Silenced Loyalties: Memory, Ambiguity and Intergenerational Resilience in a Romanian Family under Surveillance

Абстракт

This article explores the intergenerational transmission of political trauma and morally ambivalent positioning within a Romanian family marked by repression, surveillance, and forced silence under communism. The Pușchilă family ‒ compris-ing three generations of architects ‒ serves as a microhistorical case study of how state violence, surveillance, and forced silence affected not only individuals but also family dynamics, identities, and vocational choices. The patriarch, Ioan Pușchilă, was imprisoned between 1949 and 1956, in the aftermath of the estab-lishment of the communist regime. His wife, Marcela, and later his son, Ion, were both formally approached and recorded as recruits in Securitate paperwork; however, in the archival record examined here, there are no documentary traces of sustained informant activity (e.g., informative notes, reports of meetings, opertional outputs) that would allow a substantiated assessment of the content or effects of such recruitment. This study refrains from moral judgment, focusing instead on the contexts of constraint, fear, and negotiation that shaped these ambivalent positions. Drawing on archival documents (criminal, surveillance and informant files from the CNSAS, and a long-form interview with Ana Pușchilă (daughter and keeper of the family memory), the article analyzes how silence, not speech, became the main vehicle of trauma and loyalty. It engages with theoretical frameworks such as postmemory (Marianne Hirsch), the ethics of care (Carol Gilligan), and microhistory (Ginzburg, Levi), proposing a multidimensional understanding of what it means to survive ‒ ethically and emotionally ‒ under authoritarian control. Ultimately, the Pușchilă case suggests that key moral and affective dispositions are transmitted less through explicit narration than through tacit communication rules, everyday risk-management practices, and patterned forms of family cohesion under surveillance.