“Every night, at midnight, the prison doors opened by themselves.”
I had an uncle who was a Securitate officer in Brașov in ’48. I was young and I used to go to Brașov and stay with him for a week so I could see the world. I used to go with him in the evenings, wherever he had business, he would take me to work, and that’s how I found out what I’m going to tell you next.
The Securitate police took Father Arsenios away from Sâmbăta because he was known to work miracles and crowds of people came to see him. In 1944, for example, he told the people at the Holy Mass to bring their children home from Bucharest because there was going to be a catastrophe, and shortly afterwards there was the terrible American bombing. They were afraid that now, under Communism, he would tell people with the same clarity what the reality was. So they took him to the Securitate and they beat him up a lot, poor guy. My uncle told me these things. The problem was that even though he didn’t move from the floor of the cell, he stayed on his knees and prayed, the prison doors opened every night at midnight. The cell was fenced in, in a huge hall like room. And in the middle of the hall, at a table, there was always a deputy guard who watched him constantly. They took him out, beat him up and made him tell them how he did it, because they thought he had the animal grass that the hedgehogs used to walk on their snout, and since he had been in the forest at Sâmbăta, he had got the grass and put it on the lock. But how could he put the grass on the lock when he was always kneeling at the bottom of the cell and there were two sets of doors? One night they put two guards in his cell to watch him. But the father had nothing to do with them. They kept questioning him, they kept harassing him, and he kept kneeling in his cell and praying. At night, at midnight, when the locks were opened, the guards seemed to be struck by God’s lightning, they got scared and ran away. And after a while, no one wanted to stand guard because they were afraid. The commander was also afraid, and he said I’m going to go and in order to get away with it, I’ll bring everyone here to see and then I won’t keep him anymore.
One evening my uncle came and told me that he would take me that night to see a monk from Sâmbăta who opens the prison doors with the power of prayer. So I went in the evening, curious to see. All the Securitate was there. I sat on the stairs because there was no room to go in, and we all waited until midnight to see if it was true. And, what do you know, it wasn’t just a padlock that opened, it was my luck that I was holding on to the banister, that at midnight the bar on the cell door was torn off its hinges and all the people who were downstairs waddled up the stairs in fear. They were scared, they didn’t know what to do, they trampled each other. From that hour on, they didn’t keep him there, they let him go with a forced stay. My uncle told me some of these things. But I saw with my own eyes how the padlocks opened and the iron bar was torn off its hinges and the guards, who were old men, not young men like me, who were 18-19 years old, ran away from the floor. For a long time after that, when my uncle and I went to restaurants, that’s all his Securitate friends would talk about.
(Testimony of Baglazan Dumitru from Porumbacu de Sus – Saint Father Arsenios Boca, p. 45-46)