Ioan Arbore, “a beautiful man of high moral character and dignity”
(In Văcărești) I also met General Arbore, a descendant of the Arbore hatters. Accused of war crimes, he was serving his sentence despite being seriously ill and suffering from hypertension. He had been brought in not for treatment but to be at the disposal of the Securitate, to be blackmailed into making compromising statements in exchange for medical treatment.
He was a handsome man, although the years of suffering had left their mark, and he was of high moral character and dignity. With us, the younger ones, he acted like a grandfather, trying to pass on to his grandchildren his last thoughts of love for God, nation and country…
One Saturday, we, the youngest and strongest, had cleaned all the wards, and in the evening we reached the smallest one, with about 8 beds, where General Arbore was; he wanted to wash his own bedside table. We insisted that he leave it to us, but he wouldn’t give in. Then, tired, he went to bed. After 10 minutes, while he was talking to us, he put his hand to his temple:
– Ah, what a headache!
When we went to give him a compress, his head slipped on the pillow. He was in his 70s. We lit a candle (we always had a candleholder with us, from the infirmary) and we all cried.
We called the militiaman at the station and he called the administration. After an hour, ten officers and two doctors arrived and confirmed the death. They ordered an autopsy on the body. In the morning I was washing the corridor leading to the wards. When I heard the banging, I went down the stairs to the yard, pretending to go to the toilet.
Through the half-open door, a militiaman on duty as a woodcarver was hacking at the general’s body with a bard and an axe.
– What did you find, why did he die?
– It hardly matters. It’s good that he’s dead! I have orders to cut him down!
But he looked at me in horror when he saw that the man who had asked him was a prisoner. He rebelled:
– What about you? Get out!
I thought he was looking at the axe. I ran away, pursued by the image I had seen: the general’s head, split in four, with his brains on the corner of the table, smashed by the axe blade. God gave him another welcome in the “saloon” of the royal banquet.
(Virgil Maxim, Hymn to the Cross Bearer. Abecedar duhovnicesc pentru un frate de cruce, 2nd edition, Antim Publishing House, Bucharest, 2002, pp. 338-339).