Constantine Oprisan of Jilava in Romania (on the photo above) passed away on this day in 1959. On January 28 I wrote about Archbishop Valerian (Trifa) of the Romanian Church in America, who, as a young man during World War Two, was actively involved with the Legionnaires fascist movement in Romania. In the 1930s, most of Eastern Europe came under various right-wing regimes. In Romania, in 1940, General Ion Antonescu took over from the British-oriented King Carol II of Romania. Initially, he shared power with the Iron Guard party (Legionnaires), which became the ruling party of the country. Antonescu abandoned the Constitution and Germany’s stationed troops in Ploiești to protect the oil fields there. For the Legionnaires, Antonescu was not far enough to the right, and they began “cleansing” the country of liberals and “Jewish conspirators.” At the end of 1940, Nikolae Iorga, a Romanian scholar, was killed. Iorga had coined the term “Byzantium after Byzantium” in his eponymous monograph (Byzance après Byzance), defining the cultural and political continuity of the Eastern Roman Empire following its collapse in 1453. Hitler, apparently, saw in the Iron Guards young idealists similar to his own brownshirt movement. Reluctantly, he promised Antonescu not to interfere in his standoff with the Legionnaires. Early in 1941, they revolted against Anatonescu. As a result of the ensuing pogrom, around 100 Romanians and Jews were killed in Bucharest. Following the defeat of the revolt, Constantine Oprisan, like Trifa, fled to the Third Reich, where, before the end of World War Two, he was interned with special status in the Buchenwald concentration camp. Oprisan was trained to be a paratrooper for a drop from a German plane to Romania. In 1945 this plan was aborted and Constantine returned home. Constantine Oprisan was a leader of the youth department of the Legionary Movement the Brotherhood of the Cross. Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (d. 1938), the head of the Legionary explained the major task of this brotherhood in the following words: "The Frația de Cruce is an elite body of youth with the ultimate goal of creating good soldiers for tomorrow's Romania." Having returned home Oprisan was arrested by the communists and became “a guinea pig” in their re-education experiment. He was taken through the Romanian Gulag ending up in the Jilava underground prison. Eventually he gave in and claimed changing his mind. Most likely beating and other forms of torturing resulted in Constanie’s giving in to the demands of interrogators. I hope that eventually Constantine Oprisan had changed his heart regarding a positive attitude on nationlism and antisemitism. Fr. George Calciu, who shared a cell with Oprisan, described Oprisan’s profound impact in his own survival of the imprisonment: “He was in [such a terrible physical] condition because he had been tortured in Pitesti for three years. They had beaten him on his chest, on his back and had destroyed his lungs. But he prayed the whole day. He never said anything bad against his torturer, and he spoke to us about Jesus Christ. All the while, we did not realize how important Constantine Oprisan was for us. He was the justification of our life in this cell. Over the course of a year, he became weaker and weaker. We felt that he had finished his time here and would die” (Interview with Father Gheorghe Calciu, recorded by Nun Nina of St. Nilus from Alaska
“The Orthodox Word”, Vol 33, No 6/197, 1997) My takeaway from this story is that Christ suffered on the cross for the redemption of the sins of every human being. And it is up to any person whether or not to personally participate in this redemption. | 
