“To all the legionaries of Radio he was a good example of honesty and modesty, of good manners and tolerance”

In Zarca were imprisoned in diabolical isolation the legion leaders: Professor Nicolae Pătrașcu, Alex. Ghica, lawyers Radu Mironovici and Nistor Chioreanu, Alexandru Constant, Radu Gyr, Victor Biriș, Radu Budișteanu, Petrică Țocu, Eugen Teodorescu, Filon Lauric, etc. There were no more political prisoners working in the prison’s workshops, only ordinary prisoners, and the wards were full, as were the “mad rooms” in Section I and the “punishment cells” (a section set up after 1954).

I would also learn that on the ground floor, just below our cell, was V. Voiculescu (the poet), arrested and sentenced to hard years in prison in the trial of the intellectuals of Sandu Tudor’s “Burning Bush” organisation. The poet Sandu Tudor (later Father Daniel, abbot of the Rarău hermitage) had long since died; Dr. N. Roșu, Mircea Vulcănescu and other unfortunates shipwrecked in the oceans of “socialist humanism” had also died in prison.

Many years ago I worked with the poet Vasile Voiculescu at Romanian Radio. Most of the good things (if they were good) I did there in 1940 were due to the wise advice of this extraordinary man. He was not a legionnaire, his work during the Legionary Government was only humanitarian, not political. He was a good example of honesty and modesty, of good manners and tolerance to all the legionnaires at Radio. During Antonescu’s “executioner’s dictatorship”, no one, none of the royal commissioners-investigators found him guilty. The Communists considered him a “legionnaire sympathiser” and waited for the first opportunity to put him in prison. They did not forgive him. […]

Doctor V. Voiculescu followed him for a while through the window of the walk-in jail. He was like a shadow. He no longer had the beard that made him so interesting, he could hardly walk, he had become so dystrophic. For a while he didn’t appear (with his hands behind his back and his eyes on the ground, he walked through the pens in fear of the living), I never saw him again. He was also one of those who, powerless as they were, lacked the strength for the few hundred steps of the 10-15 minute walk every 2-3 days. He had fallen into bed, and the story of the priest Florea Muresanu was repeated: after many noisy “interventions”, some of which led to isolation in a mental hospital or in prison, a knock at the door, the doctor went to the prison ward, and not long after that came the death […] of the “great poet of the spirit”. When he died, the weight of the good doctor Vasile Voiculescu was not more than that of the unfortunate literary critic Dinu Pilat.

(Vasile Blănaru Flamură – Mercenaries of Hell. The curse of the files. Incredible întâmplări din Gulagurile românești, Elisavaros Publishing House, 1999, pp. 262-264)