Gili Ioanid “had something seraphimic in his being”
Between 1941 and 1964, Aiud was for many a prison of hard and long suffering. […] In the cell I met, for the most part, people of character, who put the purity of their conscience above suffering and humiliation. Aiud was a real school of Romanian life and resistance. Everyone learnt prayers, texts from the New Testament, poems written in prison, foreign languages and everything that could be learnt about ‘good and beautiful’. (…)
There were a few young people, real “walking libraries”[1], who knew all the poems of Radu Gyr and Nichifor Crainic, apart from religious texts.
Anyone who knew him, or had the good fortune to sit with Gili Ioanid (Alexandru Virgil Ioanid), can see that what I have said above is true. Gili was such a man. But not only that. When you listened to him speak or recite religious texts or poems, you got the impression that this man’s soul had a very special experience that does not belong to us, the commoners. There was something seraphic in his being that made you feel small and urged you, by his example, to have a similar experience.
Patience, the sublime Christian virtue, was Gili’s firm attitude even after his imagined liberation in 1964. I also saw him on his bed of suffering, as a martyr of the nation. And in the last lines he sent me, he told me that he knew why he was suffering and that he was at peace with his fate… “I have gone through and am still going through hard trials in terms of health, but I thank God for everything He gives me” – and God gave him a heavy cross, which he carried until his last breath, as only martyrs and saints carry it.
May God rest him with the righteous.
(Nicu Popescu Vorkuta, Faith and Truth, Bucharest 2009, pp. 271-272)
[1] Among these “walking libraries” were Relu Stratan, Grigore Caraza and Alexandru Virgil Ioanid. Years later, Atanasie Berzescu, who had also spent time in Aiud prison, recalled that when he asked the great poet Radu Gyr how he managed to write his poems without pencil and paper, he received the following reply: “Well, look how! I sit on my back in bed and look at the ceiling. As it is white, I imagine it to be my paper. There, in front of my eyes, I write the lines as they come to me. And so on, verse by verse, until I have finished the poem. When I go for a walk, I take one of you with me and tell him the poem I have written in the room. The one who helps me the most is Relu Stratan. He is my library. He knows all the poems I have here. There are others who learn them, like Gili Ioanid. If one of them dies, there’s another to take over. (Tears and Blood. Armed Anti-Communist Resistance in the Banat Mountains)