I felt the need to give an impulse and to force in a certain uncommon way the steps Gheorghe Petrov took for the exhumation, which was constantly postponed, not only because of other priorities, as he said, but also because of the lack of sufficient financial resources of IICCMRE. I was told that donations could increase the resources of the institute, so I asked my family members if they could donate for this purpose.

As I said before, Cornel Dobrescu grew up in Mărioara’s parents’ house, where he was spoiled and adored especially by his aunt. He knew very well his uncle, Petru Decean, whom he surely admired, as I understood from my discussions with Mărioara about the relationship between them. The age difference between them allowed for the youngest to glorify the eldest.

Many years before 1989, Cornel settled with his family - his wife, Ana Maria Carmen and their children, Alexandru Sotiris and Adrian – in New Orleans, in the United States. They still live there, but he comes to Romania quite often (each time his means allow him) and probably spends two-thirds of the year in Romania, at Lipova, where he has a property, land and a house which he also used before leaving the country.

I assumed that this family, closely related to aunt Mărioara’s family, would be happy to give a donation for the exhumation. I intended to donate myself.

I e-mailed Cornel and Carmen excerpts from my correspondence with Gheorghe Petrov, so that they could know more details about the exhumation.

Carmen, who is sincere and good-hearted, answered enthusiastically, in an email of December 13 2010: Dear Mihai, I am deeply impressed by everything I read in all the links and I feel obliged to inform my boys on their paternal family history. Both Alex and Adrian are curious about it and proud to be the descendants of their great grand-parents who sacrificed everything for a good and noble cause. Today so few people of their generation still know what happened in those years of extermination directed from Moscow and accomplished without hesitation by the Romanian servants, who certainly had no good feelings for our country! Please keep me informed on what you are doing there, meetings, decisions. I would like to donate $ 1,000. Send me the bank account to which I can send contributions! This is “wonderful news”, full of hope that things would be cleared up.

I informed Gheorghe Petrov that bank account details were required from the US for a donation for the exhumation at Bistra-Groşi, sending him the above email and asking him to e-mail me the bank account number. I have no idea what happened with Carmen’s enthusiasm, how she was influenced by her husband Cornel Dobrescu, but she never wrote to Petrov, as both of them confirmed to me, although Petrov sent her a few emails in which he told her about the concerns, the results, and the budgetary difficulties of the institution for which he was working.

What happened next is of no importance, because anyone can change their mind about their own financial resources at any time, as it was the case with the Dobrescus. However, Carmen told me that the money she offered to send to the account for donations (even more, US$ 1,400) went to Mărioara, who used it as she thought better.

I had, and I still have, the well-founded suspicion, if not certainty, that I, Petru’s distant relative, interfere in his family affairs that shouldn’t concern me more than his closer relatives, namely his nephews (his sister’s sons), Cornel and Ion Dobrescu, and his nieces (his sister’s daughters), Cornelia Doina Bădescu and Olimpia Margareta Filip. How else could I understand my niece Doina (my first degree cousin’s daughter) who told me some words of reproach that involuntarily remained engraved in my memory (because I felt deeply offended): “What do you want, why do you insist on Petru’s exhumation?!” I would have ignored this incident with Doina if she had apologized, but now, after the exhumation, which she missed because she was on holiday abroad, she obstinately refused to recognize the offensive reproach she had made me and thus become even harder to forget.

Besides Mărioara, the only one who, shortly before her death, encouraged me to do everything I could for the exhumation (“the others are not capable of anything, Mihai”, she told me worriedly) was Ana (Nica) Dobrescu, born Decean, Petru Decean and Mărioara’s elder sister and mother of those named above.

Nica always treated me with overwhelming simplicity and rare sincerity, which I nostalgically remember more and more often as I am getting older.

I have nothing to reproach my cousin-nephews and nieces. I respect their right to disagree with me and have different opinions about the exhumation of their uncle, Petru Decean. However, I cannot and will not understand why they do not treat me with minimal tolerance, refusing to talk to me about the exhumation, although we were such good friends when we were young that we used to share everything we had and get over troubles with humor! Yes, this is what must have happened: we have a different understanding of our different if similar life experiences; once we reached adulthood, we weighed them differently, depending on our intelligence and personality.

However, I finally understood that all these happenings and discussions regarding the exhumation and the burial expenses, the officials’ suggestions to the relatives of the victims of communism to give money for the victims’ exhumation and  burial, were intended to postpone the exhumation indefinitely, in a diversionary way. Moreover, in the summer of 2013, I was invited by Viorel Marineasa to a seminar on the anti-communist armed resistance. There I heard a professor of history, whose ideas could seriously influence his students’ conscience, categorically stating that we, the Romanians, need not know more about the black pages of our history, thus pleading, unconsciously or not, for writing other black pages in the history of Romania. With such educators in our universities, we might always remain stuck in the mire of history.