“Tell everyone that I haven’t compromised in the slightest.”

I often looked at him with admiration and studied him secretly, Ion Dima tells us… George Manu was fifty-four years old at the time. He wore glasses with very thick lenses, was not very tall and seemed very modest, too modest for what he was… He had none of the recklessness of the revolutionary fighter, none of the hiding places or cynicism of the politician. He was the calm professor, master of his knowledge and ready to pass it on to others.

After the outbreak of the so-called non-violent re-education in Aiud, pressure was put on him to renounce his political ideas. He refused to compromise. Reprisals followed. He was interned in a cell for tuberculosis patients, “they put him alone in a bed,” says Nicolae Goga, a former political prisoner at Aiud:

“His whole body was a wound. He had scabs all over his body. His wrists were oozing pus. Every night we tried to give him water to drink and the doctor, although she wasn’t allowed, gave him drips. Before he died, Manu called me to his bedside and said: Tell everyone that I haven’t compromised in the slightest. See you on the other side! I shook his hand. He gave me a sign that looked like an embrace. The next morning he died. I think we have lost one of Romania’s greatest intellectuals.

(Radu Ciuceanu – Entering the Tunnel, Meridiane Publishing House, 1991, p. 331)