Doctor Uță – Like Saints Cosma and Damian, he was a “holy unmercenary”
It was 1957 and the end of the decade was approaching, but the problem had not yet been solved. In 1938, a poet from Charaș, Pavel Bellu, in a poem published in the magazine “Tomorrow’s Generation” by the students of the “General Dragalina” gymnasium in Oravița, said: “I return crushed, but undefeated”. That was it, the prisoners of Aiud were crushed after so many years, but they were not defeated.
A new phase of total and forced collectivisation of agriculture and the liquidation of the ideological remnants of the old world was to follow in the country. They were gathering material for their new campaign, which followed in 1958-1959. Thus, Dr. Aurel Iubu, whom I had known as a university assistant at the O.R.L. Clinic in Cluj, was brought to my new cell. He had been sentenced to 7 years for aiding the legionaries. What had he done?
A colleague of his, Dr Mihai Uță[1], was sentenced for the assassination of Prof. Ștefănescu-Goangă in 1938. The bomber[2] was a student who had been a legionnaire, but the quarrel was personal: the student wanted to avenge an old lecher who had mocked his sister. This professor, it turned out, had his eye and his hand on the student. As the political atmosphere demanded a campaign to discredit the Legionary Movement, the victimisation of the teacher also became political, and Dr. Uță was given a heavy sentence, many years in prison, which he served from 1938, with a four-month break in 1940, when he was released.
In 1945-46, Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, as Minister of Justice, issued a decree of pardon, but this did not apply to all of Antonescu’s remaining political prisoners.
For those who remained in prison, a period of relaxation followed; they were taken to an unguarded colony in the vineyards of Galda, Alba County. Doctor Uță, unbelievably, walked freely through the prison gates, and the peasants from around Aiud came to call him to the villages, to their suffering. For Mihai Uță, like Saints Cosma and Damian, was a “holy unmercenary”. Inflation followed, the economic crisis of those years, the prison had no money, but it had sick people, and Dr. Uță received a mandate from the prison administration to go to Cluj and bring the necessary medicines from wherever he could find them. With this mandate in hand, he contacted his former colleagues, many of whom were now university graduates. He also gave them the medicine. If I hadn’t carried the suitcase full of medicines from the pharmacy of the University Clinic on Babeș Street to the train station, I myself, along with my colleague Gicu Scrob, might have believed their stories. I gave him my suitcase and followed him on the train, keeping an eye on him until he was out of sight. But there was no one else to accompany him. He was still going to the prison, alone, to carry the medicine.
I don’t know how he found out. I didn’t report it during the dubinkings. Scrob wasn’t with me in Pitești and there was no risk of me being caught red-handed. The Securitate didn’t want to take into account the prison’s authorisation given to Uță, he said it was false, he made it up. But the free movement on the C.F.R., which I have seen with my own eyes, is still a fabrication?
(Ioan Muntean – On foot through the re-education camps of Pitești, Gherla and Aiud)
[1] Dr Dumitru Uță’s first name is confused in his memoirs by both Antanasie Berzescu and Ioan Muntean. This mistake of name is common in many memoirs and is natural due to the large number of people the memoirists had to remember (in the order of hundreds), but also due to the passage of years, which led to the memory and confusion of first names. In the case of Dr. Dumitru Uță, as in the case of other confessors described in other sources, it is easy to see that Constantin Uță, Mihai Uță and Dumitru Uță are actually one and the same person. This is clear from the presentation of identical details concerning a single person, regardless of the first name used: the fact that Dr. Uță was arrested during the Antonescu regime for the “crime” of being a legionnaire, the fact that he spent most of his time in Aiud prison, the fact that he was free to bring medicine from Cluj to treat typhus in Aiud prison, etc.
[2] The bomber is not Doctor Uță, as the memorialist Ioan Muntean unintentionally implies, but Pop Ioan. In fact, the attempted murder was motivated by the accusation of rape made by the fiancé of a student against the carlist Rector, none other than Professor Ștefănescu-Goangă.
However, Dr. Uță was also convicted, along with other young legionaries, of participating in the attempted murder of Professor Ștefănescu-Goangă. Whether Dr. Uță’s involvement in the assassination attempt is real or not, we have no evidence to draw conclusions from, because after the attempt several young Legionnaries were arrested, regardless of whether there was incriminating evidence or not, because the aim was not only to find out the truth about the attempt, but to make the Legionary Movement illegal, regardless of the situation and the culprits. The event of the assassination attempt was the perfect reason to denigrate the Legionary Movement and, therefore, to imprison its members and to arrest its leader, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, because he represented a danger to the totalitarian power typical of that period (the regime of the sad memory of the Carlists). More details about the assassination attempt can be found here: NapocaNews.