour beating up the group. In fact, they went into a frenzy, wildly beating the seven prisoners.

“They even made us kneel, and then with their hands holding on to our necks they kept kicking us in the kidneys,” Gazda recalled.

After the beatings they were brought to a hallway inside the Securitate building where they were ordered to lie face down in two rows with their arms outstretched.

“They (the security forces) told us that if we talk to each other or move they would gun us down. So, we lay there motionless for four-five hours.”

All seven were then imprisoned and were expecting the worst. Outside on the street they could hear the shooting and the screams – those horrific screams...