Well, well, well! Let’s dive into this rather heavy topic with the lightness of a feather… or perhaps a lead balloon. You know, discussing political repression in a former communist prison is like trying to find a sprightly melody in a dirge—it’s tricky. But let’s give it a whirl!
Entering the Gates of Memory: A Journey Through Jilava Prison
(Pulls open the heavy rusty gate with exaggerated effort)
Ah, Jilava Prison! The kind of place even the bravest of delivery drivers wouldn’t want to visit, let alone a young lady like Niculina Moica, who was detained here at the tender age of 16. Now, if I had to spend any time in a place where the walls reek of pain and regret, I’d probably have a meltdown… and not the glamorous kind!
Niculina, bless her heart, describes the building with the nostalgia one might reserve for a long-lost relative—except this relative was involved in horrific human misery. As Niculina ushers us in with memories of, you know, "the rancid repression," I’m left wondering—did they ever think about a nice paint job? Maybe throw in a few potted plants to lighten the mood? It’s a prison, not a set for a horror film!
From Sinister Fortress to UNESCO List? You Must Be Joking!
Now, it seems Romania is lobbying to get places like Jilava, Sighet, and Pitesti on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Ah yes, nothing says "UNESCO World Heritage" quite like a heap of urine-soaked sadness! Talk about setting the bar low. I mean, who needs the Eiffel Tower when you can visit a museum dedicated to 44 prisons and 72 forced labor camps? It’s like a holiday but without the fun and the suntan!
However, this is important. Here we have a country looking to confront its dark history—like an ex trying to apologize for ghosting you in the early ‘90s. Minister of Culture Raluca Turcan stood up to say it’s a "moral duty" to remember the past, which might sound like a politician trying to sell you a used car. “It’s reliable, it’ll serve you well, just like remembering our past, dearest!” What a sales pitch!
Memory Lane: From Dungeons to Documentaries
Niculina’s experience of isolation and fear—crammed in with the history like sardines in a can—is echoed in chilling tales from the Sighet Prison. The notion that this was a maximum-security framework for dignitaries gone awry is, frankly, bizarre. It’s a bit like putting the Queen in a kitchen cupboard because you’re afraid she might start a revolution!
And the “Experimento Pitesti”—a name so grim it sounds like a new horror franchise! To think they made 600 students torture one another like some twisted reality reality show! It’s almost as if someone in the planning department thought: “Let’s spice things up a bit… with a dash of psychological torment!” And really, how did this not win a reality TV award?
Resurrection of the Collective Memory
Now, Ana Blandiana—the poet who fought tooth and nail to transform the Sighet prison into a memorial—would basically make a great motivational speaker. “Relearn memory,” she says as if we’d forgotten how to remember! Maybe we should all just put a sticky note on the fridge to “Remember Your Past!” Memorable moments shouldn’t be limited to family holidays and the odd embarrassing haircut.
I mean, can we picture it? “Move over, Instagram! Here’s our new social media platform where all we do is remember dark moments in history! Forget selfies—let’s take a photo of the Pitesti dungeon and hashtag it #NoFilter!”
Conclusion: A Journey Worth Taking, Even if It’s Grim
So, as we contemplate whether Jilava and the other prisons should be marked as UNESCO properties, let’s remember that preserving our past is important. But let’s also sprinkle a little joy into the mix—after all, history is painful enough.
And if we’re going to remember, let’s not just mourn the past; let’s transform it into lessons, into art, into something that allows us to go, “Well, at least I’m not being tortured in a damp cell today!”
So, here’s to the memories and to making sure future generations know the icky parts of our history—even if it’s through a fun theme park ride… just not that “Pitesti Experience.” That one needs to stay firmly in the past.
Now, who’s up for a bit of karaoke to lighten the mood? Anything to drown out the echoes of that dreadful prison… maybe "Don’t Stop Believin’"? Because with a history like this, we clearly must!
In the former communist prison of Jilava, about ten kilometers from Bucharest, Niculina Moica pushes the heavy rusty gate at the entrance. Desolate by the memories, but also by the decrepitude of the disastrous place, where she was detained for four months when she was 16 years old, the honorary president of the Association of Political Prisoners of Romania, now in her eighties, warns before entering the macabre prison: “Its walls contain the unfortunate memory of the thousands of political prisoners who suffered the most rancid repression that the communist dictatorship began in the late 1940s through the imposition of a terrifying Stalinist regime.”
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Now, this fortress intended to defend the capital in the 19th century—and which has become a symbol of political repression between 1948 and 1964—is on the list of the five penitentiary centers that the Ministry of Culture of this country of the Eastern Europe presented in mid-April to the Unesco so that they are declared universal heritage. EL PAÍS has been able to visit this site and two others, Sighet and Pitesti, thanks to the Romanian Cultural Institute (ICR). Everything indicates that they will enter that coveted list, say the competent authorities. Esma, the largest torture center of the Argentine dictatorship, and memorial sites of the genocide in Rwanda—Nyamata, Murambi, Gisozi and Bisesero—became part of this select group in September of last year as part of a United Nations strategy. with which it aims to recognize the places that reflect suffering and violence to influence the memory of the recent past and, thus, try to stop the horrors of the present, such as the rise of dictatorial ideas.
“It is a shame the apathy with which a past that continually looms over society has been treated,” says Moica, who believes that its inclusion would also stop the deterioration of the prison. “It’s a shame,” he deplores, while looking at the dilapidated façade. The corroded scrap beds and the gloomy, dread-inducing corridors can only be visited with the permission of the prison administration. “In other parts of the world these places are open to the public!” cries the former dissident, who spent five years behind bars after being sentenced to 20 years in prison and hard labor in 1959 for participating in an anti-communist youth organization. Both Moica and other few survivors of the old prisons fight to transform these places into “crucial testimonies of the reality of the regime,” he explains. “Because of the way they tortured us and the inhuman conditions we endured such as the beatings, the scarce and disgusting food they provided us and the cold we endured,” he points out.
Museologist Andrea Dobes, at the memorial with candles in the old prison of Sighet in Romania.Raúl Sánchez Costa
Jilava’s cells are buried ten meters deep in a hill, which generates a gloomy and disturbing aura. “They were dark and humid, it seemed as if they had locked us in a hole,” recalls Moica, who arrived on Christmas Eve under a freezing drizzle: “I thought they were going to shoot me.” After each visit to the prison, he showers quickly to eliminate the feeling of impurity. During the dictatorship (1945-1989) there were 44 prisons and 72 forced labor camps that housed more than 150,000 political prisoners, according to the institute responsible for investigating communist crimes, which estimates that the number of citizens convicted was around 600,000 in that period. . While some prisons still house detainees, many were closed, demolished or bought by companies. Only two of them, with the help of private funds, have been converted into museums.
Covered patio of the old Sighet prison, in Romania.Raúl Sánchez Costa
The current Minister of Culture, Raluca Turcan, criticizes her predecessors for having neglected the past and evokes as a “moral duty” to make future generations aware of painful events in Romania’s recent history. “The former communist prisons of Sighet, Pitesti, Jilava, Ramnicu Sarat and Fagaras, which represent the phenomenon of communist oppression, are symbolic places that keep the memory of the victims of the totalitarian regime. Its inscription in the UNESCO World Heritage would recognize the importance of historical memory and education about political repression, thus guaranteeing the preservation and transmission of these lessons to other generations,” Turcan points out.
Relearn the memory
On the edge of the border with Ukraine, almost 600 kilometers north of the Romanian capital, is the Sighet prisona penitentiary center with common prisoners that became a maximum security prison in the first half of the 1950s. During that time, two hundred personalities were transferred in the most absolute secrecy; among them, former Prime Minister Iuliu Maniu —who died in his cell—, other senior political officials, journalists, soldiers and priests. “We are aware that 54 people died, although they were buried in places that have not yet been identified,” emphasizes Andrea Dobes, museologist at the Memorial of the Victims of Communism and the Resistance, while pointing out a chilling punishment dungeon. “Prisoners considered recalcitrant were chained to shackles in the center of the dungeon, their feet were kept attached to a grill submerged in water; Naked and barefoot, hungry and cold, and sometimes tied, they were forced to stand all day in the dark,” Dobes details.
Cell of the old Sighet prison in Bucharest.Raúl Sánchez Costa
The Sighet museum, which was used as a warehouse for salt, vegetables and tires before being abandoned, is the largest in the country about the communist dictatorship. More than 130,000 visitors a year encounter a description of political anomalies that brought pain and death, Dobes says. But its creation cost its founder, the poet and essayist Ana Blandiana, years of struggle, who will receive the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature at the end of this month of October.
It all began after the fall of communism in 1989, when the European Council encouraged Blandiana to present a project to erect a place that would serve to “relearn memory.” “The greatest victory of communism was the creation of the man without memory, a new man with a brainwashing, who should not remember anything of what he was, or what he had, or what he did before; Therefore, the Memorial of the Victims of Communism and Resistance represents a way to counteract that victory and resurrect collective memory,” emphasizes Blandiana. The author, who was awarded an Honoris Causa doctorate by the University of Salamanca, discovered during the pandemic four notebooks and a diary written a few months before the fall of the regime and which ended up in a successful book, especially among the youngest. “As I read the pages, I was surprised that the dictatorship was much worse than I remembered; I realized that the memories were sweetened.”
Entrance with memorial of a prisoner in the Pitesti prison, Romania.Raúl Sánchez Costa
On a smaller scale but with the same purpose, the Pitesti Prison Memorial revives through testimonies the martyrdom experienced by some 600 students who were physically and psychologically tormented between November 1949 and May 1951. A KGB agent implemented the one known as Experimento Pitesti, which consisted of forcing them to be not only informants but torturers through violence. Precisely, one of the victims ended up becoming one of those most responsible for the atrocious test, the most terrifying in the Eastern European bloc. “If it can be included as universal heritage, no one will doubt the importance of these places,” confides María Axinte, who started this project on her own initiative ten years ago. “They were tortured and forced to disown their family, friends and principles to show that they had become new people and aggressors of other victims,” says Axinte, before showing the room where satanic acts were practiced and now transmuted into a place of religious cult: “It was a diabolical operation of depersonalization, self-destruction and moral murder.”
This experiment ended after a criminal investigation due to international pressure and a pseudo macro-process between 1953 and 1954, without condemning its true creators. However, the method of mass subjugation through psychological blackmail and subliminal aggression continued during the regime. This former prison, classified last year as a historical monument, welcomes around 10,000 visitors each year. But its founder, 34, still regrets “the lack of interest of the State and the lack of understanding” of a past that shapes the mentality of citizens.
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