“He had all his fingers frostbitten, sitting every day for seven hours in prayer”
About a month after the “walks” of the big ones,[1] the first re-education session was organised, in which several hundred people were taken out of their cells and put in a room with a capacity of five hundred people. I was one of those taken out. The commander, Colonel Crăciun, opened the session with a short speech praising the government’s good intentions in dealing with the fate of political prisoners. Then he took an army newspaper, ‘The Voice of the Fatherland’, from the table and had one of the prisoners read out articles written by those who had been taken out in jeeps. The articles were, of course, about the achievements of “socialism” and the welfare of “working people”.
On the occasion of this meeting, I had the great surprise and immense joy of meeting Father Ioan, the confessor of Tudor Vladimirescu monastery, Galați County. He was clean-shaven and slender, like a saint. He had been through hard trials, torture chambers and, above all, isolation. He had also been examined several times by Colonel Crăciun.
I’ll open a bracket here. Nine years ago, after my release from the Danube-Black Sea Canal, in the summer of 1954, I had gone to the Vladimirești monastery with my whole family. Cornelia was 13 and Olguța 9. Waves of believers arrived at the holy place that afternoon. A nun took us to her cell, where we slept until morning.
According to the nun who welcomed us, about five thousand souls had gathered in the convent courtyard. They had all come for the second day’s Liturgy, the great feast of the Assumption. Many wanted to go to confession and receive Holy Communion.
At dawn on the 15th of August, Father John confessed the thousands of souls who were there, because it was impossible to do otherwise, and asked them to repeat after him: “All these I have done and more”.
But let us return. Halfway through the ‘re-education’ session, there was a half-hour break. People were allowed to go out into the yard, walk around or talk. A few stayed in the hall, complaining of heart or foot ailments. I also stayed with Father John, using the same excuses. Then we retired to a corner and received the Sacrament of Confession in the most perfect communion of souls. I felt happy and my soul was like a flake. For me, meeting Father John that day was a real miracle. […]
In our dark and freezing cells, where in winter the water no longer remained liquid, I saw people kneeling for hours with folded hands, praying. Father Ioan, from the Tudor Vladimirescu monastery, had frostbitten fingers because he spent seven hours a day in prayer…
(Costache Caragață, Notebooks of Sadness. The notes of a teacher in handcuffs for free children, f.e., f.l., 2010, pp. 168-169, 225)
[1] It is about the famous removal from the Aiud prison of great political, cultural and theological personalities, to be taken around the country in order to “convince” themselves of the great “achievements” of the communist regime and its “benefits” in the social field. The re-education action was aimed at compromising the peaks of anti-communist resistance so that the rest of the prisoners would succumb to the domino effect.