“I am bound for life by the serene face of Aurel Dragodan”

The other prisoner I sat with was a student, also from the elite Brotherhood of the Cross; he had also been in prison since 1941. His name was Aurel Dragodan, but everyone called him “The Master”.

I stayed with him the longest and discovered in him a poet of great value, another brilliant example of our generation. Born in 1919, he was a student at the Faculty of Law in Bucharest when he was arrested for being a legionnaire and sentenced to 25 years in prison, of which he served 23 without interruption.

I remember fragments of his poetry because the tension we were under in Zarca had weakened our memory considerably:

And we stand, illuminated by a glimmer of thought
On this sole of hell, waiting
The angel of God, white, to give
On one side the heavy tombstone

Aurel Dragodan believed in the power of poetry and composed verses as a memorial to pain, to show those who did not go through the hell of the Communist dungeons something of what was suffered there:

We are all in the stigmata of restrictions.
Let people know them, let them learn them by heart.
Maybe then we’ll all succeed,
to show the world something of what was.

For him, Zarca was a tomb, which he masterfully described as follows:

Something without a cross, under a black curse,
With dark cells, frozen with frost,
The fortress of silence where we lie,
Far from the world, far from life.

It was also from him that we received confirmation of what Papa Popovici had said in the factory, of the martyrdom of Mircea Cătuneanu, horribly mutilated, and of the murder in the same way of Gheorghiță Cârciumaru and Petre Vila.

Aurel Dragodan immortalised the memory of these heroes in a poem: “The confession of a man who was maimed”, which I do not remember. I am bound for life by the serene face of Aurel Dragodan, who also remained in Zarca until the last moment, enduring hunger and isolation with Socratic resignation.

(Puiu Năstase – Temerarii, edited by Gheorghe Andreica, Metafora Publishing House, Constanța, 2004, pp. 410-411)