In the communist prisons

That was until the beginning of 1948. From that year on, everything changed. The legionnaires in the prisons were declared the greatest enemies of the communist state and a very harsh regime was imposed on them. And not only on them, but on all the enemies of the Bolshevik regime. Father used to tell me how he had experienced death again:

“After being arrested a second time (and having passed through Galda and Ciugurdel), I was in Aiud around 1950-51. Here I was given rotten cucumbers and rotten maize meal left over from the army every day. When they ran out of that too, they gave us bean juice and we all got really weak. But me more so.

At one point I couldn’t get out of bed. I had learnt from some doctors how to starve to death: first you use up the fat, then the muscle – you’re left with skin and bones – then you use up the noble cells, the nerve cells in the brain and heart. That is what happened to me: I started to lose my eyesight, I could no longer speak or think. One day the younger guys from work came and asked me how I was doing. I couldn’t tell them anything. I just cried. Later I told them I was preparing to die. The second or third day came, the feast of the Assumption. Our Lady worked a great miracle: a wagonload of beans had arrived, who knows how or from where. It was ready in a few days, with all the people there. But in those days we ate beans, and we ate them heartily. That’s how I recovered. Then there was an enquiry about the cart. No one knew where it had come from or who had sent it. What strengthened me in that difficult ordeal was a word from Nicu Mazăre, with whom I was in the cell: “Your youth will be renewed like that of the eagle”.

Indeed, those years were very hard for political prisoners. Certainly, the economic situation of the country was not brilliant after the famine of 1947 and the following year, which caused many peasants (and not only), especially from Moldavia, to leave their homes and all their possessions and go to other parts of the country where there was still food. It is possible to speak of a real exodus in those years. There were cases where some gave or even sold their children to families in Transylvania, where the disaster was not so great.

In the prisons, life for political prisoners was as hard as it could be. Hundreds of thousands of arrests had been made, and initially, after the investigations of 1948-1950, the prisons were organised according to the “social classes” to which the prisoners belonged. Aiud was for intellectuals, Pitești for students, Gherla for workers, Făgăraș for military personnel, etc. Father Iustin told me about a general strike that broke out in Aiud in 1950, which began somewhat violently by breaking the wooden shutters on the windows (the prisoners were kept in the dark day and night, except for a few minutes’ walk a day, followed by a hunger strike of several days). His Holiness himself fasted for two weeks and told me that most refused all food and water for at least a week or two.

Petre Țuțea fasted for 38 days, after which he could no longer resist force-feeding. This was followed by a change in the government’s policy towards political prisoners, who were offered work in the mines of Maramureș, where they received much better food, although the work regime imposed on them was very harsh.

As for the daily life of those in the prisons during the first years of communism, we know with certainty that in Aiud in 1944-47, where Constantine was with the “mystics”, the lover of Christ devoted himself to unceasing prayer and to the other good works so beloved by the monks. According to the testimony of Father Justin, the group of “mystics” at Aiud gave the solution to surviving in those harsh conditions and turned the prisons into monasteries, for the many prayers that all the prisoners said day and night, for the Psalms and chapters of the New Testament that they had learnt by heart, and for the spiritual exercises that they had learnt there. Just how hard life was for them, and who they met, is shown by the visit of one of the Bolshevik torturers of those years to one of the political prisons, where he exclaimed in amazement at seeing the starving prisoners:

“Why don’t you bandits die again? Those out there are fat and beautiful and dropping like flies, and you criminals are living!”

(Fr. Marcu Dumitru – Confession of a Christian. Father Mark of Sihăstria, edited by monk Filoteu Bălan, Petru Vodă Publishing House, 2007, pp. 47-50)