Student Ioan Pintilie – A luminous figure

A shining figure was the medical student Pintilie, brilliantly clever and outspoken. Although he had noticed the dubious side of some of his flatmates, he often expressed opinions that were as sensible as they were incisive against communism, especially Soviet communism. Among other things, he severely sanctioned praise for some of the ruling regime’s major works, saying that the pyramids had been built in the same way, with tens of thousands of deaths.

When Pep[1] heard Pintilie, he was convinced that he would be severely punished by Țurcanu’s group. The doctor in question was short, a little stocky, but his whole being expressed intelligence and honesty. Pep was amused by the dry humour of the man, who told banal stories about his student life in Iași, wrapped in a special charm. […]

One day[2] a barrel of extremely salty, well-salted, purposefully prepared and very richly salted goulash arrived with the gravy that made up the meal. The first victims were Pep and the doctor Pintilie, who were to drink this concentrated salt solution instead of water or soup. When someone signalled for Pep to stop drinking, he obeyed the order not to kill him.

He watched in amazement as Pintilie took the bowl of ultra-salty juice, which was an almost saturated solution, put it to his mouth as instructed, and drank it all. When he was given more to drink, he ingested several hundred grams more.

Neither then nor later was Pep able to say whether the doctor Pintilie was not consciously accepting that he was going to die, with the scientific knowledge he had. The torturers refused to give him water when he asked for it. The evening and night passed in the same infernal atmosphere, with groans in the background.

The next morning Pintilie, who had not had a drink of water for more than 20 hours, was completely swollen. The swelling in his face was so bad that it blocked his vision. He could have been saved if he had been taken to hospital, but the torturers wanted to kill him. Towards evening the kidneys began to shut down and the rapid poisoning of the body, including the brain and nervous system, began. There followed a scene that haunted Pep for a long time. Pintilie rose from his seat and, in the sudden silence that fell over the room, began to speak in French, moving restlessly:

– “Voici Professeur, cette terrible constelation, voici Professeur!!!”, whereupon Pintilie collapsed on the cement. Two hours later he was removed from the room. It was later learned that he died a few hours later. His body was buried in the ground, as one buries rubbish and waste, with no mark above the hole.

(Dan Lucinescu – Jertfa (Transfigurări), Siaj Publishing House, Bucharest, 2008, pp. 141-142, 155-156)

[1] Pep is the author himself, Dan Lucinescu, who refers to himself in the third person.

[2] From this point on, the action takes place at least a few days after the previous moment in which the memoirist portrayed Ioan Pintilile. In the meantime, the re-education campaign had already begun and the students had been subjected to bestial and, above all, incessant torture, which had left them in a state of psychologically paralysing agony. This is also the reason why the Martyr Ioan Pintilie carried out the order to drink the saline solution without resisting, regardless of the consequences.