Student Gheorghe Calciu – From intransigence to re-education, and from re-education to holiness

Another, more complicated case: medical student Gheorghe Calciu. It depends on when you met him: before his re-education, after his own re-education, or after the whole operation was over. Before Pitești, Calciu was one of the most intransigent; after re-education, one of the most hardened torturers[1]; after the experience, when the scapegoat trial was being prepared, he was the old man again, brave and loyal.

Calciu could not be tried in Țurcanu’s batch because he announced that he would not answer any questions until the real initiator of the experiment, General Nikolski, was brought to the trial as a witness. Dumitru Bacu saw him in his own cell in Gherla:

“Among the re-educated in the cell, the most dangerous at that time was a former medical student, Calciu Gheorghe, nicknamed “the grey eminence” of director Goiciu; Calciu was one of the most devoted informers that the re-education gave and who to some extent took the place of Țurcanu”.

But Dumitru Bacu adds a few more pages:

“He was picked up from Gherla and taken to the Ministry of the Internal Affairs for investigation. When he left, he was still a convicted re-educated man. I don’t know how long he stayed like that, but exactly two years later I had the truly unique opportunity to hear directly from him about his passage through the Ministry and what was being prepared for him. In 1956, in a cell in the Ministry’s main detention centre on Calea Victoriei, more precisely in the cell opposite the room of the duty officer, or “head of detention” as they called it, I found the following sentence, written with a needle in Morse code, which sent shivers down my spine:

“I, Calciu Gheorghe, have been brought here to be killed, I am not guilty”.

He was not sentenced to death (or had his sentence commuted) and after his trial he was sent – separately from Țurcanu and his group – to the extermination section of Jilava, the famous Room 53, where he proved that he had changed completely. He behaved, his cellmates would later say, like a saint with them, going to the point of sacrifice. During a dysentery epidemic, he slit his wrists to give blood to the sick. When he came out of prison, he was deeply religious, enrolled in theology and became a professor at the theological seminary. His sermons were heard not only by his students but also by students of the natural sciences. In 1977 he was dismissed from his teaching post, watched, threatened and blackmailed in order to be silenced. He refused to be silenced. With the help of a group of faithful who had gathered to defend him and write to the Patriarch, Calciu refused to give in. He was arrested again on 10 March 1979, sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, which was commuted to seven and a half years, and subjected to an extermination regime in Aiud prison.

(Virgil Ierunca – The Pitești Phenomenon)

1. The claim that the student Gheorghe Calciu was “one of the most hardened torturers” during his re-education has no documentary support. Gheorghe Calciu succumbed to torture and collaborated with the aggressors in Gherla, but not as a torturer, but as a resident informer. His work as an informer consisted of collecting information from inside the prison. Moreover, even if Gheorghe Calciu had become an aggressor, this would in no way detract from the spiritual stature, the nobility of soul and the holy courage he showed after returning from the traumas of re-education. If this were true, it would only show that the temporary fall was deeper, but the greatness of the Great Confessor, which later characterised him throughout his life, remains the same. Regarding his recovery from the traumas of re-education in Pitești, Father Calciu would later confess: “My recovery was much more difficult than that of others, because my fall was greater. I was a rather naive young man, a peasant child with a strong faith, with great trust in people. I was very likeable. Even after my fall they used to call me “the blue-eyed fallen angel” because everyone thought I was an angel. Now I was a fallen angel. And my suffering was so hard and my brokenness so total that I recovered much harder”. (Life of Father Gheorghe Calciu according to his own testimony and that of others, p. 57)