“What a saintly figure this priest was!”
In the cell was a dark-haired young man with a moustache, whose name was Costache. He said he was a hard worker, but that he liked mathematics. I agreed to do mathematics with him, but I didn’t have the necessary materials, paper and pencil, which were absolutely forbidden. I used an old familiar method of writing in the miserable conditions I was in. We used the bottoms of metal pots, which we soaped and then dusted with lime powder from the wall. We used a wooden stick instead of a pencil. Here are the materials for studying maths, so get down to work! Costache had found two matchsticks thrown on the floor by the guards, so we had two pencils! Here I am acting as a maths teacher in Jilava. […]
The 17th of April was Easter. I had two priests in my cell, Father Vasilachi and the hieromonk Dobzeu. On the eve of Easter we gathered around them and sang with muffled voices: “Christ is risen! Father Vasilachi was a vicar in the Patriarchate and secretary to Patriarch Nicodemos. He was in charge of the services that were transmitted by radio from the Holy Patriarchate. He was an exceptional man, of great culture, the likes of which I have rarely encountered among Orthodox priests. Priest Dobzeu was a different kind of man, simpler, but with great love for the faith in God.
They both had warm, masculine voices when they prayed or sang.
At all costs, I asked them to lead the Easter service. Some of the elders objected, saying it was not good to upset the guards. I said that if we were to be beaten or made to lie on our bellies on the cement, that could happen even if we didn’t serve Liturgy. In the end they agreed to do the work because God will help us and nothing will happen to us. The Liturgy was held in two parts, before and immediately after the “count”, in order to confuse the guards. The Liturgy celebrated by Father Vasilachi and the hieromonk Dobzeu was uplifting and I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. This Liturgy is forever engraved in my soul. All was quiet, everyone was happy, and at 10 p.m., when the curfew was announced, everyone fell asleep with folded hands in silent prayer to Our Lord Jesus, the Saviour of all who suffer. May Your resurrection, O Lord, bring about a resurrection of our souls in freedom in the near future. […]
Costache asked me if I knew how to play chess, and when I said I did, he began to make chess pieces out of a loaf of bread. The next day I gave him the crumb of my bread to finish the chess game. On the back of a blue coat I drew the chess board with a piece of plaster. We decided to play at certain times when I had a break from maths. For two days everything was normal, but on the third day the inevitable happened. A guard who used the boot-locks managed to catch us playing chess. He opened his visor and shouted: “But he didn’t wait, he opened the door and rushed in, grabbed the pieces, threw them on the floor and smashed them with his boot. Then, as we were lucky enough to have the prison outfit on us, he took us out of the cell. In the corridor he began to curse and beat us, pushing us towards the end of the corridor. Running and trying to escape the blows, we entered the guards’ room, where we found an officer who was apparently on duty that day on his mobile phone. The sergeant major, surprised to see the lieutenant in the office, stopped beating us and explained to the lieutenant that he had been watching us and found that we were playing backgammon with bread. “They’re rotten capitalists who gamble, comrade lieutenant,” the sergeant said. I told him that wasn’t true, that we were playing chess, not backgammon, and that it was just for fun.
The lieutenant asked to see the chess set, and we told him that the lieutenant had smashed it in the cell with his boot because it was made of bread. The lieutenant decided that we should be punished for this deviation from the rules with 5 days solitary confinement. So here we are, in solitary confinement! The cell was 10 metres long and 2 metres wide. It was completely empty, with no windows and water dripping down the walls.
It was a gloomy cell. To keep it from being dark, it had a dim light bulb above the entrance door. The cell was cold and damp. We kept moving in order to keep ourselves warm. In the evening, at 10pm, we were given a mattress and a blanket and told to go to bed. The mattress was damp, but once we were dressed, with our prison outfit on, we lay back to back, wrapped the blanket around us and went to bed. At 5am, after the alarm went off, our mattress and blanket were taken away and we were changed into an empty, but terribly smelling, bucket. After being counted, we were given a cup of hot water and a 100-gram slice of bread. Then no one asked us anything. [As hungry as we were, we realised that we had to keep moving or we would freeze to death. We sat back to back in a corner and felt better. It seemed to be a solution for the moment. It was still good that there were two of us and we could stay in this position. Another night passed and we slept on the same damp mattress, wrapped in the same blanket. The next day we got a hundred grams of bread and instead of hot water we got our ration of coffee!
The day passed slowly and hunger gave us no rest. We knocked on the door and asked for water to drink. After about an hour a cup of water was brought to me. By the third day I wasn’t hungry anymore. I tried to follow Dr Răileanu’s advice to drink water, as much water as possible! But here, in solitary confinement, we were only given water as a ration. If I drank two cups of water, I had the impression that I was no longer hungry! The third night we had the chance to get a second blanket, so we wrapped ourselves in both, but we didn’t give up the back-to-back position.
The day came when we were allowed to eat. We thought the food that day was excellent. The spaghetti with jam looked like a cake, just as tasty as the apple pie, which was my favourite cake. Two days of 100 grams of bread and hot water followed, and then we were back in the cell.
Our colleagues were waiting for us with sweets. Father Vasilachi gave me 300 grams of bread, his ration for three days, and told me that he was praying for me, that the good Lord would help me to be healthy and to get through this ordeal. What a saintly figure this priest was! What impulse can bring out in a person such wonderful qualities that it is difficult to describe? Fr. Vasilachi had a brother, also a priest, who had been imprisoned for about 10 years, but had not heard from his brother for more than 7 years. He had been through several prisons and now he was here where he had been given a new sentence of 8 years for some religious works that were later discovered in his house. He assumed that his brother had been released because his 8-year sentence had expired. […]
We were approaching Christmas[1] and the situation was quieter. About 20 more people were brought into our room who had had typhoid before they were in prison. So they were isolated with us. Among them was Colonel Andreescu, an old, brilliant officer. Again we had to stay in bed two by two. Although I was young, I found it difficult to move to the upper beds, so I occupied a bed on the ground floor, as we called it. I had Colonel Andreescu in my bed. [The colonel spoke little and always seemed tired. When he heard that Father Vasilache was in the room with us, he called him to his bed. He asked him if he was a brother of Father Vasilache, whom he knew. When Father Vasilache replied in the affirmative, Colonel Andreescu, with tears in his eyes, told us how he knew him, how he took care of him and in what conditions Father Vasilache’s brother died three years ago. The shock was very strong, because Father Vasilache had thought that his brother had been released three years ago. The Colonel told us that Father Vasilache’s brother had died three weeks before his sentence was due to expire. He told us that they had been in the same room together in hospital and described all the suffering that Father Vasilache’s brother had endured.
Everyone seemed deeply impressed by Colonel Andreescu’s account, which gave us many details of the operation to kill Father Vasilache’s brother.
How painful it must be to hear that you have lost your brother and to hear all the details that led to his death. For a week, Father Vasilache did not speak to anyone and prayed all the time.
At Christmas, Father Vasilache celebrated Liturgy in silence. We were happy to have him among us. Normally priests were isolated in special rooms, but Father Vasilache, being a Tific[2], stayed with us.
(Doru Novacovici – In Romania behind bars, Youth Foundation, Buzău, 1994, pp. 94-95, 96-98, 168-169)
[1] From this moment on, the action takes place in Gherla prison, a few years after the celebration of the Easter Mass.
[2] Ill with exanthematous typhus.