Aurel Dragodan – a modest boy with the figure of an ascetic

Now I found myself in a room with my nephew Aurica Dragodan, who was in prison in 1941-1942. He was called the teacher because he had taught many people in his life. He was from Alexandria and had lost his freedom after the events of January 1941, in a trial against the Brotherhood of the Cross. He was a slender boy, with the figure of an ascetic, no wonder after so many years of living in the prison cauldron. Arghezi himself had remarked that “hunger and the torment of patience / Sticks their bellies to their spines”. But he was cheerful, optimistic, smiling enough after so many years behind bars. He walked around the room a lot, quietly. We didn’t suspect he was into poetry, he was modest and never told us what he wrote.

(Ioan Muntean, La pas prin “reeducările” de Pitești, Gherla și Aiud sau Ridică-te Gheorghe, ridică-te Ioane, Majadahonda Publishing House, Bucharest, 1997, pp. 52-53)