Overall, over 2 million people in the People’s Republic of Romania were discriminated by coercive methods.

The number of Romanians sentenced between 1945-1989 was of 600,000. Other hundreds of thousands were administratively detained, that is, jailed without a trial (some of them for 8-10 years).

Overall view of Room 6: The Romania of Prisons

The peaks of terror were registered between 1948-1953 and 1958-1963, when, besides the existing penitentiaries, numerous forced labour camps were organized, and deportations took place, massive displacements of those deemed dangerous for the regime (overall, another 200,000 people).

Detail from Room 6: The Romania of Prisons

Postcard sent to his family by inmate Ilie Stănescu in 1952. Sentenced to 22 of forced labour for “attempted border crossing”, he would die in the Galaţi penitentiary in 1960.

Detail from Room 6: The Romania of Prisons

Sock with dozens of patches, worn in prison by a political prisoner and kept upon his release from prison.

Emil Agalidi was arrested on 22 January 1953 and convicted to 10 years of forced labour for the crime of high treason.  Upon release, he was assigned forced domicile in Rubla. He emigrated to Canada in the ‘70s. While in Rubla, he befriended priest Opriș, himself a political prisoner. Over the years, Father Opriș kept the sock he had received from Agalidi. His daughter donated this item to the Sighet Memorial.

Detail of Room 6: The Romania of Prisons

Sewing needles made one out of beech wood, and the other out of bone (Gherla, 1953)

Detail from Room 6: The Romania of Prisons

Woollen socks worn by political prisoner Victor Isac upon his release from prison. They have hundreds of stitches and patches where they are torn or thinned.

Detail from Room 6: The Romania of Prisons

Hat worn by Dinu Pillat upon his release from prison

Dinu Pillat was arrested on the night of 25/26 May 1959 and convicted during the famous Noica-Pillat trial, to 25 years of hard labour for “conspiracy against social order”. He went through the prisons of Malmaison, Jilava, Gherla.

Detail from Room 6: The Romania of Prisons

The sack in which Dinu Pillat put a few clothes prior to his arrest. He used the same sack when returning from prison, on 28 July 1964

Detail from Room 6: The Romania of Prisons

Lyrics “picked” with a broom bristle on a medical bandage by doctor Serafim Pâslaru, of Câmpulung Muscel, in the Gherla prison’s infirmary, where he worked as inmate. The poetry bandages, kept hidden after his release from prison, were donated to the Memorial by the doctor’s family. Serafim Pâslaru (1911-1998), doctor, arrested on 23 December 1957, accused of having provided care to a sick person in 1955 in the house of some acquaintances. He was convicted to 15 years of hard labour for “aiding and abetting”.

Detail from Room 6: The Romania of Prisons

Detail from Room 6: The Romania of Prisons

Haversack that belonged to political prisoner Radu Roșeanu

Detail from Room 6: The Romania of Prisons

Letter sent home by a detainee through a colleague released from prison

Detail from Room 6: The Romania of Prisons

Damaged glasses, repaired in the Peninsula labour camp by political prisoner Adrian Brișcă

Detail from Room 6: The Romania of Prisons

Box with stamps received by Cecilia Georgescu, wife of lawyer Eugen Georgescu, dead in prison. Made in prison, the box contained her husband’s watch and death certificate. Although it was sent after his death, his name is used as the sender’s name.

Eugen GEORGESCU, lawyer,  received an administrative sentence in 1952 for “hostile displays against the USSR and its leadership and against the People’s Republic of Romania and the Romanian Workers’ Party” He died on 30 July 1953.

Detail from Room 6: The Romania of Prisons

In 1951, with the escalation of the Communists’ “class struggle” against the rest of the population, the personnel in the D.G.S.P. had increased nearly 5 times (to 15,280 positions), preserving the same selection criteria: social origins and “class hatred”.

Detail from Room 14: The Securitate between 1948 – 1989

Forced labour – using political prisoners as work-force on various construction sites or in mines – was largely used during the Communist period.

Thousands of political prisoners were held in the labour camps in the Danube–Black Sea Canal or in the work colonies by the Maramureș lead mines. in the early ‘50s.  The forced labour camps in Bălțile and in the Danube Delta were full of inmates in the late ‘50s.

Overall view of Room 17: Forced labour

The best-known construction site was that of the Danube–Black Sea Canal, started in March 1950, suspended in 1953. The workforce consisted of “reactionary elements”, most of them under “administrative detention”, without a trial, for periods between 12 and 60 months. The Canal was, as labelled by the Gheorghiu-Dej regime, “a tomb for the Romanian bourgeoisie”. According to the most conservative estimates, over 40,000 inmates were concentrated in its camps in 1950 alone. Other 20,000 were the so-called “voluntary workers”.

Detail from Room 17: Forced labour

“In the Aiud prison factory there were specialists, there were first-class engineers… And an order came: that we should design and manufacture a motorcycle, engine and all, in the factory… A team of 3 engineers was set up, we had to design a motorcycle engine and to build a motorcycle… The engine design was made by engineer Stambuleanu, the gear box was made by Costel Nicolau, and the rest of the installation and the engine were made by me, the whole assembly…”

Testimony of Sorin Tulea

Photo: The motorcycle designed by the political prisoners in Aiud, where there was a prison factory as well. Detail from Room 17: Forced labour

In Northern Romania, in Maramureş, three labour camps for political prisoners were opened in 1950, Baia Sprie, Valea Nistrului and Cavnic. They operated until 1955.

The working conditions in the lead mines were harsh, especially for people who had undergone the starvation regimen of political prisons.

Ion Ioanid summed up the situation as follows: “It was hard to tell where the chances of holding on and making it out alive were higher: starving in a prison cell, but without making any physical effort, or wasting your last powers working in the mines until extermination…”

Photo: The mining operation of Baia Sprie, which, between 1950 and 1955, operated as a labour camp for political prisoners. Detail from Room 17: Forced labour

“This escape was no rush for freedom. Because the wider camp, the one including the whole country, could not offer us what made us tick, what concerned us. … We just wanted to prove for once, in that terror and fear that dominated everything, and especially in prison, that this hermetic claustration, which the Communists had so successfully impressed upon us, was not impenetrable, that is why this escape was rather a form of protest.”

Testimony of doctor Miltiade Ionescu, one of the 14 political prisoners who escaped the Cavnic labour camp on 6 June 1953

Photo: sketch of escape drawn by Ion Ioanid. Detail from Room 17: Forced labour

“The camp in Salcia is increasingly looking like a version of hell… beatings all around, prisoners hunted for mistakes, a poorly made bed, a bonnet that was not snatched fast enough from your head upon the passage of some minion, but, especially, failing to make your norm, of which they know and we know that it was calculated in such a way as to not be achieved…In Salcia I only washed my hands, a few times since November to late March, and my body – never. In the spring, I shed my dead skin like a snake… “(Al. Mihalcea, Jurnal de ocnă)

Photo: layout of the Salcia colony, one of the forced labour camps on the Great Brăila Island. Detail from Room 17: Forced labour

Article 209 of the Penal Code is the “black hole” of Communist justice. A third of the post-1948 political sentences were given under this article, which would, with diabolical ambiguity, define “conspiracy against Socialist order” or “conspiracy against state order”.

Overall view of Room 46: Article 209

Under the charge of “conspiracy against social order”, you could be convicted for being part of an anti-Communist organization, for refusing to join a union or the collective farm, or for listening to a Western radio station, for cutting off the eyes in a picture or simply for telling a joke.

Detail from Room 46: Article 209

The punishments were set by activists and prosecutors, and eventually by the red magistrates, depending on the “social danger” represented by the accused

Excerpt of a criminal charge sheet of an inmate convicted under article 209 P.C.

Detail from Room 46: Article 209

Along time, punishments increased, so that in 1959 the death penalty could be applied for a reason which in 1948-1949 was “only” punished by 7 years of prison.

Excerpt of a criminal charge sheet of an inmate convicted under article 209 P.C.

Detail from Room 46: Article 209

Excerpt of a criminal charge sheet of an inmate convicted under article 209 P.C.

Detail from Room 46: Article 209

On the night of 17/18 June 1951, the largest deportation action in Romania’s contemporary history was set in motion, after the one undertaken in January 1945 against people of German ethnicity in Romania. Approximately 44,000 people were taken from their homes on the border with Yugoslavia (the counties of Timiș, Caraș-Severin, Mehedinți) and deported to Bărăgan.

Overall view of Room 47: The Deportation to Bărăgan

The deported included Romanians, Germans, Serbians, Bulgarians, numerous refugees in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, Aromanians. People were loaded into freight wagons under military escort and, after ten-fourteen days of travel, they would be thrown off in the middle of nowhere and left to their own devices to build adobe or earth houses, covered with straw or reeds.

Detail from Room 47: The Deportation to Bărăgan

In order to justify this complete isolation, the Securitate launched the rumour that there were Korean deportees! In the 18 newly-built settlements, most of the deportees were kept for five years, until 1956, but some stayed here forever. The number of the dead rises up to 1700. The eldest of the one who died had reached 100 (he had been deported when he was 95!).

Photos from the deportation, and also objects kept since then, are attempting to reconstruct the image of Banat deportees to the Bărăgan.

Detail from Room 47: The Deportation to Bărăgan

The number of victims in the years of Communism (1945-1989) goes up to 2 million. They were former prisoners and political deportees, the (half a million!) young forced to perform subjugating work during their military service, those thrown out of their family homes, those whose human resources “file” shut doors towards the future they wanted, those who were summarily killed or sentenced to death.

Victims were also those families which were torn apart, martyrized or exterminated by Communism.

Detail from Room 69: Repressed Families

The Sarafolean Family

Amalia and Gheorghe Sarafolean of Comloşu Mare (Timiş) were deported with their two children, Dora (aged 8) and Silviu (aged 4), on 18 June 1951 to Bărăgan. In 1959, three years after they returned from Bărăgan, Gheorghe Sarafolean was arrested again and sentenced to 10 years of “forced labour” for “conspiracy against social order”.

Detail from Room 69: Repressed Families

The Mateoc Family

Ioan Mateoc, peasant, executed by Securitate troops on 3 August 1949, in the commune of Ucuriş, following the revolt against collectivization; on the same day, his family was deported, and a few days later his son, Ioan, was also executed.

Detail from Room 69: Repressed Families

The Lugoşianu Family

Ion Lugoşianu, former minister, a delegate with the League of Nations, convicted in August 1949 to hard labour for life for “the crime of high treason”, died on 7 November 1957 in the Râmnicu Sărat penitentiary. His son, Ioan, arrested in 1958 and sentenced to death for “acts of terror”, was executed in the Jilava penitentiary on 5 December 1958. Two of his sisters, Elena Lugoşianu and Ana Stan, were arrested on 15 April 1952 in the lot of “dignitaries’ families”. Another of Ion Lugoşianu’s sisters, Veronica Georgescu, was arrested at the same time as her brother, being sentenced to 8 years of reformatory.

Detail from Room 69: Repressed Families

There were thousands of arrests and deportations of high school students, between 1948 and 1989. Statistically, they represent 2% of the total political prisoners.

Most of them set up anti-Communist organizations (“leagues”, “movements”, “societies”), were sworn to confidentiality, would procure weapons, would write and disseminate manifestos, preparing to support the resistance groups in the mountains or, on the contrary, to run across the border. With others, it was about juvenile revolts, posters or smudged or broken portraits, jokes, epigrams, cartoons, which the Securitate would take seriously and sanction by arrests, investigations, exemplary convictions, meant to induce fright.

Detail from Room 71: Detained Students

Over 10,000 teenagers were dispersed on the night of 2/3 March 1949 or deported to the Bărăgan on “Back Pentecost” night (17/18 June 1951).

Picture of a class of students deported to Bărăgan. Detail from Room 71: Detained Students

Other victims of Communists were also the 175 students (even some pre-schoolers) who were injured or investigated in December 1989. 40 students died at the same time, in the “children’s crusade”, constituting the pure core of the Romanian revolution.

Overall view of Room 71: Detained Students

Bessarabia, a former Romanian province, held for 106 years by the Russian tsars, returns to the motherland in 1918 and becomes a Soviet territory in 1940, following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Liberated in 1941 and re-Sovietized in 1944, under the name of the Moldavian SSR, it becomes a trial ground for the experiments of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the NKVD: life deportations, the extermination of elites, the collectivization of villages and forced industrialization, the Russification of culture and public life, altering mentalities.

Photo: Children deported in Siberia. Detail from Room 22: Bessarabia in the Gulag

After the Budapest Revolution of 1956, the Hungarian community of Transylvania was the target of persecutions, with numerous arrests made.

Detail from Room 41: Ethnic repression

Thousands of women went through the Communist prisons, women who were tragically imprisoned and separated from their children, women who suffered in prison, whether as mothers, wives, or daughters of prisoners, or because they were themselves deemed dangerous to the social order by the Communists.

Overall view of Room 52: Women in Prison

Besides the mixed prisons, there were some exclusively for women: Mislea, Mărgineni, Miercurea Ciuc, Dumbrăveni or Arad.

Overall view of Room 52: Women in Prison

Elisabeta Rizea’s shirt

Elisabeta Rizea was convicted twice – first to 6 years of reformatory, then to 25 years of forced labour – for the support she had given to the resistance group in the Nucşoara area, led by captain Toma Arnăuţoiu.

Detail from Room 52: Women in Prison

The exhibition also holds objects that were saved with great efforts from the detention period

Object made in detention, donated by Aurora Ille Dumitrescu

Aurora Ille Dumitrescu was sentenced in 1953 to 6 years of reformatory for “conspiracy against social order”

Detail from Room 52: Women in Prison

The most horrific methods of psychological torture were applied on young ‘unamenable’ inmates, of various political and religious beliefs, with the purpose of making them humiliate each other, maim each other and mentally mutilate each other, by denigrating each other’s past. This diabolical operation of depersonalization, of “dissolving entourages” and of moral assassination took place starting with the summer of 1948 in the Suceava penitentiary, culminating in the Pitești penitentiary, where it reached the peak of cruelty and bestiality, then continuing, on a smaller scale, in the penitentiaries of Gherla and Târgu Ocna.

Detail from Room 50: The Pitești Phenomenon

Overall view of Room 50: The Pitești Phenomenon

Sequelae of political imprisonment

Post-1989 studies have identified the main emotional and mental ailments of former prisoners, still present years and decades since their release. 85% of former political detainees and the politically oppressed are complaining of permanent physical and mental asthenia, and an increased hyper-emotivity has been found in 78% of them, alongside irritability, jumpiness, emotional outbursts.

Other identified afflictions also include sleep disorders, painful hypermnesia caused by re-living old indignities in a state of semi-vigilance, nightmares, insomnia, psychosomatic distress, asthma syndromes, colitis, ulcers, diabetes. Also, organic encephalopathies caused by malnourishment, by repeated trauma.

Finally, one of the characteristics of the state of post-detention is the “dysphoria” (states of fear, psychomotor unrest, unwarranted feelings of despair, the conviction that life is meaningless).

Detail from Room 72: Medicine in Prison

Prison illnesses

Post-torture afflictions. Detail from Room 72: Medicine in Prison