Aurel Lazarov, the martyred spiritual father from Constanța
The period in which Romanians were tortured and killed in the communist camps can, without fear of exaggeration, be called the period of the martyrs. The empty eyes of the dead in the mass graves reflected the impossibility of understanding the atrocities committed in the name of a dark, stupid and merciless regime. But they have been mathematically proven (witness the unimaginable numbers and endless lists of the missing). One of these dead speaks today, through the testimony of his camp friends, through the memory of his only son, and out of our desire not to allow the harsh history of the martyrs’ time to be forgotten. His name was Aurel Lazarov, he was a priest, and his story begins like that of hundreds of thousands of other martyrs like him.
“FATHER, IN THE NAME OF THE LAW, YOU ARE UNDER ARREST!”
“7 May 1950. It was early in the morning. Three men, one in uniform with a gun, broke down the door of the house. The gunman fired a shot into the room where I was sleeping… “Father, in the name of the law, you’re under arrest,” they shouted. They picked us up and took us to the right of the oak tree, laid us on our stomachs on the ground and held us like that… I don’t know how long. I was very cold and very frightened. My mother was crying. The fact is that when we found the courage to get up from the floor… Just me and my mother. I was about three years old,” says Aurel Lazarov, the priest’s son. The brutality of the arrests, the lack of explanations, the searches, all these tools of a system designed to intimidate and destroy any attempt to protest or demand explanations, have had their effect in this case too. “My father was imprisoned for ten years, until he died, and in all that time I only heard one message from him, through a special man, a good friend of my father’s parish, Father Mocanu. Around ’58 – ’59 he came to us and brought me, on my father’s behalf, a small wooden cross and an icon made of some kind of bone. And a piece of shirt for my mother, he says. “Then, around 1992, Father Calciu Dumitreasa came to us and told me about my father: ‘he was a saint'”.
“Why did they arrest him? To be honest, I still don’t know. The stories that circulated in the village were that one night, in the Babadag Mountains, two refugees who had been in the Resistance came to him and said: ‘Preftule (‘priest’ in Aromanian; ‘Preftu’ will become his prison nickname – ed.), confess us too’… And he confessed them, and on his way out he gave them two sacks with some goods… And it came out, and…”, Aurel Lazarov remembers.
“My mother was the daughter of Anastase Mihalache, one of the great landowners of Constanța. But the communists confiscated everything. We were left without a house, without anything, just the debts of the Church. It was very hard. My mother and I lived in Ion Borîndel’s house. I used to collect the leftover wheat, corn and barley from the barn, and my mother used to grind it in a mill with two stones. And she made a kind of polenta, from which she cut slices and put them on the stove to heat up. My mother was asked to divorce him, to stop calling him Lazarov. My mother worked at the bank, and in order to continue working there, she had to do this,” Lazarov recalls.
On 7 June 1960, a banal administrative document arrived at the People’s Council of Dulgheru commune, Hârșova district, Constanța region, and in a few lines full of mistakes, without any signature or official stamp, it announced the death of the martyred confessor. “This is how I learned that my father had died. There was great mourning in the house and even in the village, because my parents and grandparents were very well-known people in Hârșova. The following year we received a parcel from Aiud. It was his reverence, his bloody shirt and a pair of boots. Grandma took them and went to Father Manea and read them. Then she put them in a cardboard box under her bed and nobody was allowed to touch it. She made me put my father’s things in the coffin and his photo on the cross,” Lazarov says.
“Unfortunately, I didn’t know him personally. I was very young when he was taken away. But my mother, my grandmother and people around us told me about it, especially after the revolution. But my mother told me a story that made a big impression on me. In order to buy me a sugar bowl, my father gave me a very expensive violin that was very dear to him. (He stares at a point on the ceiling, trying to get over this moment of memory… and continues) He went to Jilava, Cavnic, Aiud. He took imprisonment for granted, he was a fighter, but he was not very diplomatic. He was tortured because he wouldn’t renounce his oath as a priest. They told me he was a real priest. The torturers didn’t know that he had an antimension (an embroidered cloth placed on the altar during Liturgy). For a long time they didn’t know, and he held services, real services,” says Lazarov’s son.
The strong and chosen spirit, the holiness and indestructible inner structure of this priest, a structure which, at the cost of his life, helped hundreds of Christians to escape from the hell of spiritual destruction, left indelible memories in the minds and hearts of those who knew him. […]
Eugen Zefir Lazarov visited Father Justin Pârvu in the monastery of Petru Vodă, near Neamț, in order to keep alive the memory of his father, who had died too soon. “It was a feast, the world was on fire, and there was a long queue of people waiting to see the priest. I got in touch with a monk who, after finding out that I was ‘Father Lazarov’s son’, crossed himself and helped me enter the priest. Justin Pârvu looked at me for a long time, crossed himself, called me to his side, put the patrafir on me, read to me and then told me all sorts of miracles. He was a good man, a perfect priest, the kind you rarely meet, who did his duty to the end,” he told me.
“Do you know what Father Aurica was like? We were all in the Zarca. Water was coming down from above and Aurica was standing over me so that the water wouldn’t run down me, because I had a lung condition. He was the man who, even if he was hungry for a week and received a piece of bread, preferred to give it away so that he could see others smile,” says Father Arsenie Papacioc, in conversation with Father Lazarov’s son. […]
In his article “Prigonirea Bisericii Ortodoxe strămoșești sub comunism” (published in “Vestitorul ortodoxiei românești”, year I, no. 3, February 1990 – n.r.), Fr. Dumitru Stăniloaie mentions Fr. Lazarov, with whom he was a cellmate. “[…] Among the priests who were imprisoned in 1958-1964, I was personally in the room with several who died, sick from all kinds of torturous treatment they had been subjected to, including starvation. They were (…): Father Lazarov from Dobrogea, in 1959, in his 14th year of imprisonment; he thought with emotion that he had left his son, only one year old, at home. Terrible headaches led to his death three days later”.
Father Lazarov was truly a confessor of the camps. The real spiritual strengthening, powerful, almost inexplicable in this imposed isolation, came from the very nature of the torturers’ intention to frighten, weaken and enrage. Thousands of weakened faces, thousands of trembling voices, the almost palpable despair, the suffering that surrounded the prisons like a shroud, all this nourished the Christian spirit of the righteous path and gave it strength until the end, when, according to Father Justin Pârvu, “the degradation of bodies was perceived by the few like us as a deep peace.” Faith had thus become the only way out for crushed and frightened souls, and one of its righteous guardians was Father Aurel Lazarov. God rest his soul!
(Alina Cristea[1] – Cotidianul Telegraf, online edition of 29 October 2013 and 30 October 2013)
[1] The author would like to thank the librarian of the Archdiocese of Tomis, Ionuț Druche, for his perseverance and patience, as well as Eugen Lazarov, for his courage to call a spade a spade.