“Legionnaire” Gheorghe Calciu in C.N.S.A.S. documents NETER

With levity, with contempt or, more rarely, with assumption, it is said of Father Calciu that he was a legionnaire. This study is part of a larger research on the life of Father Gheorghe Calciu, who was also accused of being a legionnaire.

Father Gheorghe Calciu was sentenced three times: in 1949, 1957 and 1979. Of these three convictions, the first two are related to legionnaireism, but only in the case of the first can his legionnaire activity be discussed, since the second conviction was the result of the events in Pitești prison, and the authorities’ version that the legionnaire prisoners tortured each other in a bestial and unimaginable way, with the sole intention of discrediting the communist regime, is completely absurd.

The documents available to the researcher are those in the archives of the C.N.S.A.S., in its criminal, information and network files. It is true that many pieces are missing which, in context, seem to have existed at one time, and it is understandable that situations unfavourable to the Securitate were passed over in silence, as can be seen from the reflection in the Securitate documents on the December 1984 episode which could be called the “escape from escort” of Father Gheorghe Calciu. But there is no doubt that the Securitate and the S.R.I.[1] had no interest in losing essential evidence for the prosecution of Gheorghe Calciu. It is also true that some of the archives are still inaccessible because they are considered “national security”, but it is unreasonable to believe that those relating to the activities of the young Gheorghe Calciu can still be classified as such.

Among the documents produced or collected by the communist, communist and post-communist secret services, apart from Gheorghe Calciu’s own statements, there is no evidence, direct or indirect, from which it can be concluded that the pupil and then student Calciu “did anything” as a legionnaire before his arrest on 22 May 1948 from the student dormitory on Matei Voievod Street, and there is no evidence from which it can be concluded that he did anything even remotely resembling a crime.

We stress that there is no evidence of any act that would have constituted a crime, but only that Gheorghe Calciu was sentenced to 8 years of hard labour by the Bucharest Military Tribunal, in Criminal Sentence No. 148 of 1 February 1949, for subversive legionary activity. It should also be noted that although the C.N.S.A.S. archives contain numerous statements (by witnesses and defendants) from the 1956 trial, there are no statements from the 1949 trial. The reasonable conclusion is that the only reason why Gheorghe Calciu was convicted as a legionnaire in 1949 was because he had been arrested as a “legionnaire” in May 1948.

This fact is absolutely true, because in both the Antonescu regime and the communist regime, the label of “legionnaire” was enough to condemn someone. As a practising Christian and a man of good faith, it was impossible not to have done something that could be grounds for criminal conviction if one was – or, more precisely, had been – a legionnaire[2]. It is also known that in May 1948 the Communists arrested the vast majority of the Legionnaires. Thus, in addition to those who had somehow undermined the security of the state, who were subject to the provisions of article 209 of the penal code, many others were arrested who could only be accused of having been legionnaires.

Since, as we have shown, there is no other evidence, the only data on this matter can be taken from Gheorghe Calciu’s autobiography, dated 16.11.1952, when he was in custody during the execution of the first sentence[3], and from the interrogation of 28.05.1955[4], taken during the trial that led to the 1956 sentence.

In December 1940, the high school student Gheorghe Calciu joined the “Fratelli” organisation. The “Brothers of the Cross” were high school students of the upper class, and the “Brothers” were those in the first classes of high school. However he did it, this “Brother of the Cross” was active for only a few weeks, because after the Legionaries were expelled from the government and outlawed in January 1941, the Brotherhoods of the Cross ceased to be active.

In January 1942, despite the restrictions, the 17-year-old student resumed his activities, but only for two months, as some of his comrades were arrested and sentenced. It was then that he himself became involved in the criminal proceedings: “In 1942, I was investigated and tried by a military tribunal in Constanta for legionary activities, but I was acquitted”[5].

There are two things to note about this situation. Firstly, although it is well known that the Antonescu regime was extremely harsh on students who were involved in any way in “legionary activity”, any pretext being sufficient to convict them under special laws, young Calciu was acquitted. There is no basis for constructing any other explanation than that the “legionary” activity for which he was tried in Constanta was not sufficiently “legionary” in the sense of the criminal law, even to serve as a pretext. Of course, this was possible in a “bourgeois justice” that still had to do with the rule of law, which was to change in just a few years.

The second aspect to be remembered is the legal consequence of this trial: all the facts for which he had been acquitted at the time should have been subject to what is known in law as “res judicata”, i.e. these facts could no longer be the subject of any other legal proceedings or be considered in any context as “legionary activity”. Today’s reader, whose view of justice has been shaped by the communist and post-communist judicial system, may be tempted to qualify the significance of this fact. But however dry, inadequate and possibly useless contemporary justice may seem, those who, in spite of historical arguments and simple logic, disregard the decision of the Constanta Military Tribunal, put themselves in the position of the irrational brutality of the Communists themselves[6].

In the autumn of 1945, at the beginning of the school year, he rejoined the legionary organisation of the Brotherhood of the Cross “at the suggestion of Neculae Manolache, in order to fight against the communists who wanted to destroy the family, the Church and the nation”[7]. It is worth noting the register of this statement, made in prison in 1952, after the ordeal of Pitești, in which two overlapping tones can be discerned: That of a general acknowledgement of the accusation of legionnaireism and of “fighting against the communists” (which should not be interpreted in the useless perspective of our time, nor in the general perspective of the 1950s, but should be considered in the specific situation of those who went through the Pitești experiment), and that of an affirmation, regardless of the risks, of the true aim of communism: “to destroy the family, the Church and the nation”. And the truth, in this situation, was not used for its unlikely legal value of justification, but for a long-awaited mystical action of post-Pitești exorcism.

Brothers of the Cross attended meetings, collected donations and paid subscriptions. Each of these actions constituted a crime, since they were legionary, and any legionary manifestation was definitively banned from January 1941. But what did the Legion’s meetings, aid and membership fees mean to some secondary school pupils? First and foremost, they were the expression of an impressive and unbeatable youthful sincerity. All these gestures, essentially Christian and communitarian, were not imposed by anyone and had no reason to be imitated. Then these acts showed the seriousness of the mature man. For one had to believe deeply that one was doing a good and necessary thing in order to expose oneself to arrest and summary trial, in accordance with the procedure specifically laid down for legionaries, in order to continue doing something that no longer had only the charm of a more or less gratuitous adventure: to pray together with one’s comrades, to help people in need, to give freely of the money of one’s own poverty. In the absence of any other indication, it would be completely inadmissible to assume that the activity of the Brother of the Cross, Gheorghe Calciu, was anything other than this.

The end of his high school studies in Tulcea in 1946 interrupted his activity of this kind because, under the conditions of the ban, several months had to pass after the beginning of his university studies in Bucharest before he could establish new contacts, so that he joined the student organisation only in March-April 1947. In addition to the meetings, the membership fees and the aid in which he continued to participate, Gheorghe Calciu included in his legionary attitude the participation in a camp on the Retezat mountain in July 1947 and the reading of “Legionary materials”.

In July 1947, no legionary action, however benign, could take place on Mount Retezat, as it had in the former labour camps. In fact, it is not at all clear what the legionary nature of the camp was. It is true that Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, in the face of an increasingly likely political failure, once said that when he retired from public life he would go to the wilderness of Rară to tend a flock of sheep, and that the legionary students might perceive the height of the mountain as an opening to the transcendence of the tragic victory of their shepherd and hero, but this is anti-legionary speculation in the worst sense of the word. Since the Securitate was unable to extract anything of substance from this event, it is conceivable that the camp in question could not even be characterised as legionary.

As for the danger of reading, the Communists always understood its true dimension, especially when it came to “legionary material” (perhaps that is why the Communists disliked reading), but, fortunately, the legionary Calciu was not caught in the act.

In fact, the material act for which Gheorghe Calciu, a medical student, was arrested and sentenced was the fact that, in the spring of 1948, he hosted a friend from Tulcea. It is true that he was a legionnaire, that he was the leader of the Brotherhoods of the Cross in Tulcea County, that it was the period of the arrests (when none of the legionnaire leaders remained free) and that, as we have seen from the above context, Gheorghe Calciu had been a legionnaire since 1940, which he himself admitted[8]. All in all, it was enough for him to be sentenced to 8 years in prison! After the sentence was pronounced on 1 February 1949, he was held in Jilava prison until 4 February, when he was transferred to Pitești prison.

What happened in this prison is complicated, profound and extremely serious. But before the chain of events began, the prisoners led a normal life. The vast majority were used to hardship, the vast majority were students or graduates, the vast majority were practising Christians. Only the fact of giving food from one’s parcel to those who did not receive a parcel in Pitești prison in 1949 was considered “legionary aid” in 1955[9]. The common prayer on Easter night in 1949 was also considered a “legionary demonstration” in 1955. And the Orthodox fasting days of 1949 were called “legionary fasting” in 1955.

Similarly, “Legionary” became a second surname for Gheorghe Calciu. It should be noted that the statements in the criminal files are not written by the person who makes them, but only signed by the declarant and recorded by the investigator or a clerk. From 1955 until his release from prison in 1963, in the overwhelming majority of procedural documents, his name is written in the corresponding box as “Calciu Gheorghe – legionnaire”, although the standard form also contains the box “political affiliation”, as if his first name had been “Gheorghe – legionnaire”!

The CNSAS archives[10] show that, during Father Calciu’s imprisonment from 1979 to 1984, the Securitate, in order to undermine the action of various legal and natural persons in the West who were intervening for his release, spread by various means, mainly through its agents and collaborators, the information that Father Calciu was involved in fascist activities and that he was anti-Semitic (it was also taken into account that Nöel Bernard, the director of the radio station Free Europe, was Jewish). At one point it was claimed that he had been involved in the “slaughterhouse murders”… These disinformation schemes did not work, as it is clear from the correspondence intercepted by the Securitate that these things were undoubtedly taken out of the equation by Westerners.

One of the clearest proofs that the West was well aware of the situation of Father Gheorghe Calciu’s “fascism”[11] is the “note”[12] written by “tov. Tudor Postelnicu and Comrade Iulian Vlad”, dated 24 January 1984, a detailed information prepared, in all probability, for Nicolae Ceaușescu. Here are some extracts from this note:

Drake Zimmerman, a prosecutor from Bloomington-Normal[13] and a member of Amnesty International, called the US Embassy in Bucharest on 17 January, asking for a number of details about Calciu Gheorghe[14]. During the conversation with Marc Desjardines, political officer at the embassy, Drake Zimmerman asked where Calciu Gheorghe was being held because he wanted to send him a package; what his situation was; how he could be helped; what his wife’s situation was; what the chances were that an International Red Cross team, which the organisation he represents wants to send to Romania, would be able to contact him and how the authorities would receive the members of the team; to what extent Calciu’s case was known to the State Department. He reported that Amnesty International had lobbied the US Congress when it granted Romania most-favoured-nation status in 1983 and planned to do so again in 1984. […]

Marc Desjardines has expressed the view that “Calciu cannot be helped directly, but the only thing that can be done is to publicise the case, in the sense of exerting pressure in various ways”. […]

When asked about Gheorghe Calciu’s past activities, the American diplomat claimed that “he was convicted for fascist actions, although there was no evidence of this…”.

On the other hand, he never denied having been a “Brother of the Cross”, but although it is important, we will not deal with the question of the Legionaries and the Brotherhoods of the Cross itself[15], since such a subject requires other spaces and other availability. But we maintain, with the evidence and arguments presented above, that the legionnaireism of the young Gheorghe Calciu, as probably of most of his friends and comrades, consisted exclusively of what is seen in the present study. And any other contextual extrapolation of the connotation of “legionnaireism”, however common it may have become in the last 60-70 years, is clearly inadmissible.

Father Calciu was a man who was not affected by labels. He had no desperate or stubborn obsession with “what the world says” or what the Securitate know. In 1957, with a colossal mental effort, he exposed the lies of the communist authorities, who, in an attempt to exonerate themselves from the crimes they had committed in the Pitesti experiment, set up the trial of the group known as “Vică Negulescu”. We are going to reproduce here an extract from Gheorghe Calciu’s appeal against the criminal sentence that ended this trial, in order to see the position of this man who, at the age of 31, after terrible disfigurements, has finally – and definitively – turned his face and his heart towards God and mankind:

I protest against the title of legionary aid and legionary activity of the profoundly human acts that led me either to give a piece of bread to those who were literally dying of hunger in Pitești (a bloody act supported by the administration since then), or to try to save the life of Sîrbu Ioniță, victim like me of that odious Pitești, or of Lăptucă Stan, who also succumbed. I could not save him. I was a medical student. My goal was to alleviate human suffering. If I were in a similar situation a thousand times, I would repeat the gesture, even if at the end of each act a new Pitești or a new investigation awaited me.

I feel defenceless […]. I have been deprived of my right to the last word without any legal justification, simply because I have proved the non-existence of the substance of this trial.

Mr. President, I ask that this sentence be quashed by reference, so that the truth may be established in this country in the spirit of true justice, so that the perpetrators of crimes, not the victims, may answer for their actions. I am innocent. I demand my right to life, to freedom, to care, to health, which was destroyed in Pitesti and in the frame-up of 1955-1956. I do not accept this deliberately unjust sentence, I protest against it, I contest it and I ask for its annulment. Citizen Gh. Calciu – 13.07.1957[16].

(Lucian D. Popescu)

[1] The S.R.I. cannot be unmentioned for several reasons, but the most important one for the present study results from the following fact, which we mention by way of example: the last informative paper in Petre Țuțea’s file dates from May 1990 and records the spiteful discussions the accused had about the elections that had just taken place in Romania!

[2] The situation is much the same today, when the fact of having been a legionnaire and even the uncertain association with legionnaireism (as a historical phenomenon or as an ideology) is enough to undermine the public image of someone, living or dead.

[3] C.N.S.A.S. archive, file no. R 271861, p. 6.

[4] C.N.S.A.S. Archive, File No. P 1137, Volume 2, p. 149. [5] C.N.S.A.S. archives, file number P 000766, vol. 1, p. 61.

[6] Unfortunately, 20 years after the formal dissolution of the communist state, public or anonymous individuals, otherwise thin-skinned and culturally well-motivated, have, in certain judgements in the political-historical field, “let us know…” type blocks.

[7] C.N.S.A.S. archive, file no. R 271861, p. 6.

[8] Perhaps with a slightly bourgeois tone of expression, the “organs” of the communist order considered recognition to be the “queen of proof”.

[9] C.N.S.A.S. archive, file no. P 1137, vol. 2, pp. 149-155.

[10] C.N.S.A.S. archive, file no. I 155109, vols. 6-8 and 11-12.

[11] Beyond political or diplomatic attitudes, it is known that, at least in the last half-century, Western specialists are perfectly informed about Romanian issues, about which Romanians are mostly ill-informed or outright misinformed.

[12] C.N.S.A.S. archive, file no. I 155109, vol. 11, p. 186.

[13] This is the double municipality of Bloomington-Normal, in the state of Illinois, USA.

[14] It is not important here that the Securitate tapped certain telephones of the US Embassy in Bucharest, but it is interesting that the Americans used such a telephone precisely to transmit a certain message to the “Romanian ear”.

[15] For a new academic approach to Legionnaireism, we recommend the book Noica e la Movimenta Legionaria by Sorin Lavric (ed. Humanitas, Buc., 2007).

[16] C.N.S.A.S. archive, file no. P 1137, vol. 5, p. 425.