Traian Orban (b. Petroșani, 20 februarie 1944) is a vet by profession. However following his participation in the Revolution of 1989, this became an insignificant detail for his identity. As he presents himself, in a veritable declaration of faith in the mission taken up by the institution that he has run for more than two and a half decades: “At present I am a pensioner, a category II invalid and disabled since I was shot during the Revolution. I am the president of the Memorial to the Revolution Association, founded in 1990, an association that was set up out of the desire to honour the memory of the heroes, to create a centre of documentation, to find out the truth about the Revolution, to create a memorial complex of monuments marking the most important locations in the city, where people were killed.”

The Revolution of 1989 brought a change of regime for the whole of Romania, but Traian Orban’s direct participation in the revolt in Timişoara was an event that marked him profoundly with the drama of the events and radically changed his way of looking at life. Traian Orban was shot on 17 December, one of the bloodiest days of the events that took place in Timişoara at the start of the Romanian Revolution of 1989. As recalled by Traian Orban, the moment that changed his destiny unfolded thus: “I arrived in Liberty Square in front of the Macul Roşu [“red poppy”] confectionery. Some individuals had devastated the confectionery, taken the furniture out onto the tram lines and set it on fire. The second-hand shop in the square had also been devastated; people were coming out with clothes, with cameras, with TVs and other valuable objects. They were offered to the demonstrators. We refused to take them. We protested, but in vain – they got on with the job and disappeared with the objects. In Liberty Square the tanks arrived. One of the tanks was set on fire and headed quickly towards Unification Square along Str. Alecsandri, to the cheers of the crowd. The cordons of soldiers were trying to block access to the square. There was still no shooting. I took part in blocking a tank in Liberty Square; some young people positioned themselves in front of it, and tried to stick various objects into its tracks. I got my hand on a tank towing cable, and stuck it into the tracks, and I asked a young man to put a rag in the exhaust pipe, with the result that the engine stopped. Immediately to the cheers of the crowd, the tank stopped. Near the garrison in Liberty Square there were some cars. One of them was set on fire. I found out later that they were the cars of some military staff in Division 8, which had its headquarters in the square. After the burning of the car, the signal was given to start the repression; it was after 4.30 pm when they started shooting. They were probably using training bullets, because nobody was wounded. There were cheers; a lot of people were trying to withdraw from the square. We tried to head for the Opera along Str. Alba Iulia, but a column of demonstrators was coming from the Opera shouting ‘Freedom.’ The crowd in the square thinned out. I saw a few people being detained. I didn’t want to go away from in front of the garrison; I was shouting: “The army is with us!... Down with Ceauşescu!” I want to tell you that between 4 and 4.30 I talked with some conscripts. They told me they had been on alert since 5 am. They had weapons, but they didn’t have bullets. I offered them cigarettes. I noticed that after 4.30 the firing got more intense. I saw that pieces of plaster were falling from the walls, a sign that indeed they were firing real bullets. I was scared and withdrew into various buildings on the square. Then I went back into the square, trying to head towards the museum on the then Str. Karl Marx, but another column of demonstrators came from there too and I saw an officer being attacked by the demonstrators. They were beating him. We went back, back in front of the garrison, where before 5 pm three civilians with pistols emerged from the military garrison together with three men in military greatcoats and caps and with automatics in their hands. I saw that from the Division headquarters, where the statue of Decebalus is, they were firing from the balcony and from a window; I saw some conscripts trying to put out a fire, a Dacia car. At a certain point, when I was at the crossing of Liberty Square with Karl Marx, I talked a little with the soldiers and I heard that a soldier had been shot. Beside me someone was wounded, and I bent down over him to see what had happened to him. He was bleeding heavily and the blood splashed on my face and my clothes. At the same moment I was shot in the leg, before 5 pm. I cried out; I fainted with pain; I could feel I was being carried by some young people to a car, and I was taken by car to the County Hospital. The pain was very severe when they held me by the wounded leg. They thought I had been hit somewhere in the face, in the head, because I was covered with blood. In the hospital, I was undressed; I was put on a stretcher; they gave me first aid; but I was left in the corridor. Probably there were much greater emergencies. In the corridors, on stretchers, in wheelchairs, there were wounded people; some were shouting; there were dead there; it was beyond description. Stretchers were coming with wounded from ambulances, which kept bringing more and more wounded. I waited a long time; I was in the corridor; it was cold; it was winter. At a certain point, a stretcher-bearer came up to me and said he worked in the village of Şipet, in Dorna. He asked me how it had happened; I told him. He got to know me. I asked him to bring me a blanket and he suggested to some stretcher-bearers that it would be a good idea for me to be taken to the Orthopaedic Hospital. And so I got out of the County Hospital, where I heard that horrible things happened. I was transported to the Orthopaedic Hospital after about an hour; it was after 6 pm. I was taken into a ward; a preliminary toilet was carried out, but it was all an incredible shambles. The hospital was overcrowded. The next day I was moved to another ward. After about nine days, I heard that a team of doctors from Austria had arrived in the hospital; they treated me in an initial phase, and then I was transported as part of a convoy of ambulances to Vienna. On 27 December I was the first patient the Austrians operated on. They were a team of Austrian doctors from various hospitals; from the Polytrauma Hospital there was Professor Johan Poigenfurt, who was the head of the clinic. During the period when these doctors were treating the wounded, they were still shooting in Timişoara. These doctors were extraordinary. They saved a lot of people from perishing.” (Orban 1997)

Traian Orban is at present one of the leading figures in civil society in the west of Romania, a respected personality in the Romanian public space and one of the most insistent fighters for finding out the truth about the Romanian Revolution of 1989. As he confessed to the COURAGE project researchers, Traian Orban has a vision of communism, at least the communism that he experienced in Romania, that is utterly unequivocal: “It was a political system without a God; it was a system against human nature. It cultivated fear, opportunism, toadyism, laziness, snitching – just about everything that is low and base in people. It didn’t bring wellbeing to people; it reduced most of them to the verge of bare subsistence. Communism generated a lot of suffering through dictatorship, through the repressive system that it embodied, through the personality cult, through restrictions on human rights. With all sorts of limits imposed, with food rationing, with insufficient clothing. Nothing was for people; on the contrary it was against people, against people’s normality. With the hunger, with the cold, with the fear that it brought, communism was against people.”