Professor Grigore Zamfiroiu – “a model of Romanian dedication and Christian living”

With his dark, intelligent and penetrating eyes, made all the more expressive by the fine features of a handsome, sunburned man, Professor Grigore Zamfiroiu has a special fervour, which is brought out in his soft but firm and convincing voice when he presents a situation or explains a point of view. A reserve officer in the USSR, he was a prisoner of war for several years, refusing to enter the country with the pro-Soviet “Tudor Vladimirescu” or “Horia, Cloșca and Crișan” divisions. He is a good friend of “Elder Nae”, from whom I learn something about “Grigore”, as he called him, with respect for the human value of this Gorjean, with strict ethical principles organically incorporated and becoming his nature and substance.

“How could Grigore have disappeared from the Romanian prison?” – Elder Nae asks me while laughing, telling me about the school inspection that led to his dismissal from teaching, then as evidence at the trial, where even resistance from prison became a fault, to the creation of the aforementioned pro-Soviet divisions and his return to the country as a perjured officer, servant of cowardice and ally of Satan, under the guise of defending Romanian interests.

Returned from the USSR as a prisoner of war, at the end of the war the teacher had been assigned to a primary school in Bucharest, where he had his residence, and the “new school” had assigned him to the first class. (This was not the only case of the demotion of teachers who did not “adhere”: in the years ′50 – ′51, my former Latin teacher from “Spiru Haret”, David Popescu, a distinguished Latinist, translated into Romanian Boethius’ “The Managers of Philosophy”, a translation that was praised in the ”Gândirea” years ′43-′44. Nor was he, the Latin teacher of Petru Creția and Octavian Paler, the only one to be taught at the school in Balta Albă: there was also Pamfil Georgian, co-author of some good history textbooks for the high schools of my time). 

All those who “didn’t support the regime” – a phrase coined by the madmen who belonged to the “working class” – were teased and systematically persecuted with the aim of removing them from education and sending them to “blue collar jobs” (i.e.: manual labour!), if they couldn’t be implicated in some trial, however false, however infamous.

A “comrade inspector” therefore came to the class of “teacher” Grigore Zamfiroiu, where an original lesson in “intuition”, as it was called at the time, was given, the first contact with science.

The inspector asks the children to answer one by one: if they can see their bench, if they can touch it, if the bench “is” and to all the questions they answer in the affirmative, in unison.

The inspector shows them the bench and repeats the questions: do I see it, can I put my hand on it, is it, and the children’s voices answer “yes” in unison.

The inspector (confident that the method has been successful) asks a new question: Children, can you see God?

Children (still in chorus): No!

Inspector: Can you touch Him?

Children (less sure, it seems): No!

Inspector: So if you can’t see Him and you can’t touch Him, then God exists?

Children (hesitating, voices muffled): He does not!

Inspector (satisfied): That’s right, children: God does not exist!

The teacher intervenes: Inspector, please allow me to continue with your lesson.

Inspector (beaming): Of course!

Teacher: Children, can you put your hands on the inspector?

Children: Yes, we can!

Teacher: Is the inspector here?

Children: Yes, he is!

Teacher: Children, can you see the inspector’s mind? Can you touch it?

Children: No!

Teacher: Does it exist then?

Children: It doesn’t!

Teacher: That’s right, children, you can’t see the Inspector’s mind because it isn’t there. Mr. Inspector has no mind!

Grigore’s heroic deed – Elder Nae tells me – was then circulated in Bucharest as a story or as a joke, when they were trying to establish communist atheism. And in schools, where icons had already been removed and set on fire.

After 5 years in prison (1949-1954), in 1959 Professor Grigore Zamfiroiu was included in a group with Radu Gyr and sentenced to death. His wife and two children over 14, a boy and a girl, were also imprisoned. The “socialist-humanist” left his third child, who was not yet 14, at home. The sentences were severe, the teacher spent a few months on death row in Jilava, then his sentence was commuted to 25 years’ hard labour, and they were released in 1964. Widowed by the death of his wife and left alone in the country after the revolution, the professor became a monk under the name of Father Andrei, after the three of them had obtained university degrees and gone abroad, and after he had become a member of the French Academy of National Moral Devotion during a session at the Sorbonne.

In the consciousness of those who know him – and I am one of the fortunate ones – Father Andrei (Grigore) Zamfiroiu remains a model of Romanian devotion and Christian life.

(Gheorghe Stănescu – Jurnal din prigoană, Venus Publishing House, Bucharest, 1996, pp. 56-58)