Goe Nițescu – a young man with an astonishing openness of soul

A few days later, Goe Nițescu was taken to his cell[1], so badly beaten that his face was so swollen that the flesh of one jaw hung down to his shoulder like two huge bloody gouges. The eyes were nothing but two narrow slits covered by swollen eyelids, and his long Cyrano type nose was now the size of a button.

Goe Nițescu… A Polytechnic student, with an astonishing openness of soul and with an inexhaustible sense of humour that never offended anyone.

The months I spent with him in different cells, on and off, made me love him deeply, like the best of men. We laughed together at that dramatic moment of conscience in the Securitate cell, and when we met again much later in Pitești, on the occasion of a medical visit, I was speechless. Goe was as bloated as ever. His yellow, parchment-like skin was shiny and tiny drops of water dripped from his open pores. The details of his face had become rounded, losing their sharpness, and his leg was enormous.

– What happened, Goe? I asked him out of the corner of my mouth, afraid the guard would see us talking.

He tried to joke again:

– I don’t know, Ghiță. I’m not eating, but my belly’s getting bigger. I think I’m going to give birth!

Shortly afterwards Goe died. Without complaint, without protest. He probably died with a joke on his mind that he never managed to articulate. People said that the blows he received during the interrogation, either with a boot or with his fists, had destroyed his liver and caused cirrhosis, which led to his death. One day, through the window of my cell, I saw ordinary prisoners loading a coffin made of old planks. In the prison cart, pulled by two gentle oxen, was the last journey of Goe Nițescu,[2] a young man of twenty-three who did not know what evil was, who did not hate or curse.

(Fr. Gheorghe Calciu Dumitreasa – The Life of Father Gheorghe Calciu according to his Testimony and that of Others, Christiana Publishing House, Bucharest 2007, pp. 157-158)

[1] The action takes place in the Pitești prison.

[2] Gheorghe Nițescu did not die in Pitești, where he remained until 10 February 1950, but three years later, in Târgu Ocna, as a result of untreated pulmonary tuberculosis, which he had contracted during his stay at Pitești.