User:Peterkecs/Alexandu Iacob

Alexandru Iacob (born Jakab Sándor) was a Transylvanian communist politician born in 1913 in a Jewish family. His father died before the Second World War. His mother was deported and killed at Auschwitz in 1944.

Alexandru Iacob became a member of the Romanian Communist Party in the early thirties. In 1941 he became the Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party for Northern Transylvania. He was in hiding during the entire period from June 1941 until the arrival of the Red Army in September 1944. While in hiding, he recruited some new party members and followers after the massive arrests of the summer of 1941, and organized the distribution of anti-war leaflets.

After 1944, Alexandru Iacob became one of the leading members of the Communist Party's Regional Committee in Cluj. He married Farkas Magda, daughter of a prominent businessman from Cluj who had escaped deportation by hiding in a nearby village.

In 1947 Alexandru Iacob was moved to Bucharest, where he joined the staff of Vasile Luca, Minister of Finance, Secretary of the Communist Party and vice-President of the Council of Ministers. In 1948 he became Deputy Minister of Finance and acted in that capacity until the spring of 1952, when he was arrested as part of the campaign against the so called "right-wing deviation". At the trial of Luca and his group, he did not admit to willful wrongdoing (the accusation against him was sabotage). He was sentenced to 20 years in prison and spent 12 years in solitary confinement. He was freed as part of the general amnesty of 1964, decreed by Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej before his death. Iacob’s wife had also been arrested in the summer of 1952. She was released in 1954, insane.

Following his release form prison, Alexandru Iacob worked as an economist. In the late sixties he remarried and some time in the 1980's he and his wife emigrated to Sweden, where they were well received and he was very nicely treated as a former victim of a totalitarian regime. He died there some time in the nineties.

The defendants from the “Luca trial”: Vasile Luca, Alexandu Iacob, Ivan Solymos and Dumitru Cernicica were officially rehabilitated in 1968. Vasile Luca and Ivan Solymos died in jail.