“Here is Ilarion Felea… I can’t eat anymore”

We arrived in Caracal with 31 legionaries. As we queued, a more modern Soviet colonel, wearing sunglasses and better dressed than the other peasants and miners, asked me in Russian, I was translated:

“Why were you brought here?”

I replied: “I was a legionnaire.”

The Russian replied: “The people will punish you for your crimes.”

“Siberia awaits me!” – I think.

We were taken to some barracks left over from the German army, where we saw rivers of bedbugs. We were given a petrol lamp to burn them. It was summer. […]

In another camp there were prisoners from Arad county. There we found Professor Ilarion Felea, a native of Valea Bradului. He was the dean of the theological faculty in Arad.

I went to him and asked him to answer some religious questions:

1. What does he think about the Apocalypse?

2. If Pompiliu Pizo, the former protopriest of Zarand, who became a corrupt man before his death, goes to confession and is reconciled, will he go to heaven after his death?

3. Why is sin of thought punished the same as sin of deed?

The Dean of the Faculty of Theology in Arad answered me:

1. The Apocalypse was written by the Apostle John when he was about 90 years old, and all scientific research has concluded that the Apocalypse is very confusing and has not been able to arrive at a clear explanation.

2. Each individual passes through the next world with the specific weight of sins committed. Some sins are unforgivable.

3. Jesus Christ wanted people not to even think about sin.

When we arrived in Aiud, in the cell, the others started knocking on the walls and saying: “The geologist Brana Viorel from Bucharest has been brought to our cell”.

One wall said: “Let Brana come to the wall!”

I approached the wall and heard: “Is that you, Viorel?”

I replied: “Yes”.

He replied, “This is Ilarion Felea. How is your health? I can’t eat anymore. I live with the poet Vasile Voiculescu, he’s also ill”.

It wasn’t long before they told us from the side cells that Ilarion Felea had died.

(Dimitrian-Laurentiu-Viorel Brana, Memoirs of a Romanian geologist and former political prisoner, Ramida Publishing House, Bucharest, 1997, pp. 54-55)