Hunted by Securitate
A true anti-communist fighter, Father Constantin Voicescu could not escape political imprisonment and harassment by Securitate. His file in the archives of the National Council for the Study of Securitate Archives shows that he had been followed by the secret services since 1942. In that year he was arrested for the first time and sentenced to three years’ hard labour on political grounds. He was a member of the “Brotherhood of the Cross” at the Normal School in Buzău, an organisation he joined under the leadership of Marin Naidin.
In fact, young Voicescu, together with other comrades, had given some of his little money to buy boots for a political refugee. But that was at a time when Marshal Antonescu was hunting down every last one of the former legionaries he had forcibly removed from power. And a Christian act was severely punished if it benefited a political supporter of the head of state. Thousands of pupils, children of 14 and 15, fell victim to the Marshal’s wrath because they belonged to the Brotherhood of the Cross – the youth organisation of the Legionary Movement – and he filled the prison of Târgsor (Prahova), the only children’s prison in Europe, with hundreds of them.
Constantin Voicescu was released from prison in 1944, finished high school and enrolled at the Faculty of Geography in Bucharest. He never stopped acting according to his national Christian beliefs. As a result, in 1949, according to the CNSAS file, Voicescu was again sentenced to four years in prison for his Legionary activities. In prison he behaved with dignity and faith. He was released in 1954. He married Laura-Florentin Durac, had a son, Mihai, enrolled at the Faculty of Theology in Bucharest, where he studied for two years, and in the meantime worked as a technician at the Institute of Geology. In short, he was trying to get on with his life. But the Communists didn’t think they had “cured” him of his youthful idealism and tried to put him behind bars again. He was arrested on 30 October 1958 and charged on 19 November with “conspiracy against the social order”. Unusually, he was accused of this crime in prison. Specifically, Constantin Voicescu was accused of having almost destabilised the communist regime by setting up a “subversive group” in the Târgu Ocna hospital prison between 1951 and 1954, together with Ion Cazacu, Vasile Petrescu and Gheorghe Samoilă. The members of the group helped elderly or sick Legionnaires, gave some of their food to others, made sweaters, held religious discussions and tried to keep up the morale of those with whom they were imprisoned. Our younger readers may wonder that under the Communist regime, you could be imprisoned for behaving humanely. But that is how history was written, with much blood spilled out of pure hatred, out of a diabolical urge to kill any glimmer of divinity in man.
The four were also accused of holding nest meetings after liberation, from 1954 until the date of their resettlement, providing aid to the families of prisoners, distributing anti-communist propaganda material, organising marches and “recruiting new members”. The sentence in the case of Constantin (Tică) Voicesu was merciless: hard labour for life, later commuted to 25 years’ hard labour. He had lived for 34 years, seven of them as a political prisoner. With the new sentence he received, few in his position would have had any hope of getting out of prison alive. But God rewarded his hope and faith and he was released in 1964 along with most political prisoners.
He continued his studies and graduated in Geography-History and Theology. He was also ordained and given a small parish in Bucharest. Securitate followed him for a while, but his records end in the 1960s.
(Nicolae Tescanu – Rost Magazine, Issue 25-26, March-April 2005)