Catea Avram came from a family of horse and cart traders who lived in the area between the Romanian Dobruja and southern Bessarabia. Her date of birth is not known. Shortly after World War I, she married Ion Tudorachi Avram (unknown–1943), a Rom from her community. They had eight children together: three boys and five girls.
During the interwar period, Catea Avram lived and travelled with her family in Tulcea County. In 1939, her husband applied to the prefecture of Tulcea to be allowed to settle in the municipality of Câșla on the outskirts of Tulcea.1Direcția Județeană Tulcea a Arhivelor Naționale, Fondul prefectura jud. Tulcea, Serv. administrativ, dosar n° 899/1940, f. 12, Application for the resettlement of Roma, 8 October 1940. A year later, Ion Tudorachi Avram and other Roma applied to return to the district of Tulcea: they had worked as harvest workers in Dobruja and were expelled from there following the return of this area to Bulgaria as part of the Treaty of Craiova of 7 September 1940.2Ibid., Serv. administrativ, dosar n° 851/1939, f. 52, Application for approval of the prefecture for final resettlement, 9 August 1939.
Deportation
In 1942, the family was arrested in Horia in Tulcea County to be deported to Transnistria as ‘țiganii nomazi’ [‘nomadic Gypsies’] in accordance with the deportation order of 22 May 1942.3ANIC, fond IRJ, dosar 258, f. 2-3, Order Nr. 70 of 22 May 1942 from Cabinetul militar du preşedinţia consiliului de miniştri, published Achim, Documente privind deportarea ţiganilor în Transnistria, Vol. I, 9 f. Parents and children crossed the Danube in Tulcea on 8 July and were driven on foot to camps in Golta County in Transnistria. According to Catea Avram‘s son Radu Avram (born 1934), who was eight years old at the time of the deportation, the family had to live in various camps, first in Domanovca, then in Vradievca and Boric. Radu Avram remembers that they lived in half-buried huts [Bordei] in Domanovca. He also remembers the distribution of rationed food—one bowl of cornmeal and two potatoes per person per day.
According to family oral tradition, Catea Avram‘s husband spent one night outside in February 1943 to prevent German soldiers who were roaming the Bobric camp in search of women from entering the hut. As a result of this night watch in the freezing cold, he fell ill and died within a few days.
Catea Avram was left alone with the children until the spring of 1944. Then she fled the camp together with the other Roma. On the way back to Romania, the group was separated. With the help of her son-in-law Stefan Colia Feraru (1893–1981), Catea Avram was able to slip into goods trains with the children and return to Galați, from where they travelled to Babadag on foot.
After 1945
In the first years after the war, the family lived in villages around Babadag: in Cataloi, Frecăței and Agighiol. In 1947, the family members in Zebil, a village on the outskirts of Babadag, were registered by the prefecture as ‘illegally settled’ and subject to dispersal to various villages.4Direcția Județeană Tulcea a Arhivelor Naționale, Fondul prefectura jud. Tulcea, Serv. administrativ, dosar n°1464/1947, f. 1 and 6, Census of the Țiganii in Babadag from 1947. When the land collectivisation movement began in Dobruja at the end of the 1940s, two of Catea Avram’s sons found work on agricultural cooperatives and settled in Babadag. The eldest left Babadag and moved to the outskirts of Galați, and Catea Avram’s daughters also settled with their families in various towns in the region, namely in Tulcea, Constanța or Brăila. Catea Avram died in 1969 while visiting one of her daughters in Brăila. She was buried at the cemetery in Babadag. She never received compensation.
In 1970 his son Gheorghe Avram (1930–2017), applied for a compensation, in the name of the loss of his father in deportation via the Romanian government to the Federal Republic of Germany. This administrative procedure was in vain.5On the Romanian government’s attempts to seek compensation from the Federal Republic of Germany in 1970, see Matei, “The Reparations Game”. Radu and Georghe Avram finally received compensation in 2005.
