Arrested again

Late one evening, after I had finished my obedience, I went to bed in my cell, which was above the cellar. And while I was in a state between wakefulness and sleep, I heard footsteps coming up the stairs leading to my cell.

And suddenly the door slammed against the wall and several militiamen with a lieutenant colonel entered the cell. And they said to me, “Don’t move! You’re under arrest. They put me in one of their vans with Father Arsenie and others. I don’t know who the others were because we were blindfolded. They took us to Rădăuți, and at dawn we were put back in the van and driven to Ploiesti. I know it was spring because at one of the stops where they took us down, people were roasting corn for the first time [it was June 1958; in the mountains corn is roasted later]. They stopped me in Ploiești and Father Arsenie was sent to Bucharest, to the “Burning Bush” trial. They put me in the trial of the Prahova people (related to Miti Dumitrescu and others) and they investigated me in Ploiești for 18 months.

When they took us from Slatina, the others in the trial had already been arrested and had to face the data. And they kept us under investigation for a year and a half. And what was an investigation in the communist era? It was death. That it couldn’t wait. You see, they wrote something about Pitești or Gherla, but they couldn’t write everything we went through. For many reasons. And the most important of all is that you can’t even think about the horrors that happened there. You can’t even think.

Now I realise – God forgive me – that what the Fathers said and what the Saviour said happened there. One of the things you find in the Paterikon is that a brother asked Avva Ishiron: But what will those who come after us be like? They will fulfil half of our deeds. But what about those who come after them?, the brother also asked. Those who come after us, he said, will do none of the deeds we do, but they will have such great and terrible trials that, if they endure them, they will be greater than we are in the Kingdom of God. Well, that’s what happened in Pitești and the other prisons.

It was here that the greatest events of my salvation took place, and it was here that the Saviour directly intervened to strengthen me with His divine power. Shortly afterwards I had a second vision in which I saw all the wheat (which in the first vision was green) ready for harvest, yellow, ripe, stalk by stalk, as far as my eyes could see. And in the midst of it an orchard about an acre in size, with trees 10 by 10 feet. There was no sun in the atmosphere, but still a divine (or Taboric) light. There, about 40-50 metres from where I was sitting, were two orchards, with plum trees, plums almost ripe (rarer, about 10 metres apart), and flowering apricot trees, with flowers so beautiful they didn’t seem earthly. And many people came to see these flowering apricot trees.

While I was in a cell, I had a dream. Here in the cell, there were two of us on a narrow bed, and underneath we had a heater that burned all the time, even in the summer. We were somewhere on a hill, between the Danube and the Bucegi. A very smooth hill, covered with green grass – a deep green, dotted with yellow and red flowers. And I was carried, in my vision, with my bed on the grass. It was a very pleasant atmosphere, like a cool spring. God had ordained that I should be freed from the torment of the radiator below, and still in that room, where there were many of us, we sat and talked. Here I asked if anyone knew what conscience was, what humility was, what modesty was, what repentance was[1]. Only one Jew knew how to answer me. The answers, together with what I knew, I checked later and they were exactly what Nichita Stithatos had written in The Life of Saint Simeon the New Theologian and in his other writings.[2]

Again, I was with a seminarian from Dâmbovița and a Jehova’s witness. The Jehova’s witness described a dream in which a crow entered his cell, sat on the window, put his hand on a pistol* in the seminarian’s pocket and fired several shots. Nothing happened to the crow. He watched the dream in amazement and didn’t know what to make of it. At that moment the Spirit enlightened me to interpret his dream (like Joseph to Pharaoh). And I told him that the crow was the devil, whom he had no power to cast out because he lacked the grace of the Holy Spirit. It was revealed to me, who was Orthodox, as it was to Joseph and Daniil, who were then in the right faith.

From there I was taken to an adjoining cell. Here, in a very small cell, there was a narrow bed, a table with a hot stove under it, and a sink. Suddenly, as I was sitting in prayer, facing east towards the window outside (it was a cellar), I heard a noise behind me. I turned around and saw that they had inserted (there were about three rows of bars between me and them) a tube about half a metre long with a funnel at the other end. I saw them put something in the tube and blow. Suddenly the room filled with a bright dust and I began to choke and see yellow, blue and green stars. Then I felt the Saviour to my right, about half a metre away, but I felt Him much more strongly than I could see or hear with my own eyes. And immediately it dawned on me to fill my mouth with water and spray the water around the cell. That’s how I neutralised the killer dust and stayed alive.

I also had some other near-death experiences during this investigation: before they took me to the cell where they were going to suffocate me, I fainted when they brought in an engineer who was bruised all over from the beatings. They made us rub him all over with spirit so that he would recover, and I fainted when I started to do this, thinking of the terrible pain I was causing him. They took advantage of this and took me upstairs to examine me, and they said to each other: “Enough! I’ve knocked the Fakir out!” because I was black and blue from fainting.

But one thing got the better of me: I couldn’t bear to see others being tortured. I fainted three times: the first time was when they called me to tell them things I refused to say, and then they tortured a poor man in front of me. The second time was when they brought in from an investigation this Christian who was in the same cell with me, who was crushed from head to foot, bruised from the many blows he had received. The guards brought him in with a cloth and a bottle of brandy, and the prisoners had to rub him down to bring him to his senses. Then there was the incident with Doctor Uță.

Afterwards, I was taken to another cell where there was a man in khaki trousers (and this caught my attention). The colonel had opened the window to let the air in. I asked him why he was wearing khaki trousers. And he told me that he had been the chief prosecutor. Before that he had been a foreman in a factory in Florești – Prahova. That’s where the Securitate had taken him, trained him and made him a prosecutor. His name was Dumitrașcu, and it was here that I had a dream vision of the peak of Omu. I was up there, near the top, on a kind of platform. And it was clear all around and you could see the plain, the Danube, the sea, everything. It was bright, but there was no sun anywhere. Suddenly I saw an eagle circling the summit. And out of the eagle’s claws came a white bird, a pigeon, quite fluffy. And it came flying fast, straight out of the eagle’s claws, and it flew into my chest on my right side. That’s how I woke up, and my right side was hot and a deep peace came over me. I realised that it was the Holy Spirit.

(Pr. Marcu Dumitru – Confession of a Christian. Fr. Mark of Sihăstria, edited by the monk Filoteu Bălan, Petru Vodă Publishing House, 2007, pp. 58-64)

[1] Here Fr. Mark explained to me his distinction between repentance and penance. In the meantime, however, I have learned another, which I am sure His Holiness would have been pleased to know: the Paissians Fathers have translated the hellenic word µFràvoLa as “repentance” and µr_TaµéÀELa as “penance”. Repentance, then, would be the inner change towards the good, and penance would be the change of the seen man towards the divine good. (n. ed.)

[2] Some are the tears of repentance, and some are the tears of divine humility. For these, like a stream, drown and spoil all the stains of sin, and these, like the cloud on the storehouses, come into the soul, and like the dew on the hay, the thorn of knowledge increases and fructifies it, and pours out much dew-bearing”. (Nichita Stithatos, head of 70 of the 100 workers) (n. ed.)