Memories from prison

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen!

What follows are the confessions of my life, the stirrings of my conscience as a priest confessor, for things that have always been, but especially for those that have come in recent years with the changes in the social and spiritual life of our Christian faith. They are things that happened in the home, in the house, in the destiny of every Romanian citizen after the war of 1939-1941; they are written in the history of the country by people who fought with weapons, who fought with words, who carried out a programme of social life. All the fighters of all times have tried to create a better life for the people from which they came, all the changes through revolutions have sought the good and the betterment of the country and the people, although we see with the history before us that the desired goal was not always achieved, but only partially achieved, although the programme, the motto of the struggle was enshrined and unanimously shared by the fighters. […]

I dare to say this for my lifelong teaching, up to the age of 80, and for my love for the people I have loved and love like the apple of my eye.

The thread that runs through my thoughts during this time, since 1940, is my imprisonment for 2 years, 1962-1964; and if every prisoner or detainee has much to tell, here you are listening to a priest confessor, with the Holy Gospel before him, with history and facts. So please listen to me as if I were in front of the Holy Altar, at the Holy Liturgy. […]

Who am I addressing?

What made me write these things, I said: namely, the wave of unbelief and rebellion that has come over the country, the denial of Christ, the prisons, the punishments, the murders, the torments of death. I could have remained silent, endured as hundreds and millions endure, and gone on with my work, as those well-wishers of the Party had advised me from the beginning. But my conscience wouldn’t let me. So I was filled with grief, I felt the pain of the people’s suffering, and I decided to cry out.

I am addressing the faithful Romanian public: good Christians of the Church. […]

The two candles of Easter night

On that holy night in 1962, I went out with two lighted candles of pure wax and called out to the Holy Altar: “Come and take the light”. But at the outburst of the people, both my candles went out and I lit them again. I felt a burning in my heart, but I controlled myself. What happened next?

That year, all sorts of temptations against the faith and against me began: they mocked my church, stole it, defiled it, tore it down, not once, but seven times. Churches in neighbouring villages were also defiled by despised and cursed people. Of course we protested right and left, but especially at the intercessions of the saints. My soul changed, it grieved deeply, I no longer had joy on my face. People found the vestments of the shrine thrown on the streets, in the woods, as prey for robbers. I cursed them and threatened the wicked with divine punishment. With the help of the people, everything was put back together again. But the wickedness did not stop: all kinds of mockers, blasphemers, drunkards, thieves, fornicators, most of the gypsies screamed, whistled in the church, howled, played the violin, the cymbal, even climbed on the church. The good people tried to pacify them, but there was no one to pacify them, they were rabid, aggressive, diabolical.

Mass arrests followed, horror and compassion overcame me, I saw their suffering, their torment and the bitterness of the children thrown away, hungry, opressed, and my heart melted: I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t serve like the rest of the world, quietly, peacefully. They took our grain from the fields and we came home naked, mad with bitterness.

Now there is a complete change for me, a change of life, a vengeful thought, but no fist, no stones, no sword. Seeing so many innocent souls slaughtered, I decided to sacrifice myself of my own free will and tried to enter the prison.

Of course, some people pitied me as a madman, others as a lunatic, and still others gnashed their teeth, saying that “this is what I deserve”.

Then I wrote memos to the management, to the Party leader, I wrote complaints to many, but no one answered me, no one cared about me; I went like a dog to no one and no one received me, no one sent me away.

Once a man from the Party came to the church and said to me gently: “Father, go about your work in peace, be quiet, stop scolding us, we don’t want to hurt you.”

Well, I said, on the one hand, so as not to make myself a complacent judge of those whom I cannot change, I cannot stop. This “kindness” went further: they called the bishop of the church and advised him to “silence me”, which woke me up again, but I could not be silent.

The Dream of the Black Dog

Another year of mischief and hardship passed. One night I dreamt of a big black dog: it passed through the gap in the neighbour’s fence, came straight at me and grabbed my left wrist; in vain I stuck my right hand in its throat, it cut off my hand and fell to the ground. When I woke up, I realised that this was a bad sign: the dog means enemy, I said.

And I saw him the next day at about 9 o’clock: three guys came into the yard through the same gap in the fence, they approached me and one of them, a black gypsy, grabbed me by the same left hand and dragged me into the house and arrested me. I was well aware of it, but I didn’t change, I wasn’t afraid at all. They asked me a few questions and took me to the black van at the gate and from there to Bucharest, to the Uranus prison.

The research

They kept me there all summer, from autumn to Christmas. There were four of us in the cell, some of us sad, blackened, lost: me, not at all, I was at home. They questioned me about all my thoughts, my teaching, my politics, everything. They showed me all the letters and memoirs I had written, which surprised and frightened me a little.

Peter’s defrocking, my defrocking.

When the priests who know me and the people read this, they will wrinkle their foreheads and bite their lips: how? The priest C., who boasts of his faith, should do this?

Let’s go on, let’s go back to the beginning. When I was a child and I read the story: the deprivation and sale of Tudor Vladimirescu, the sale of Michael the Brave, the exile of Cuza Vodă, the betrayal of officers during the war, the deprivation, the oppression of parents by their children, I was filled with an unbridled rebellion of the soul, combined with an unforgivable revenge. How is it that this man, chosen and recognised by the whole country as a great benefactor, as a man of justice, as one who gives his soul for the faith and for the law, is persecuted and hindered in his thoughts and in his deeds?! […]

As for Judas Iscariot, and the Herodians and Herodias, who tormented and killed the saints, it pained my heart and I wondered with sorrow: “How could God endure injustice, crimes against the righteous?” […]

It hurt my heart when I was a child, it hurt me more than now because of all the injustices and crimes against great men, against the just. But here, in the cell, in front of the investigators, I, the priest Ilie Cioruță, have changed, I who was looking for prison as a “conscious madman”, as a jealous priest, I am the one who denied my letters. The investigator showed me the documents I had written – the corpus delicti – which I did not recognise: the same handwriting, the same ideas, the same screams and threats against the infidels: I said I did not know them…

The psychologist-graphologist specialist came, he threatened me a little, he didn’t hit me, he didn’t push me, I was sitting at the little black table, but still, I said: “I don’t know!”.

Then I went back to my cell and they left me there for three days. During that time, I don’t know if I ate or slept, but I was worried with many pains in my head and in my heart, and then I said to myself: “Don’t let me lie! I, who condemned lying among the people, I, a priest, who had to take a man to confession for all his sins, including lying, slander and deceit, how can I lie? I asked to be taken to the investigator, and when I entered I said I wrote all the letters, I admit it. At that moment I felt relieved, and even if they had killed me, I felt at peace with my conscience.

They didn’t punish me at all, I wrote the statement and went to my cell. A few days later they called me in and spoke to me gently: “We have looked for you all over the country and found that you were neither a legionnaire nor did you do any other mischief, the people speak well of you, we could let you go with the guarantee that you will not speak again and that you will go to work”. I was silent for a while, then the interrogator said ironically, “Do you want to die a martyr?

I want to die a martyr!… woe is me! I confess that I would not turn away from such a death, I have thousands, hundreds of thousands in the church books that I chew day and night, but one thing tortures me: what kind of disciple can I be, knowing and judging myself, with so many bad things, with so few good things!

The sentence

So, when my heart urged me to do time, I went to court: they took me through the bleak walls, cold, snowy winter, and at the door a black gypsy man threatened me to “tell it straight” or else (he showed me his fist). The judgement was quick: guilt = conspiracy and so it was, so I did. He allowed me to speak in my defence, I started slowly, humbly, but they stopped me. The lawyer appointed by my parents spoke and defended me, ready to bail me, but from my attitude, everyone understood that I had the mania or madness to go to prison, so the lawyer, a man of culture and old, could not remain silent, but said: “I have never seen a man who wants to go to prison until this father”.

And so it was, they took me to the cell and two days later they came and read me the sentence: 2 years in prison.

I stayed for a month, then I asked to be taken to Jilava prison.

They tried and convicted me: a Jew, a Romanian and a Gypsy.

The prison

For me, who wanted it, it didn’t impress or sadden me at all; I went from a bedroom to a tent or a junk shop. In the evening they brought me food and I thanked them kindly. They didn’t keep me here for many days and moved me to a cell with more light – you could see a bit outside, with 5 prisoners; I got to know each one of them; here I also had books to read. We talked about life, the prison regime, our deeds, our problems; at night we slept, but during the day we were not allowed to lie down, only on the edge of the bed. One hour a day we would go out for fresh air and walk around the cellar without talking to each other. For me it was a good opportunity to pray slowly. The soldier above us, who was guarding us, asked me slowly, “What are you?”; I replied, “A priest,” and he leaned over me pitifully.

At the top of the window of the chapel-cell was an invisible strip through which I could see the sky with the moving clouds; it was the only consolation, the only hope; that patch of sky was the holy, the most holy, the wonderful icon. In front of the stained earth, with the world full of sins, full of sorrow, suffering, the agony of death, that patch of sky was the door to heaven, “where there is no pain, no sorrow, no sighing”. At home and in the green field with its abundance of wheat, flowers, trees, the forest with its springs, I bathed my eyes in light, I was drunk as with wine, I was relieved as a bird.

Out of the cell, to work

In the spring I asked for work and took many of us to the vegetable garden, where everyone knew what to do.

One observation about our life is that we were yellow and slowly, slowly the holy sun cleared our faces and we were normal again and had better food. Coming out into the light was for us a resurrection from the dead, like beetles, like trees in spring.

A special thing for me, an unexpected kindness and mercy on the part of the soldiers who watched over us; they protected me as much as possible in this place of torture and punishment: they approached me like a bird in flight and whispered to me: “Do what you can, I won’t hurt you”.

Where could this come from but from God’s care! Everywhere, from everyone, I saw a human face during my two years in prison.

I am here to point out, with a bloody pen, that in prison I saw more respect for human beings than I saw in the pharisaical behaviour of the clerics who oppressed and sold me. I am here because what I did was wrong to the new state order, but to those clerics, my so-called superiors – I did not do anything wrong, I did not violate the holy canons of the Church, but I respected them with holiness like a conscientious priest.

Mercy towards me was everywhere: the soldier who stood on the hill, from where you could see everything, said to the soldier who took me away: “Don’t guard this old man, because even if you tell him to go away from this place and he won’t”.

The people who snitched on me that I had gold, that I had buried it in the church…

When I came out of prison, I heard from bewildered mouths how some people had pressed me with this thing, without thinking or imagining: that I had hidden gold! I heard that they came with prisoners at night, surrounded the church, put a tight guard around it so that the people would not see it, dug, probed, to find… To find what? Gold? I did not ask my parents or relatives for gold: we were ploughmen, poor people; my mother had many children and brought us up on borscht, milk, eggs, a pig she cut up at Christmas, we barely had a coat on our backs, and my father made us shoes – slippers; we went barefoot rather than wear shoes.

What a pity these hardened defendants have done to themselves; they will take their punishment as false witnesses. They also said that they took me in at night, with an escort, to show where the gold was buried; another blatant lie: no one took me out of prison for an hour. May God forgive them!

Liberation – freedom and the second prison

On the day and hour of my second birthday, they called me, stripped me of my prison clothes and brought me my clothes – not priestly, but simple; they carried me through sad, ruined, dirty places, showed me chains of different calibres, thinner, thicker, lighter, heavier. This, of course, to teach a man a threatening lesson, so that he does not end up here, which is not necessarily for the worse; like a parent to a child, he shows him the rod: “Look, I’m going to put this on your back if you don’t listen to me”. At home, however, I saw it as the harness of a horse. I was never tied up and I never saw a man in chains.

When I went out of the gate and saw the world, with work, with good clothes, with cheerfulness in my face, I was like a stranger, like a savage, ashamed, despised by the eyes around me. When I found myself, I entered a holy church and what I saw there: a dead man, a brother priest in a coffin; I worshipped; I felt at home. And what did I do? I was hungry and I asked the caretaker or the priest for a piece of bread, but he shook his head, looked at me cruelly and didn’t give me any. I went to the tram to get home, but I didn’t have a penny; I waited until I saw someone I knew and begged for tram fare; I came home a hated stranger.

From where, from what, from the boiling of evil, from everywhere, everyone, relatives, friends, priests, neighbours, shunned me, like a leper, like a dangerous man who might be to their misfortune. In fact, many were punished simply for talking to or helping an ex-convict who was now considered an enemy of the people.

I went to the Metropolitanate to ask for my position back, but they gave me to another church, in another village, where the people received me with pity, except for the parish priest, who wanted to send me away as soon as possible.

What deeply offended me, what hurt me in my heart, was the indifferent, defiant attitude of the people there, who, to my bitterness, I understood they would have demanded a “tip” – a bribe – to give me a position as a priest somewhere.

I heard not a word of kindness from anyone, but an official, a security man, who met me in the street, stopped me and said gently: “Father, go to the Metropolitanate and ask them to give you your church – Ștefănești – because I have spoken to everyone to get them to accept you”. Well, fine, but the priests in the Metropolitan’s office wouldn’t do it. I had nothing to eat, no clothes, no money; my relatives gave me something to live on.

(Hieromonk Ilie – Memories from Prison, Eparchy of Argeș Publishing House, Argeș, 1998, pp. 1-38)