Gheorghe Jimboiu – the heart’s supplicant
The most beautiful figure from Târgu-Ocna, after Valeriu, was Gheorghe [Jimboiu]. I feel that I do not have enough data to sketch this portrait. He came from Oltenia. He was the son of a widow with few resources but a big heart, who struggled all her life to send her only child to school. Gheorghe went to prison for the first time in 1941, was released and returned in 1949.
At first, he stood out both for his dignity and his spirituality. He prayed a lot, studied the holy books and delved deeply into Christian matters. Although modest, his personality was self-evident. He was quiet, but his views carried great weight. He seemed to be a mystic par excellence, but he was also dynamic and a good organiser. His spirit of sacrifice knew no bounds. He knew how to be a friend and easily opened people’s hearts. Many sought to be close to him.
After his release, he entered the university and asserted himself with authority among colleagues and teachers. When he spoke in seminars, he was listened to with rapt attention. Professor Victor Jinga had become his friend. He was also close to other professors. One of them had studied Freemasonry and introduced him to its secrets. He deciphered Marxism for himself, better and more courageously than the professors, who at the time tended to compromise their consciences.
Between 1944 and 1949, Gheorghe led the students of Brașov. They prepared to fight against the communists. In the first wave of arrests in 1948, he escaped the vigilance of the Securitate. Those were troubled times. Many young people went to the mountains and formed partisan groups. Life in the mountains was hard. The country was hot and ready to turn upside down, but it needed help from outside, and it didn’t come. The heroism of the Romanians had often been Europe’s defensive wall, against the barbarians and the Turks, and now it was the Russians’ turn. But we were under Russian occupation and without military support. A counter-revolutionary action was unthinkable. With no way out, the Romanians were arrested in waves. Their imprisonment crushed all resistance among the people, and so socialism could be built.
Gheorghe was arrested in Brașov in 1949. He had not committed any crime, but had prepared the resistance. And for this audacity he was not pardoned. For a year he was subjected to a harsh investigation that destroyed his health. During the torture he prayed fervently and said that he felt the real help of God. He was sentenced to 15 years’ hard labour and taken to Târgu-Ocna because, in addition to cirrhosis of the liver, he also had tuberculosis.
From the first moment, he stood out among us. In addition to the usual prayers, he prayed Psalm 50 fifty times a day, each time dedicating it to a person or a cause. Sometimes he prayed in bed, sometimes while walking, just to be quiet. He was serene and obviously detached from worldly things. He believed without limits. He was a source of purity and wisdom, kindness and severity, peace and struggle, certainty and relentless search. He longed for the deepest waters of the inner life. When he learned of the prayer of the heart, he began to practice it, gradually replacing Psalm 50. He progressed quickly and intensely. Soon he came to say it in his heart. He felt a refreshing cry flowing within. He saw the light within. He rejoiced in the gifts of the Holy Spirit. God revealed to him the deep order of the world and of man. He rejoiced that he was alive, human and Christian. He was a child and determined to remain a child of Christ for the rest of his life. His longing for God moved him with the glory of eternal life.
But he remained a fighter. In addition to his strictly spiritual concerns, he feverishly sought Christian socio-political forms of life. His goal was a harmonious, religious world order. Together with Valeriu, he decided to serve Christ and the Church throughout his life. He did not want to become a monk or a cleric, but felt that his mission, though celibate, was as a layman. In repeated conversations they both sought the coordinates of future Christianity and the methods to achieve it. Both were full of spirit, but Valeriu excelled in word and George in deed.
Once he was taken by the Securitate and tortured to become an informer, but his firm and definitive answer saved him. Between us, he was a kind of catalyst, with his gift for befriending everyone. He knew how to behave differently from person to person. Being around him made you feel good and allowed you to open your soul.
From Târgu-Ocna he was taken to Caransebeș and then to Aiud. Wherever he went, he left a beautiful impression. Although he was so modest, his personality made an impression. He helped many to discover the power of the Jesus Prayer, contributed to the formation of the Christian conscience and was a model of tenacity of spirit. He often found himself in the company of wicked people or informers who tormented and challenged him, but he overcame them with his good sense, his shrewd tact and his great power of love. Although he loved prayer above all else, he was sociable, amiable, concerned with current affairs and prospects for the future. Those who were close to him in those years speak of him as an exceptional man.
During those years, the food in Aiud was wretched, the isolation total, the tension constant, so much so that his cirrhosis of the liver progressed. After 15 years of imprisonment, when he was a few days away from being released, he was so exhausted that he was taken to the prison infirmary. But it was not long before he died, conscious, at peace, without wavering, confident that Christ would triumph in the world. He was buried without a cross in the political cemetery of Aiud, the land that gave birth to much of the flower of the Romanian people in this century.
(Ioan Ianolide – Return to Christ. Document for a New World, Christiana Publishing House, Bucharest, 2006, pp. 151-152)