The lead mines of Baia Sprie and Cavnic

From the trial I was brought back to Jilava for a short time. During this time, I was daily overwhelmed by worldly thoughts, regrets about the conditions of life in the past, the thought of my lost hopes, the thought of my books, my child and my wife, who were left without support or means of subsistence, and the thought of their social ostracism.

The only hope for them, as for me, remained God’s mercy, His will, in which we all placed ourselves. I began to pray more and more for the forgiveness of my sins and those of my Romanian people. I dedicated all my suffering to God. It was my only purpose in life, which gave me meaning and allowed me to rise above the constant suffering.

But other hardships came to attack me, to bring me to my knees. Starving, exhausted and with no hope of ever escaping from prison, I ended up in the lead mine at Baia Sprie, transported in cattle wagons with other prisoners.

For a month we were kept in rehabilitation, on the surface, because we could barely hold a pickaxe. At least here we got plenty of bread and a more substantial meal. A month later we were sent underground. Here we found other political prisoners who had been working for a long time and who welcomed us with love, encouraged us and introduced us to mining. They made the burden more bearable, even though we often fell to our knees under the weight of the hardship and toil of mining.

I did all sorts of jobs here. I worked as a carpenter, reinforcing the drifts, I was a stonecutter after the blasting, I pushed the wagons with the mined material, I worked as a driller.

I will now tell you about a premonitory dream I had here.

It seemed that I was on a muddy stream with my colleague and he had gone into the water and started to sink… I pulled him out and saved him.

The next day we went into the mine and we were drilling in the shaft where we had fixed the site. It was a very wide shaft. We found that on the previous shift another crew had been drilling and had set off a dynamite explosion in the sky, in the ceiling of the shaft.

So there was rock that had been dislodged, but it hadn’t fallen out of place. And we started to cut, to remove the rocks that were about to fall on us.

We lost more than half of the eight hours shift with this operation. We had about a third of the shift left[1] and we hadn’t done any work. For this we were threatened with prison on our way out of the underground.

My team-mate was afraid we would be punished and was ready to start work. At first I didn’t agree, but later I gave in to his pressure, on condition that he set up the perforator and I held his hand, eyes fixed on the Cerime rock above.

This was because the vibrations produced by the perforator could cause the rock separation. And that’s what happened…

When I saw the rock detach, I yanked it out of its place and fell a few feet from where it hit the ground. It was a rock 7-8 metres long and 3-4 metres wide… and as it fell it made sparks and dust.

We didn’t do any more work that day, except to pull the drill out from under the fallen rock, which had smashed itself to pieces and cut our hoses.

There was no more underground work at that site for several days. We waited for the rocks to settle, and they continued to fall from above and from the sides of the gallery.

During this time my conscience groaned under the burden of guilt and reproach for the life of soul and body that I had led up to that time, although in freedom I was a person who could not be socially reproached.

However, I felt that I had to atone for the guilt of my life and that of my nation – for no one is without sin – and I had not always lived up to the moral standards I knew I should.

I was particularly rebuked by the sin of the Apostle Peter on the night the Saviour was arrested, mocked and tortured. Peter denied himself by saying that he was not a disciple of Jesus. I myself, on one particular occasion when I was free, did not confess the faith and conviction I had that God existed, and let it be implied that He might not exist.

This rebuked me deeply and I always wondered if I had suffered enough to be forgiven for my sins.

I once climbed up the piles of stones in a gallery with the perforator in my arms and fell on them, broken from effort and fatigue.

Then I hit my knee on the stones and felt that this was my Golgotha and that God would forgive me. I felt that through the sufferings to come I could hope to earn His love and mercy.

The people in the mine told me how they had celebrated the Resurrection of the Lord on Easter night by the light of coal lamps underground.

There, in the mine, many things and events happened of which I will not tell you more. I only remember that it was there that I began to experience my first liver attacks and that, so tired from so much pain, so as not to disturb those who were sleeping, I went out at night through a window washer with broken glass…

It was winter, cold, frost and draughts, where I went to live my pain, setting the stage for the TB[2] I later had.

Working in the mines was under constant threat. You were imprisoned for imaginary reasons. In the lock-up you were crammed in with 3-4 other people, although this small room was only meant for one person… In it you stood up because there was no place to sit down.

Those who were squeezed in there would come out suffocating after a few hours. I’ve been there myself.

Once, when the militiaman who took me to the cell ordered me before he put me in the cell: “Lie down!”, I did not want to obey his order, because I was not guilty of anything.

He asked the guard at the gate to shoot me if I did not obey his order. Then I turned to the sentry and said: Shoot, soldier! But the officer did not. He only turned his back.

The gesture may have been one of pride on my part, but I felt it was my dignity not to carry out the order.

And that was because I never feared death while I was fighting on the Eastern and Western fronts[3]. In fact, one of the most uplifting moments of my spirit was near Stalingrad, when, surrounded and attacked by tanks and superior troops, I was convinced that I was going to die.

I felt an almost ecstatic joy that I had never felt before. The troops under my command had begun to retreat, along with those of other units, and I forced mine to stop, threatening to shoot anyone who took another step back.

Times were critical and many began to cry in fear of the approaching tanks firing. We were out in the open and had no pits or ditches to hide in.

The soldiers were lying on the ground facing the enemy, while I was sitting upright, passing from one to the other.

Beside me I saw a sergeant with a machine gun firing continuously. Because we infantrymen in front had stopped, the anti-tank guns behind us started firing and stopped two tanks.

The commander of the anti-tank guns later confessed to me that if we had not stopped, they would have retreated.

I didn’t know about the fear of death, but since childhood I had been afraid of demonic spirits, a fear that I managed to overcome in prison through prayer and God’s grace.

In what follows, I will testify to the trials, the terror and the bitter struggle I went through, which was terrible, until I came to see the light of God that surrounded me and made me invincible against the demonic attacks that followed each other day after day in various forms.

Having acquired the gift of seeing in the spirit, I began to know and distinguish the nature of those who were reflected in my spirit.

Later, after my liberation, when I read the Philokalia, a theological work translated into Romanian by Fr. Dr. Dumitru Stăniloae, I was convinced of the correctness of the interpretation, at various spiritual stages, of what is from the Spirit and what comes from the satanic trial.

(The complete writings of Blessed Elijah, the Seer of God, and his life, commented by his disciple and son in the Lord, Pr. Dr Dorin Octavian Picioruș. Vol. I, Theology for Today, Bucharest, 2010, pp. 280-284)

[1] Shit = one day’s work in the mine.

[2] TB = tuberculosis. See here:

http://www.sfatulmedicului.ro/Tuberculoza/tuberculoza-tbc-generalitati_499.

[3] In the Second World War.