“This is the intellectual attitude I learned from Mircea Vulcănescu”
I spent about two weeks with Mircea Vulcănescu in the political disciplinarians’ room. I was sharing a room with him. They brought him into the room, all beaten up, along with two legionaries, Vojen and Constant, who were also severely beaten.
One of his roommates recognised him and said: “That’s Mircea Vulcănescu.” He’s a university professor. “He’s got a head like that!” He even opened his arms to show me how smart he is. Even though we were all packed in together, I made room for him between us. “Maybe I can pick his brain a bit, or at least get some useful info, because he’s a real bookworm,” I thought to myself as I invited him to sit next to me.
I tried to get some more information from him, but I didn’t learn much more. The others told me: “Come on, you can see how weak he is, how beaten. Let’s stop asking him and stop tormenting him!” He didn’t say much – only to me and my neighbour. Other people would ask him questions, but he’d just answer in a simple, almost monosyllabic way and not engage in conversation.
He’d lost a lot of weight. He was unable to eat. He’d give me the food, but I couldn’t eat it because I was angry that he couldn’t. And yet I learned something important from him: that the true intellectual is unwavering and sacrifices himself for the ideas he believes in, demonstrating his commitment to these ideas through his actions. And he passes away peacefully.
The true intellectual is in tune with the concept of eternity. They live their lives in a way that reflects this, and they act from a perspective that encompasses eternity before entering it. This is the way I approach things now, based on what I learned from Mircea Vulcănescu. From his looks, his gestures and the few conversations we had – he was too tired to be at my disposal – he exuded eternity, insisting that ‘only God does justice’. “We can’t just make our own justice.” […]
I always thought the communist system would collapse, just like Mircea Vulcănescu said in Jilava. “I’m not going to be around to see it, but you will live to see the moment of liberation and the collapse of communism.”
(Nistor Man, Saints I have met. O convorbire cu Traian Călin Uba, Editura Fundației Academia Civică, Bucharest, 2012, pp. 67-68, 195)