Physician Gheorghe Calciu in Gherla Prison
I can’t close the door to the bedroom of those in charge – there were not only those from the technical office, but also the heads of the workshops in the factory – without talking about a friend I made there – Ghiță Calciu – the future Father Gheorghe Calciu-Dumitreasa.
He didn’t work in the technical office and often Mihalcea [commander of the production unit in the Gherla prison workshops, n.n.] would bump into him and punish him, without me understanding at the time the reason for the grudge. Later I suspected that the political officer’s informers passed through Calciu, and it seems that they were more effective than Reck’s, through whom the head of production was informed directly. For he often came to the stapled work meetings to discuss certain things that were going on in the factory and of which he was unaware.
I assumed that at the real production meetings, the grading meetings, he would be confronted with some of the facts that had leaked down the line. Since the political officer couldn’t confront him, he would take on Calciu and beat him up as much as he could. My friendship with him was bound by proximity – by bed – and in the rare moments of respite he would tell us things that had nothing to do with the present.
He was a small, thin, windy young man. Very lively in spirit and movement, always in a hurry. Bright eyes and a smiling face, even when he should have been angry, I never heard him scold anyone. He was a second-year medical student in Bucharest. He was from Mahmudia-Tulcea and jokingly said that his mother had some Tartar blood in her veins, just like the Germans.
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By Easter 1953 my brother was already working in the factory. […] After he was isolated, he told me after a while that Ghiță had remained a “bandit”, doing acts of legionary aid. He took money from the C.E.C., which he had deposited from his work here, to buy P.A.S. [para-amino-salicylic acid n.n.] for Costache Oprișan, who was also isolated in Zarcă and had fallen ill with tuberculosis. The new medicine that had appeared for the treatment of this disease seemed miraculous and life-saving, and I don’t know how it could have been obtained, as there had been no such custom in Gherla until then. Later, Costache was taken to Bucharest to study for Țurcanu, and in 1954 Ghiță Calciu was also taken to study the same problem. I heard that they stayed together, that Ghiță took care of him like a brother, without considering this as a political attitude, that Oprișan influenced him a lot, that he was a good connoisseur of religious existentialism and of the “living style” that appeared in prison. It seems that Ghiță’s choice of theology can be explained by this difficult period in his life, a period illuminated by the views of his suffering brother. He was not involved in the primary process, he was not much involved in the debunking. In fact, I didn’t even know he existed until I met him in the factory. I learned from Dumitru Bacu’s book that Ghiță Calciu was preparing for another trial and a fateful end, from which perhaps God’s will also spared him, in order to glorify and preach his name, as he would do later.
I told him that, as bed neighbours, we had told each other stories from the outside world. He had literary talent. He gave me three of his works, published, if I am not mistaken, in a magazine from Brăila. He was passionate about the Delta, on whose shores he grew up and whose life inspired him. Of the titles, I remembered The Sapper – autobiographical in nature, from his childhood, mixed with a fairy-tale mirage, as young years go. The second title was The Legend of the Aușel, in which he embodied the love story of two young lovers from old Mahmudie (he called himself Aușel), who, tormented by the world, escape by transforming themselves into birds and build their happiness in a nest of their own, in the shape of a bagpipe, suspended on a twig in the mythical world of the Delta. Aușel was the village bagpiper in his third literary invention, a beautiful young Lipovan girl, Aniota: and her poor old grandfather, a tormented and unlucky fisherman, whom the girl helped by pulling his boat to the Edec as best she could.
Less than five years had passed since he had published them, when not only the stories, as I now remember them, but also the words that made up the whole narrative, with the writer’s own charm, were vivid in his mind, and he saw a talent in their assertion. After his release, swept away by the whirlwind of other ideas, I never heard that Ghiță had continued the literary pursuits of his beautiful youth. Also unpublished, but still full of charm for me, were his memories of his early childhood, when he used to sit on his older brother Stefan’s lap and go to school with him, although he could barely drag his “shirt” behind him.
Since Gheorghe Calciu-Dumitreasa is now known in a different way, I have taken the liberty of completing the portrait with shadows and lights, as our life was.
(Ioan Munteanu – On foot through the re-educations in Pitești, Gherla and Aiud)