“Like an apostle he went from man to man to encourage us” – Father Constantin Galeriu in the extermination camp of the Galeș Coast

On a gloomy, cold and rainy night, as if the weather too was crying out for mercy, we were rounded up, a few hundred of us, and buried in the dirt roads, arriving, I don’t know how long ago, at the newly founded colony of Coasta Galeș. If I remember correctly, it was around the end of October or the beginning of November 1952. We were immediately assigned to dormitories in wooden barracks, 80 overlaied beds each.

We threw away the few things we still had with us and immediately went out to be counted, one of the most exhausting and pointless operations: we lined up “in fives”, in detachments set up in front of the barracks, and waited for the counters to pass by several times until the total number of prisoners was reached. I remember with some regret that there were times, and not a few, when this “number” did not come out right; it was repeated for hours, either in the morning or in the evening. That night the count came out quickly, we were few in number, then we were ordered into a large tent, from the centre of which we were addressed by the camp commander, whose name I learned was Borcea; After blinding us with a beacon or a bright lantern in order to recognise our faces, he gave us a short and comprehensive speech, explaining that we had been brought to the Canal to atone for our sins against the people, we, the bitter enemies of the working class, and that we would be rehabilitated either by working without a care or by dying with hoe and pickaxe in our hands. He also warned us that the galleys were not a boarding house for bourgeois ladies, that we would have to submit to an iron discipline, that any attempt to escape would be punished by being shot without warning, that failure to meet the work standard (eight cubic metres of dug earth) would result in the withholding of parcels, postcards and loudspeakers, and at the end of this encouraging lecture, peppered with threats and insults, he assured us that few of us would return to our homes. As, sadly, happened.

Next, we were forced to kneel and undress to be shorn like sheep for hours in the rain and mud. Of the innumerable silences and taunts to which we were subjected during our internment, this seemed to me the most humiliating, the most unbearable, the most inhuman.

The next day, after only a few hours’ rest, since it was impossible for anyone to sleep, I began a twelve-hour workday (ten hours of actual work, without breaks, and two more trips back and forth from the construction site), a day and a night. The brigade to which I was assigned dug the embankment and loaded wagons with the excavated earth in order to comply with the above-mentioned extermination rule. Although I was one of the youngest, unaccustomed to physical exertion and exhausted, I could hardly move and often fainted, which the guards took to be a simulation and punished me severely on the spot. It was then, and not only then, that I felt the brotherly support of those around me, especially those from the countryside, used to hard work, who came one by one to help me do my “share” of the work.

Then I received the encouragement and comfort of Father Galeriu, who, like an apostle, went from person to person to encourage us, Father Galeriu, who was able to take off his shoes to give his boots to a sick old man with bleeding feet. It was then, and not only then, that I realised that a nation blessed with such sons can never be brought to its knees or perish.

(Mircea Ionescu-Quintus, The Mill of the Devils, Ion Creanga Publishing House, Bucharest, 1999, pp. 13-15)

As a witness of the same events, the former political prisoner Sebastian Popescu recounts the Samaritan gesture of Father Galeriu: “From Cernavodă I was transferred to Poarta Albă and then, in the autumn of 1952, to Coasta Galeș. There were unheated wooden huts, and in the yard the mud ran over my boots. That’s when I met Father Galeriu, when they exchanged our broken boots for new ones from the army reform. By chance, Father Galeriu had dropped a pair of mountain hunter’s boots, which were better and sturdier, and a pair of peasant’s boots, which were even worse than the ones he had exchanged. With a Christian gesture, the priest gave him his boots and took away the bad ones”. (Sebastian Popescu, “The Calvary of an Undefeated” in Simona Luncașu, Câmpinenii și închisorile lor, Grafoanaytis Publishing House, Ploiești, 2007, p. 47)