Dumitru Bordeianu – from the denial of God to the Resurrection
Dumitru Bordeianu was born on the 15th of August 1921 in Drăgușeni, Botoșani County, and grew up under the obedience of the Mother of God, both in the family and in the darkest trials of life. From a young age he felt the spirit of Orthodoxy caressing him and protecting his steps towards a life pleasing to God.
He went to school in his native village and to high school in Fălticeni and Storojineț, when he entered the Fraternity of the Cross (1939). With the outbreak of the war, with the territorial losses suffered by Romania, he was mobilised and fought at the front until he reached Stalingrad, being decorated with the “Manhood and Faith” medal.
But with himself, with the enemies of the nation and of God, he would later fight great battles.
“Bandit, enemy of the working class”.
In 1946, as a student at the Faculty of Medicine in Iași, he was active in the ranks of the Legionary Movement – “links, information, meetings, discipline, training, courage”* – in the student centre in the “uncompromising fight against all that is evil”.
He escaped arrest on the night of 14-15 May 1948, when the police were looking for him at home, not in Iași. He went into hiding with the family of a friend. He was arrested on 12 June, having been betrayed to the Security Service by a former classmate when he returned to take his summer exams, and taken at gunpoint to the Security Service; from there he went to Galata, constantly accused of being a “bandit, enemy of the working class” and threatened with death. After, he was later sent to Suceava prison, where the communists (Țurcanu, Bogdanovici and Popa Alexandru) had commenced the re-education process. The regime of the five-month investigation, which was carried out only at night, included: hunger, cold, beatings and tortures until he fainted, punishments in solitary confinement, interrogations to explain everything, which led to the weakening of trust in the leaders and between the prisoners.
After his mock trial in February 1949, he was sentenced to 10 years’ hard labour. Faced with the prospect of a long imprisonment, Dumitru Bordeianu decided to choose the path of truth and life confessed in Jesus Christ.
Re-education in Pitești prison: from resistance to downfall
In April 1949, he was transferred to Pitești with a group of 80 legionnaires, where the re-education by beatings and torture was to begin (those responsible for this “experiment” were those who had been encouraged to do so by the Soviet Union itself): Nicolski, Zeller, Jianu or Sepeanu, Dumitrescu or Goiciu; not the students, who were subjected to unimaginable torture). For 11 months “the most pleasant ones in prison” he would share a cell with Costache Oprișan (who was at the “top of the Romanian intellectual pyramid”, aged 30), and together they would enter the hell of debunkings.
Until the summer of 1950, Dumitru Bordeianu had resisted all forms of torture (starvation, beatings by the torturers, incomprehensible humiliation) until he fell into Satan’s trap and decided in his heart not to say the Psalms (to avoid the risk of being caught); from that moment, the last stand of inner resistance collapsed; he had been warned by the comrade (from the Security Service , perhaps Nicolski) who had investigated him: “Even if you are made of reinforced concrete and we’ll still melt you…”
They deny God as a result of being forced to eat their own faeces.
In the rooms and cells of Pitești, they watch helplessly or suffer on their own skin: The beatings until they were disfigured, the stress position – sitting on the bed, arms on their knees, staring straight ahead – endured day after day, for hours on end, the written and public unmaskings, the tortures which took “the most humiliating form, now inflicted by us”, the defamation of parents, brothers and relatives, the slandering of comrades, the compulsion to eat one’s own feaces, the verbal or staged blasphemies against the Saviour, the Mother of God, the Saints. In this hallucinatory system of brainwashing, of the choice between death, madness or surrender, there is also the denigration and detachment from: the movement, the faith, the comrades, God; in the end there is the collapse.
From hell to resurrection
The terror and agony of re-education, the torture that was repeated over and over again, the disbelief in people, would last for Dumitru Bordeianu for 4 years, during which time his soul would be possessed by a satanic power. His only chance was not to attack his comrades, “everything that happened to me was only for my conscience and my person”. At the end of this period, in the prison of Gherla, he has the kindness of the comradeship of the disciple and brother in holiness of Valeriu Gafencu, Gheorghe Jimboiu (who died in Aiud in 1963) – “since I met him, I live with the impression of speaking with angels” – of the paternal care of Dr. Traian Trifan. Traian Trifan (23 years in prison), former legionary prefect, “promoter” of the mystical resistance in prisons (in Aiud prison, when Antonescu demanded the “rehabilitation” of the legionaries) – “during that holy Easter, I saw the radiant face of Elder Trifan, which looked like the faces of the great Romanian mystics”. It was the day of the Resurrection in 1954, when Dumitru Bordeianu was reborn and felt that God had not abandoned him.
He was then imprisoned in Aiud (transferred in 1955), where he faced the last attempts of re-education, with a speech in which he spoke about the re-education in Suceava and the debunkings in Pitești and Gherla, concluding: “I do not adhere to this circus, to this masquerade…!” Isolation in the Cellular followed. In the summer of 1963, he was sent to a village in Bărăgan, Viișoara. Released, he entered the great dungeon: the whole country.
After 15 years of imprisonment – during which he had only one contact with his family – and compulsory residence, he was released in 1964, when he married and started a family. Professionally, he was unable to complete his medical studies (the communists did not allow it), but he managed to graduate from the Pedagogical Institute (1969) and the Faculty of Biology (1972) in Bucharest. Struck by the understanding of his own human drama, he had the revelation of understanding – which “those who do not argue with Christian metaphysics and the Holy Fathers” can have – by reading the lives and writings of the Holy Fathers, on the advice of a great Romanian theologian.
Investigated by the same Security Service guard as Fr. Calciu
He visited monasteries and had guides and friends such as Fathers Cleopa and Marcu of Sihăstria, through whom he strengthened his faith and hope of salvation. In 1979, he was investigated by the same Security Service guard as Father Calciu, Grigoriu, who threatened him that he would lose his job if he did not testify against Calciu, but he faced the threats with the conviction that no more intelligence could be extracted from him.
In exile: the most shocking confession of Pitești’s passions
At the end of his ordeal, “after twenty-five years of persecution, investigations and threats”, he chose exile and arrived in Australia in 1989. There he found the peace and solitude of his house near a waterfall – which he recognised as the one he had dreamed of sitting and writing by in Romania.
Between February and December 1990, after a period of fasting and prayer dictated by his conscience, he dictated to his wife his memoirs, which had clearly come to him under divine inspiration. These were published in Paris (1992) and reprinted in Bucharest (1996, 2001) under the title “Confessions from the Swamp of Despair”, a book that describes the drama of re-education and paints the faces of martyrs: Gioga Parizianu, Corneliu Niță, Ionica Pintilie, Aurel Pandurescu, Mihai Iosub, or people without equal, such as Nedelcu, Berza, Reus, Dinescu, Andrișan, Mitan, the hero Vișovan, Bădia Ungureanu, ascetic and mystic, Gelu Gheorghiu, Hutuleac; then: Pop Cornel, Magirescu Eugen, Pătreașcanu Nuți, Popescu Aristotel, who cannot be judged by those who have not gone through those terrible ordeals or figures of torturers: Virgil Bordeianu, Livinschi, Zaharia, some of whom did not fall. The changed and degraded man, who tortured and crippled his fellow men, came to shake his soul, in the “phenomenon” of Pitești-Gherla.
In his book, Dumitru Bordeianu describes the mystical phenomenon of the struggle between the young people, aware of their historical destiny, who served their nation and the Church of Christ against communism, and those possessed by the spirits of Satan.
The phases of re-education, the methods of torture, the mockery and blasphemy were described in great detail, but some of them were too incomprehensible and unbelievable to be written down.
From exile, the guide of Romanian youth
The joy with which he returned several times to the country was shared by his former friends of suffering, but also by young people, monks and priests who sought him out to drink directly from the source fragments of his mystical experience in prison and in life, to listen to his exhortations not to stray from the path of the Church and to understand and follow the struggle for nation and country, preserving the cult of the dead. He died on 16 August 2002; his body was buried in Australia, far from the country, but in a welcoming land, where he was able to overcome his memories and write his confession, and his soul was raised to the ranks of the Martyrs and Saints of the Romanian nation.
(Ionut Băiaș and Costel Condurache – Hotnews)