“Uncle Dumitru, the imprisoned saint of our family”

I spent the summer of 1964 in Govora with my mother’s sister, a doctor in the resort. I was studying for the university entrance exam with my cousin. Suddenly we heard the news… Uncle Dumitru had been released from prison.

Uncle Dumitru – a name pronounced with reverence in our family, an uncle who had the aura of a saint for us. An uncle for whom we always prayed that God would give him the strength to endure, that we would see him again and that we children would know him. He was in Cluj, admitted to the hospital for internal diseases. His former university colleagues, now professors and directors of clinics, cared for him with an extraordinary devotion for those times, transferring him from clinic to clinic, trying to cure or alleviate his ailments acquired during 23 years of hard imprisonment.

On my way back to Oradea, at the beginning of a warm September, when nature was still in the fullness of its power and beauty, I interrupted the trip to Cluj.

I was looking for my uncle in the clinic. And as I was sitting in an alleyway lined with multi-colored rose bushes, my uncle suddenly appeared in front of me.

Tall, very thin, pale, with an ascetic figure, but serene and smiling, with snow-white hair, dressed in his pyjamas and hospital gown, he embraced me and kissed my cheeks, my forehead and my hands.

I was so excited, there before me was a saint, a saint of prisons, whom I had always prayed for, whom I had dreamed of so often.

He was the man in whose arms my father died in Aiud prison.

He began to ask me about everyone; I was the first in the family to visit him. He was interested in every member of the family, in prison he had been completely isolated after the communists came to power.

He wanted to know if they were healthy, if they were alive, what jobs those who were young or children at the time of their arrest had, if they were married, if they had children or grandchildren, what they did, how they thought.

From the way he asked the questions, from the comments he made, I could see that he was very much out of touch with reality. He, a man of absolute sincerity who remained faithful to his beliefs even when the consequences were terrible, did not understand from the start the duality in which most of us lived; we felt one thing and did another, overwhelmed by the fear of reprisals from the Securitate, the fear that we children would be thrown out of school and the adults – that they would be unemployed. Were we cowards or did we realise that the communist monster was much stronger than us and that the international situation was not in our favour either? Moral values, faith in God, the spirit of justice, freedom, democracy, fairness, love of country and nation, love and respect for the traditions of the Romanian people, care for their preservation and perpetuation were secretly cultivated in our family. We never said them out loud at school or in the presence of strangers.

In Aiud, Dumitru Uță had refused any kind of “re-education” and had spent many years in a completely isolated section of the prison, with much harsher conditions than in the main prison, which was already very hard.

I knew from his family that he had been an exceptional student, passionate about medicine, a believer in the principle that the doctor should heal both the body and the soul of the sick.

Arrested in 1941 after the “rebellion”, he was sentenced by the Antonescu regime to 25 years in prison and interned in Aiud.

Until the communists came to power, he was able to practise medicine both inside and outside prison.

With his solid knowledge of the field, he was in demand by the city’s notables and ordinary people alike.

It was during this time that a high school student, Viorica Motolea, met and fell in love with him. Over the years, their lives became closely intertwined.

After the change of political regime, the father of the family took steps to get him out of prison.

To do this, his uncle would have to declare in writing that he disagreed with his ideas and joined the Communist Party.

He refused, preferring further imprisonment to renouncing his political beliefs or being hypocritical.

And so he lived in total isolation, cut off from the world, completely deprived of medical care, let alone religious care, without books or writing utensils, in the cold, without food, with poor hygiene, without the benefit of sunlight or fresh air, insulted, mocked and threatened throughout his almost 20 years of imprisonment under the Communist regime.

It was his faith in God, his upright character and the certainty that he was fighting for a just cause that kept him alive.

After a period of treatment in clinics in Cluj and a sanatorium in the area, he ended up in Bucharest, where he had many cousins and grandchildren. With no job, no place to live and only the money provided by his mother and his sister, a doctor, he had to take them in. He was welcomed with great affection, some even with awe, and stayed with each of them for only a few days. People were overwhelmed by fear of reprisals from the Securitate. Uncle had been informed of the reality of the country and did not remain silent. He was very critical of socialism and communism, of the situation in the country and of the whole socialist system, and of the betrayal and indifference of the West. In those days, it was enough to complain to the Securitate that you had ideas contrary to the ideology of the Communist Party and you could lose your job or be arrested, especially if you had a “bad record”. So after only two or three days, a polite reason would be found for breaking off the stay, and the uncle would go to another relative without being surprised or upset. But the uncle continued to speak without censorship and to frighten people. Only in time, with Aunt Viorica’s help, did he realise the truth behind the polite reasons for not continuing his stay. His family had looked up to him as a hero while he was in prison and had looked after him, but now, on his release, many of them, with a “bad record” of their own, were afraid. So there were nights when he slept in the trams that ran in the city at night.

By God’s providence, Viorica, the student who fell in love with him many years ago and who always carried his icon in her heart, learns that he did not die in prison, that he is free and in trouble in Bucharest. Although she is a school principal and professor emeritus of biological sciences, she gives up everything, comes to Bucharest and manages to find him.

They share a rented flat in Secuilor Street. Uncle is refused the licence exam, but manages to get a job as a medical assistant at the Neurology II Clinic of the Central Hospital for Neuropsychiatric Diseases. Aunt Viorica, with the help of her family, buys an apartment near the hospital and becomes a department head at the Didactic Enterprise.

Strict and demanding, with a high regard for his profession, his uncle made a superhuman effort to keep abreast of everything that had been achieved in neurology in twenty-five years. He spent a lot of time in libraries, studying treatises, reading articles in journals and was fluent in French, English and German. Knowing his history, the doctors at the hospital respected and valued him, and so his uncle was able to attend the specialisation courses for neurologists organised by the Ministry.

He discreetly used his wealth of knowledge to give medical and psychological advice to patients admitted to the ward. Although he did not have a car, he often made home visits to patients who had been admitted and needed to continue their recovery at home, or at their request. He tried to treat and comfort both body and soul. He offered medical and religious explanations to the sick. Together with Aunt Viorica, he often helped the needy with food. He never accepted money; he was a holy unmercenary.

He was demanding and with us, his grandchildren, an iron hand in a velvet glove. Both he and Aunt Viorica were big-hearted givers, hosting many grandchildren who went to school in Bucharest. He was very keen that we should practise our professions at the highest professional level and that we should know foreign languages so that we could be informed. Uncle had an encyclopaedic culture and we loved to listen to him.

We would often go to mass in the convent of Cernica and then eat on the green grass, and uncle would speak to us in simple words, making extraordinary connections between seemingly opposite things. We wondered how so much information, so much knowledge from so many fields, so different from his profession, could enter a man’s mind. He and his brother Constantin Uță, a great intellectual and professor of philosophy, often had heated, sometimes contradictory discussions.

In discussions with us, he had an infinite calm and patience in arguing his point without offending us. His faith in God was strong and deep. He only missed Mass when he was on call at the hospital. He ate little and fasted a lot. He slept little and worked hard. We always wondered how a man who had been tortured for years in prison could have such a strong body. Only God helped him and gave him strength.

He talked to us about faith and prayer, he analysed with us the parables of the Gospels, often giving them a profound and original interpretation. He talked to us about the physical and spiritual benefits of fasting, but he did not force us to fast. He educated us, but did not force us. He taught us not to judge our fellow human beings and, if we cannot correct someone with kind words, to leave everything to God and to pray for it. Sometimes he gave us the strength to fast with him, just by his personal example.

When he did not speak, we always had the impression that he was praying in his mind, and he was. At that time I didn’t know about the prayer of the heart. I learned about it later, also from my uncle.

After the earthquake in 1977, my uncle became very ill and his old suffering was reactivated. The earthquake put him in hospital. The Neurology II Clinic was in a very old building and many patients were bedridden. The building was badly damaged and the patients were suffering. My uncle stayed in the hospital for over 48 hours, along with other medical staff. Excessive fatigue and emotions reactivated his old ailments.

He continued to work under treatment until he retired. Now he had become more distant from us and we felt that he had withdrawn into prayer. One day he fell into bed and Aunt Viorica nursed him with great devotion. He died on the morning of the 5th February 1980.

His passing into eternal life affected all of us who were close to him. We have lost a dear friend who was a good listener, a good counsellor and a good saviour. I deeply regret that the thread of his life was not longer, that he did not get to enjoy our children, the grandchildren he trained. I very much regret that he did not have time to write his memoirs in the few years he lived after his release from prison. He was much more concerned with keeping up to date with the latest developments in medicine and with his patients.

(Felicia Deac – Rost Magazine, Year X, Issue 106 of February 2012, pp. 35-39, material prepared by Ioana Alina Dida)