“If he would let me, I should kiss his hands…”

You can’t even imagine what a heart of gold this man has, a little statesman, like St. Stephen the Great!…

I had the great good fortune, essential for my development, to spend a year and a half in Aiud prison, in a cell on the third floor with His Lordship.

A Christian to the last fibre of his being, a man of unimaginable modesty and humility, in the Christian sense of the word, towards all the others with whom I was there.

An extraordinary example of moral honesty, of gentleness, of encouragement, of deep living, of transforming suffering into a state of enthusiasm and, for the more gifted, even of revelation, because this poem written by Radu Gyr, which Mr. Caragață has just mentioned (“Jesus in the cell” n.), was in fact a reality. It happened in 1945, in a cell in the Văcărești prison, the former Văcărești monastery, later destroyed by Ceaușescu.

Earlier he thanked me!… If he would allow me, I should kiss his hands, because if in my first imprisonment I began to become something different, the meeting with Mr. Costache Caragață in 1959 was a total transformation, a true rebirth of myself. Thanks to his way of being, I and others like me who had been imprisoned with him became better, more modest, more humble. Perhaps, as far as I am concerned, one of the things I learned from him was not to be a proud man!

You have seen how calm, how serene, how handsome he is, and I was amazed when I saw him again this evening, how young he looks at 90! […]

(Prof. Dr. Paul Păltănea – Notebooks of Sadness. The Notes of a Teacher in Handcuffs for Free Children, edited by Gheorghe Nadoleanu, 2010, pp. 239-240)

Excerpt from a speech given at the “C. Negri” Pedagogical High School in Galați on 13 December 2001, during the festive dinner, after the song recital of the “Camerata Juventus” choir, conducted by Prof. Olga Nadoleanu, daughter of the teacher Costache Caragață.