Father Mark Dumitru the Sufferer
Who is Father Mark? A blessed monk who was born on 12 September 1910 in the village of Hătcărău, Prahova County, as one of thirteen children of the Dumitru family. His parents were named Stere and Ana. At baptism he was given the name of Constantine, and later, when he entered monastic life, after having been in the prisons of three political regimes for more than 20 years, he became a monk at the age of 62, under the name of Monk Mark.
His whole life was an uninterrupted series of sufferings and hardships, and the things written here are but a few of those he wished to put down on paper, calling on me to do so shortly before his blessed end. And he would not have wished to do so had he not known the benefit of reading the Lives of the Saints.
And because many asked him to leave a written testimony of his life in need, and I was among them, the unworthy one prayed that God would reveal to him what he had to do, and the answer to his prayers is found in this book. It is with great trepidation that I write these lines, for years have passed and much of what I experienced, saw or heard has faded into the darkness of oblivion. It is also with fear that I write, because the true life of the Father (about his inner life it is impossible for the mind to think) is too far removed from what I will manage to write. But I have hope in his prayers, and so I say with faith: Bless you, Father!
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Father Mark could not tell me anything about his father, because I did not ask him. He only told me that he went to the front in the First World War and died on one of the battlefields of those very difficult years, leaving Ana at home, widowed at 38 with 13 children.
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After five years at school, when he had finished primary school, the teacher asked him what he wanted to do next. He replied that he wanted to be a tailor, a shoemaker or a carpenter. He couldn’t even think about staying at school or staying at home, because he was also one of his mother’s 13 children, all struggling to make a life for themselves. So he went to a tailoring school in the village of Broaștele, between Cîmpina and Telega.
After three years at the tailoring school, she went to Ploiești to enrol at the commercial school.
In 1936, Corneliu Codreanu published his book “For the Legionaries”. Reading the book, the young Constantin Dumitru decided to join the movement. Soon after, he built a nest where several young people and acquaintances of his gathered, and he took care of their education according to what was written in the “Little Book of the Nest Leader”, a small manual of legionary life written according to exclusively Christian principles. This was the beginning of a journey of sacrifice and suffering.
Here’s what Father told us: “Another case in which I was close to death and escaped: I was called up for mobilisation (in November 1939). I reported to the 1st Signal Regiment – Bucharest, joined a signal battalion and was sent with the battalion to Focșani, from where I was arrested two weeks later. I was taken to Bucharest for investigation. Here, among many other torture methods, they stretched me out on a long and wide table, one held me by the head, two by the hands, two beat me all over my body with two very heavy batons and two with two crowbars on the soles of my shoes. But I neither breathed nor whimpered, so those who beat me thought I was dead. And to make me recover, they took me by the hair and put me in a basin of water and beat my head against the walls. They did this for two or three days. When they saw that I was resisting, they tortured me in a basement of the Securitate: they took out the wooden beds that were there, and there was some kind of rubbish under the slats. They chained my arms and legs with chains, my hands behind my back, and put a bucket of dirt next to me to use as a toilet. But how could I use it if my hands and feet were tied? So they kept me tied up like this for several days.”
(Confession of a Christian. Father Mark of Sihăstria, edited by the monk Filoteu Bălan, Petru Vodă Publishing House, 2007)