“The enemy is asking for new victims. The enemy requests sacrifices” – The last moments of agony of Professor George Manu

The nuclear physicist Georges Manu, Madame Curie’s pupil, a neighbour at his bedside, was in agony; 15 patients who had undergone surgery, his patients waiting for surgery, responded to the colonel with agility, caught up in fever or the conspiratorial law of silence. Manu even died, to the utter despair of the good doctor (Balea) who came twice a day, including Sundays, and gave him all sorts of transfusions and injections.

Manu recognised me when I arrived, one minute, friendly, and went into agony. He always recognised the doctor, stood up politely, his head resting on his dusty bones, and smiled from his demolished face.

The doctor said motherly:

– What are you doing to me, Mr. Manu?

She tried to give him life and hope. She asked him to fight, to resist, to live. Manu died on Palm Sunday in 1961[1]. His last words, repeated dozens of times in a coma, were:

– The enemy is asking for new victims. The enemy requests sacrifices.

The physicist had joined the Iron Guard, had tried to form a neo-liberal party with the old Carlist liberal, the engineer Ion Bujoi (director of Petroșani and owner of mines and industries), had been in communist prisons. He fought in the Zarca of the last resistance, the stronghold of Romanian reaction. Put behind bars, he was a favourite teacher of English, as I was of German and French.

(Petre Pandrea – Re-education in Aiud, Vremea Publishing House, Bucharest, 2000, p. 260)

[1] Easter 1961 was celebrated on 9 April. Palm Sunday, on the other hand, fell on 2 April, which confirms that the date of death of Professor George Manu was correctly recorded in the death certificate and the criminal record. For many years it was widely believed that 12 April 1961 was the date of the professor’s death, which is inaccurate.