The torture of the moral conscience

The first time we were asked if we were still Legionaries, only five of us said we were not.

This was followed by the torture of the fixed position on the prici with hands raised, the beatings inflicted on those who could not endure this ordeal, then the mockery of God during Passion Week, and the “pilgrimage” on our knees across the room for eight days, culminating in the expulsion of all from the Legion.

Then Țurcanu announced to everyone that there were no more Legionaries.

We were on the seventh day of unspeakable torture. Our memories had been wiped clean of “everything we knew and didn’t know” about our activities and those of the “free.”

In order to escape this unbearable torment, many of us—especially the young—told truths and untruths, known and unknown, because the suffering had exceeded the limit of human endurance.

The Romanian proverb “God forbid that a man should have as much as he can bear” had come true in a dramatically tragic way. The photograph of these figures, expressing despair at its height and agony to the point of madness, would have been the most shocking proof of the bestial, Satanic unleashing. Psychologists, parapsychologists, psychiatrists, and other specialists would have had a wealth of material to study. These images would have illustrated, in full, what communist terror meant and why there had been no uprising in the communist empire against such diabolical rule.

If the written and unwritten testimonies had robbed us of our memory, if the denial of the Legion had compromised us as Legionnaires, the most despicable torture, which took place in our privacy, was the prostitution of our moral conscience.

Conscience is the most intimate part of the human being. It is because of this intimacy, inaccessible to any other person, that the Saviour instituted the sacred Sacrament of Confession, by the power given to the holy Apostles and transmitted by them to all priests until the end of the world, with the words:

“What you loose on earth you will loose in heaven, and what you bind on earth you will bind in heaven.”

This mandate, entrusted to man through the priests, is the mandate by which God allows man to participate in the great work of his salvation.

The person who confesses empties his conscience before his confessor of all that is inhuman in him, of all the temptations and seductions of the devil, of all the evil he has done to his fellow humans.

Of all the tortures I have seen—and of which the reader is now aware—the moral torture is beyond imagination. Therefore, no one in this world has the right to violate the privacy of another’s conscience under any circumstances, because freedom of conscience has been granted to man by God.

Each one of us was tortured to realise that there was no escape from this moral “prostitution.”

That is why some of us invented or exaggerated facts that not even the sickest mind could believe, just to be believed and escape further torture. We were asked whether, in addition to stealing, lying, and cheating—which had to be confessed publicly—we had also committed sexual perversions, the prostitution of conscience, or other sexual deviations. The young Legionaries, in the Brotherhoods of the Cross or in the student centres, had been educated to be free of perversions, both moral and sexual.

Before the torture committee, we were asked if we had committed sexual perversions. If you answered “no,” you were tortured for not having done it; if you answered “yes,” you were tortured for having done it. Either way, you were tortured.

So you ended up in Andrișan’s situation, beard or no beard. In this madness of despair, after constant torture, many came to the conclusion that they would “say anything and do anything.”

At that stage, when the power of judgment, modesty, and common sense had long been abolished, when the tortured man was writhing in the mud, knowing that tomorrow he could go mad under the likes of Pintilie, Nedelcu, and Ionescu, what more could one ask of this young man?

Some of us began to recount, without hesitation, all sorts of facts that defy pathology. Poor people—they had no judgment, no will, completely insane.

That is why they declared that they had committed all kinds of sexual perversions, even with domestic animals, mothers, sisters, relatives, and close friends.

It was as if Sodom and Gomorrah had been transplanted into Pitești prison.

When such statements were made, one wondered—without having an answer—whether you were mad and didn’t understand what your comrade was saying, or whether he was mad and you could not comprehend why he had gone insane.

This prostitution lasted about 15 days. In hard labour and in cellar room 3, these testimonies were more restrained.

In the Gherla testimonies of the younger ones, the accounts were so scabrous that one is ashamed even to remember them, let alone write them down.

(Dumitru Bordeianu – Testimonies from the Swamp of Despair)