Alexandru Ghica – The gentle and entreating prince
With the shackles at my feet, I arrived in the so-called TBC ward, in the same corridor, a few rooms further from the exit [the action takes place in Jilava prison n.n.]. There were four rows of beds, three on top of each other, on only one side of the wall. The room was much bigger, with more light, fresh air and slightly better food.
I had the honour and good fortune to have Prince Alexander Ghika as my bedmate and Mihai Timaru on my left. Different lives, different people, different novels!
Prince Alexandru Ghika, a member of the Legionary Government, a magistrate by profession, imprisoned since 1941 by the courtesy of Marshal Antonescu, was a tall, straight, serene man with grey hair and blue eyes. He had come to terms with prison life, with the cell and with suffering. He was a descendant of the ruling Ghika family, with a lineage stretching back hundreds of years and giving our country many great men. When I met him, he had already served 15 years of daily imprisonment.
I quickly became friends with Prince Ghika, as if we had known each other forever. He was a very kind and communicative man. He liked my stories about what I had seen and experienced in the Arctic Circle and changed my name to “Vorkuta”.
When I arrived in Aiud in 1958, all the prisoners in the cell knew Nicu Popescu Vorkuta.
It was from conversations with him that I first heard about the prayer of the heart that he had been practising for many years.
– It was thanks to this prayer, he told me with conviction, that I didn’t receive a single beating when, here in Jilava, the guards would storm the cells every day and beat me with sticks, boots and fists!
He also told me about the “miracle of Vladimirești”[1] as a great grace given by God to the Romanian people.
I totally believed what he told me, I trembled and cried when I heard about the miracles that happened there!
When the Communists tried to find out from him what his political beliefs were, he was summoned to Jilava and interrogated for several days. He wrote whole pages in his own hand and ended his testimony with the firm words: “Long live the Legion and the Captain!
When asked why he was doing this, he replied firmly:
– Because I feel like it!
Much later, I had the opportunity to read that when the thinker Petre Țuțea, who had been in prison for 13 years, was released from Aiud in 1964, he invited Prince Ghika, who had been in prison for 23 years: “Go ahead, you have 23 years in prison; if I get out first, they will say that I am the man of the government”. (The Romanian Word, Ontario – Canada, no. 179, March 1991).
Prince Ghika also told me that Marshal Antonescu’s mother was allowed to see her son before he was executed.
When she arrived at Jilava in a carriage, the first words she said to her son, after embracing him, were:
– Well, Ioan, you won’t say anything about Bessarabia at the trial?
– What am I to do, mother, replied the marshal, “when those two rascals (Mihai Antonescu and Alexianu) have been begging me for two weeks, crying and whining, that they were promised their lives, if I do not mention anything about Bessarabia at the trial?! Wouldn’t it have been better if I had gone with those young men (the legionaries n.a.), because they knew how to die?!
[…] I have heard of the heroic attitude of Marshal Antonescu before the firing squad, which he commanded, unblinking, during his own execution”.
(Nicu Popescu Vorkuta – Crez și adevăr, Bucharest, 2009, pp. 245-247)
1. The Vladimirești phenomenon is as unique as it is complex and controversial. Until a comprehensive and official study of the Church on this phenomenon we are of the opinion that at least in the first phase, that is until the arrest of Father John and the abolition of the monastery, the phenomenon had healthy spiritual fruits. However, during the course of time, the Vladimirești phenomenon degenerated seriously, giving rise to misunderstandings (the marriage of Mother Superior Veronica Gurău to George Vasîi is just one example) and generating a sectarian group that still has followers today, namely the “nuns” of Tichilești (Brăila county). Prince Ghica, having been imprisoned for many years, and therefore cut off from knowledge of the subsequent evolution of the phenomenon, had no way of knowing of the nefarious turn. He cannot therefore be accused of presenting the phenomenon subjectively.
A book that objectively treats the Vladimirești phenomenon in its entirety is still awaited today.