Grigore Caraza – The young man with the longest detention

“Grigore was a kind of guardian of the truth,
a sword of the dignity of truth, which hit
mercilessly into untruth, bestiality and cowardice.
Sometimes with too much ruthlessness”.

Priest Gheorghe Calciu

Grigore Caraza was only 20 years old when he set off on the road to Calvary, leaving five other brothers and his parents at home in tears.

He was a support at home, helping his father with the farm work, but he did not neglect his beloved job of looking after the children of his village, Poiana Teiului, at the foot of Ceahlău. It was the end of the school holidays when, on 31 August 1949, the militia and Security Service police came to take him away. He had just helped his father with his sewing.

He was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment by decision no. 166 of 18 February 1950, as an organiser of the Brotherhood of Arms in the district of Ceahlău. He distributed manifestos and collected money for this organisation.

He was framed by the agent Constantin Hrușcă, who had come to Pipirig as a teacher and had taken over the Brotherhood’s documents from Caraza, with the complicity of the Poiana Teiului school administration.

The group he organised was linked to the organisation Decebal’s Guards, led by the monk Filaret Gămălău, former abbot of the Rarău monastery, sold to the Securitate by his brother-in-law I. Roșu, from Poiana Teiului, and Dumitru Irimescu.

Grigore Caraza was sentenced by the communist courts to three terms of imprisonment totalling 47 years, condemned to the communist hell of Romania. He served 21 of the 47 years, the longest period of imprisonment ever served by a prisoner[1].

The ordeal of this legendary man is described in the book Bloody Aiud, a harrowing account of the 17 years he spent in Aiud alone, eight of them in Zarca. He was an exceptional man present at all the protests against the extermination policies of the prison administration.

Endowed with an extraordinary memory, he recorded the poems of Radu Demetrescu Gyr and Nichifor Crainic, and was considered the walking library of the prison, carrying his verses as spiritual food through the isolation and cells of the prisons and then, over the decades, bringing them to the free world.

Released after his first sentence, he was sent with administrative punishment to Răchitoasa, in Bărăgan, from where he was arrested again on 20 September 1959 with a group of 11 former prisoners from a group of 62 D.O.s. He was tortured during the investigation and sentenced this time to 23 years of hard labour, by sentence no. 349/16.06.1959, by the Military Tribunal of Constanța. Chained to his legs, after 106 days he was transferred to Jilava and after a month to Aiud.

Here, after a cruel isolation, on 29 November 1962, he was asked to give his opinion on what Colonel Gheorghe Crăciun had started: re-education, i.e. kneeling before the regime and denying the past, which he was to mock and accuse everyone he knew.

Caraza replied quietly and calmly: “I do not make pacts with those who want to mutilate my conscience”. He was immediately isolated and subjected to a regime of extermination.

On 13 January he was taken to the dreadful Zarca. Grigore Caraza recalls this dark period in detail: “The great unrest began in 1962 and lasted until the summer of 1964. … The people, who had withstood the storm like a rock at the top of a mountain battered by wind and rain, rolled with roar and thunder… … What is more, they even foresaw the end of this sad and painful collapse of an elite generation that was both the cream and the shield of the Romanian nation; they committed themselves as volunteers, to the point of killing their instinct for preservation”.

Under these conditions, Grigore Caraza, who constantly refused to collaborate with the prison administration, was subjected to 65 days of harsh solitary confinement, with a regime of extermination, during which he collapsed on the floor and lost the feeling in his legs and hands.

At the beginning of 1964, an attempt was made to forcibly remove the people from Zarca and take them to the club to hear the self-defences of those who had accepted re-education. Militia force was used, but to no avail. The prisoners held on to the beds and door frames and could not be chased out. Then loudspeakers were installed in the corridors and cell windows were opened so that the prisoners could listen to others renouncing the ideals for which they had fought. The cell blockers stuffed blankets in the windows. All these punishments stopped in April 1964 and the food improved and became more acceptable.

At the same time, amnesty decrees began to be issued, and dozens of prisoners who had accepted re-education were released every day. Around St. Elias’ Day, a group of officers asked the remaining prisoners who wanted to give up their resistance positions. When they found no candidates, they opened all the doors of the Zarca and told them to come out with their bags. There were less than a hundred “plague-ers”, supporting each other, rotting in the “trenches”, but with the pride of having remained dignified and healthy men. They were taken to the former Orthodox chapel, furnished with beds and clean linen, and at the entrance two kiosks with hearty and good food awaited them, and Father Dumitru Bejan, with his experience of Russian imprisonment, taught them to eat little and sparingly, so as not to suffer from intestinal obstruction, just on the threshold of liberation. Freedom was won in Aiud by this small group, whose executioner, Gh. Crăciun, in the courtyard of the factory, where the last political prisoners, about a thousand of them, were gathered and seated behind the benches on which the “flounders” of the Zarca were placed: “Dear comrades, I call you comrades because from now on you are all free. In a few days the last of you will leave. You who are leaving uneducated, underline Crăciun, you have won!”

At that moment, the standing people jumped over the benches, embraced each other and shouted: “You have won, you have won!”

When the atmosphere had calmed down, the same Gheorghe Crăciun added: “Those of you who come from the Zarca, remember that you will pass this way again”.

On 11 June 1970, the Iași Military Tribunal moved for the first time to Piatra Neamț for a new political trial. This new trial had before it the fearless defender of justice and freedom, Grigore Caraza, and with sentence no. 183/11.06.1970, he was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment for having resumed his activities after his release from Aiud (where he had refused to undergo re-education) and for having carried out actions that “perverted the state order” and “propaganda against the socialist order”.

To protest against this new arrangement, Grigore Caraza declared a hunger strike and managed to get the military prosecutor in Bacau, Col. Alex. Ionescu, in the same way as the previous ones. He passed through the Bacău Security Service and Văcărești prisons and ended up in Aiud, also in Zarca, where there were about 250 political prisoners.

On 1 September 1976, Grigore Caraza wrote to the Aiud Prison Administration and the Ministry of the Internal Affairs, stating that he refused to leave the prison, having just completed his 20th year of imprisonment, in a country where he had done nothing but good and where “my family had sacrificed themselves for the country”. The political officer informed Bucharest, which sent two commissions (on 14 and 30 October) to re-examine the case. On 3 September 1976, he was told that his sister had come to see the spokesman, and he reluctantly agreed to see her. Although there were five militiamen present, he managed to denounce in front of them the conditions of extermination to which he was being subjected and, pointing his finger, he named four of the militiamen present who had mistreated the prisoners and because of whom he had suffered a lot of solitary confinement and had been forced to go on hunger strike. All the while, his sister Alexandrina sobbed.

Before Christmas 1976 he was taken to the TB hospital in Târgu-Ocna, where he was the only political prisoner and where he was kept in isolation for 101 days. He was given special treatment to make him fit for release, but was sent back to Aiud.

On 13 July 1977 he was taken out of his cell and brought before General Vasile Ionel, who served him coffee and American cigarettes. Grigore Caraza ironically asked the Minister of the Internal Affairs how he could manage with American cigarettes when he, Caraza, had been beaten to death on the charge of waiting for the Americans to come?

Changing the subject, the general told him that he had come to see what a man who refuses to leave prison looks like and what the reason for his refusal is. Caraza replied with two examples:

1 – That of Admiral Karl Dönitz, Hitler’s successor, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison by the Nüremberg Tribunal, was kept in good conditions and after his release became a high school teacher. And he, Caraza, has done no harm to anyone and has been in prison for 21 years.

2 – An Italian, 28 years old, imprisoned during the reign of King Louis XIV and forgotten for 35 years at the bottom of the dungeon. During the reign of the king’s successor, a census was taken and the prison administration remembered the prisoner in the dungeon and brought him out into the prison yard by opening the gates. The 63-year-old fell to his knees and refused to leave the prison: “I have no right to be outside. I was 35, I had a country, now I don’t; I had parents, now I don’t; I had a wife and two children, now I don’t; I had a house and food, now I have nothing. I refuse to leave prison!”

And when he had finished, Grigore Caraza got up from his chair and walked towards the door. As he reached for the doorknob, the general called out to him, saying he had something more to discuss. He told him that mistakes had been made, to which Grigore replied, “Find out where the evil began, expose it, make it known and punish the guilty”.

He was told that he would be released in the next ten days and asked not to resist so that no violence would be used. Caraza replied that he would leave the gate unwillingly. After five days a decree of pardon was issued, and on St Elias’s Day Captain Vasile Asaftei came and drove him to Piatra Meamț, where a studio and a job had been prepared for him.

This Captain Asaftei was always on his trail, trying to find out all his thoughts, even trying to invite him for a drink to see him in the security entourage.

But Grigore Caraza had other plans, known only to himself. In July 1979, he began to take steps to get him out of the country, submitting a memo asking for his expatriation. He went through countless committees that tried to calm him down, but he told them one last time that if he wasn’t released he would pour petrol over himself and set himself on fire. Finally, on Christmas Day 1979, his passport was issued and he obtained a visa from the US consulate in Bucharest. Until then, he had been followed, tried to be run over by a security car on his last trip to Piatra Neamt station, had his skin searched at Otopeni airport, and had his suitcase knocked out of the hold of the plane so that he would miss his flight on 21 May 1980. But he took the flight on 23 May. On the plane, the stewardess served him a meal on a grey-blue tray, the only one of its kind. Noticing this, he returned the tray and took another cream-coloured one, the same as the other passengers, with the note that his would be given to the one who had prepared it. So the long hand of security followed him everywhere. He arrived in New York in the second half of June 1980. At the same time, Ion Ovidiu Borcea left Bucharest and we were waiting for him in Rome. Remus Radina also arrived in Paris in May. I mention these names because they meant the revival of the exile, and so the drama of the Romanian people began to be known in its true magnitude.

Grigore Caraza, together with Ovidiu Borcea, took part in the activities of the Romanian National Council and the Association of Political Prisoners; he put his heart and soul into the Romanian cause, fulfilling the mission he had dreamed of for so long: to make the suffering of the Romanian people under Russian occupation known. He was present and organised all the Romanian demonstrations and those for the reunification of families.

At his side was Liviu Butura, a great man, two decades younger, and they spent all their free time together. Both of them, with their bags full, went to the American Congress, to journalists or political personalities, trying to draw attention to Romania, distributing the Black Book of Romania (in English), the Drama of Romania (in French), Romanian pamphlets and manifestos to those who were constantly arriving in the United States.

He and Liviu Butura used their own money to carry snacks and mineral water in the trunk of their car to give to the 40-50 Romanians who accompanied them everywhere. In Soultzmatt, on the steps of the American Congress in Washington, or at the “Vatra Românească” in Jackson, Michigan, wherever Romanian hearts beat, demanding freedom for their country subjugated by Moscow’s agents and traitors.

To pray to the Almighty to support Romania, together with Liviu Butura, in the Canadian rain, he climbed the one hundred and one steps of the St. Joseph Oratory in Montreal on his knees, saying the Our Father on each step, arriving after 65 minutes in front of 600-700 candles placed side by side. They walked past the 14 life-size Stations of the Cross carved in marble, including the three falls from the Cross, before which not only the eyes but also the soul wept.

Together with Liviu Butura, he also took “in his hands” the tomb of General Nicolae Rădescu, which they had been tending since his death, planting flowers, weeding and even sprinkling it with tears.

Mia Braia, whom I met on the occasion of the celebration of the 1st of December in the church “St. Nicholas” in Woodside New York, where Father Nicolae Bârsan served, was also present since 1984. Since then, Mia Braia has been a fixture at Romanian events, even on the steps of the US Congress in Washington.

Grigore Caraza, who settled in the country after 2000, together with Ioan Roșca (from Piatra Neamț, a Canadian citizen), Liviu Tudoraș, Gheorghe Jijie and Răzvan Pârâianu, filed a criminal complaint with the Prosecutor’s Office of the Supreme Court of Cassation and Justice of Romania, submitting to General Dan Voinea documents registered under no. 35/P/2006, requesting the criminal opening of the communist trial, because the genocide committed in Romania is obvious and can no longer be covered up, because the hour of history is too late and the guilty must be punished. The truth is undeniable.

(Cicerone Ionițoiu, Figuri de legendă, published by the Civic Academy Foundation, Bucharest, 2013, pp. 142-149)

1. The statement, like the title of the essay, is subjective in the sense that there were other political prisoners who served more than 21 years in prison. This is particularly true of young students who were arrested and sentenced during the Antonescu dictatorship. Examples: Ioan Ianolide (23 years old), Marin Naidim (23 years old), Virgil Maxim (22 years old).