Priest Gheorghe Beșchea
He was the son of a peasant from the commune of Osmanu, Brăila County. He graduated from the Faculty of Theology in Bucharest and was parish priest of Mărăcineni from 1925.
In 1942 he was mobilised as a military priest, but was taken prisoner during the Don War. During his imprisonment in camp 74 Oranki, he refused to join the volunteer division “Tudor Vladimirescu” recruited by Ana Pauker. He was sent to the frozen solitary confinement.
He returned to the country in 1948. However, my father was registered as an anti-communist by the political police and was arrested in 1958. He was sentenced to 15 years’ hard labour for ‘conspiracy against the social order’.
He was released in 1964 and managed to become a priest at the “Sf. Sava” parish in Ploiești. However, the trials of imprisonment and detention convinced the priest that he had to build a church for the glory of God. Bedridden and watched over by the Security Service, Father Gheorghe passed on to the world of the righteous on 25 May 1986.
(Adrian Nicolae Petcu – Lumina Newspaper)