Aiud – the first two years
Father was sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment and was taken in a convoy to Aiud prison. Somewhere, towards Ilva Mica, there was a sunset that the 130 prisoners, crammed into a wagon that could hold up to 80 people, watched one by one. This landscape was perhaps some consolation in the stifling atmosphere of those wagons of torture. But here is Father Justin’s story:
“In August, on a hot day, they loaded us into wagons and we left Suceava for Aiud. We were crowded together, very hot, sweat was pouring out of us, the lack of air made us gasp for breath; we felt our strength running out; some of us died on the way in these inhuman conditions, who knows how long we had been unconfessed or not taken Communion; what happened to us was no laughing matter… death made us think. We went like this for a day and a night. When we finally reached Aiud, no one spoke, there was no noise, just a hissing sound, that’s all. They blindfolded me and when I got to the third floor… the guards opened a cell and pushed me in: “Go in, you bandit!”
And so it was that Aiud the martyr maker also sheltered Father Justin within its walls for two years, during which time Father Justin barely sobered up and understood that liberation would not come soon, and that in these conditions – in which Jesus was the one persecuted – he had no reason to wish for liberation, but that this was a good opportunity and a blessing from God for the sanctification of his soul.
For Father Justin, it was from this point that the true monastic school, the true spiritual formation, the “self-denial”, began.
In Aiud prison, Father Justin met a former Minister of Transport and a General, a former military attaché in Paris. Their portraits were pitiful, they had been there for two years and already the traces of the dehumanisation caused by the treatment of these men showed their ghosts: sagging skin, drawn faces, terrible hunger that made a stolen potato a great victory. All these were telling arguments for the regime that was to confront Father for two and a half years here and many more years in other equally terrible places.
(Hieromonk Teognost – Father Justin Pârvu and the richness of a life given to Christ, Vol. I, Credința Strămoșească Publishing House, Iași, 2006, pp. 88-90)