“Professor I.D. Sârbu, a very special man”

At Grindu seemed to be different. Invigorated by the sun, we had escaped from the enclosure in semi-freedom. Here, too, there was a “favoured” hut for the dying, the unfit, a sort of elephant graveyard. There were people suffering from hepatitis, typhoid and other diseases that brought the sick to a very advanced state of physiological decay: in the morning, as if from the belly of a huge monster, beings would emerge from this hut that one would not believe to be human.

Here I was to spend some of the most beautiful moments of my prison life, if any of these moments could be called beautiful. I would rush to the barracks after my evening meal and stay there until lights out, and then in the morning from the time I woke up until the count. Here I had the opportunity to meet Professor I.D. Sârbu, a very special man, and Sașa Ivasiuc, with whom I became very close, a man of many moral and spiritual qualities.

There, without exaggeration, I was like in church: I listened with humility as Mr. Sârbu spoke. This man had a smile that was painful but subduing. The smile was the alphabet of his lectures. The professor had a strange mixture of piety and compassion for us young people. When he heard of someone who had fought in the mountains with a rifle in his hand, who had been a partisan, he simply adored him, but when he heard of someone who had told political jokes or talked about the imminent arrival of the Americans, he was cautiously amused. The explanation was organic, witty and cerebral to the core.

From his philosophical dissertations, he always slipped into purely political ones, with a firm conviction that he stubbornly maintained: as long as the Americans are a force, a superpower, it is not the fate of the Romanians that depends on them, but our fate, because more than half of the blood tribute given to the communist prisons was due to the lies and delusions that inoculated our people with their imminent arrival, when in fact we had been sold by the Americans for who knows how long. He insisted on the need for us to fight for ourselves, without the slightest hope of rescue from outside. He did not even believe in the overthrow of communism by internal forces, which was only possible if international circumstances were favourable. He was a very calculating man in his hopes for the future of the country. One thing that always struck me was that he never talked about his family, his relatives. I didn’t even know if he was married or not, if he had children, and I was inhibited by the thought of committing an indiscretion by provoking him into such a revelation.

There were many cases where the wives of those I was with had since divorced. I saw many people destroyed by this, but I must confess that those who seemed to me to bear such news the hardest were the intellectuals.

Mr. Sârbu’s biographical discretion was due to a conquering modesty: he did not like to talk about himself. “I feel strong and healthy, despite my deplorable appearance, when I see myself surrounded by these children. What are they doing in prison? I tell you that salvation and justice will not come from the outside, but from the soul of this generation, which is here to prepare for battle. Let us be aware that they are the ones who will save the people! From here he began to recall the death of Arnăuțoiu and other fighters from Făgăraș, Bukovina, Vrancea, Dobrogea… He was a veritable repository of such stories, a database of the lives of anonymous people, but about whom he spoke as if they were saints.

In this regard, he said that the Orthodox Church did not play its calling card in prisons; he was thinking of informers, spies, collaborators…

Now I think of Father Dascăl from the Constantin Brâncoveanu Church in Făgăraș. He was the oldest among us, a handful, for the good Lord had been very economical with the material from which he was made, and in return had been very generous with the soul he had given him. In one of my discussions with Mr. Sârbu, about the not always high behaviour of priests, the priest had an answer that I have never forgotten and will never forget as long as I live: “Mr. Sârbu, if Judas betrayed and sold Christ, does that mean that all the disciples are guilty?”

Mr. Sârbu paused for a moment and said: “I am not talking about the Church, the institution, but about some of its servants. “However,” the priest replied, “I think this would be the place to discuss what has been done well, in the spirit of faith, and not the work of evil!”

The truth is that Father Dascăl was not a man of the vastness of Mr. Sârbu’s culture, but he was a priest in the full sense of the word, a man of gold.

The real sources of information were the monologues – very rarely the dialogues – of the professor, which I listened to with youthful curiosity. He was never in a hurry to get to the table, to get in line with the first of the 700-800 prisoners we had in Grindu. He controlled his body with pride, I would even say with greatness: I never saw him marked by poison, bitten by the serpent of greed or the fear of death. I believe that a certain principle also worked in his reign: he did not have the family ideal, he regarded it as biological. The moral, spiritual ideal was sovereign. Otherwise, as he confessed, he would have remained quietly at his desk, he would have been preoccupied with theatrical matters, in a word, he would have been socially “integrated”.

He had no ideal of going abroad; “oh yes”, he said, “I would go there just to see how the West has improved”. He is the man who greatly lowered our unjustified hopes for the salvation we expected from the Americans. I’m not exaggerating at all when I say that his principles were firm and his whole personality commanded respect. He was effective in keeping order and calm at the gate and in the Guards Control Corps.

He was not afraid of the consequences of what he said, even though he knew there were spies among his listeners. He wasn’t afraid of the beating, the terror, with which he subdued the biologist.

He came from the school of the Romanian Spiritual Senators in Cluj. He had a real cult for this school, he did not cultivate it ostentatiously, but it radiated from all his gestures and words. He breathed the air of the Cluj school, of German culture. He spoke several languages: German, English, French, Italian and he could also speak Polish. He was an encyclopaedia!

He was unwavering in his respect for Catholic priests, but he found space in his speech to punish certain sins of which Catholicism was also guilty, using the Inquisition as an example.

There were many young people who wanted to be with Professor Sârbu as much and as often as possible: Alexandru Ivasiuc, Prelipceanu, Iuga, Brâncoveanu, Sorin Botez, those who came from Gherla.

I often met them, and when I was asked, “Where are you going?”, the answer was always: “To see Professor Sârbu”. We went one after the other, because we didn’t want to risk breaking up our “circle”. Eventually the purpose of our meetings was discovered, but it was tacitly accepted, without any fuss.

Mr. Sârbu was a perfect Christian, he respected all the statements of our Orthodox priests – Father Dascăl from Făgăraș, Father Ciocârlie from Iași, Father Mihai from Vrancea, Father Gheorghe from Suceava – as well as those of the Protestant Hajdu Geza or the Catholic Augustin.

During these little events, Mr. Sârbu was simply transfigured. He had a profound state of humility that would have obliged anyone – I stress anyone, and I am thinking of the carals who were watching us – not to disturb us, and indeed they never did. […]

Mr. Sârbu had such a spiritual, religious predilection that there was never a meal at which he did not pray before he began to eat. He was a man of seductive beauty, and in this case I am convinced that beauty was enhanced by intelligence. He had outgrown his kneeling; he had a peace, a serenity that was almost beyond logical explanation. I went to him as to a temple, as to a source of generous wisdom, as to a sprinkler of spiritual diamonds.

One of the young people who eagerly followed his courses was my friend Sandu Zub.

We were deeply influenced by the teachings of Mr I.D. Sârbu! We were young people who took everything at face value without ever thinking about our condition, our destiny or the meaning of true existence. There, in Grindu, we met a master. The incomparable Al. Zub, the historian, we had him with us at Stoienești, cutting reeds, we were in fact the most honest flies of socialism, former Utemists who had ended up in this prison hell without knowing how.

At I.D. Sârbu, Sandu Zub came with some extraordinary additions about our existence on these lands, about the people of the ancestral faith, about the sacrifices made throughout history.

All these thorough and documented discussions lasted only half an hour, because breaking the rules and the draconian programme meant being beaten with feet or hair. […]

I stayed in Grindu for a year and a half. There I lived with the current senator for Mehedinți, Mihai Buracu, with Ghiță Dunărințu and with other Severineni. We still talk about the lessons Mr. Sârbu taught us, and we especially remember the moments when we broke the rules, when, after curfew, we held discussions under the blanket to avoid being discovered by the guards.

We were eager to be on duty so that we could learn a “lesson”. I have to admit that the record for planting was Al. Zub, who stayed up all night just to talk to I.D. Sârbu.

“How do you feel?” was one of the Master’s questions. He was pleased when the questioner gave a somewhat optimistic answer.

“Bravo!” he said. That’s good. We’re off the hook. If you really think we’ll get away with it, we will!

We tried to please Mr. Sârbu, and he was happy to be surrounded by young people who understood the meaning of his words. He always spoke in a whisper, and his face lit up when he remembered his teachers: “I was Blaga’s pupil”, he said with undisguised pride, a leitmotif of his sayings; or: “I was D.D. Roșca’s student. I’m glad I had the opportunity to pass Iuliu Hațegianu on the street. I never tired of listening to the lectures of my great teachers.

I am glad to have had him as a teacher of freedom – even in prison! – I.D. Sârbu!

(Source: Dumitru Arvat, “Here we fight, not complain” in Dumitru Andreca, Streets in the Dark. Destine mehedințene 1945-1964, Civic Academy Foundation, Bucharest, 1998, pp. 91-96)