Gheorghe Jimboiu – an embodied angel

I knew Jimboiu, a faithful disciple of Gafencu. He always said the prayer of the heart and lived only on the coordinates of love for others. He was extraordinarily kind and serene; you never heard a single word of revenge or hatred from him. An angel in the flesh. I once saw Jimboiu have a tooth extracted without anaesthetic. It took a very long time, but he didn’t make a sound or even a sign of pain. (…)

While I was in the cell with Costică Cristescu, under a very strict regime, I asked the guard to take me to the doctor of the ward I had left. It was my university colleague Virgil Lungeanu, from Iași, who had convinced Dr. Mărculescu, the official doctor, to give him full freedom to consult the patients and not to discuss the diagnosis he had made. (…)

A few days later I was taken out of the cell where I was with Cristescu and taken to room no. 1, in the building called Section, above the chapel where I had met Flueraș. It is significant for me that I met Jimboiu there.

Jimboiu had not undergone the denunciation in Pitești because, after having been cruelly tortured during the investigation in Brașov, when he was a student at the Commercial Academy in that city, he had come out of the investigation seriously ill with tuberculosis and liver disease. In this condition he was taken to the sanatorium for tuberculosis patients in Târgu Ocna, in the Trotuș Valley.

Left fatherless as a child, he was brought up by his mother, who never married and lived in the purest Orthodox faith. To this spiritual heritage was added his Legionary education, in the Brotherhood of the Cross, and he was directly under the influence of the man who remained a myth for all those who knew him, the Legionary student Valeriu Gafencu, condemned during the time of Antonescu.

I did not know Gafencu personally. I read his thoughts, written down and miraculously brought out of prison. I saw him only a few times in Pitești, before he was exposed. Everything I know about Gafencu I know from other comrades, including Jimboiu, and so I leave it to the comrades who knew him and were influenced by him to write and speak about him.

Jimboiu was perhaps Gafencu’s most brilliant pupil, combining in the most harmonious way the legionary concept, the orthodox faith and the thirst for intellectual knowledge. He was one of the few young Legionaries I knew who lived with the idea that he would rather die than denounce another to the Inquisition. The result of this conviction was that he fell ill with tuberculosis and liver disease and later died.

He was sentenced to hard years in prison, not on his own testimony, but on the testimony of others, and so emerged from the inquiry with a clear conscience that he had not dragged other young men into prison with him.

I have known all kinds of people in my life, both before and after imprisonment, but I have never met another, regardless of age or background, who understood Orthodoxy and loved Christ as much as Jimboiu did. A young man, pure in body and soul, gifted with great gentleness and kindness. He was the only person I ever met who never said he was hungry. He had a love for people, whoever they were, friend or foe, to the point of self-sacrifice. He had an understanding of his enemies and of those who tormented him and continued to do so, which could not be explained rationally. He was so convinced of his earthly mission to do good that he seemed to come from another world. Had I not known this young man, I would have doubted or disbelieved many things. Jimboiu identified, as only the saints understood, with the call of the Son of God: “Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest”.

From the moment I met Jimboiu, I no longer read the Lives of the Saints as just another reading. Knowing him, any doubt, any suspicion that there were and still are saints on earth, was forever banished from my soul. This martyr, with his Byzantine, saintly physique, was for me the incomparable model of what man must be and do for the salvation of himself and the nation that conceived him.

Although faith is something that has little to do with reason, most people need evidence to believe (St. Apsotle Thomas’ category). I cannot find words to express my honour and admiration for this legionary martyr. Any words I might use to help others understand who this young man was and what he meant to those who knew him would be superfluous. It can all be summed up in one sentence: he was an angel in human form.

It is my firm belief that the existence of people on earth and the relationships between them are not accidental.

From the moment I met Jimboiu, I lived with the impression that I was talking to angels. He was perfect in every way, according to the commandment: “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect”.

(Dumitru Bordeianu – Confessions from the Marsh of Despair, Scara Publishing House, Bucharest, 2001, pp. 369-371)