Professor Ion V. Georgescu – “A man loved by all, about whom you could say nothing but chosen words”.

Another exceptional personality with whom I had the pleasure of staying in Lățești was Professor I.V. Georgescu of the Faculty of Theology in Bucharest, a man loved by all, about whom one could say only choice words. Those close to him called him “Tetea”. He came from Ștefănești, Argeș. His father, a clever farmer, was in the business of buying and selling cattle, and like any wealthy farmer, he wanted his son to become the priest of the village. So I.V. Georgescu became a theologian and then, being very intelligent, with a prodigious memory, he became a university professor. He knew Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit and Latin. The only thing he knew less about was Slavic, which is why he did not dare to accept a proposal to make a new translation of the Bible. There, in Lățesti, he told us:

– Now, after ten years in Siberia, I know Slavonic perfectly, but it is too late for me to undertake such a great task!

In 1930 he began work on a unique treatise, ‘Demonology’, a study of demons. A colleague of his, Professor Roventa, had the indiscretion to publish it in a journal, and immediately both the Catholic and Protestant Churches rushed to offer him support in the form of grants, on condition that the work was published under their aegis. Professor I.V. Georgescu rejected this temptation: he wanted the work to bear the stamp of the Romanian Orthodox Church.

How many words of wisdom, how many ideas they heard from him! Even the Russian language, which we could not swallow, was sweeter and more appealing in his mouth, which made us learn it later, in the Culmea camp. How pleasant the poems of Pushkin, Mayakovsky and Esenin sounded from his lips!

His drama began in 1945, when the Russians snatched him from the street and took him straight to Lublianka prison in Moscow. How did the KGB find out that he was the head of the Legionary Movement in the country? […]

After interrogating him and forcing him to give a detailed account of the Legionary Movement, they set up a Soviet-style trial, sentenced him to 10 years’ hard labour and sent him to a special camp in Siberia, at the North Pole. The camp was exclusively for former state dignitaries who had fallen into Stalin’s disgrace. There the professor worked in the forest, chopping wood, braving the polar winters and the famous Siberian blizzard, and getting to know the Slavic soul and all of Russian culture. The grandeur of the former empire and the brilliance of the Russian aristocracy, what was left of it, were faithfully represented in the Siberian camps. And he, with his intelligence, with his memory, assimilated everything, but above all he synthesised everything. He also spent time in hospitals because his heart, exposed to atmospheric pressure and decompensation, was beating like an old clock. Even his liver was not functioning normally. He told us that there, in Siberia, in a hospital, he was about to die because he had eaten a clove of garlic that he had taken from a man.

Meanwhile, someone had mysteriously predicted that he would be free when the sun rose at the same time in two places. Many years later, on a prisoner train travelling south from the North Pole, he saw the sun rise in two places. Even he could not explain the phenomenon. When he looked out of the window to one side, he saw the sun rise; when he looked across, the sun rose there too. Then he shuddered and remembered his prediction: “Am I going to liberation? And so it was. In 1955, he arrived in Russia with all the Romanian prisoners. He was taken to Gherla, where he stayed for a year. He was released in 1957, but with a mandatory domicile order. And that’s how we ended up with him in Lațești.

What a sad story, it’s hard to believe it! […]

Professor Georgescu was warm, the Siberian ice had not chilled his soul. He was troubled by many problems of the past and of the future. He no longer believed in change, nor did he foresee the fall of communism. He had known the power of communism and had formed a deep vision of it. […]

He told us a great deal about the immense wealth of the Russians beyond the Urals; about the Soviet colossus that was being moved by Stalin’s hand; about the powerful institutions that had been set up there, such as the “Marx, Engels, Lenin Institute”, the grey eminence of the Soviet empire; about the diplomatic system and the spy schools in Russia and the world. […]

But beyond this intellectual verve, the professor, like all political prisoners, carried with him a drama that was not only his own, but that affected his entire family. After his arrest and abduction in Russia, his wife and two children remained in the country. How they lived, how they coped, is hard to say. His wife was forced to divorce him, and only then was he allowed to buy a barrel through a cooperative where he sold ice cream in the summer. Because of the dampness in which she had to live, she became very ill with rheumatism in her feet.

When the teacher came home in 1957, she found her children grown up, about fourteen or fifteen years old. Good and bad. The question that haunted him like a thorn in his heart was: “How can I talk to them, how can I scold them, when they have grown up without a father, without my presence, without my help, deprived of so much and ostracised by society, called ‘bandit children’ and pointed at by teachers and pupils?”

It’s true that they listened to their mother, but the influence of society was enormous. Poor mother, what should you do first? Go to the cooperage, look after the household, look after the children, what should she do? Woe betide her! What pain in her heart, what a bitter fate! […]

A few years after his liberation, around 1970, I visited him at the Theological Institute in Bucharest. He had a post there, in the library of the Institute. Later I learned that he had died in 1972. What a great value our nation has lost! I don’t know if anything he wrote has survived, because death took him too soon.

(Nicolae Purcărea – Howl of the pack… Pitești, Canal, Gherla, Jilava, Aiud, published by Fundația Sfinții Inchisorilor, Pitești, 2012, pp. 183-190)