Mihai, what will happen to the bones if this big excavator hits them while scraping the ground, what will we rebury?, my cousin Mărioara asked me while we witnessed in astonishment the force with which the heavy double-function machine (excavator and bulldozer) was digging, scraping and leveling the ground and the vegetation, crushing branches, wood, stones and boulders.

I am convinced that the digging of the bones in the mass grave was a masked profanity, either deliberate or caused by negligence. It was an action that, from a legal perspective, would have raised specialized comments based on art. 383 of the Romanian Criminal Code, Desecration of corpses or grave, which provides imprisonment for such acts. The consequence of such specialized comments, with a high degree of probability, may be the incrimination (definition of crime and its legal punishment) of the act of desecrating mass or individual graves containing the bones of martyr heroes. Only the government may initiate criminal investigations in this case, since IICCMRE reports directly to the Prime Minister. Certain images in the documentaries about the Nazi holocaust against the Jewish people came involuntarily to my mind, those images of piles of human corpses pushed into the mass grave with a bulldozer – innocent people who had suffered terrible tortures in the death gas chambers, and became martyr heroes of humanity.

Fortunately for the memory of the martyr heroes partisans, whose remains were searched, I was there and could prevent the “ingenious diggings” with the “steel animal”. 

The excavator’s driver followed the indications of Petrov, who was guiding him by making signs, since the heavy excavator was making a loud noise while excavating the ground and the vegetation, breaking stumps of fir trees and crushing stones, then leveling everything with the bulldozer, after repeated twisting at 180 degrees of the furious “steel animal”. Sometimes, some of us thought we saw traces of bones on the ground leveled by the bulldozer. Fortunately, we were wrong; they were only dark-grey crushed stones or pieces of green or dried wood.

The excavator worked for more than three hours, but with no result. By a stroke of luck, the poor human skeletons were rescued from the rage of the “steel animal” that would have certainly crumbled them. We would have witnessed the desecration of the martyrs’ remains that had been resting there for almost seventy years.

It was very difficult to see anything on the archeologist’s face due to his big thick beard like a natural mask, and his imperturbable calmness. I am not sure whether he was aware (or is aware today) of what could have happened from the moral, legal, historical and political point of view, if the excavator had destroyed the remains of the five partisans- martyred heroes of the Romanian nation.