Ernest Bernea, the professor of great honesty of soul and superb naivety

In the autumn of 1948, something new appeared in the cell regime – a certain relaxation, the meaning of which I could not deduce[1]. It was enough to want to move from one cell to another, and one could see one’s acquaintances. There was also a wall diary – the diary of communist intellectual misery.

The people in charge of this work, appointed by the political officer Dincă, had been given pencil and paper, which they could not part with. The first was called Teianu, later nicknamed Tăune. […] The second was called Bojâncă, a significant name. […] Not before long, and a memo from the political prisoners in Brașov prison to the Ministry of the Internal Affairs appeared, in which they were self-critical, accusing the bourgeoisie, the former political parties and even some prisoners who had been moved to other cells. Of course we realised that this was the first action of this kind and that others would follow. It was the beginning of a new kind of terror, a way of breaking the solidarity between the prisoners, of creating the illusion of release.

The professor and writer Ernest Bernea, who was among us, arrested[2] in Poiana Mărului, where he had his family, in his great honesty of heart and, at the same time, out of his splendid naivety in the face of cunning, also concerned about the dirty action that had begun, suggested that we call Teianu and Bojâncă to cell 6 and talk to them about the act of conscience, the correctness of ideas, etc. This was not yet written on the wall. It had not yet appeared in the wall diary that he was someone who carried out hostile activities in the cell, explaining Christian philosophical ideas, pure education, or talking about philosophers like Jacques Maritain or poets like Francis Jammes. Professor Bernea was suffering and we tried to protect him. If we could get him an extra boiled potato, we felt we had done a great service. When he spoke of his works on philosophy and culture, more than twenty, he said, his face displayed a pained grimace because he was convinced he would never be able to publish them again. His large-format Ethnography of Oltenia had been burned in Sibiu, a book that had just come out of the printing press. He had no greater pleasure than when his cellmates, young people eager for knowledge, asked him to talk to us.

[…]

I remember that in 1949, in Brașov, Ernest Bernea, a writer and analyst of popular philosophy, was in his cell with about sixty people, and after the morning prayer he would take an hour or two to meditate… And he said to me intimately: “My dear, this is what we live with and this is what God helps us with! Here, prayer and meditation are food!

(Petre Baicu – Stories from Prisons and Camps, Biblioteca Revistei Familia, Oradea, 1995, pp. 46-47, 217)

1. This is about the re-education campaign in the Brasov Regional Prison, which began in the autumn of 1949, not in 1948, as the memoirist erroneously states.

2. Ernest Bernea was arrested in August 1949 and detained in Braov until March 1950 for alleged “peasant” conspiracies.