At Gherla prison

After a few years in the lead mines, for reasons I suspected, we were taken out of the mines and sent to Gherla prison. Conditions[1] had changed for the better.

At Gherla we were put in larger rooms where there were 30-40 prisoners at a time.

After a while we were given mattresses filled with straw or hay instead of the straight beds with blankets. This was around 1954-1955… and people began to hope and deceive themselves, as usual, when there was even the slightest improvement in the situation.

It was here that I met and became friends with the lawyer Muscalu from Bucharest, a very cultured man, especially as he knew several languages and literatures. I also found a university professor from the former Commercial Academy. I learnt a lot from him in the discussions we had in various fields. I will tell you an enlightening story about the manifestation of demonic spirits.

One night I woke up with a black slime on me, tormenting me and trying to strangle me. It couldn’t have been a nightmare caused by an illness, because I had no heart problems until I was 71 years old, which is what I am now.

I woke up fine and still couldn’t get out of my grip. I could hardly make the sign of the cross and then the mud went to another bed where the agricultural engineer Manolescu was sleeping, a very calm and rational man who immediately woke up… and, sitting on the edge of the bed, began to pray.

Then I saw the shadow move towards another bed where the Macedonian Gioga, who had undergone re-education in Pitești, was sleeping, and he woke from his sleep screaming and shouting in terror.

At dawn I asked them what they had dreamed and seen. They all told me that they had dreamed terrible things. I told them what I had dreamed and what I had seen when I woke up.

We were all amazed by the wanderings of the evil spirit, which for us was the real proof of the satanic spirits that haunted that cell.

According to the confessions of some, someone had committed suicide in this cell, and it was here that the beatings took place during the re-educations, when people were forced to confess what they had not done, and where some could no longer bear it and denied their faith because of the horror of the tortures.

One day, unexpectedly, I felt a warm liquid in my mouth. It was blood. I had a pulmonary haemorrhage, which stopped after a few hours, but returned in two or three days.

In the following days, others in the cell began to have the same bleeding symptoms.

After a few weeks, all of us with haemorrhagic symptoms were taken out and moved to another prison building where there were rooms only for tuberculosis patients.

In Aiud, in one winter alone, on one floor of the building, we went from a hundred tuberculosis patients to more than 400. Why did this happen? Because when the meals were served, there were so few mesh tins[2] that we weren’t allowed to wash them, and when the mesh tins were passed from one cell to another or contaminated with tuberculosis, several hundred people were affected.

In the room where we were later taken there were 15 very sick people with cavernous lungs. What surprised me in this room was that I found some young people sitting on the bed, lying down and blindfolded.

Some of them were still taking the blindfolds off…but others were sitting there blindfolded all the time and wouldn’t talk to anyone or answer any questions.

I found out from the others that all the blindfolded people had gone through re-education, first being mutilated and then being made to mutilate others. And they were so traumatised that they asked us not to speak out against the regime in front of them, because they were so terrified by the torture that they were able to tell the militiamen everything they had heard under interrogation. They told us that they had succeeded in suppressing their will…

We considered them victims of the terror here and left them alone. But after a while they began to talk, even to us, who tried to encourage them.

I told them that what they were being forced to do was not their fault. Some were more confident, but others remained silent, saying that even if everyone forgave them, they still couldn’t forgive themselves for what they had done… and that they were no longer worth living.

Some committed suicide in prison, others did not recover for years. They kept saying that they were permanently damaged and that they could never go back to what they had been before.

The things they described were so terrible that words cannot describe them…

Also here, in Gherla, I met a student who had spent some time in the monastery of Sâmbăta[3], where he had met the monk-priest Arsenie Boca[4].

He was among the monks until he was discovered and imprisoned, where he learnt and practised the hesychast prayer. From him I learned to practise it myself, making the sign of the cross over the heart, breathing in and out.

At first I did it 300 times a day until I was doing it all the time. Later, my heart rate, my pulse and the rhythm of my prayers quickened.

Before my imprisonment, I had also read about this way of praying in the pre-war magazine Gândirea[5], around 1941-1942, a magazine to which, among others, the priest Dumitru Stăniloae[6], Lucian Blaga[7], Nichifor Crainic[8], Mircea Vulcănescu[9] etc. contributed […].

I said the prayer of the heart again and again, and in the end I said it 10-15,000 times. Through this and other prayers, I received a cross of divine light in my heart, which then spread around it.

In time, the light spread throughout my body and later around me, and I saw the whole universe in divine light. This revealed to me the Kingdom of Heaven with which the Spirit of God had endowed me. And this was because I was fulfilling the word of the Apostle Paul: “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17).

Later, when I was in Aiud, the prayer of the heart began to creep into my being, not only in the rhythm of my breathing, but also in the rhythm of my heart, of my pulse, that is, in every beat of my heart.

I could feel it? and I could see the light in the rhythm of my pulse and my heart when I woke up from sleep, because it had penetrated so much and so deeply into my body and my heart the rhythmic saying of the prayer.

But I will tell you more about these things when I describe the struggle for God’s Light and how I overcame the darkness within me through a desperate fight.

For months I obsessively saw a raven or devil on my forehead, tormenting me. Finally[10] the obsessions disappeared and there was light in my whole body.

(The complete writings of Blessed Elijah the Seer of God and his life, commented on by his disciple and son in the Lord, Pr. Dr Dorin Octavian Picioruș. Volume I, Theology for Today, Bucharest, 2010, pp. 285-288)

[1] Politics in Romania.

[2] Mesh tin = metal bowl in which they received their food.

[3] The site of the Brâncoveanu Monastery at Sâmbăta de Sus: http://www.manastireabrancoveanu.ro/.

[4] An article about the cell of Blessed Arsenie Boca: http://www.crestinortodox.ro/diverse/chilia-parintelui-arsenie-boca-87576.html.

[5] See: http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A2ndirea_%28revist%C4%83%29.

[6] Idem: http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumitru_St%C4%83niloae.

[7] Idem: http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucian_Blaga.

[8] Idem: http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nichifor_Crainic.

[9] Idem: http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mircea_Vulc%C4%83nescu.

[10] That is, shortly before his release from prison.