Dan Mihăilescu – a martyr of the communist prisons
It was November 1951. After the end of the investigation I arrived in Jilava and here in cell no. 12, the first on the left in the 2nd “secret” section.
Here I met Dănuț Mihăilescu. Since I was the only one of my group in this cell – as usual, before the trial, the members of a group were scattered, each in a different cell – and since I was still stunned and frightened by the investigation (barely a month had passed since my arrest), Dan’s warmth of heart, his sensitivity and delicacy, and perhaps above all his extraordinary kindness, made him come close to me from the very first days, giving me exactly what I was missing most at that time: a friendship based on total trust, given without reserve from the very first contact. […]
He was as modest as he was intelligent and affectionate. I don’t know which of these qualities prevailed. I think he was endowed by God with all of them, to the full. Maybe I’m exaggerating because he was my first best friend in prison, or because I felt terribly lonely and helpless and he gave me exactly what I needed. I don’t know. Today it is very difficult for me to be more objective than I was then, because the halo of immeasurable suffering, courage, honesty and Christian love with which I see his face in my memory, later identified, according to vague information gathered here and there, as the face of a real martyr of communist prisons, perhaps prevents me from appreciating him with the detachment of an analyst for whom affection must be absent.
But one thing is certain: in the years that followed, in prison and out, I never forgot Dan. And when I opened the first volume of Cicerone Ionițoiu’s three-volume documentary Tombes sans croix, it was by chance, or who knows what else, that I first came into contact with the fragments of the concentric universe presented there, and it was Dan’s photograph, just as I had known him. […]
… he lived in my memory as he was when I met him and, above all, exactly as he was in the photograph, looking directly into my face, as he always looked at his interlocutor.
(Testimony of the architect V. Mairon in Gheorghe Stănescu, Jurnal din prigoană, Venus Publishing House, Bucharest, 1996, pp. 83-84)