George Manu – “gave himself with infinite love to everyone”
Few have passed through the prisons of Aiud without having heard of “Professor George Manu”, the man with the prodigious memory who seemed destined to be a teacher.
This vocation paid for itself with many weeks of solitary confinement and starvation, sometimes bringing him to the brink of physical collapse. But each time he was returned to his “pupils”, who were us of all ages and intellectual backgrounds, he was reborn within days and filled the Zarca with his wax plates.
He was amazingly inventive. The method of spreading soap emulsion on the bottoms of mesh tins, on planks, on soles, on rags, on shards of glass, was the fruit of his inexhaustible inventiveness. He wrote on them with the tip of a needle, in very small block letters, even though he had very high diopters in his glasses.
This was how his lessons in English and French history, world geography, French and English went round. Then, after all of us had mastered the method, the poems of Radu Gyr, Nichifor Crainic and other poets such as Dragodan, Vișovan, Dem. Iliescu. George Manu never tired! With the same enthusiasm he resumed his lessons, interrupted by the restrictions imposed by the administration.
Between 1950 and 1952, I had the good fortune to spend several months in isolation in Zarca with this titan of culture, who was in communist prisons. He never gave up. He was always working. When the prison conditions made it impossible for him to communicate with others, when he was alone in his cell, the “professor”, with the tip of a needle that he kept safe from any search, would write on the walls entire lectures from his inexhaustible store of knowledge for those who were transferred to the cell where he had been. The fruits of this labour were reaped by some who read and learned: the history of the Black Sea, the history of America and the American Constitution, dictionaries and grammars of English and French, data on astronomy, nuclear physics and much more.
During one of these periods he also invented a system of communication based on a combination of the knotted writing of the ancient inhabitants of Easter Island and the Morse system. Thus, on a simple thread taken from a mattress (if he had one) or a sock, he strung whole texts with large and small knots (the large knots being the lines and the small ones the dots of the Morse alphabet), which had the advantage of being easy to hide or manipulate and almost impossible for the guards to find and decipher.
If there was more than one in the cell, he would immediately start ‘teaching’, teaching all sorts of interesting things to everyone’s taste. This was his greatest pleasure. It also delighted his cellmates, who giggled as their time passed. For those who loved geometry, he would use a bright needle to draw figures on the blanket, on which he would then prove famous theorems that would keep his students’ brains active, creating preoccupations that would lift them out of their daily misery and into the sphere of Descartes, Pythagoras…
On the permanently cold tin stove, with a piece of plaster from the walls, he proposed problems of elementary or higher algebra or differential equations, which he made up for the more advanced, and the most interesting he immortalised by writing them on the wall above the door.
For the Teacher, this uninterrupted work was a prayer of gratitude to the Almighty for giving him the divine gift of not forgetting anything he had learned. He often said, “This is my duty. When he concentrated on reconstructing something, he would descend into himself like into a rich mine, full of rare minerals and magnificent geodes; then his face would be completely still, as if he had left his body and travelled with his spirit to places unknown to us. These moments did not last long, for he soon regained his usual mobility and liveliness, like the water of an artesian spring that, after seeping through deep layers of rock underground, gives itself up on the surface, gushing into the sun to quench the thirst of many.
Everyone wondered when and how this man could have accumulated so much and so many. I have solved the mystery for myself and I am happy to share it with others. […]
He was the nephew of General Manu, the one with a street named after him, as we used to say among ourselves. His parents decided not to send him to school because he was physically handicapped from an early age, but they found him teachers of the highest moral and intellectual standing, who came to the pupil’s home according to a programme drawn up by the General himself. In this way, he learned history not from textbooks, but from lectures that were forever engraved in his memory.
He knew history and taught it to us by connecting events throughout Europe. He taught geography in great detail, and I remember that when they were talking about Korea and the war there, during one of the walks in the circle, Nistor Chioreanu whispered to him: “Hey George, write us something about Korea, because apart from the fact that it is a peninsula in East Asia, we don’t know much!
Only 3-4 days had passed and a double-sided blackboard was circulating all over Zarca: On the first side was a map of Korea, drawn with a cartographer’s precision, with all the rivers, all the bays and their names, all the towns, the railways, as I believe no Korean professor could have done; on the second side were economic data, including the production of coal, crude oil, iron ore, manganese, copper, arable land, orchards, forests, pastures, the total length of roads, railways, the main sources of energy, and so on.
On another 3-4 days he started a series of soap pieces on Korea’s prehistory, tracing the migration of peoples from the west and southwest to the east, linking everything to the great migration of Mongolian peoples to America. Korean history then followed on other plates.
This was the man! A priceless treasure, given with infinite love to all who wanted to learn.
His memory and logic sometimes reached limits that frightened everyone, but especially the imbecile investigators, whose minds could not comprehend the dimensions of these qualities.
So when, at the end of 1947, the professor’s report on our deliveries to the USSR appeared in France, showing that we had already paid twice, in raw materials and products, what was stipulated in the peace treaty, the professor was arrested and subjected to terrible tortures in order to reveal his network of collaborators who had provided him with information. It was only after months of torture that he managed to make them understand his method of working: by correlating the data published at the time in the statistical yearbooks with the production data of the various sectors and with the data obtained directly from the trade consulates of our main partners, and by subtracting the total production of the country from that which went elsewhere than to the USSR, he was able to obtain a precise figure for the volume of supplies to the Russians.
They couldn’t understand how a man could pack so much data into his brain, something even computers couldn’t do at the time. They began to torture him. Angrily, the executioners took off his glasses, and then one of them, with a deft flick of a small paddle, turned his right eye inside out. A terrible pain made him cry out. They told him:
“You scoundrel! We’ll turn the other one backwards and take them both out!”
“Listen to me, because I can prove to you that everything I have told you is the truth, and I have worked alone, without the complicity of anyone!” At that moment, he had a saving idea and suggested that they take the production statistics from September 1944 and see if he knew the exact figures. A confrontation ensued which was a walk in the park for George Manu, even though many months had passed since he had read it. But it disarmed his investigators, including the Soviets, and convinced them that they were dealing with a unique phenomenon. The confession came from the KGB-ist, in Russian:
“This mother…, he’s got a head as big as your whole ministry of rams!”
When he finished his doctorate at the Curie Institute with flying colours, writing a thesis on nuclear physics, an ultramodern subject at the time, he was asked to stay on as director of studies at the Institute. He refused in order to carry out an apostolate in the country he loved. After taking up his post, he gave a lecture in the Dalles Hall, attended by all the great physics and mathematics professors of the time: Prof. Bianu from the Polytechnic, Țițeica, Pmopeiu, Mangeron from Iași, Barbilian, Hulubei and others. Among those closest to Professor Manu was an uncle of his, named after his mother, General Cantacuzino the Rifleman, as he was called because he was the commander of a division of riflemen. At the end of the conference, after everyone had congratulated him, the general approached the professor, embraced him effusively and said to him: “You’re clever, man!… You’ve been talking for two hours and I haven’t understood a word!” For George Manu, it was a superlative of appreciation that moved him again years later when he told me about it. “You see! The nuances of the Romanian language? It is deeper, more expressive and closer to the native truth than any other”.
Late at night, total silence fell over the prison. I kept watch with my eyes open. It was then that I realised that the “professor’s” greatest quality, even greater than his enormous memory and working power, was the love he transmitted to those he delighted with his treasure of knowledge.
This love of knowledge, passed on from one person to another – like the candles on the night of the resurrection that are lit from one person to another – flooded Zarca, then Aiud and then, through the deceased, all the prisons, being one of the strongest forms of resistance – the resistance of the spirit that learned from him.
Therefore, now, so many years after George Manu left us, let us not forget that he left us a legacy of love, his love and that of Paul of Tarsus; let us preserve it and let it grow, enveloping the whole Romanian nation in it, for its salvation, and may God rest him in His Holy Peace.
(Gheorghe Jijie – George Manu – Monography, Babel Publishing House, Bacău, 2010, pp. 341-345)