Father Steinhardt died watched over by the Securitate
On 29 March 1989, Father Nicolae de la Rohia died in a Baia Mare hospital at the age of 77. Thirty years had passed since he had been sentenced to 13 years of hard labour in the “Pillat-Noica lot” for the crime of “conspiracy against the social order”, an experience that would later give rise to “The Diary of Happiness”, which for many would become the book of his life.
That day, Nicolae Steinhardt was to leave Rohia Monastery for Bucharest. On the way to the airport in Baia Mare, he confessed to Father Mina Dobzeu, who was accompanying him: “Some thoughts disturb me greatly, that God has not forgiven me the sins of my youth”. “Satan, seeing that he can no longer make you sin, is troubling you with the past,” Father Mina replied.
Father Nicolae wanted to stay in Bucharest for at least two months. “Alexandru Paleologu, Mihai Șora and Oliv Mircea were waiting for him. Unfortunately, he fell ill at the airport in Baia Mare: he had a heart attack. His whole life had been marked by such “passing places”. Now he had to prepare for the last one: his personal Easter.
He was immediately taken to hospital, where the next day, fully conscious, he orchestrated and directed his own “passage”: after making the last testamentary arrangements and the list of people to be invited to the funeral, he asked for a candle to be lit, a psalm to be read to him, and then decided to go? “I have fed on this world,” he had told me some time before. But one wonders if he might not have said the same thing about the world we were all about to enter,” says Virgil Ciomoș, one of Father Steinhardt’s closest friends and students.
The will of the “Christianised Jew”
Two days before his death, Nicolae Steinhardt wrote to his friend Ioan Pintea, almost sensing his departure for the “other side”: “Dear Ioan, I am having an increasingly difficult time with angina pectoris. The attacks are more frequent and more painful. I may have little, very little, to live for. I’ve asked Fathers Justin and Emanoil to send you all the files in my room. They do not contain any news or anything too important, but I ask you to take them so that they are not thrown away. (…) I would still like to try to leave behind me a proof, a testimony of Christian faith. I know that I am making things difficult for you, but I trust in the friendship, affection and devotion that you have shown me in abundance. (…) Perhaps I will be able to endure the journey to Bucharest and come back here to finish the job. So much the better. But you never know, and that is why I am making this bold and very friendly appeal. With all my heart and soul, Nicolae”.
Ioan Pintea remembers the day he received the letter: “A dark foreboding had settled like a lead ball on these lines. I was far away from him, somewhere among the bookshelves of the Bistrita County Library, and I felt, through tears, how, from the depths of my heart, something huge suddenly came over me. I didn’t understand it then. I understood later. It was actually something very simple. Grief and gratitude. On the day I received this letter, my dear father, the one who had woken me from my sleep and confusion, was dying peacefully in a hospital bed in Baia Mare. He sent me, and no one else, the last letter he wrote in this life. It is a terrible letter, with the value of a will, in which Nicolae Steinhardt gives me his last advice, his last requests and his last thanks”.
Even on the day of his funeral, Father Nicolae de la Rohia, accompanied on his last journey by his best friends, was closely watched by the Securitate. Virgil Ciomoș remembers: “It seems strange, but in those days saints were put in prisons, and the communists were interested in the holy things. One of the visitors had once sung in the pew… Naturally, he was denounced and his house in Bucharest was searched. Among the “victims” were several typed copies of the “Diary of Happiness”. The manuscript had also been confiscated following another denunciation by someone who had attended the “clandestine” readings given by the new author as a “friend”, eager to share his experience of conversion to Christianity.
“The saints were put in jail and the communists were interested in the holy things”
Between the time of the search in Bucharest and the more discreet rescue of the last copy of the diary, Father Nicolae, “the writer” for his superiors, managed to mobilise several “operational” services in the capital and in the Transylvanian counties.
Today we can retrace his path during those difficult months, starting with the documents still in the Securitate archives: an explanatory note on the resources of the library of the Rohia monastery, a report on the confiscation of the Bucharest copies of the “Diary of Happiness”, another analytical note intended to prepare the search and, above all, the recovery “from the elements” of the other copies of the Diary. This was followed by some “operational” measures concerning “the dismantling of Nicu Steinhardt’s entourage through repeated investigations”, accompanied, of course, by threats, the minutes of the collection, “with the consent of the abbot and the accused”, of the so-called “secret fund” of the Rohia monastery – books by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nadezhda Mandelștam, Alexander Zinoviev, Vladimir Bukovschi, Emil Cioran, Monica Lovinescu…
In the ten years that had passed since the manuscript was returned in the presence of Virgil Teodorescu, president of the Writers’ Union, Laurențiu Fulga, vice-president of the USR, and Traian Iancu, director of the Literary Fund, times had changed considerably. The communist regime was showing its inhuman face – at an accelerating pace. The numerous and painful investigations had tried to persuade the new monk to break off relations with his friends abroad, with the local “elements” hostile to the regime.
Frequent searches of his home and the Rohia monastery were aimed not only at discovering and confiscating any manuscripts hostile to the regime, but also at discouraging him from writing similar ones; The insistent pressure exerted on Abbot Seraphim, Bishop Justinian and Archbishop Theophil was explicitly aimed at compromising his image as a monk by systematically infiltrating his entourage with sources such as “Bratu”, “Udrea”, “Apostol Nicolae”, “Nistor”, a Transylvanian relative of Father, it seems, and even through his housekeeper in Bucharest. The installation of listening and recording devices in various places was also aimed at detecting any movement of the “target” and his “connections”, in order to prevent and hinder, above all, the “Diary of Happiness” from crossing the border.
However, a version of it has reached Free Europe. Out of scruples and precautions, even those who, like me, offered to drive him to the monastery “in my own car” were identified and checked.
The truth is that Father Nicolae, worn out by provocation and mischief, had acquired a kind of sixth sense with which he could quickly detect “tricksters”, which was, I think, the only human category he really hated. I noticed so many times how he tried to protect me from his own “friends” who he knew or suspected were informing the “competent authorities”. He cultivated them to ensure that their reports would contain information of his own choosing. I was given a more specific task – to keep his diary under wraps. The strategy worked: from the moment the manuscript reached me, the “organs” lost track of him. In the ‘Writer’ file, the Securitate archives mention me in passing as his “favourite’ driver”.
The newspapers of the time unjustly wrote little about Nicolae Steinhardt’s death. Ioan Pintea remembers only “an announcement in România Liberă in the obituary section, a profound article by Adrian Popescu in the magazine Tribuna, a short commemorative article by Ioan Alexandru in the magazine Flacăra and a careful essay on the deceased’s last book by Radu Săplăcan in the magazine Steaua. Nothing more. It was only after 1989, through the breach opened by the ‘Diary of Happiness’, that the enormous literary and theological personality of the ‘Christianised Jew’ was revealed to the world”.
(Carmen Dragomir – Jurnalul Național)