Father Gheorghe Dragomirescu, a man of great moral character
On 19 August 1959, immediately after the service in the church in Lopătari, Buzău County, where he was a priest, my husband Puiu Dragomirescu was arrested in front of everyone. He was respected and loved by the villagers with whom he had made tens of thousands of bricks to build another church in the village to which he was very attached. This was also taken into account by the authorities at the time. Priests were seen as the great enemies of the authorities and had to be exterminated.
In the same year, but on different dates, my father, my brother and two brothers-in-law were arrested, all priests – five priests in one family! One by one, on different dates, they all came back, but Puiu never appeared!
When they all returned in 1964, relatives and acquaintances who had been arrested, I waited for my husband, the father of three children, to appear. I was happy for all those who came back and asked everyone if they had seen Puiu in prison. No one had seen him. The children and I waited anxiously for him to come home, competing with each other to make him happier. Days and months went by with no news of Puiu! Then we began to contact the Securitate authorities in Buzău and Ploiești, but to no avail.
In 1961, the Buzău prison sent me a parcel with his coat, toothbrush and toothpaste, without any explanation. Later I also received a death certificate from 1962, which stated that my husband had committed suicide on 29 August 1959, ten days after his arrest. The idea of suicide was rejected by all, as my husband’s moral probity was recognised.
All my attempts were in vain and Puiu’s death remained a mystery. When I no longer hoped to find out anything, a lady came to me and told me that she had been a secretary in the Securitate and that, impressed by my fate and my persistence, she had decided to come and tell me the truth about my husband’s tragic death. This woman had closed accounts with the Securitate, disgusted by what she had seen and heard there.
She confessed to me that after the arrest and the harassment to which he had been subjected, the investigating officer, annoyed by Puiu’s resistance and by his inability to extract anything compromising from him, put him in a car and took him somewhere in the Vrancea hills, to a place called Comisoaia Cross.
Once there, he told the priest to get out and leave.
The priest realised that something was wrong and refused, not understanding why he had to take him there to free him. The angry officer ordered him to turn around and shot him. He ordered the driver to get out and together they buried him in a ditch. The driver obeyed, but soon disappeared after reporting the scene to a comrade in the commune of Odăile, who confirmed his account.
After this despicable act, the officer ordered an immediate return to the Securitate. He locked himself in his office, wrote a note, put it in a drawer and shot himself. In the note he wrote: “I am guilty of killing an innocent man”. The official story was that he had a heart attack and died in the line of duty. He was buried with honours.
I was always followed, my children were expelled from school, they had to continue their studies in places where we were not known. The consternation of relatives and villagers was immense, for the priest was a man of high moral character who would not have committed suicide thus accepting his fate.
Due to the disappearance of the driver, I could not identify the scene of the tragedy and I still do not know what to make of his death. But perhaps he was one of the many included in the poem’s poignant lines: “Where are those who are no more?”
May his sleep be sweet and his memory unbroken!
(Ecaterina Dragomirescu, “In memoriam – Preotul Gheorghe Puiu Dragomirescu” in Lacrima prigoanei, Vol. II, Gama Publishing House, Iași, 1997, pp. 121-122)