Elder Ilie Bâră – a peasant of flint
I won’t try to make portraits of the legionaires now, because that would fill hundreds of books, but I can’t neglect to write two or three lines about Ilie Bâră, a peasant born in the commune of Vurpăr and who is related to us.
After paying for the new house he had built in Vurpăr, he got a job in the army pyrotechnics in Bucharest to earn some money. Until he went to Bucharest, he was part of the Legionary Movement; there he recruited workers to the movement. The uprising caught up with him in Bucharest.
He didn’t have a weapon, he didn’t hit anyone, no one accused him. In order to get 20 years, the military court had to justify his sentence. What he did was completely ignored and he was punished instead of those who should have been punished. He broke the swords of three officers. These officers, if they appeared in court, could not justify how a civilian, without threatening you, without hitting you, could break your sword on his knees like you would break a twig! The officers had to be witnesses. They were humiliated; they had willingly surrendered their swords during the rebellion, certain that the Legionary Movement would win and not Antonescu. For his part in the uprising, Ilie Bâră was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment.
In Aiud, during the 16 years, and in Suceava, during the 4 years, he displayed an honourable attitude. All the legionaires respected him. One legionary teacher said: “If you could put Elder Ilie in a cannon and shoot him in Moscow, you’d wreck it up!”
When they released him, they asked him in the chancellery: “Well, Elder Elijah, how do you get out of prison?” The answer: “Legionnaire, because that’s how I got in.” On the spot, he was sentenced to another five years’ imprisonment and sent to work chopping reeds. After three and a half years, the “administrative” sentence was lifted and he was released after twenty-three and a half years. When I asked him why he did not say to the executioners, “I have served my time and I will go back to my house in peace”, this flintstone farmer replied “Well, my Mitule, when I go to my nephew Ionel (my brother Ion Banea, shot at Râmnicul Sărat) and he asks me: “Did you betray, my Elder Ilie? “No, nephew, you brought me up like this!”
I wonder what those who read these lines could answer after 20 years of hell? And three and a half years of forced labour?
Long ago he met my brother; the great and the good ones go to the One who created them, the small and the weak remain.
(Dumitru Banea – Accused, Witness, Defender in the Trial of my Life, Punctte Cardinale Publishing House, Sibiu, 1995, pp. 165-166)