“I have dedicated all my suffering to God”

I was born in January 1922 in the town of Bârlad, of Romanian Orthodox descent. I attended primary and secondary school in the town of Bârlad, then the Academy of Higher Economic Studies in Bucharest.

I was arrested on 16 May 1948 and sentenced to 15 years’ hard labour, then another 10 years’ hard labour for “subversive organisation”, being classified, like all political prisoners, under Law No. 209, “conspiracy against state security”.

I passed through the following dungeons of “Bolshevik heaven”: the Ministry of the Interior twice, Jilava five times, Uranus, Pitești, Gherla, Aiud three times, Alba-Iulia, Galați several times, Focșani, Ploiești twice, Codlea, Iași, Periprava, Bârlad several times.

At the Ministry of the Interior I was subjected to long interrogations of 70 and 80 hours, without food, sleep or rest. From the Ministry of the Interior, the first group of prisoners was sent to Pitesti in March-April 1949. Here was the filter of Nicolski, Moscow’s representative in Romania, assisted by General Dulgheru (real name Dulbergher), the head of investigations in the country, the political officer in Pitești, Marina Ițicovici, and other members of their team.

During the investigation I was taken to Dulgheru’s office three times and told: ‘You don’t mean it? We’ll make sure you don’t get another academy out of prison!” After us came other batches from Iași, Suceava, Cluj, Timișoara, Craiova, Brașov, etc. The capacity of the cells was a maximum of four people, as there were two beds. They also put seven or nine people in a cell measuring two by four metres. In the black cells they also put 20-30 prisoners – like worms in a wound…

All the prisoners passed in front of Marina Ițicovici, who noted the resilience of each one. Then the prison commander, Dumitrescu, together with a group of guards, swarmed over the prisoners in Room 4 of the hospital, beat them until they were mutilated and threw them on the floor like bundles of broken bones and flesh. They then handed them over to Țurcanu and his team.

The “re-education” took place in the rooms. They played volleyball with you and it didn’t matter where they hit you. One of them was hit in the liver in front of me and died instantly. They stuck your head in the dirty tub (urine, faeces, blood, pus, phlegm) and “baptised” you up to your neck without allowing you to wash afterwards. I was forced to eat and drink a three-kilo jar of this filth.

My head was swollen like a sieve, my left eye was gone, my left jaw was broken. I stuck the cloth under my upper lip and pulled out the bloody, pus-filled pustules. My buttocks and soles were black, both my legs swollen like stumps from the beating. To deflate them, I wrapped my legs in wet underwear and lifted them up the walls. Another time they piled fifteen people on top of me in the space between the wall and the clothes peg. Another one jumped on top of the fifteenth to crush me even worse. I puffed out my chest with air and rested my elbows on the cement. I held on until the eighth, then let the air out and all my right ribs broke.

In the basement of Room 1, the head of the “Re-education Committee” was Mărtinuș. On his orders: “Bandits, escape under the beds!”, everyone went under the beds, and he beat with a drug what was left outside. Once I, who had nowhere to go, had three quarters of my body left outside – the drug blows stopped in my spine. Repeated in the same place, they caused three vertebrae to give way, going into my spine, after which I could not move a finger. But God repaired the mutilation of my body… I was still in room 1, sitting on the bed, under the window, around 12 o’clock at night. It was January, the window was open and I was wrapped in a thin gauze blanket. I was sitting under the blanket, with my knees to my mouth, when I saw the blanket fly away and heard Martinus’ voice: “What are you doing, you bandit?”. I replied, quietly and simply, “I am praying” – and I was. It was as if I’d hit him over the head with the edge of an axe. He fell silent.

In room 2 in the basement, where Leonida Titus was the head of the “committee”, I was “made” a priest, dressed in a blanket. I was given the canteen and a spoon to “share” the dirt from the tin cup with 70-80 people. Unwilling to carry out the order, they came from the back of the room with a bat wrapped in string and hit me on the head. I collapsed. They poured water over me and beat me until I recovered. I had a large lump on my head. They made one of them ‘stretch’ the lump with the back of his hand, which caused me terrible pain. Also in Room 2, I spent two days and one night on one leg with my hands raised. I was disfigured, ugly, no longer like a human being. Then I saw beads of sweat coming out of my skin, with a very thin trickle of blood. When Titus saw me in this state, he said to the others, “Bandits, do you see him? You will all be like him!”

During the Great Week of Holy Easter they did the “debunking” of priests and monks – the greatest blasphemy against God and Our Lady. I am a priest of Christ and I know and believe that it is hell, but what happened in Pitești during Holy Week I think was worse than hell…

In Aiud I was in the cell with priest Nicolae Pâslaru from Roman, with priest Barnovescu from Bârlad, with hieromonk Iustin Pârvu from Petru-Vodă, with priest Mihai Lungeanu from Iași, with hieromonk Ioan Iovan from Recea. There I did my daily prayer. The daily schedule consisted only of kneeling in the corner of the cell, except for closing time and meals. So the days passed as if they didn’t exist.

There, in Aiud, in the bath, after nine years of prayer, God gave me a priest to confess to, Father Nicolae Pâslaru, so that I was alone with him and he confessed me for a whole day. He took two threads from the mattress, twisted them, consecrated them as an epitrachelion and then confessed me. In the dungeon and in prison, that’s what the Romanian Orthodox priests did…

Also at that time, Mihai Lungeanu, a medical student and the son of a priest who had been in prison for 10 years and was now serving a new sentence of 15 years, brought us from outside a very small bag made of parachute material in which were hidden the dried Holy Sacraments, which were very precious to us. From the slice of bread we received at the table, we would take the crumb and knead it. Then we would take pea-sized pieces and flatten them. With a needle, we would take from the bag of Hollies and put on these flattened balls, then we would lift the edges, make them round and flat again. They would dry and I would put them in the two hems of a towel that I never wiped myself with, or in the collar and cuffs of a shirt. They were the size of a large grain of lentils. They couldn’t tell when they were being searched because they were too small. At Lent we would give our names to a priest in the cell, and at 6am, when the bells of the Orthodox church in Aiud rang, we would all kneel in our cells and make our confessions, and the priest would hear the confession.

In 1953, at the Securitate station in Bârlad, they kept me for seven days and seven nights on a chair behind a filing cabinet in the duty officer’s room. I had nothing to do with them, my schedule was quite full: two Akathists, two Paraklesis, 15,000-20,000 “Lord Jesus”… I repeated the Gospels and the Epistles in my head so that I would not forget them.

During an interrogation, I asked for paper and ink to write a statement. On the paper I wrote: “I have never been with you and I will never be with you. I am with those who have Christ. Signed: Vasile Pătrașcu”.

In the evening they gave me cabbage with meat. When I tasted five spoons of the juice, I tasted washing up liquid. These spoonfuls made me yellower than an orange in six hours. When they saw the colour of my face, they put me in a van and sent me to Focșani prison, where for fifteen days I ate nothing and drank only boiled water. They sent a lieutenant-major to see how I was behaving and if I wasn’t dying. After another fifteen days they took me to the infirmary, where a sick prisoner offered to give me two small tubes of metheonine from his luggage, which saved my liver. The doctor at Focșani told me he had never seen such jaundice in his life. I lived for 87 days on half a kilo of potatoes the size of walnuts – that was the ration – and God saved me. After this poisoning, I could not eat oil or fat for many years.

At the end of my sentence, I was sent to Periprava, in the Delta, for two more years of “administration”. I was released from Periprava together with 200 priests, including Father Ilie Lăcătușu.

We arrived at home, in Bârlad, around three in the morning. We jumped over the fence. The dog was different, he didn’t know me anymore. My mother came out and asked who I was. She had known I was dead since 1957, when she brought home the pocket watch I had packed in Aiud. When she recognised my voice, she almost collapsed. I helped her up and entered the house. I asked her where my father was and she said he was in the country. I told her that I was no longer a child, that death had passed me by a hundred times, but God had spared me, and I asked her again, “Is he dead?”. He told me that he had been dead for two years and that he was heartbroken that his two boys were in prison. That was the most painful moment of my life.

When I came out of the dungeon, I dedicated all my suffering to God:

– Lord, I offer you all my suffering. Forgive, pardon and sanctify those who tortured me. And if they need days of my days, I am ready to give them, because “the treasure of the soul and of the mind is to love in order to forgive”.

When I came out of prison, I wanted to go to the north of Moldavia to become a monk, but my confessor told me to stay in the world, not alone in the monastery. And I stayed in the world…

(Fr. Vasile Pătrașcu – text published in the magazine Familia Ortodoxă, no. 9, 2010, pp. 8-11)