We, the Băldescu family of priests…

From generation to generation, in our family, the Baldeists, there has been a priest. Me, my father, my grandfather and… going back, my great-grandfather; and…

In order not to get lost in time, I will start with my great-grandfather, the priest Ilie Băldescu, from Mihăiești commune, Olt county. Married to Maria, a simple peasant girl with a lot of common sense, he had three sons: Ioan, Radu and Marin.

To their credit, all three boys, went to school and were successful. The eldest, Ioan, became a priest; the second, Radu, embarked on a career in the military, reaching the rank of general; and the third, Marin, made a name for himself in the field of education, reaching the rank of school inspector.

Of the three children, only Ioan Băldescu, my father, had a male heir. I was baptised Emil-Emilian. I was the first boy in a row of eight children. According to family tradition, I was destined for the priesthood. In fact, it was also my wish, because I had learned from my father the truth that… the priest must be a “doctor” of the human soul. I remember that when I decided to take the path of the Church, my father asked me: “Do you feel up to it? And I said yes. (…)

Everything seemed natural, normal, until… until communism was established in our country. That was the decisive moment when the country’s destiny, which had been based on Christianity and love of country, changed direction and became based on atheism and… (…) Our family could not escape the communist yoke, thrown into slavery along with so many others. The first tribute was paid by my father’s brother, my uncle, General Radu Băldescu (…) The tragedy of my uncle will continue with the tragedy of his brother, the priest Ioan Băldescu, my father and, later, with me.

But first a few words about my father. He graduated from the seminary in Bucharest in 1906. With the intention of becoming a priest, he had married a girl from near his home village, Mihăilești. However, he was involved in the peasant movements of 1907 and was prosecuted as an instigator. He had to leave his home town and was sent to become a priest in the commune of Seaca, Teleorman County.

The year was 1908. He arrived there with his young wife, who held a child in her arms, me. Seaca, as the name suggests, was a poor village of about 260 households. He was taken in by an old, childless widower who left him the house in his will. The other children were born there, eight of them. […] The misery was great. No priest had lasted more than two years. The peasants worked on the estate of a certain Mauriciu Blanck, an estate of about 2175 hectares given to dishonest managers, such as the Mone brothers and a certain Hasan Rudolf. My father, a man sensitive to the suffering of the peasants, took up the fight against the managers and the landlord. They tried to corrupt him in various ways. They did not succeed. Nicolae Iorga and Tache Protopopescu proved to be good allies in his struggle. Especially Iorga, to whom my father provided many subjects worthy of comment in the magazine “Neamul Românesc”, Iorga’s newspaper. As a result of his efforts, the estate was wrested from the hands of the greedy managers and taken over by the Rural House. Then the village also acquired a 675 hectares pasture, which remained the property of the village, as there was no other commune around. […] In the same way, during the post-war expropriation, my father personally took part in the measurement of the land allocated to the peasants, so that not a single person was left unsatisfied. The local people loved him, I could say they adored him. But his superiors appreciated him too. That is why, in July 1919, he was appointed “Protopope of Teleorman County”[3]. Although he was a rural priest, his new position, which he held until 1933, obliged him to direct the pastoral and missionary activity of an area equivalent to the present Teleorman County. The position made him responsible for four large cities: Turnu Măgurele, Roșiorii de Vede, Alexandria and Zimnicea.

When he left the commune of Seaca, a commune he had found pitiful, he left behind him some remarkable achievements: two schools, a modern building for the town hall, a new church (consecrated in 1916), a 7-room parish house, a people’s bank and a dispensary. These are places that still exist today. The elders of Seaca, as many as there are, are witnesses that all this is due to the priest Ioan Băldescu, who did not die in vain.

Despite his position as a priest, my father did not want to leave Seaca for good. But in 1928, a decision by the Patriarch Miron Cristea forced him to move to Turnu Măgurele, the capital of the diocese. Since he did not want to give up his religious service, he was assigned to the Cathedral of St. Haralambie in Turnu Măgurele. After leaving the commune of Seaca, he did not leave it completely, as he kept a “string of land”, that was 5.25 hectares of land, which he worked with his own hands year after year. But it was not long before he was accused of being a “landlord” of this land (1952) and paid for it with his life. But it was not only his status as a ‘landlord’ that was to blame, but also the fact that he was a priest and, more seriously, a liberal politician. In fact, he had been elected senator in the 1933 election on the Liberal Party lists.

Priest, farmer, liberal… too many “faults” in the eyes of the Communists! He would have to pay for them.

The lighting struck on 15 August 1952, the Dormition of the Mother of God. It was towards evening, I think it was 10 or 10.30pm, when I said goodbye to him. I had spent most of the evening with him discussing the tragic fate of his brother, General Radu Băldescu, my uncle, who had been arrested a year earlier. We were trying to find a way to contact him, as we hadn’t heard from him since his arrest. Unwittingly, the Security Service … gave us a helping hand. As soon as we got home, my father was arrested. I was arrested the same night. We were both taken to Turnu Măgurele. Later, in the Ghencea camp, where we were taken, we found out that my uncle, Marin Băldescu, my father’s brother, who lived in Mihăești, Olt County, had also been arrested that same night. We were no exception, because that same night there were massive arrests all over the country. (…)

At night, loaded into two lorries filled with the best of Turnu Măgurele’s spirituality, we arrived at dawn at the Ghencea camp, guarded by the secret police.

A strange world opened up before me. I had always thought that prison was for those who kill, steal, destroy, etc. And suddenly… I looked at the handcuffs on my hands and the chains on my legs and those next to me and realised that it wasn’t our dangerousness that had made the secret police put us in chains, but their pleasure in humiliating us. That was the beginning. The humiliation would continue, and for many of us it would end in death.

At Ghencea our chains were removed. We were crammed into barracks, huddled together. I was with my father, I had not been separated from him. We were both in chains, not knowing what awaited us, our main concern being for those left at home. My mother was left alone, without any help, because my father’s pension had been cut off a few months before. So was my wife, a housewife with two small children to look after. I was their only support. I thought that if they were evicted from the parish house, as was expected and happened, they would have nowhere to go. I didn’t tell my father and he didn’t tell me, but it was written in our eyes. Our only consolation was that we were still together. That’s what I asked in my secret prayers to the good Lord: that we would never be separated on the path of this ordeal that was just beginning. And God answered my prayer.

In early September, my father fell ill. He had been suffering from a heart condition for some time, that soon aggravated. He was breathing harder and harder. I took him to the camp infirmary. The doctor there was kind enough to admit him, but there was no medicine. He was there for about 10 days. But he didn’t come out any better. He had just turned 66 and I never imagined that his life had begun to wither away.

On 18 September we were all taken out of the barracks and brought to the assembly area. A committee had come to triage us. They said that those who were fit to work should be taken to the canal. And so it was. But they didn’t just take the able-bodied. Like my father.

The second day, 19 September, the group destined for the canal route, about 400 people, were put in lorries and driven on a back platform in from the Bucharest-triage railway station . There we were loaded into several railway carriages. I held my father in my arms and tried to get him close to a small window where there was still some air circulating. But there was no more room. Between our legs was the priest of Alexandria, Father Serculescu, who was also ill. We stood on one leg so as not to crush him.

The third day, 20 September, at dawn, we felt the howling of the Cernavodă bridge below us. We were crossing into Dobrogea. And suddenly, I don’t know who among us made the assumption that they were not takins us to the canal, but that they wanted to throw us into the sea. A logical assumption, as there were too many sick people among us.

But the train stopped at Dorobanți station. We were taken off and rounded up. Between the armed guards we crossed the city towards the Gale; Coast, a colony in formation. As our pitiful convoy passed, the locals, standing at a distance, looked at us in amazement. I saw many of them wiping away tears.

When we reached the top of the plateau between the huts, we were told to sit down. The ground was damp and a strong wind was blowing. The commander came and called the roll. Then he said, “You have been brought here to do 60 months’ work. It was our sentence, which had just been communicated to us.

The next day, a Sunday, we began our work around the colony; finishing the construction of the barracks, putting up the fences, digging the holes for the cupboards, etc. It was our respite, our “acclimatisation”, so to speak, with our new prison. That’s how we found out that the water was brought all the way from Constanța, in barrels, and only for the kitchen. They soon told us why: it was also used for cooking in the secret police canteen. We were not allowed to use even a drop of this water for washing.

He died pushing the wheelbarrow

My problem was that I was separated from my father. He was in one brigade and I was in another. In the evening of Tuesday 23 September I found out where my father was. With great difficulty I sneaked into his barracks. It was the last time we spoke. The poor man tried to console me. He told me that he was very happy that I, one of his children, had put on a priest’s cassock. And he made me promise never to betray my mission.

The next day came, Wednesday 24 September. Father’s brigade was working the first shift. Mine was the second shift. On the way, at a distance from each other, our columns of the doomed crossed each other’s paths. The column returning from the construction site was carrying a dead body. At that distance I didn’t realise it was my father. I was to find out later that it was my father, carried on the shoulders of the priests Leonida Dumitrăchescu and Ioan Turcu, with the help of others. Dead, they took him to the colony to be present at the roll call.

When I returned from work at night, around midnight, I was told that my father had died. I was told he was in the infirmary. As it was night, it was impossible to get out of the barracks. It’s hard to describe the night I spent there. When daylight came and the alarm went off, I ran to the infirmary. The orders were that no one was to see him again, but I met a humane guard. His name was Tocaliuc, a Bukovinian, and he allowed me to see him. He was thrown into an unused toilet cubicle intended for the infirmary. I found him lying there in his priest’s garb, the clothes he had been arrested in and had never taken off. Then I found out how he died: pushing a heavy metal wheelbarrow up a high railway embankment. His heart couldn’t take it. He fell as if struck by lighting near a man called Roman from Ploiești. A doctor, Teodorescu, from Bucharest, a prisoner of the same brigade, was quickly called and pronounced him dead”.

I returned to my brigade with tears in my eyes. When I heard the news, I was surrounded by some of my compatriots (…) And I remember my first impulse: to be happy for my father, who had escaped humiliation! It wasn’t a very orthodox thought, I admit, but that’s what I thought at the time. My prayer had come true, that I would be at my father’s side until the last moment. But was I?

[After my release], I returned home to my parishioners, who welcomed me with great love. I had gone to prison with my father. I returned without him.

And life went on as before, supposedly “in freedom”. But I knew only too well, as did my family, that the ruthless Securitate was watching our every move. But what the Securitate never knew was that our faith in God was stronger than them. If you have that in your heart, you have nothing to fear from anyone or anything on this earth. That is what the Security Service didn’t know…

(Fr. Emil Băldescu – Memoria Magazine, No. 9, pp. 18-26)