Monk Filaret Gămălău – a gentle and merciful man
The monk Florea Gămălău, of the Durău hermitage, was the youngest monk I met in the prisons I visited. He was 27 years old. He was a gentle and kind man, a graduate of the monastic seminary of Neamț Monastery. He went to prison with one of the batches of the “Black Sumans” organisation from the Obcinele of Bukovina, with which the monks from Durău also had links. He worked hard to catch up with the norm. He had lost a lot of weight and walked slowly down the main avenue of the factory with the composure of a sick man. When I asked him how his health was, he answered embarrassed, as if guilty: “Not too good’. I don’t know if he reached the day of his release.
(Ion Antohe – Crucifixions in Romania after Yalta, Albatros Publishing House, Bucharest, 1995, p. 340)