Fr. Ion Drăgoi – the priest who paid with his life for the defence of the anti-communist fighters in the mountains

My father, I must tell you about him, was originally from the commune of Vâlsănești. He attended the seminary in Bucharest and the Faculty of Theology, also in Bucharest. (…) He married my mother in 1926 and at the end of 1926 he took over the parish here. With salary, without salary… In 1946, when those purges took place, he was dismissed from the service and did his church work without receiving any money, because here, unlike elsewhere, the priest has no great advantages.

My father worked his ass off here and now we have nothing from him, because the second sentence was accompanied by the confiscation of his property. So we lost all our land, which was sprinkled with his sweat and mine and my brother’s and my mother’s. I remember that someone came down from the valley and said: “Father Drăgoi, well, do you sew, do you work, do you go to the forest, to the mountains, to the sheep? What can I do, I don’t eat? Don’t we eat like you?”

He was a good servant. He served well, sang well and spoke well. When he would go to a pastoral circle, as the priests had from time to time, with the protopopes and bishops, or when they were at a more formal funeral, the other priests would say: ‘Father Drăgoi, let me speak first, because if I speak after you, what I say will be of no value.”

Of course, he couldn’t stay on the sidelines for the whole thing. I think the first person to be contacted in the village was Father Drăgoi. And I have to say, to the credit of the village, that the intellectuals of the time, the priest and the teachers, were all involved. (…)

And that day, when I jumped into the lake and they arrested me, my father escaped. When they arrested me, he was on a rock looking at me. His soul… only he knows. But he escaped. He also went through the soldiers and ended up on the south side, on Aluniș. When they decided to make a circle and search the houses, he was two or three hundred metres outside the circle. He went down Argeș. He had a sister in Bălteni, other relatives in Vâlsănești, he went to them. They caught him in April 1950. (…)

So my father was arrested in April 1950. Someone saw him, someone who had a fly on his head, and to get in good with the security – look, Father Drăgoi is at his goddaughter’s house, at so-and-so’s house. And he caught him there…

But because our file was pretty much closed, because the whole Lotto had tried us, and because nothing was really said about my father, and he was the last one arrested, he got off easy: “Father, did you know her? Well, I met them, I was with Gheorghe Rizea, I was with… And he was only five years old.

… the third time they put me in solitary confinement, my father was there. That after they arrested my father and the investigation was over, they took him from the security to the prison, to the camp. And there were three rooms in the security camp with arrested people. They put him in the room where I was. I was lucky. At that time I was crippled, weak, I couldn’t stand up. When my father saw me, he started to cry. For a month my father ate only half of the 250 grams of bread we were given every day, half of the 600 grams of soup at lunchtime and nothing in the evening. For a month he gave it to me and kept me on my feet. And I stayed with my father from April 1950 to February 1951, I think about eight months. (…)

And my father, after we were separated, when they took me to the infirmary, he stayed a little longer and they took him to Gherla. From Gherla they took him to the canal and didn’t stop him at the White Gate, even though he had only been sentenced to five years. Because he was a priest, they took him to the Black Sea and put him in the famous priests’ brigade.[1] I don’t remember what he did there. I worked there too, later.

In ’59, on the canal route, I was a driller, breaking rock. And somebody said, I was working with a priest, Father, let’s call Fr. Drăgoi to give us a hole in this rock, we can’t break it. And we put the sledgehammer in, and when we hit the sledgehammer, it cracked. What did you call it? Damn. What Drăgoi? Well, that moustachioed boy with the perforator. He comes to me. I forget his father’s name. He says – I’m the priest… Go away, Father. Are you a priest’s boy? I’m a priest. Is your name Cornel? Yes. And the old man began to cry. Why are you crying, father? He says – I worked in this house with your father in ’52, ’53 and now God has brought me to work with you… And the canal is finished. My father was taken back to Gherla and in ’55, when it was finished, he let him go. But he didn’t give him a parish, he stayed like that, to be a helper, they took him to a monastery to teach him… In ’58 he caught the boys in Poienărei and after a while they took him too. But the main reason they took him away and sentenced him to death was that he wouldn’t give them the mountain[2]. But I’ve already told you about that. My mother said, “Ionele, give them Ulmu so that we can leave. You won’t get rid of them, how can I give them to you, my wife, they are a nuisance and they make people miserable… Dad didn’t want to.”

(Cornel Drăgoi’s testimony – The story of Elisabeta Rizea from Nucșoara, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 1993, pp. 147-152, 162-163)

1. The Brigade was famous for the fact that it was intended for extermination by labour.

2. In the sense of not giving information about the partisans in the mountains, which would have meant their capture, torture, conviction and execution. By this act of silence, which cost him the death penalty, Father Ion Drăgoi protected and saved the lives of the fighters in the mountains. Even if the mountain fighters were caught shortly afterwards, the sublime gesture of the priest of giving up his own freedom and life for the good of his neighbour remains.