A priest with a novel like life

In 1960-1961, after the quarrels with the Westerners, the leadership was thinking of liberating us, and so we found ourselves back in Aiud. We were put in a cell with three priests. Father Toma Gherasimescu had been a missionary of the Romanian Orthodox Church, had travelled the country, visiting towns and villages, and had written many books and pamphlets of a theological and moral nature. Father Grigorie Băbuș was abbot of the Cheia-Prahova monastery, then librarian at the Patriarchate and confessor at the Theological Faculty in Bucharest.

Father Dimitrie Bejan was from Hârlău and about fifty years old. He had been a religion teacher in Bucharest and then a military confessor who had gone to the front with his unit. He was an encyclopaedist, especially in ecclesiastical history. He was captured at Stalingrad and remained in camps until 1952. Back in the country, one day he was outside the North Railway Station in Bucharest when someone approached him and asked for a light for a cigarette. He didn’t want to give it to him and was about to walk away when the man asked him to get into the car next to him. He got in, was taken to the M.I.A., convicted and imprisoned in Aiud. When he was released, he was forced to stay in Bărăgan. He was allowed to travel only short distances. From Bărăgan he was taken to Aiud again, this time with a sentence of 25 years. If a book were written about his life, it would be one great novel.

In prison he told us about scenes without any trace of morality and humanity, scenes that took place in Russia in the prisoners and convicts camps in Vorkuta or from other places, some of which were not even on the map.

(Fr. Ioan Bărdaș – The Calvary of Aiud. From the Sufferings of an Orthodox Priest, Anastasia Publishing House, 1999, Bucharest, pp. 78-79)