“We, the younger ones, were like cups receiving the nectar of this wonderful man’s wisdom”
The period 1953-1956 was one of international political relaxation after Stalin’s death, when the West still hoped that East-West disputes could be negotiated. It was not until October that Hungary tore down the Iron Curtain and the Soviet colossus brought tanks to restore order in Budapest.
In Romania, the political prisons, though overcrowded, saw a rapid influx in the autumn after the Hungarian tendency to break out from behind the curtain was stifled.
In the dreadful communist prison of Gherla, where I survived, the already precarious diet suddenly got worse. Goiciu, the prison commander, appeared at the count with his sinister figure of terror, personally checking the cells, accompanied by the zombies Șomlea, Cârciu, Bunea and his whole gang of thugs, criminals with abject sympathy, whose numbers were strictly secret. The triages were intensified and the cells searched to the point where a cloud of dust gathered in the cells. The purpose of the triages was to prevent escapes, but only the souls of the exterminated escaped. […]
Such a sorting, with “glasses” on my face so that I couldn’t see anything on the way, brought me out of isolation into a room with about a hundred human ghosts. Once inside, I found myself suspected by several dozen gazes that probed me in a sharp zigzag.
One of the hundred or so greeted me by introducing himself as Nicu Steinhardt. I inked my own name and, led by another, was offered a place for ‘accommodation’.
Nicu Steinhardt appeared to be human, but in reality he had a protruding skull, bulging eyes and temples crisscrossed with veins that showed under the skin. His head, attached to the skeleton by a fragile neck, gave the impression of a dead man. His slender hands were bones attached to a former lung cavity that seemed to retain the outline of a human body. His gaze, and especially his voice, made one wonder why his soul had not yet escaped from these human remains. The necessary inner service in this silent community was done by those who were still standing.
Nicu Steinhardt offered what little he had for the benefit of the bedridden and served in their place. Often he would lie on the floor in a faint and, after being picked up and placed on the nearest bed, he would get up and continue his Golgotha. Apart from this domestic work, N. Steinhardt kept the calendar records, and after the latches had creaked at the evening count, he would climb on a bed and sow light from his lamp into the cups of the “auditorium”.
We younger ones were like the cups, receiving the nectar of this wonderful man’s wisdom. We learned. We took notes on pieces of glass, soap dishes or other objects, in literature, history, languages, poetry, etc.
But the parting was as random as the composition from which I now gather the fragments of these painful memories.
N. Steinhardt has remained engraved in me like a marble of light that, detached from his nation, enters into the community of sincere humility of Romanian Christianity with the deed and the concern that characterises the monk. This monk now has his eternal rest in an Orthodox monastery in northern Transylvania.
(Mihai Făget – Chain of Assassins. Memories and Evocations from Communist Prisons. Versuri, Macarie Publishing House, Târgoviște, 1999, pp. 17-18)