Vasilică Turtureanu, the man with kind and good eyes, able to radiate joy after 16 years in prison under two dictatorships

Among those gathered around me was a very tall, balding man who, despite his appearance, did not seem particularly old. He had a warm smile and kind, gentle eyes. He was not wearing the usual striped prison vest but a bundiette fashioned from a scrap of a cloak. Beneath it, he wore a sweater clearly assembled from the remnants of other woven garments—a patchwork of unravelled wool. Later, I learned that it had the same origin as the sweater I had received from Anagnostu, though mine had a different pattern and was made from two colours of old sweaters, whereas my new companion’s was certainly composed of several.

“I am Vasilica Turtureanu,” the tall, bald man said, extending his hand. “I was your age when I was arrested.”

I immediately tried to calculate his age and place it in relation to the time he mentioned, but I couldn’t. I needed to know how old he was. Perceiving my confusion, Vasilica clarified:

“I have been in prison since February 1941, after the Legionary uprising that January. I have two comrades here who were arrested at the same time.”

I was stunned—sixteen years in prison! How little I knew of what had happened and was still happening in my country. How little history we had been taught in school! Our parents told us almost nothing—out of fear. This was the first time I had ever heard that, in my country, there were political prisoners who had been passed from one regime to another.

Where was I? When and where had all these things taken place that I was only now beginning to learn? Until then, I had believed that everyone imprisoned had somehow tried to remove at least one brick from the foundation of communism, imposed upon the country against the people’s will. But why were they—Vasilica and the other two—imprisoned? Who had arrested and sentenced them, and why were they still behind bars?

They had been arrested and sentenced in 1941, before the outbreak of the war, following the January Legionary uprising. But the Antonescu regime no longer existed! Antonescu himself had been tried and executed. Why then were the Communists still keeping in prison those sentenced under Antonescu? How could they be found equally guilty under two utterly incompatible regimes?

I later learned that Vasilica Turtureanu’s only “crime” had been that he led the Brotherhood of the Cross in Bucovina. That was the sole charge for which he had been arrested under Antonescu’s rule and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison—of which he had already served sixteen when I met him. I could hardly believe it. I realised then that not only the Communists condemned their own people; our own country had done the same. I had dreamed of the values of a past I had never known, only to find they shared dark similarities with the very system I sought to overthrow. […]

Vasilica Turtureanu, too, had never known the sweetness of a kiss or the scent of a lover’s breast, but he had lived through the harsh reality of two dictatorships. […]

Yet my attention was drawn most strongly to Vasilica himself. I could not fathom how, after sixteen years of imprisonment, he had managed to preserve, display, and so generously share the gentle smile he seemed born with—nor how he had kept both his mind clear and his health relatively intact. I would often imagine the torments he must have endured and compare them to my own—magnifying them by the sheer weight of the years he had survived. The thought both shook and strengthened me, giving me the certainty that I too could endure the long years of suffering ahead. At that time, I had no idea what awaited me—how often I would find myself standing on the brink between life and death. […]

(Paul Andreescu – Colours of Suffering, Vol. II, Stef Publishing House, Iași, 2013, pp. 180–181, 192)