36 - In Jilava

Summary

One day in late November, the joy of being together with my distinguished colleague and Petrache Lupu, our good friend, was over, because I was taken to Jilava. I was only dressed in the clothes I had received in the zarcă, and the two shirts and the old underwear, when I received them, were torn. My clothes, which had kept me warm in the zarcă, were still at the Aiud penitentiary, even though I had asked for them when I left .

“Don't worry, you’ll be back here anyway,” said the hurried lieutenant who took me to the penitentiary in Sibiu. He didn't want to lose even five minutes more than he had to.

It was cold and snowing outside, and there was no fire burning in Jilava. I was taken to cell 20, in the fort surrounding its central redoubt. There were two rows of double bunks, one on top of the other, and nineteen inmates were sleeping on them. There were no blankets or mattresses, because the people in the room had their own clothes because they had not been sentenced. Why they put me with the detainees in the fort and not the inmates in the redoubt, I never found out. The next day, however, my new brothers in suffering gathered together all their rags and lined my clothes with them. My good friend, Colonel Petre Petrescu, former director of the ASTRA industrial works, gave me his sweater, because he had a furlined short coat. We were taken out for strolls once a week. I awaited this eagerly in the cold room. It was snowing outside. It was the first walk I had taken outdoors in a year and a half, and the clean air got me almost drunk.

Also in the room I found General Traian Teodorescu, former military attaché in Ankara and deputy chief of staff. He was a scholarly officer with a high temper. His systolic blood pressure was over 270 mm Hg, and later, when it went up to 285, a new kind of instrument had to be built to be able to measure it.