I was born in January 1922 in the town of Barlad, from Orthodox Romanian people to nation. I attended primary school and high school in the city of Barlad, then the Academy of High Economic Studies in Bucharest.
I was arrested on May 16, 1948, and sentenced me to 15 years of hard labor, then 10 years of hard work for “subversive organization”, being classified as all political prisoners under Law no. 209, “foolishness to the safety of the state”.
We went through the following dungeons of the “Bolshevik Paradise”: the Interior Ministry on two occasions, Jilava on five occasions, Uranus, Pitesti, Gherla, Aiud on three occasions, Alba-Iulia, Galati on several occasions, Focsani, Ploiesti on two occasions, Codlea, Iasi, Periprava, Barlad on several occasions.
At the Interior Ministry I was subjected to protracted inquiries of 70 and 80 hours, without meals, without sleep or rest. From Internes, the first batch of convicts was sent to Pitesti in March-April 1949. Here was the Nicolski filter, the Moscow commissioner for Romania, seconded by General Dulgheru (the real name, Dulbergher), the head of the country’s inquiries, the officer politicians from Pitesti, Marina Iţicovici, and others from their team.
During the investigations, I was taken to Dulgheru’s office three times, and I was told, “Do not you mean? Let’s make sure we do not make you an academy out of jail! You say in Ural mercury mines! … “After us, other lots came from Iasi, Suceava, Cluj, Timisoara, Craiova, Braşov, etc. Cell capacity was up to four people, because there were two beds. They put seven and nine people in a two-by-four-meter cell. In the black cells, there were also 20-30 detainees – like the worms in the wound …
All the detainees faced Marina Iţicovici, who noted the resistance of each of them. Then the commander of the prison, Dumitrescu, along with a bunch of guards, rushed over those in Room 4 Hospital, beating them up to mutilation and banging them like packs of broken bones and flesh. They then gave Turcanu and his team a welcome.
Rooms were re-educated. They played “volleyball” with you and did not matter where they were hitting you. In front of me, one received a blow in the liver and died instantly. They put your head in the filth of dirt (urine, faeces, blood, pus, phlegm) and were baptizing your throat without letting you wash afterwards. I was put to eat and drink a jar of three kilos of such dirt.
My head was swollen as a bucket, my left eye was no longer visible, my left jaw broke. We pulled the cloth under our upper lip and pulled fistula with blood and pus. My buttocks and soles were black, both legs swollen like bumps for kicks. To deflate, I wrapped my legs in wet, lifting them on the walls. Again they put fifteen people on top of me in the stack in the space between the wall and the prick. In the fifteenth he plunged one, as the crush was bigger. I swollen the chest and broke my elbows on the cement. I kept until the eighth, then I let go of the air and all the right ribs broke.
At Room 1 in the basement, the head of the “re-education committee” was Mărăşine. On his order: “The Bandits, under the slums of marching,” they all went under, and he was struggling with a drug that was left out. Once, as I did not know where to go, I was three quarters out of my body outside – the drug blows stopped in my spine. Repeating in the same place, they made three vertebrae to give in, entering the column, after which I could not move a finger. But God has resolved my mutilation of the body … At Room 1, I was standing under the window at 12 o’clock. It was in January, the open window, and I wrapped it with a thin blanket like the gauze. I stood under the blanket with my knees in my mouth when I saw the fly fly off me and I heard Mărtinş’s voice: “What are you doing, the bandit?” I, calmly, I said, “I pray” – what I was doing . I would have given them an ax edge in my head. He’s been silent.
In Room 2 in the basement, where he was head of “committee” Leonida Titus, I was “made” a priest dressed in a blanket of Sandu Ghica. I was given a spoon and a spoon to “share” 70-80 people with dirt. Not wanting to execute the order, they came from the bottom of the room with a batt wrapped in a string and hit me in the head. I crashed. They watered me and slapped me until I came back. I had a big bump on my head. They put one to “stretch” my bump with the back of the range, which made me some frightening pain. Also in Room 2 I stood on the cup for two days and one night in one leg with my hands up. We had been disfigured, livid, we did not look like a man. Then I saw the sweat guns coming out of my skin with a very thin blood. Seeing me in that state, Titus told the others: “Bandits, do you see it? You will all be like him! “
During the Great Easter Week they made “the display of” priests and monks – the greatest blasphemy against God and the Most Holy Mother of God. I am a priest of Christ and I know and I think it is hell, but what was in Pitesti’s Great Easter Week, I believe it was worse than in hell … At Aiud I sat in a cell and in cell with priest Nicolae Pâslaru from Roman, with priest Barnovescu from Barlad, hieromonk Iustin Pârvu from Petru-Voda, priest Mihai Lungeanu from Iasi, and hieromonk Ioan Iovan from Recea. There I was doing my daily prayer. The program of the day was only on the knee, in the corner of the cell, except for closure-opening and tables. This is how the days fled as if it had not been. There, in Aiud, after nine years of prayer requests, God gave me a priest for confession, Father Nicholas Paslaru, I only sat with him and he confessed me a whole day. He took two yarns from the mattress, twisted them, sanctified them as epitrahil, and then confessed me. In prison and in prison, so did the Romanian Orthodox priests …
At that time, the medical student Mihai Lungeanu, the priest’s son, who had executed 10 years of imprisonment and now came with a new conviction of 15 years, brought us out a very small bag of parachute cloth, in which were hidden the Holy Mysteries, which were of great value to us. From the bread slice we received at the table, we took the core and weched it. After that, I took pieces as much as peas and made them flat. With the needle, I took the bag with the Holy One and put the flat-faced billiards on them, then we raised the edges like in the “waist-to-brace”, round them and flatten them. They were drying up and putting them in the two edges of a towel I never wiped off or on the collar and sleeves of a shirt. They were like a bigger lobster. They could not realize the search, because they were too small. In the great posts we transmitted to a priest on the cellular the baptismal name of each and at 6:00 when the bells were banged at the Orthodox Church in Aiud, we all fell on our knees in cells and made our confession, and the priest gave up.
In 1953 , at the Barlad Securitate, kept me seven days and seven nights in a chair behind an archive cabinet in the office of the service officer. I did not have a job with them, my schedule was quite busy: two Akathists, two Paraklisis, 15,000-20,000 “Lord Jesus …” We repeated the Gospels and Epistles in their minds, so I would not forget them. During an investigation, I asked for paper and ink to write a statement. On the paper I wrote: “I have not been and will not be a second of my life with you. I remain with those who have Christ. Signed: Vasile Patrascu “. Last night they gave me meat with cabbage. When I tasted five tablespoons of the spice, I felt the soda of dishes.
From those spoons, in six hours I became more yellow than orange. Seeing the color of my face, they put me in the van and sent me to the Focsani penitentiary, where for fifteen days I ate nothing and drank only boiled water. They sent a lieutenant-major to see how they behaved me and if I did not die. After another fifteen days, they took me to the infirmary, where a sick prisoner offered to give me from his bag two small tubes of meteor, which were the rescue of my liver. The Focsani dentist told me that he did not see such a jaundice in his life. I lived 87 days with half a pound of potatoes than nuts – that was ration – and God saved me. After this poisoning, for years and years I could not bear the oil or fat.
After the expiration of the punishment, I was given two years of “administrative” to Periprava, in the Delta. From Periprava, I freed myself with 200 priests, including Father Ilie Lăcătuşu. I got home in Bârlad at three o’clock. I jumped the fence. The dog was another, he did not know me anymore. My mom went out and asked who he was. She knew I was dead since 1957 when she got my pocket watch that I had put in Aiud, in the bags for home. When she recognized my voice, she was more likely to fall down. I supported her and went into the house. I asked her where my dad was and she said he was gone to the country. I told her that I was no longer a child, that death passed by me hundreds of times, but God escaped me, and I asked her again: “He died?” She told me he had been dead for two years, with pain in the soul that his two boys were in prison. That was the most difficult moment in my life.
On leaving the prison I worshiped all my suffering to God: “Lord, I worship You all my suffering. Those who have tortured me forgive them, please them and sanctify them. And if they need days of my days, I am ready to give them, for “the treasure of soul and mind is to love for forgiveness.” On leaving the prison, I wanted to go to northern Moldova to be my father, but the confessor he told me to stay in the world, not alone in the monk. And I remained in the world…
Tell the legend that it was a country
With golden hills and charming sky,
With the screech and song of water,
With holy trimmings in the village.
And in that land of buried times
They watched the view:
Stefan in Suceava, Mihai from Turda
In Olt, Mr. Tudor and lads.
Start the storm and hell through the country,
Legend does not say how many dead have died.
We’re just telling the elders that they’re cemeteries
Of the dead without the cross, by giving birth …
Memories of Father Vasile Pătraşcu
Father Vasile passed away “as a tear of blood”, in midday September 23, 2006. I lost a very grateful, beloved, respected and sometimes feared spiritual confessor for his firm orthodox attitude, but combined with great modesty and especially full of the spirit of gentle Christianity. Born on 1 January 1922 in Barlad , studied economics and theology. Spirit fighter since the adolescence, joined the Brotherhood of the Cross, then endured in his 18 years of imprisonment, continuously tortured for his intransigence and uncompromising attitude, and then continued his struggle for faith and race as a priest until at the end of his life. Father Vasile was of great modesty, sensitivity and kindness of soul – a great soul, always ready to help the needy. The cravings suffered in the prison in Pitesti failed to wash his brain, poison his soul, turn him into a “reeducated” who would deny everything he had most holy.
On the contrary, the hell from Pitesti embraced it and strengthened it in faith. Like other “pitesti”, he did not like to talk about what he suffered there, but in all his memoirs, Father Vasile Patrascu is quoted as an integrist resistance, who did not give up, did not go to Satan. parish village Nefliu Magurele, sometimes attending Sunday Mass or Holy Unction. The first thing that strikes you when you enter the beautiful and flowering courtyard of the church was the crowd of small white crosses that lined the bones of priests gathered by Father Basil on the churches demolished in the time of communism. The spirit of the Father’s manager and manager was obvious.
From a poor village church, grace and endeavor built a real place of pilgrimage, gathering believers from neighboring villages, from Bucharest and even from other corners of the country. The old church was strengthened, renovated and painted, and in its yard Father Basil built a parish house surrounded by a beautiful flower garden and ornamental trees. The Father also made other foundations and helped some parishes in need. The monumental neon rugs that the Father raised in the courtyard of the church, in front of the Institute of Atomic Physics at Magurele, and in other well-thoughtful places, shine with light and the most indifferent passerby who seems to wake up and make his mark of the Cross.
As the minister priest, Father Vasile was compelled by the diligence with which he served, without omitting a jot of the typical. Each ministry was a sacrifice, its own, and the believers in the church – through the meticulousness with which it served, through the conscientiousness with which it read all the martyrs of the year, through the order and discipline that ruled in the church.
The Sunday Mass began for him early in the morning and ended at about four o’clock. Most believers were kneeling throughout the Liturgy for hours, not because the Father had imposed it, but only because they felt that way the need to pray in the state of praise that reigned in the church. The fervent, untiring and gracious, gracious, Father Vasile was of a just but gentle severity that made you fulfill your canon not as a punishment, but with joy and spiritual cleansing. Holy Unctions that were in the church at Nefliu were famous as a great help to those who were in faith healing of soul and body, up to exorcism shattering, unforgettable for us, those we were witnesses. Served every Wednesday along with two other priests, the Holy Unction brought a special atmosphere in the church, imploring the aid of the Divine Power in the struggle for defeating the evil that torments the faithful.
Almost always on the altar stood a tormented person from whom, from time to time, there was a shrieking cry like a rage or a roar. They grew when the Father came to the altar and began to read the devotions and molitvas of St. Basil the Great, with the curses to Satan. If I see now Father Basil as he stopped reading and glanced savagely over his glasses, he commanded like thunder: “Shut up!” – and screams dumbing … A lady came in every ministry of the Holy Unction story as the Father has healed her condition, which doctors did not find a remedy. He sensed burning all, though the body temperature was the normal one. He came to Father Vasile and begged him, crying, “I am burning all, do something with me, Father!” And, with much prayer and endeavor, Father Vasile healed her – and now she came to the Holy Mass to please her of God.
I personally loved and honored Father Vasile in particular; he felt this, and although I was not a spiritual, I sometimes stood and told myself for hours together. Once he spoke of a terrible exorcism when the Father cried out to her evil spirits, “Who are you?” To whom he replied: “Believe me! And in the same month, a dog bite the Father by one foot, and the other one shed a varicella. The healing of these wounds lasted several months. Father Vasile’s church was always full, but more with people coming from places other than those in his village. The reason was that the Father showed them, without sparing and with frightening icons, the consequences of abortion, witchcraft, and other sinful practices in the village, for which reason the village witches made it a bad atmosphere among the inhabitants.
For me, Father Vasile Patrascu was much more than a dear friend. For my family, he was a true, good and just confessor, who helped us incessantly in difficult moments. The grave-filled tomb in the churchyard always comes with grateful gratitude to thank for the spiritual, moral and material help received from this unparalleled priest. God forgive and rest his great soul in the Garden of Heaven.
Erast Calinescu
