“A destiny cut into the living flesh of the most unworthy of ages…”

Grigore Caraza was born on 1 February 1929 in Călugăreni – Poiana Teiului, Neamt County, the fifth of six sons of the family of Ioana and Vasile Caraza. He had a high and clear Romanian conscience, he was a witness of an exceptional generation that knew how to die and be reborn on all the crosses of history, itself a crushed history, but never defeated, with its destiny cut into the living flesh of the most humble of ages.

Because he was a man of the right, with a firm national and Christian stance, Grigore Caraza passed in the eyes of many as a former political prisoner with a legionary past, which could have been honourable if it were true, because the great legionary adventure, beyond its errors, excesses and shortcomings, had a positive side of faithful Romanianism and European solidarity in Christ.

Grigore Caraza was only a contemporary and a partial witness of a phenomenon that he had difficulty understanding and with which he came into contact more in prison (21 years of imprisonment plus two years of compulsory residence in Bărăgan) than in his early youth. The young people of his generation were trapped by fate in a tragic impasse. The fact that most of them, although socially and professionally annihilated, morally resisted all the terrible ordeals, is further proof of their good character, but also a possible landmark for today’s generation.

The moving episode recorded by Lucia Hossu-Longin in “Memorialul Durerii”, the dialogues in television programmes, the written press and conversations with students are still able to move enough people, even if pragmatism is rapidly conquering the Romanians. The younger generation has fallen prey to pragmatism, and the feeling of patriotism has become a dry, outdated notion.

In fact, those released in 1964 felt they were entering a larger prison. For Grigore Caraza, the cross of freedom was no lighter than the cross of imprisonment he had borne in the hell of the concentration camp from which he had emerged. But Grigore Caraza had the nobility not to refer exclusively to himself, but always felt the need to pay a pious homage to those who had died in the dungeons, to the anonymous heroes of that same red hell.

“Bloody Aiud” is the image of prison testimonies of the atrocities Grigore Caraza suffered through isolation and starvation. He puts himself in the position of those who refused to accept re-education and resisted the extermination conditions in Aiud’s Zarca (the prison within a prison) until the last prisoners were amnestied.

Unfortunately, we Romanians are still far from having learned the lesson of our own history to the end… May God rest him among His Saints!

(Prof. Rodica-Stefania Caraza – Doxologia.ro)