Alexandru Virgil Ioanid (en)

Gili Ioanid “had something seraphimic in his being”

Between 1941 and 1964, Aiud was for many a prison of hard and long suffering. […] In the cell I met, for the most part, people of character, who put the purity of their conscience above suffering and humiliation. Aiud was a real school of Romanian life and resistance. Everyone learnt prayers, texts from the New Testament, poems written in prison, foreign languages and everything that could be learnt about ‘good and beautiful’. (…) There were a few young people, real “walking libraries”[1], who knew all the poems of Radu Gyr and Nichifor Crainic, apart from religious texts. Anyone who […]

Gili Ioanid, “a spirit of sacrifice without equal”

Meeting and getting to know Gili Ioanid gave me great joy. I could not imagine that it was possible for one man to have so many spiritual resources. I wondered how he could have accumulated so much intellectual and spiritual baggage by his age. When he went to prison, he was in his final year of literature and philosophy. He had a modesty that was not easy to find. In fact, the communist prisons were full of the best and the most beautiful of the Romanian people, all the spiritual values of the nation were thrown into the communist prisons […]

Alexandru Virgil Ioanid, “a deeply religious young man”

In the meantime, the process of re-education continues[1]. Two camps gradually emerged: those who wanted to be re-educated and those who did not. Most people refuse re-education. Each of these two camps is divided into two other camps. In the camp of the re-educated: some want total re-education (Parpalac, Bordeianu…), others want only partial re-education (Vojen, Iosif Costea, Father Borșa, Tache Savin, Dumitru Groza…). In the camp of those who reject re-education, there are also two orientations: in the first group, the majority opinion prevails that a minimum of malleability must be shown, but that it must not go beyond […]