Director Gheorghiu

When we arrived at Gherla, Captain Gheorghiu was the director, an old man with white hair, a labourer by trade. He was said to be a master mechanic, and everyone who knew him spoke ill of him.

He had fallen in with the Communists before 1944, or maybe after, and believed, like other honest workers, that they were the ones who would bring justice and heaven on earth. I don’t know why this nice man wanted to be a prison warden, especially in Gherla.[1] During the eight months I knew him, I never heard him speak badly to the inmates or bully them. He talked to everyone as if they were old friends.

He wasn’t good at carpentry, instead he spent hours in the machine shop, dressed in a dressing gown, with dirty hands, teaching young men a trade.

I saw him several times helping to serve meals; if there was anything left at the bottom of the plate, he would share it with those who did not meet the required standard. Gheorghiu is said to have said that he didn’t come to Gherla to kill people.

Thanks to his attitude, this sensible worker did not interfere in the denunciations. It was the vile and murderous political officer Avădanei who directed, controlled and carried out the debunkings on the orders of Nicolski and Zeller.

At the end of the debunkings, when in Gherla one had to work like in the galleys, with almost impossible rules, this honest worker, Gheorghiu, was exchanged for the biggest criminal the communist prisons in Romania had: Captain Goiciu.

(Dumitru Bordeianu – Confessions from the Swamp of Despair)

[1] It was precisely the hope in the creation of an earthly heaven by man, and thus in self-salvation, that united the “good people”, but atheists, with the anti-Christians in the service of the enemy.