“He was so gentle and kind…”

In the autumn of 2012, Mrs. Constanța Ianolide, the wife of Ioan Ianolide, the legatee of Valeriu Gafencu, visited Putna Monastery. We asked her to tell us a few words about her husband.

Ionel was released from prison on 2 August 1964. On 2 March 1965 he came to visit my mother, whom he had met a few months earlier. That’s how she met me. It was a visit of a few hours and the next day she wanted to talk to me. We went for a walk in Herăstrau Park and he told me he wanted to marry me because when he entered the house and met me, a voice told him: Her is the one! We filed the marriage papers and on 7 April 1965 we had the civil wedding in Bucharest and on 30 April the religious wedding in Dobrotești.

He always suffered from various illnesses. Three or four times a year he had respiratory problems, kidney stones, cataract and prostate operations. When he worked, he had to take breaks at certain intervals and lie down on a hard bed because his spine ached from top to bottom; he had progressive pluridiscopathy, heel stumps, coxarthrosis. But what didn’t he have? But from the outside you wouldn’t know he was sick. He was so handsome and tall and good-looking and always dressed up in a shirt and tie that everyone admired him. And he was so gentle and kind…

When he went to the baths, because he was suffering from generalised rheumatism, many people, especially women who were in trouble, asked his advice because they saw him so gentle and kind.

Only faith helped him to resist. He used to tell us about Valeriu, whom he loved more than his brothers. He told us nothing about himself. We didn’t ask him, either, so as not to upset him. Once, when I was cutting his nails, he said: “Ah, you cut them and they pulled them out.” My mother, when she heard about the tumour on the back of his liver that hastened his end, asked him, “Didn’t they hit your liver too?” “Oh, how often with their boots!” And he added: “I was lucky to escape from the re-education centre in Pitești”. Later, after the revolution, when the books came out, I found out what happened in Pitești, what happened, because I didn’t know, he didn’t say.

Then, again from others, I found out how he beat them with an iron, and he didn’t make a sound. For five years he was isolated, alone in a cell, on cement, naked, without food. For the last two years, when they saw that he wouldn’t give in despite threats of re-education or promises to get him out of prison if he gave up – he told them once, “I believe in Jesus Christ and I will continue to believe in Jesus Christ! – they put him in a big cell with 20 people who had gone mad, so that he too would lose his mind[1]. God helped him and he didn’t go insane. But he said it was terrible.

I am convinced that only faith helped him to resist the terrible tortures of his 23 years in prison. My mother once asked him: “Don’t you hate those who tormented you for so many years?” “No. I pray for their salvation.”

At Putna

My granddaughter Ruxandra, the daughter of my daughter Mihaela from my first marriage, I brought up with us from the age of 5 months until she was 7 years old, when I gave her back to her parents because on 15 September 1985 she started her first year of school. Ionel loved her very much. For several years in a row, the three of us went to a monastery in the country for 2-3 months, where Ionel taught various monks and nuns how to make religious objects. We went to the monasteries of Govora, Cozia, Sihăstria and Putna.

The last time, just before he died, in July-August 1985, I went to Putna. Before the first gate of the monastery there were a few small houses and we lived there. Once, my niece and I went with a group from Ardeal to the monasteries in Neamț County. On the way back, Ionel told me to go to Iași and look for Mihail Lungeanu – Valeriu’s cellmate in Târgu Ocna, whom he also looked after – who knew Valeriu’s poems, and to tell him to come to Putna to tell him. After finally finding him, we returned to Putna, where the little girl began to feel ill and had a high fever. We decided that my granddaughter and I would go back to Bucharest and Ionel would stay until the work was done. Before we left, a priest from the monastery, who had heard that the little girl was ill, came and made us kneel down and read us some prayers. At the end he said to us: “Leave without worrying, because when you get to Bucharest, the girl will be well”. We arrived in the morning and the baby was fine. So as not to frighten them, I told her parents, who were waiting for us at the station, that we had gone home because Ruxandra was bored. Later I told them the truth. The day after we left, Mihail Lungeanu came to Putna, spoke to Ionel and gave him the text.

On the bed of suffering

After that, Ionel’s health deteriorated. Chronic hepatitis, a disease he had contracted in prison and which had returned after 25 years, gradually turned into dry cirrhosis, then fluid cirrhosis, and then a tumour appeared behind the liver. In November the doctors said there was nothing more they could do and sent him home.

On his deathbed, he was visited several times by the poet Ioan Alexandru, who gave him the book of poems he had written, Imnele Putnei: “To my beloved brother in the Lord, Ioan Ianolide, with the joy of having been together, at least for a moment, under these skies, on this Romanian Christian land, on the way to the eternal homeland. Ioan Alexandru. Saint Dumitru, 1985”. Two or three weeks before his death, Father Archimandrite Grigore Băbuș from the Patriarchate and Father Archimandrite Bartolomeu Anania came to visit him. As he was leaving, Father Anania said to me: “If we had the same state of mind as Ion in the face of death, we would be the happiest people”.

I am ready

Ionel told us: “I am ready to cross over, but I am sorry to leave you”. At Christmas ’85 he fell into a coma that lasted a day and a night. We thought it was over. But he recovered. At one point he called my daughter to sit in the chair beside his bed and said: “Why didn’t you let me die when I had already crossed over and met God!”

On the morning of 5 February 1986 he died. And since he could not enter the monastery, he wished that at least he could enter it dead. So I gave him two tombs in the cemetery of the monastery of Cernica, where his body rests, because I am sure that his soul is on the highest steps of heaven.

(Constanța Ianolide – Magazine “Words to Young People”, no. VI of 2013, pp. 44-46)

[1] This episode took place in Aiud, during the final phase of the re-education of political prisoners. John was sent to this cell with the lunatics on the orders of Colonel Crăciun after he refused to undergo re-education: “Those who categorically refused re-education were gathered in the Zarca and subjected to a regime of extermination through starvation, isolation, disease and punishment. The others were given plenty of food, bad food, but enough to keep their poor skeletons a little thicker. The Colonel called me in and spoke of re-education. I replied:

 – I’ll solve my problems of conscience myself, and I won’t let anyone interfere.

– You’re crazy! he shouted angrily and sent me to a mental hospital as punishment, the first experiment in psychiatric institutions.

I had a rare experience there, and one with unexpected conclusions. Then I ended up in the Zarca. They finally took me to the hospital because I was a wreck.

(John Ianolide, Return to Christ. Document for a New World, Bonifaciu Publishing House, Bacău, 2012, p. 215)