Ionică Pintilie – almost an angel on earth
I considered the legionary meetings that some comrades used to hold in a corner to be a great mistake, and I tried to eliminate them, but I did not succeed.
The one who came to me, as head of the chamber, and asked me to unbind myself and take part in them, was my good friend, comrade and medical colleague, Ionică Pintilie. I had worked with him in freedom, I knew him well and we had formed a close friendship.
He was younger than me, had the delicate constitution of an intellectual, and I was convinced that he would not be able to endure physical torture. He had been orphaned as a child and brought up by a childless relative. He was endowed with exceptional intelligence and had been one of the best students at the medical faculty in Iași. He had been brought up by his adoptive parents in the purest and unshakeable faith in God.
He had incomparable gifts in his being. He was of innate moral purity and goodness, almost an angel on earth. I could count on one hand the number of people I met like Pintilie in prison.
Because of the many gifts with which God had endowed him and which he did not want to change, in the end he was murdered through the means of unimaginable tortures.
I trusted him more than myself, so I advised him to stop the sessions. I knew what was going to happen and I tried my best to stop him. But Pintilie had his mission on earth, and heaven was calling him to swell the ranks of Christian martyrs. He combined Christian faith and morals, love of God and neighbour, an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and faith in the Legionary Movement in such a harmonious way that I still see him as a sol sent from another world. For those who knew him and for me, Pintilie was the prototype of the ideal man.
He would not listen to me: his vocation was one thing, my weakness another. But I am convinced that he would end up as a martyr anyway, because that was his destiny. […]
What Ion Pintilie represented as a moral and intellectual value, through his faith in God and in the Legion, I have already told you. But I must confess, and I do not want to err before God and all our comrades, that he represented for us what Moța represented for his generation. Pintilie was at the top of the pyramid of elite legionary youth. No other young legionnaire was like him, except for the student at the Polytechnic in Bucharest who was killed by Țurcanu.
Pintilie suffered martyrdom like the early Christians. He was murdered by Satan’s minions, who sold their souls and consciences to Lucifer. If Romanian medicine and culture have lost an irreplaceable value through his murder, this young man of perfect morals, with love for God, his fellow men and the Legion, will remain an example to follow for all those who will come after us in this nation.
As in the case of Moța, God has chosen to sacrifice the best among us as martyrs. If I had not known him in freedom, if I had not worked with him, if I had not known what an intellectual value he represented and what a solid moral pedestal he stood on, if I had not seen with my own eyes how he was killed in prison, and especially in room 3 in the basement, where Pintilie was always at my side, I might not be able to make the assessments that I make of this angel in the face of man.
Pintilie lacked nothing of the manliness and courage of the martyrs: faith and love of Christ and attachment to the Captain and the Legion. Martyrs are not cowards, nor are those who doubted or lacked the courage to confess their faith. Only the brave who confront Satan with their sacrifice to God will enter eternity. The sacrifices that God wants and chooses are those who, when put to the test, show the highest heroism. The nations will live only through their heroes and martyrs.
And now I remember the moments Pintilie went through before his life was taken.
I described his attitude in the cellar of Room 3, that of a perfect Christian. He was the initiator of the legionary meetings in the Room 3 and gathered around him more than ten comrades. None of them, except Nedelcu, had the courage to do what Pintilie did. He prayed to God and held legion meetings without fear and not in secret. He confessed in front of all the people in the room, including me, that he was a Christian, that he loved Christ and, like Moța, had accepted death, that he was a legionnaire and that he believed in the political and mystical mission of the legionary movement.
Before he was given the coup de grâce and lost consciousness, he was asked again if he was still a Legionnaire. Pintilie answered with the courage of a martyr: “I am a Christian and a Legionary, so I want to die!” And so he died.
As I have already mentioned, Pintilie had a frail physique, so the blows he received were fatal. And while Nedelcu, with a physique of greater endurance, endured torture to the point of near madness, Pintilie’s physique succumbed to the blows, wrapped in death.
My conscience will always see him tortured, not by Zaharia, who killed him, but by Satan. I did not see the wounds on his body because none of us were allowed to undress him. We hadn’t been to the toilet for six months, so we could see our wounds and denounce them.
His shirt and underwear were stuck to his body, only his head was visible, a disfigured, swollen head, his eyes barely visible, hidden in the bottom of his sockets. After the beatings, during the humiliation with faeces, until the day Pintilie died, most of us were nothing more than a mass of bleeding, swollen flesh that we could barely feel when our shirts and underwear were stuck to our bodies.
This is how Pintilie ended:
That morning Zaharia left the room. After a while he came back, started humming, took off his shirt and stood in front of Pintilie, who was standing next to me.
He asked him again if he still believed in God and the Legion. Pintilie, who was so weak he couldn’t move, still had the strength to shake his head in an emphatic “yes”. Then the demons who controlled Zaharia attacked him and beat him for an hour with all the instruments of torture until he no longer looked human. Then they threw him on the cliff, where he could only stand against me and Tudose.
After this exploit, Zaharia left the room to report to Țurcanu and Zeller that their order had been carried out.
Pintilie made a comeback that frightened us. His soul went to the stars. His last words still ring in my ears and will do so until I die: “I see among the stars…” and then he whispered so that neither I, nor Tudose, nor Gelu Gheorghiu could understand what he was saying. “I have reached Halas’ galaxy and I see…” and his voice stopped.
We were convinced that Pintilie had gone mad and we all waited for him to have his last breath. There was silence in the room, the horror of death.
We were afraid that, like Pintilie, we would go mad before we were killed.
When Zaharia returned to the room, Petrică Tudose, the hero of the tortures, had the courage to confront him and say: “You killed him!”
Zaharia, who knew because he had received the order, ordered Tudose to consult Pintilie, who, he said, was only pretending to be dead. Tudose also had the courage to confirm to Zaharia that he had killed him. Then the demons in Zachariah attacked Pintilie’s inert body one last time. They could not crush his soul because God had taken him. Only the dust of the body was left for Zaharia and those who had ordered his murder.
Pintilie was no longer leaning against me, and Tudose, no longer breathing, had fallen face down on the prici. I have a clear picture of the moment when he was pulled off the prici by one foot, fell flat on the cement and was dragged out. Of course, he was taken to the death cells on Tului’s head, and whether he died or Zaharia or Țurcanu gave him the last blow, nothing was heard of Ionică Pintilie from that day on.
(Dumitru Bordeianu – Confessions from the Swamp of Despair)