“Hold conferences here too, and promise you, I’ll give you hell”

One day, Dinu Iorgulescu [1], who was one of the kids eavesdropping at the door, gave us a sign to be quiet. We heard footsteps, swearing and banging. The alarm was triggered outside the cell. The door opened and three skeletons were thrown into the room, beaten and kicked.

“Hold conferences here too, and promise you, I’ll give you hell,” Ivănică warned them, closing the door.

We all rushed in. The kids took them in, put them on their cushions and gave them first aid: cold water compresses, accompanied by the sound of the prayer: “And forgive us… as we forgive…” They were wrapped in handkerchiefs, towels, the bottoms of their shirts, and so on, from their legs and buttocks to their arms and heads.

In hushed tones, everyone was asked to introduce themselves. With a sad smile and a gesture to show that nothing in this world is forever, the questioner would say: Mircea Vulcănescu, Alexandru Constant and Ion Nedelescu – a philosopher, a teacher, a legionary commander and a great journalist – had been taken from the second section, sent to the black hole without food for several days, then beaten with sandbags made of dock cloth, the thickness of a bat, which mainly destroy the internal organs, especially the kidneys, and thrown into room 5 bis, the antechamber of death. 

Are you guilty? They came up with some pretty backward ideas: things like bourgeois-legionist culture, faith and science, which they promoted against the Party and the working class. While they were in the room, which was about a week long, they were so weak and in so much pain that they could hardly speak. Mircea Vulcănescu and Alexandru Constant seemed like the moving shadows of ruined towers, from which the watchmen had once sounded the bugle, announcing the arrival of the enemy. But the lord and the city were blessed and asleep, and the enemy had turned everything into ruin.

(Virgil Maxim, Hymn for the Cross. Abecedar duhovnicesc pentru un frate de cruce, 2nd edition, Antim Publishing House, Bucharest, 2002, p. 246)

[1] This is Constantin Iorgulescu, who in turn recorded this episode in his memoirs.