“Command me, Jesus, if I am worthy of it, to crucify myself on a cross with You”.
Dialogue between Vartan Arachelian and Fr. Ioan Negruțiu, broadcast on TVR on 8 April 1990, later published in written form in the book “The Word that Builds”:
– I would like to ask you to tell us a little about yourself, because I have heard from your friends that you have suffered a lot for your faith, twenty years in prison for your faith in Jesus Christ. Where shall we start?
– I am originally from the district of Bihor. I was born in 1915, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire still existed. Therefore, three years after I was born, the border crossed over me because I could not cross the border and I became a Romanian citizen without a passport. After I was born, my parents, who were poor farmers, both died.
– How many orphans were there?
– I was the youngest, no more than two or three years old. We were left in the care of older sisters, one 16, the other 14, who took care of us, fed us, clothed us. And they clothed us as much as they could and fed us as much as they could and as much as they could find.
I remember – and I never forget – one event in my life from that sad childhood. When I had grown up, I was about 5 or 6 years old. One day a beggar appeared in the village, a blind man. He begged for mercy and eventually for shelter because the night was setting by. There was no one until our house, because we were on the edge, to take him in, and he begged us. And we took him in. We put him to bed, as we usually did, because there were many of us on the floor. We spread out some maize cobs and put two or three cloths on top of them, some of which we wrapped around ourselves and some of which we laid on top of him. The poor man felt our poverty. We gave him what we had to eat, I think he lived better at home. Around midnight he got down on his knees and began to pray to God for us. And he prayed with tears. We listened and wept with him.
In the morning he got up and left, but his prayer was so engraved in our hearts that we never forgot it. And I have often thought, and I still think, that perhaps, just perhaps, under his humble beggar’s face, God was saying that when you give a piece of bread to one of these lesser, afflicted ones, we are giving it to Him, that He is identifying Himself with every human being in the world, because we are all His icons. And so far I am reminded of the prayer of the blind man. It often seems to me that even now, in my difficulties, his prayer is heard more by God than my own.
The years of my cruel childhood passed and I had to go to school. I couldn’t go to school because I had nothing to wear, and my only clothing was a shirt made of cloth, and in winter and summer of hemp that the sisters wove. I also never had a hat on my head. Nor a hat on my feet. But I had to go and learn.
The school was two kilometres from the village and it was impossible for me to go, no matter how strong I was, with the infirmity I had acquired: it was too far, two kilometres, to walk in the snow and mud, and I didn’t go.
But my elder sister, who had finished primary school and had a really good book, who could have gone to a school further away but couldn’t because of poverty, said to me: ‘Look, don’t stay really stupid, I’ll teach you every evening when I come from the factory – she worked in a sawmill 12 kilometres from the village – when I come from there I’ll teach you how to read and write. And she got me an ABC book and a slate from there and I started to write with it.
I could only leave at the end of the school year. When the teacher saw me, she said, “What are you looking for, because the year is over and we can’t give you a pass mark to take the class.
I was with the blackboard and the alphabet. “Stay there.” He put me at a desk at the back of the class and gave me a homework assignment. When she heard me doing the homework, I got the board out and started writing: She came up to me, puzzled: “What are you doing?”… “Writing.”
When she looked, she saw the most beautiful calligraphy in the class. The task was for the students to write about the objects they saw in the classroom, and she hadn’t noticed that one of the students who had been in the classroom all winter and spring had a coat of arms above her desk. I noticed it too and then, impressed too, she took me to her husband, to the headmaster, and said: “Look, what are we going to do with this child? And they both decided to give me a first grade certificate, despite my absences, because I hadn’t been there all year, and they sent me to an orphanage in Oradea and I continued my primary school studies there. And it turned out well.
After that, the orphanage in Oradea sent me to a seminary in the north of Bessarabia, in Hotin County, as Didineț calls it. And I spent four years there. After four years they transferred me to Galați. When I finished the seminary, I went to the university in Bucharest, to be more in the heart of the country and in the best university.
– What were you imprisoned for, Father?
– At that time I was a professor of religion and a priest in Bucharest, and in addition to my teaching I tried to give the faithful what I could from my soul by other means. And the means was that I founded a choral society in Beiuș, we got legal personality, we were a very good choir of about eighty people, choristers, with whom we also responded to the Holy Mass in the cathedral, because the cathedral was moved from Oradea, in the ’40s, moved to Beiuș, Oradea had gone to Hungary.
And things were going very well until the whole world changed. After that I worked until 1948, and in 1948 I was taken by the police, the Securitate, whatever it was, and investigated.
– Were you convicted?
– I was convicted. Ten years hard labour. I served it. After I had served it, I was not released, but sent to the Bărăgan with compulsory residence. When I arrived there, in that village, called Rubla or Valea Călmățuiului, I was met by dozens of Romanians, poor people, who were there with compulsory residence, who had just come out of prison, and they asked me if I was a priest. “I am a priest.” “Well, Father, look, we’ve been here for years, four hundred families, we have no priest, no church, we sit on the ground like animals…”
– We have to say that all of them were university educated people, had been ministers, leading men of the country.
– And we built the church. The work started in the summer and before Christmas it was finished, the church and the steeple, and the people were very happy. And we started to minister at Christmas and then regularly every Sunday, every holiday.
We also held Easter. We had people coming from all over the country, all the relatives of those who lived there wanted to come and hold Easter with us, on the Bărăgan, and I remember, indeed, with much soulful gratitude, the year I spent in Rubla. In July, that is to say, the year that I had to stay there, I went to bed late one night, I had a lot of work to do in the parish, and after I had fallen asleep, in the morning I was awakened by a dream, a dream such as I have never had and I think I will never have again.
Jesus Christ came to me in a dream. I was at the foot of Calvary and I wanted to go up there, perhaps I would find the cross of the Lord. I had never been to the Holy Places, and when I climbed Golgotha with difficulty, I was standing upside down, and when I raised my head, without realising it, I was standing in front of the Cross of the Lord Christ. He was alone on the Cross, He looked at me, I felt a shiver and I asked: “Lord, are You alone? Are the robbers no longer with You? They too have left You.. Jesus, if I am worthy, command me to be crucified with You on the cross. On which one shall I sit? The one on the right or the one on the left? And Jesus answered me, “The cross on the right or the cross on the left no longer has the meaning it once had. From now on whoever comes to Me can stand on any cross, on the right cross or on the left cross”. And as I was approaching the crosses I touched His feet with my hand. They were as cold as ice, and a particularly strong chill went through me and I woke up. I realised that it was a sign from Christ that I had to begin a new Calvary that day. And I thought of running away, running away…
I prayed on my knees, I packed a small suitcase with which I thought I would go to the nearest train station and go where God would help me.
When everything was ready and I was about to go out the door to leave, I heard the sound of a car engine. I looked out from behind the curtain and saw the Galați Securitate van pulling into my yard. A colonel and two other officers. They entered the house and said, “Good morning, Father, you have been summoned to give a statement”. And as I had learned my lesson ten years before, I put winter clothes in my suitcase, even though it was the middle of summer.
– For how many years did they call you?
– I’d like to start with the epilogue, just to be clear. After the pardon decree of 1964, when I was released like all the others, one of my former students from Beiuș, who had become a military prosecutor in the same court that had tried me, came looking for me to talk to me. He found me and, after embracing me, he said: “Look, fate made me become a prosecutor in the court where you were tried. I attended your trial, I was a student at the time, and I couldn’t understand why you were given such a heavy sentence. And as soon as I took up my post, I went straight to the archives, looked for the file, read it, and I tell you, Prosecutor of the Socialist Republic of Romania, that I didn’t find any facts worthy of even one minute of detention, that you really didn’t do anything”. […]
– The sufferings you have gone through, your passion for the faith, which is in fact the passion of an entire people, of the Romanian nation in this half century, entitles you to be listened to and followed.
(Vartan Arachelian – The Word That Builds. Dialogues, Roza Vânturilor Publishing House, Bucharest, 1993, pp. 43-48)