Vasile Turtureanu – a tall, handsome, friendly young man with impeccable manners

After Father Codilă’s death, there were other, less tragic accidents in the underground. I will record the ones that come to mind, which occurred in Sector 12 West, for which I was responsible before the technical office. […]

In March 1951, I was in the shaft, about a kilometre from the access tunnel. The seam there was only one and a half metres thick, with a low concentration. A drilling team had been assigned, with Vasile Turtureanu from Suceava as the driller. He was a tall, handsome, and friendly young man, impeccably dressed, who had been arrested in 1941.

When I arrived, Vasilica greeted me cheerfully and said,
“Mr. Goga, I didn’t let go of the drill because the rock wasn’t safe.”

I asked him to continue securing the drilling site by suturing it in my presence. Armed with a two-metre crowbar, Vasilica—who was standing on a boulder—removed his colleagues from beneath the unstable rock and began drilling again. After a few strikes, a mass of slabs and boulders collapsed upon him, covering his body in seconds and nearly suffocating him. We rushed to free him. He was conscious, not crying out, but said he felt pain in his spine. A large slab, leaning against the embankment and supported at one corner by the boulder on which Vasile had been standing, had saved him from death.¹

We did not move him until Dr. Șercăianu arrived from the underground first-aid post. With the help of a blanket, we carefully lowered him through the narrow passage, then placed him on a makeshift stretcher, transferred him onto a wagon, and, accompanied by Dr. Șercăianu, brought him to the shaft to be evacuated to the surface. The next day, I met him in the infirmary. He was calm. His spine was not broken, only seriously injured. He suffered from headaches, which he bore with the stoicism of a man long trained by suffering. After months in hospital, the headaches persisted. Eventually, he was sent to Aiud.

(Nicolae Goga – The Triangle of Death. Memories from Baia Sprie 1950–1952, ed. Marineasa, Timișoara, 1995, pp. 86–88)

The accident suffered by Vasile Turtureanu, though serious, proved to be an extraordinary act of divine providence—one that saved him from the diabolical Pitești experiment. The explanation is given by the victim himself, in an interview recorded during the final years of his life:

“Around 1950, in the Baia Sprie mine, I had an accident. The ceiling collapsed above me. When it fell, two large slabs wedged into each other, and I was left in the space beneath. That’s how I escaped with my life. It was a miracle—one of the many miracles God has worked for me. But smaller stones fell on me; I had a fractured spine and several broken ribs.

I was in a cast for seven months. It was a hard time, filled with great pain, unable to move. Alone, with no one to talk to, only a sour and grumpy common prisoner brought me food. I struggled to feed myself. I couldn’t lift my hands to my mouth. I would lie down, take the bowl, raise it to my mouth, and from a distance, pour the contents of the spoon into my mouth. For seven months, I lived that way. My only support was prayer.

God gives you one suffering to save you from another. The accident in the mine saved me from re-education in Pitești. They wanted to send me there, but because I was in a cast, they didn’t transfer me. I had a good angel watching over me.”

(Testimony of Vasile Turtureanu given to Father Moise in May 2007 – The Saint of the Prisons, Reîntregirea Publishing House, Alba Iulia, 2007, pp. 56–62)