The supreme victory of the poem “Get up, Gheorghe, Get up, Ioane!” and the Poet Radu Gyr! The spirit of Radu Gyr is alive, despite the brucans who sentenced him to death!

The poet zRadu Gyr (b. March 2, 1905, Câmpulung Muscel – d. April 29, 1975, Bucharest) was sentenced to death for the poem Pick upyourselfGheorghe, Get up, Ioane!, originally called Manifesto. He was kept in “DEATH CELL”, isolated for a whilemonths, without being NOTICEthat the punishment i– has been switchedto 25 years of hard prison.

The hatred of the Comintern Clique against the poet was and is total. After August 23, 1944, the newspaper Scânteia, under the direction of KGB agent Silviu Brucan, demanded the death sentence of the poet. In the lawsuit filed by the People’s Court (executive body of the Romanian Communist Party), public prosecutor Alexandrina Sidorovici, Brucan’s wife, tries to humiliate himto the great melody of the Romanians, which has become for the occupier “criminal from rasbestos“, because he had supported and fought in the war for the reunification of Romania, following the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Bowl newspaperssheviks declared“civilian deathUm“, the author was forbidden in “principle”, his entire work came under the ban, as s-aalso happened with the work of other great Romanian creators: Octavian Goga, Mihail Manoilescu, Mircea Vulcănescu, Nichifor Crainic and others. During political detention, where he was subjected to a regime of physical and mental extermination, he was declared dead, being taken on a stretcher to the morgue. God wanted a doctor, also a former political prisoner, to–and realize that he is not dead and tosave him from being thrown into the mass grave at Aiud prison.

“The death” of Radu Gyr was the Comintern motto. But the divine plan was differentit looks at the Poet of Romanian Suffering. He survived the detention regime and lived another 12 years, putting down the poems composed in communist prisons. His daughter, Simona, removed from the faculty by Alexandrina Sidorovici (from the position of dean!), managed to fully publicthe poems that brought light and comfort to the communist catacombs. The former political prisoners spread further these treasures of Christian and Romanian thought and soul, penetrated into the souls of Romanians, who sing and recite his verses. Against the programmed death of the Pack, the Spirit of Radu Gyr lives!

Read the lyrics and listen to the song, followed by the testimonies of Bolshevik prison confessors about the Apostle of Prisons, Radu Gyr:

Pick upyourselfGheorghe, Get up, Ioane!

Not for a shovel of brown bread,
Not for blankets, not for epaulettes,
But for your free air tomorrow
Get up, Gheorghe, get up, Ioane!

For the blood of your people flow through the ditches,
For your song, nailed up,
For the tear of your chained sun,
Get up, Gheorghe, get up, Ioane!

Not for the anger crushed in the masses,
But to collect by knocking on the breadwinner
A cup of stars and a hat of stars,
Get up, Gheorghe, get up, Ioane!

So that you can drink the freedom from the sips
And in it to sink like a sky in bulbs
And shake off her curses on you,
Get up, Gheorghe, get up, Ioane!

And to put all your hot kiss
On thresholds, on lintels, on doors, on icons,
Above all, freedom comes before you,
Get up, Gheorghe, get up, Ioane!

Get up, Gheorghe, on the chains, on the ropes,
Get up, John, on the holy rocks,
Up in the last light of the storm,
Get up, Gheorghe, get up, Ioane!

In Radu Gyr’s biography, compiled by a group of former political prisoners, coordinated by the poet Aurel Constantin Dragodan, it is written: “It was said that Radu Gyr’s poetry alleviated, to the highest degree, the sufferings of political prisoners, constituting – an irreplaceable spiritual food for them. The poet’s work – written mentally in prisons and transmitted via Morse code – is today part of the cultural treasury of the country, but it is too little known. We do our duty of honor to contribute to the restitution action of this martyr of Romanian spirituality, who spent almost a third of his life in camps and prisons. We begin by presenting some biographical data, communicated by his daughter, Mrs. Monica Popa. Radu Demetrescu was born on March 2, 1905, in Câmpulung Muscel. At the age of 3, he moved with his family to Craiova, where his father, the actor Coco Demetrescu, had been employed at the National Theatre. The student attends the primary and secondary courses at the “Carol I” High School, graduating brilliantly in 1923. He writes poems from the age of 10, so that at the age of 14 he publishes the dramatic poem “In the mountains”. Due to the fact that he had started to publish epigrams, which did not suit the director of the high school, he used the pseudonyms Radu Gruiu (from the hill in the surroundings of Câmpulungului) and then R. Gyr. In the period 1923-1927, he attends the courses of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters in Bucharest, becoming first an assistant, then a university lecturer at the chair of Literary Aesthetics and Universal Literature, settling definitively in the Capital. From 1937, the suffering of detentions begins: under Charles II, he was interned in the camp, so that the Antonesian regime would condemn him, grant him amnesty and then forcefully send him to the front, even though he was medically reformed. In 1945 he was included in the “journalists’ group” and sentenced to 12 years, returning home at the beginning of the summer of 1956, only to be considered “enemy of the people” again after 2 years and sentenced to death, commuted to hard labor for life; on May 20, 1963 he was pardoned. He died on April 29, 1975, as a result of cerebral congestion, after his body had been ravaged by diseases: hemophilia, duodenal ulcer, lung lesions, etc., as a result of the inhumane conditions in which he had to live. Radu Gyr published the following volumes of poems: “Quiet hermitages” (1924), “Plânge Strâmbă-Lemne” (1927), “Cerbul de lăgăme” (1928), “Stars without a cradle” (1936), “Dry wreaths” (1938), “The Shrub Ship” (1939), “War Poems” (1942), “Ballads” (1943); his creation also includes plays in verse, literary studies and essays, poems and stories in verse for children, translations from Verlaine, Baudelaire, Goethe, Jammes, Yugoslav folk ballads, etc. (Biography source: the work Poets behind barsedited by Petru Vodă Monastery)

Confessors of communist prisons about the poet of prisons, Radu Gyr

Father Justin Pârvu: “If it weren’t for the poems of Radu Gyr and Nichifor Crainic, a lot of the essence of the martyrs and those who went through the communist prisons in Romania would be lost. All of these maintained the strong spirit of the youth, of an entire nation! Their spirit was so strong in the essence of our peasant, of our man connected to the beautiful life, to the woods and to our dead. Only in this way was the resistance to communism formed in the years 1947-1950. In prison, in addition to his powerful prayers, there were his beautiful poems Radu Gyr and others who wrote as if they were writing a prayer. If spiritual life was maintained there, in prison, it was because of Radu Gyr’s poems.”

Confessor Nicolae Purcărea: “One of the pillars of light that guided us in the prison was Radu Gyr. To him we should raise a monument to the sky, because he was the one who sustained us spiritually and constantly instilled hope in us, but not only that. He was the one who kept us as close as possible to God, kept us as close as possible to Romanian spirituality. His poems were the most important drug that kept us in prison. Radu Gyr it was for us a monument that brought us both joy and hope, and that constantly encouraged us”.

The witness Aspazia Oțel Petrescu: “Radu Gyr was a Christian and all his poetry is of a deep Christian experience. And it is an affective experience. You see, the Savior asks for a warm faith, a faith that passes through the heart. Jesus knocks on the door of our heart. Radu Gyr’s Christianity does not it’s cerebral, it’s emotional. It’s lived, it’s felt. We in prison remember the moments when we learned his poems.

If Jesus said that anyone who turns someone in His name from a wrong path will be called an Apostle, what will Radu Gyr who brought so many souls out of despair be called? How many times must he be called an Apostle just for this fact? Because he helped “n” number (“n” means infinity basically, a number beyond imagination). An unfathomable number of prisoners found in the poem “Jesus in the cell” the possibility of finding the traces of His nails in their palms. Is this a small thing?”

Confessor Ilie Tudor: “Besides prayer, the light of Radu Gyr’s poetry was the binder that bound heart to heart, soul to soul, like the links of chains that gnawed our ankles. His verse was lived. It was for us clothing and food, water and warmth. A stanza – two lighted our day, filled our bowl. At this time, he was hungry, red with hatred, he was writing in his head, in his bald head before the time , of the cold, of misery. I have no comparison term. Zarca from Aiud was shaking with what God had given him in abundance: food for minds dried up by the lack of information. the possibility of being useful”.