“All the regime food he received he gave to others”
One day at the cinema I was sitting in the back seat[1]. The lights had gone out for the film. Someone brought the great monk Ioan Iovan, the former confessor of the Vladimirești monastery in Tecuci, to me in the dark. I knew that he was in prison, that he had tuberculosis, that he was on an improved diet and that he gave most of his food to others, so much so that one wonders what he lived on.
I had admired his work at Vladimirești, even though he had been so challenged and even catechised. But we still admired him. And here he is now, next to me. We embraced without seeing each other. Then we talked all the time.
He described to me in detail all the great and wonderful events of Vladimirești. During the communist period, until the monastery was abolished in 1954, there was the greatest, the strongest spiritual centre for us.
(Fr. Nicolae Grebenea, Memories from darkness. 23 years of prisons under four governments, Agora Publishing House, Iasi, 1998, p. 368)
[1] The action takes place in Aiud prison, when “re-education” has entered its final phase, combining harsh methods (starvation, isolation, humiliation) with psychological pressures (communist propaganda, promises, etc.), but all with the aim of breaking the moral resistance of the prisoners.