Gili Ioanid, “a spirit of sacrifice without equal”

Meeting and getting to know Gili Ioanid gave me great joy. I could not imagine that it was possible for one man to have so many spiritual resources. I wondered how he could have accumulated so much intellectual and spiritual baggage by his age. When he went to prison, he was in his final year of literature and philosophy. He had a modesty that was not easy to find.

In fact, the communist prisons were full of the best and the most beautiful of the Romanian people, all the spiritual values of the nation were thrown into the communist prisons and put in chains. Gili Ioanid belonged to the young elite of Romanian spirituality. Together with Costică Oprișan, Costică Butan, Ion Sadovan and hundreds and thousands of other young people.

Gili Ioanid was an unparalleled spirit of sacrifice. He always put the needs of others first. […]

Gili Ioanid was an inexhaustible source of lessons in literature and philosophy, Tavi Tomuță, a great novelist, and Nicu Popescu, known as “Vorkuta”, carried in his pocket the entire North Pole of the Russian Gulag, where he was interned for 5 years of his life.

(Mihai Timaru, Amintiri de la Gherla, Editura de Vest, Timișoara 1993, pp. 127-128)