The suffering-bearer Gioga Parizianu

After daylight, the common-law guard in the corridor opened the door on the pretext of taking the water pipe and told us very frightened: “They have been beating one of you for a month and have got nothing out of him, so now they have put him in the oven, which can be seen from the window of this cell.”

When I heard the name of the victim from the guardhouse, which those in the cell didn’t know, it was as if someone had plunged a knife into my heart and I shouted without realising it: Gioga!

Parizianu Gheorghe, known as Gioga, was an Aromanian from Bulgaria who had arrived with his family after the cession of Cadrilater. We were classmates at the Faculty of Medicine in Iași, where Moisiu introduced me to him. Then I got to know him well and worked with him until his arrest on 15 May 1948. I loved him and admired his courage, his sacrifice and the way he stood by his comrades. He was called “the granite man”.

I had learned that he had been arrested on 15 May and I was convinced that no investigator would get anything out of Gioga. And indeed, from the time of his arrest until the beginning of July, the thugs couldn’t get anything out of him. His whole body, from head to toe, was one wound. The day we found him, the executioners had put him in a high-temperature steamer[1] to make him talk.

I don’t remember how he escaped from the oven, I only know that he was condemned on the evidence of others. Perhaps the investigators had obtained statements from those with whom he had gone on missions in the mountains or elsewhere in order to convict him, but certainly not from his own words.

As for his work in the Medical Corps, the investigators didn’t seem very interested in him, since I had no confrontation with him, although we had worked together.

I reported Gioga’s case because I had met him on another occasion in Pitești. The beating I received on 1st of July was a standard procedure applied to all those who were investigated at their first encounter with the thugs.

They used all the beating methods at their disposal to impress the person under investigation, to make him reveal everything he knew. The method was devised from above, and the thugs were only given the task of applying it during the investigation. Its severity, as I have said, depended on the position of the person under investigation in the organisation.

***

During this time, Iosub Mihai went between the beds and, to his surprise, he discovered Gioga Parizianu (the hero of the Suceava investigation) on a lower bed, wrapped in a wet sheet. All that could be seen was his swollen and bruised head. When Iosub asked him what he was doing, Gioga, who could barely open his mouth, said: “Mihai, get out of here”.

Iosub came to me and told me, trembling, how Gioga, Străchinaru and other comrades, about a dozen cripples, were wrapped in wet sheets, in the same situation as Gioga. Iosub went on and said to me: ‘Brother, what’s going on here? I repeat, I have a terrible premonition.

***

I wondered how these young men could have the strength to endure so much torture. Gioga was the most resilient comrade I met in prison.

(Dumitru Bordeianu – Confessions from the Swamp of Despair)

[1] As in antiquity, starting with the three young men in Babylon, the last torture applied was that of fire, burning alive (ed.).