The torture of Aristide Nedelcu

One of the comrades tortured to madness was Aristide Nedelcu, a student at the Faculty of Law in Bucharest.

Originally from Muscel, he, like Popa Nicolae, had been brought up in the orthodox spirit of the local monasteries. From birth he was endowed with rare virtues. He was incapable of uttering an evil word or doing harm to his fellow men. Nedelcu’s face expressed kindness, love, peace and harmony of soul.

I got to know him well in the months before his exposure, in cellar room 3. I liked him and loved him very much. Like me, he belonged to the group of young “mystical legionaries”.

He belonged to Pintilie’s group, with whom he held legionary meetings in the room, combining the Christian faith with the legionary concept in the most harmonious way. He and Pintilie were the only ones who openly confessed their faith in God and said they would not renounce it even if they were killed, which brought them unimaginable tortures.

After the new trial, Nedelcu and Pintilie were brought to my side and together they formed the group of mystics. They had been severely beaten on the head with a centurion until they were disfigured. Otherwise, they seemed to have gone mad. As I looked at them, I was seized by a horror I had never experienced before, and I made a connection with what Țurcanu had promised us before he killed us to make us lose our minds.

Until the events with Nedelcu and Gheorghiu, which had taken place around Christmas, none of the comrades in the room had made a public statement, had been taken to the inquiry and had sided with the torturers.

The atmosphere in the room was hellish, the tortures exhausting almost all our physical and mental endurance. If a normal person had entered the room at that moment, unaware of what was going on, he would have declared with conviction that he had entered a mental hospital. If someone had photographed the faces of the tortured young men and the conditions in which we were held, there would be no need to write another line about the torture in Pitești.

Coming back to Nedelcu, he seemed to think that on the Feast of the Nativity we would witness the most despicable and inhuman manifestations against the Child Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary.

One day, when Zacharias was absent from the room, I saw Nedelcu jump from next to me and hit his head on the cement from a height of about 80 centimetres. All he got was a broken head. Frightened, the two members of the committee, Măgirescu and Păvăloaia, rushed at him like hawks, tying his hands behind his back and then to the bars so that he could not move.

With his legs tied, they beat him severely on the soles of his feet until they were bruised.

When Zachariah returned later that evening, he heard what had happened and began to sing as usual. When he had finished singing, his face began to change. Meanwhile, he prepared his instruments of torture: a club, a military belt and a whip.

She untied Nedelcu from the bars, took him to the bed where the committee slept, took off his shirt and began to beat him so severely that there was not a palm width space left on his body, so that he would not be bruised and have wounds from which blood was flowing. During all these beatings, Nedelcu was hit on the head with whips, military belt and fists, so that his face no longer resembled that of a man, but rather that of a man out of his mind.

Later, after the debunking, Nedelcu went to the lead mines, so I never found out why he made this gesture, seeing what had happened to Gheorghiu. However, Nedelcu was among the group of young legionnaires who endured the tortures from November 1950 to September 1951, and he was one of the last to be released.

We have learnt from those who were in the mines that he fully recovered thanks to the environment and atmosphere maintained by the more mature legionnaires; that he was not an informer and was part of the legionnaire resistance group in the lead mines. I knew of his existence even after 1955, in Aiud; he was healthy, both physically and mentally. But I never had the chance to speak to him again. But Nedelcu is one of the heroes of the legion.

(Dumitru Bordeianu – Confessions from the Swamp of Despair)