From the beginning, at the time when the files of those who were to pass
into "unmaskings" were compiled, students were divided into two
groups according to their soul's strength or to the role played as members of
the resistance organizations. The first category consisted of the less spirited
students with an indeterminate record of activity, who thus were not good
timber for the making of the "new man," but whose weakness was yet
not sufficient reason to exempt them from unmaskings. They also were passed
through the entire gamut of disintegration but usually with less insistence and
not very extensive tortures. These were the ones who fell earlier than others
when the question, "You bandit, have you decided to make your unmasking?"
was put to them. Their number was not very large in relation to the total
number arrested. They were named by the unmaskers gugustiuci, an ironic
term meaning "wild pigeons," in other words, creatures not entirely
responsible for their present plight.
The second category, which gave the initiators many a headache although it
suited their purposes better, included the more spirited, fanatical students,
those who resisted a long time, those who had to be passed through a second
cycle of tortures before being broken. These were called "Catholics.
"
One of the tests for the fanatical students was forced gymnastics,
especially the semi-squat or "frog. " To touch the heels with the
buttocks was not permitted, and the hands had to be held laterally the whole
time, stretched out, or raised high above the head. During this semi-squat
posture, the student had to raise and lower himself in time to a rhythm set by
the re-educator by hitting on wood with a stick hours on end, uninterruptedly.
Normally and without any coercion, a man in good physical condition can do
up to fifty flexions of this kind, after which his legs begin to stiffen. The
student A. D. from the Faculty of Letters in Bucharest, arrested in 1948 and
sentenced to ten years, did in a single night, above the portable toilet, over
one thousand. When he stepped down he still had the strength to continue; it
was the fatigue of the rhythm-beater which stopped the performance. To what
mysterious force can be attributed this physical resistance on the part of a
man exhausted by malnutrition, sleepless nights, and the obligatory positions
imposed on him in the days preceding this test? For this case is but one from
among the hundreds of victims who managed to pass the one thousand-mark of such
flexions without breaking down. Only strength of will, a manifestation of
spirit, could thus temporarily overcome the body's fatigue and successfully
control it.
The student M. M., also from the Faculty of Letters in Bucharest, was subjected
to the following procedure. After everything else had been tried on him,
including beating till his body became almost insensitive to further blows, he
was forced one day to lie down on the floor in the middle of the room. Other
students, chosen according to their degree of "banditry" (i. e.,
resistance), were forced to lie down on him, one after another, until in all
there were seventeen -- all those, in other words, who were in the process of
unmasking in that cell at that time. On top of all then climbed the individual
who was committee chief in the room. Under the pressure of all this weight the
student could no longer control himself; the muscles of his abdomen gave way
and everything that had been forbidden him to do over the toilet he did there
in the cell.
What followed enters directly into the domain of madness. Under the pretext
that he had broken rules and dirtied the room, and that no washing of clothes
is permitted outside a scheduled time, the poor student was ordered to clean
his underwear by mouth. His refusal to submit to this command infuriated the
committee chief so much that he grabbed a chunk of wood and crushed the
student's fingers beneath it, then trampled the student underfoot till he
became unconscious. He then had water brought to restore consciousness -- water
which had been refused earlier for cleanliness. The student's head was then
knocked against floor and wall and he was dragged around the room by his feet
until blood flowed out of his mouth freely. Finally he could no longer resist.
In the face of such pain there can be no hero.
The student A. O. of the Faculty of Theology, one of the most
"fanatical" mystics in the cells of Pitesti, was forced to move his
bowels into his mess-pan, then to receive his meal without being permitted to
wash it. What he had to suffer until his resistance and abhorrence broke in
him, is diflicult to describe. But in the end he had to yield and to eat
everything in the dish.
Prisoners were obliged to stand on their feet without so much as moving a
muscle. They were forced to wipe the floor over and over for whole days at a
time, carrying two, or sometimes three other prisoners "piggyback" as
they pushed the cleaning rag.
Heavily tortured were those students who, unable to endure any longer but
also unwilling to yield, tried to commit suicide. Such attempts, however, were
made almost impossible by preventive measures taken by the re-educators and the
frequent inspections by O. D. C. C. committees and by the administration.
Besides, there was practically no object with which to commit suicide. Still,
some cases of its having been tried are on record. Those who failed in the
attempt were tortured as were also those suspected of contemplating suicide.
The student R. M. at the Polytechnical School of Bucharest had kept his
spectacles in the cell as a result of his own honest mistake and because of the
committee's lack of attention. One day, as he was being beaten, they broke his
glasses. R. was forced to pick up the pieces, under blows, and to reconstitute
both lenses. Although he searched a long time, he could not find the last small
piece. Accusing him of having hid it in order later to commit suicide, the
student, Diaca, of the Faculty of Medicine of Iasi who was charged with his
surveillance, beat him in such a manner that R. urinated blood. Nobody was
troubled by this and no doctor was summoned to look after him.
The student C. S. of the Faculty of Law of Cluj, endowed with an amazing
capacity of resistance, finally came to realize that he could not hold out much
longer and decided to commit suicide. But how? He could find nothing at hand.
In desperation he ate a pound of soap kept under the bed for writing
declarations! As he later revealed to me, even though the soap was made from
petrol residue, he suffered not even the slightest intestinal upset!
A student of the Faculty of Theology of Timisoara, N. V., after failing to
die from slashing his wrists, thrust his head into the food barrel, hoping to
die burnt from the hot meal. But this, too, failed, and at enormous cost to
him. He was beaten until his lungs were dislodged, and when he shared the same
cell with me five years later, he was still suffering from that painful
infirmity. All because he failed to kill himself.
Many were those who tried to cut their veins with a scrap of sheet iron
found somewhere, or with wood chips, or pieces of glass, or tried to crush
their skulls against walls, etc. There were also some who tried to sever their
arteries with their own teeth. That is why every effort was made to prevent
such "sabotaging" of the "campaign of unmasking. "
The student Gheorghe Serban, from the little town of Murfatlar, was arrested
in Bucharest in 1948, condemned with a large number of others and sent to
Pitesti where he was subjected to the usual unmaskings. One day, however, as he
was taken out into the hall, he succeeded in ending his torment by jumping from
the prison's third floor down the stairwell. When those from whom he had
escaped reached the ground floor in panic, Serban had passed into the other
world, uncompromised. The measure taken by the administration to prevent such a
thing happening again was to stretch wire nets between floors. At the same time
surveillance inside the cells was intensified, and fresh inspections, this time
made by prison guards under the supervision of the prison's director,
Dumitrescu, emptied the cells of everything that could possibly serve as a
means of suicide.
Endeavors to call the administration's attention directly to their situation
were made several times by those enduring the tortures, but the administration
remained deaf to all complaints. Not only did it not respond as hoped, but on
the contrary took harsher measures against those that petitioned. They were put
through what was called a "supplementary unmasking. " Some examples
of this follow.
The student A. R., who had performed a thousand flexions crouched over the
toilet, following several weeks of tortures, and though knowing what was in
store for him, one evening at closing time broke out from the second row where
he was being supported by re-educators, and stepped out in front of Director
Dumitrescu, who had just arrived to take the "counting. " A. R.
reported everything going on in the cells and requested Dumitrescu to intervene
with his authority as director and order the tortures ended and the torturers
punished. He also said that he personally did not intend to make any kind of
unmasking, that he knew the reasons for his imprisonment -- which he did not
regret -- and consequently he should be left in peace to serve his sentence
out, to decide for himself what he thought detrimental to society.
The director listened attentively, simulating complete surprise. He answered
that he did not even suspect such things, such atrocities, were taking place.
He could say this with effrontery because although there were some among the
"unmasked" present who had been beaten by the director himself in
Room Four, they could not speak for they were no longer their former selves. It
was too late to do anything about it that evening but Dumitrescu promised to
attend to this matter next day -- which he did: he sent Turcanu into the cell
to take revenge on A. R. for his indiscretion.
Another student, U. S., taking advantage one day of the door's being left
unlocked by a careless guard, escaped from under the bludgeon and darted out
into the hall intending to get to the main office or even the director's
office. But to his surprise, he collided just outside the door with the
director himself! Dumitrescu had been looking through the peephole to check on
what was going on inside the cell. The student requested him in strong terms to
intervene in the cell and establish order, and demanded that he be taken before
the political officer who was the real director of the prison. Taken aback, the
director could not avoid saying something, so, to get rid of the angry student
faster, promised to ask the officer to see him. The student had to get back in
the cell, where he received appropriate punishment. The next day, called out
early, he was taken not to the political officer but to Turcanu, who during the
interrogation toyed with a sharp razor in his hands.
"You told the director that if he would not excuse you from the
unmaskings and take you to see the political officer, you'd do anything in your
power to commit suicide. Do you have the courage for such an act? Look, I want
to help you. Here is an ordinary razor. Take it and commit suicide. But here in
front of me, now. " And he stretched out his left hand, offering the
razor.
"A ray of hope engulfed me," the student told me later in another
Romanian Communist prison. "If I had gotten hold of that razor for even a
second, I could have cut his throat. I could have found that much strength if I
succeeded in catching him off guard, then I would have killed myself. But
nothing I hoped for happened. The moment I reached out to take the razor,
Turcanu pulled back his left hand and with his right struck me under the chin
such a blow that I fell flattened to the cement floor. He was powerful as a
bull. Then he jumped on me with both feet. How long this lasted I do not know,
as I passed out during this part of the 'interview. ' When they took me out of
the bathroom -- for all this took place there -- three of my ribs were broken.
The scar formed afterwards will remain with me to my grave; the broken ribs
will permanently keep the imprint of Turcanu's feet. "
And to convince me of this he had me touch the broken ribs under the thin
yellow skin.
Not only were these things all reported to the director, but the chief
guards of the prison, Ciobanu and Mandruta, received innumerable verbal reports
of such atrocities. Mandruta always swore and cursed and slammed the door as he
left saying this was none of his business, while Ciobanu merely shrugged his
shoulders and said nothing. Later, in Gherla prison, I shared a cell with
Ciobanu's father-in-law, but in telling him of these atrocities, he could not
believe that his son-in-law had ever been a witness to them as he had never
breathed a word at home about such things. During the two-year experiment at
Pitesti, perhaps he had had to go through a "school of threatenings"
to get the job at all, in the interior of the prison, and was afraid to tell of
anything going on. But the guards, at any rate, were only the facade to conceal
the real authors of this villainy, the politruks of the Communist Party.
Resistance in prisons depended naturally on the factor of moral order. As
long as he could retain self-confidence, the student defied his re-educators,
though passively. I know several hundred of the students who passed through
unmaskings at Pitesti, having spent years living with them in various prisons.
I studied them under all aspects both before and after the unmaskings, and I
hold the firm conviction that at least fifty of them would have stepped calmly
before a firing squad, thus sealing their creed with the supreme sacrifice, before
the Securitate arrest and investigation. Who is not familiar with the capacity
for sacrifice of the Romanian youth in the war against Communism, willing to
die, even after the Communist occupation, in resisting it? The Legionaries Puiu
Constantin, Florescu, Spiru Obreja, Serban Secu, for example, who were executed
on order of the Military Tribunal of Bucharest in 1950-51, knowing they were to
be killed, refused to sign a petition of pardon presented by a special envoy
from the Ministry of the Interior.
Eighteen others arrested in the Fagaras Mountains had the same fate in the
summer of 1958. During these eight years, all over the country, people were
shot by the hundreds, with or without being sentenced, and died bravely. I knew
before my own arrest many students who were members of resistance groups and
fled to the hills, where they were pursued but fought the Securitate forces
till they fell; few allowed themselves to be taken prisoner. But those who got
to Pitesti, collapsed morally. What accounts for this change in behavior?
Perhaps those who were still free to dispose of their own lives, preferred to
die at the hands of the enemy; while those who were captured, finding
themselves no longer free even to kill themselves, therefore collapsed.
But the intensity of the drama and the terror that dominated this period
will never be known.
"What we lived through there," said one student, whom I had known
long before any arrests, and who had passed through unmaskings as one of the
most fanatical, "surpasses what the human mind can imagine. Language is
inadequate to completely convey what everyone of us would have to say, even if
we could say it. "
Hungry, tortured, humiliated for weeks and months on end; sleepless,
terrified, terrorized, struck by him who but an hour earlier had been his
friend and brother in chains; forced in his turn, through the threatening of
Satan, to become a torturer of others; without the slightest hope of escape;
isolated from the world by a curtain of steel; brought to the edge of the grave
but denied the privilege of dying -- of such was comprised the calendar of a
student subjected to this experiment of de-personalization. In short, he was
subjected to the "ethics" of the Communist Party.
Under such treatment, I believe no man could successfully resist. Let me
give two examples pointing up the difference in reaction of two students under
two investigations, one after arrest by the Securitate, the other later at
Pitesti, during unmaskings.
When being investigated, the student had, as did any other detainee, several
elements in his favor: he knew he would be arrested, he knew the methods of the
investigators, and he knew the Communist to be a foreign element, a stooge of
the Bolsheviks, whom he must confront. In other words, this meant a
confrontation between two forces, the one Romanian, the other the foreign
element of occupation. Because the Securitate arrested large numbers of persons
at one time, and space was limited, they could not always give individualized
attention to each prisoner nor did this concern them; they knew that the
Pitesti Experiment would take care of the details. Their main concern was to
get a confession, true or false, as quickly as possible, and send him before
the military judge for sentencing.
The student Alupoaei, a former detainee of the Antoneseu regime, was
arrested in the summer of 1948 and accused of subversive activities against
Communism. He was investigated at the Iasi Securitate by officers Fischer and
Pompilian, but despite all the torture to which he was subjected, they got no
compromising declaration out of him. Their report to the Ministry of the
Interior after several months of intensive investigation still was the same --
they could not detect subversive activities by any youth organization in the
Suceava region. But at Pitesti, after the regime of unmasking, Alupoaei told
everything he knew, betrayed everything!
Another student, Gh. Cucole from Constanta, was also arrested in the summer
of 1948. He was interrogated by a long-time Communist, Campeanu, who had fought
in the International Brigade in Spain and was now a colonel in the Ministry of
the Interior. (He fell into disgrace later and was treated as he had treated
others. ) Cucole's torturer was a Lieutenant Botea, a Bulgarian[1]
waiter considered one of the most brutal and cruel men in the entire Communist
police force. (Botea was later arrested himself. ) Cucole was kept in chains
for months with only half a pound of bread and a cup of water for his daily
food. Depositions by colleagues or friends who had been active with him were placed
before him, but he denied them all. While he was incarcerated, his sufferings
day after day were noted by a fellow prisoner, Major X, who told me about him
at Aiud in 1951, speaking of him as of a hero. Cucole never did give the
Securitate the confession they wanted, so he was finally condemned to prison on
the basis of depositions from others. He was sent to Pitesti, and there he
talked, revealing not only what he had done but also what he planned to do,
whom he considered an enemy of the regime, and whom he suspected of subversive
activity. As a result of his declarations, more than 60 Macedonians were
arrested in the Constanta region and in Bucharest. D., a student from Iasi, who
was in the same cell, told me later that during Cucole's unmasking he had to be
wrapped three days and nights in wet sheets to keep him alive after the
day-long tortures by Titus Leonida and Turcanu. I myself met him after the
unmaskings, and I did not recognize him. Not only was he not the man he had
been but something in his very mind was shaken.
I do not think there was a single student who declared everything under the
Securitate investigation. Everyone kept some secret, greater or smaller; but at
Pitesti prison, no one could resist. The number of those arrested as a result
of testimony given or extorted at Pitesti during the unmaskings was at least
3000!
Was anything left unrevealed at Pitesti? Very little, and that only because
it was known only to the individual under investigation. For if there existed
the slightest suspicion that someone else knew the secret, the one being
tortured hastened to tell it lest the other beat him to it and he be passed
through unmaskings for the second or third time. Since students were usually
active in groups, it was difficult to keep anything back when one knew that if
the same system was being used in other prisons, a dossier would be compiled
from declarations made by fellow students incarcerated in Aiud, or Gherla, or
somewhere else. And no one coming to Pitesti from other prisons was ever able
to warn the students or tell them what was happening in the other prisons, as
new arrivals were isolated immediately; first, so that they could not transmit
news from the outside world to those undergoing unmasking, and second, so that
the new arrivals could not receive any kind of warning of what was in store for
them before their turn came. Those who dared to conceal some detail, however
trivial, were found out -- a month, or a year later, -- and had to pass a
second or even a third time under the bludgeons of the torturers. And each time
the unmasking was more Draconian because the individual had continued being a
"bandit. " Nothing that two or more knew could be kept secret, for
each would tell it, having no way of knowing whether the other had already told
it and had become in his turn an unmasker. An infernal cycle from which there
was no escape!
There is, for example, the case of student T. from Bucharest's Faculty of Medicine.
After he passed through unmaskings and had convinced the O. D. C. C. that he
had told everything he knew, somebody from another room revealed facts he had
withheld.
He was put through a second unmasking and tortured almost to disfigurement.
He finally admitted the facts he had concealed before, and added another
detail. For this he was taken through a third unmasking, but this time only as
a viewer of the torturing of others, being placed in "position. " As
he had been seated alone on the edge of the bunk bed, with no special attention
paid to him, he took it upon himself to request the "watch" to call
Turcanu in, for he had something to tell him. Turcanu came in but refused to
listen. Then desperately T. implored him:
"This is the time to listen to me. I can no longer stand it; I must
speak to you right now. If you lose this opportunity, you will not get anything
out of me even if you skin me alive with a razor. "
Turcanu naturally took advantage of this psychological moment and listened.
T. told him everything, absolutely all that up to then he had managed to hide,
and which was infinitely more revealing than what he had told in the two
earlier unmaskings. Several years later he said, "I cannot understand what
happened in my soul that I should have volunteered to talk that time,
especially when I was sure the O. D. C. C. had come to the conclusion that I
had already revealed everything. "
A second case was that of Teodoru, a medical student at Cluj. He was passed
through unmasking, tortured, and considered "irrecoverable" even
though he willingly did and said all that was expected of him. But when the
unmaskings were over, and the terror of "re-education" had lost much
of its virulence, Teodoru switched to the other extreme, becoming one of the
most dangerous denouncers, with not the slightest excuse for this change of
attitude, this strange new viciousness.
And even stranger things happened, which might explain the numerous Moscow
trials that resulted in the liquidation of all those considered Stalin's
personal enemies. Crimes were invented, not by investigators but by those being
tortured by the investigators. A prisoner, hoping to be spared further torture
by convincing his unmasker that he had revealed everything, the whole truth,
would resort to lying, and invent things that could never have taken place, not
even in his imagination.
The Polytechnical student O. O., arrested for failing to denounce anyone
during the first phase of his unmasking, invented and made up from bits and
pieces an entire subversive organization into which he grouped, besides his own
classmates, almost all the instructors, the tutors, lecturers, even a few
professors, making himself, naturally, the leader. Many, fearing further
torture at first, but later out of a new-found desire to "restructure and
re-educate themselves in the new spirit" (in other words, sheer madness),
tried to prove their "sincerity" by giving the names of their parents
or relatives as members of an organization of their own.
All verbal declarations were recorded on soap tablets and forwarded directly
to the O. D. C. C. Special Investigations Office, where they were transcribed
and all declarations from the beginning were screened, compared, and
fine-combed to find any minute discrepancies in reports from two or more
individuals relative to the same fact. If the screening turned up discrepancies
of any importance to the Securitate, each prisoner involved was called in to
the office, made to put down his declaration on paper and sign it, after which
it was sent to the Ministry of the Interior through the political officer.
As you can see, the Ministry had no official contact or concern with what
went on at Pitesti; in fact, the information thus extorted was only incidental
to the real purpose. For no matter how useful the students' revelations might
become, there must be no let-up in the torment. The state of torture must
continue for the simple reason that continuous physical (and resulting moral)
terror is indispensable to the flawless functioning of conditioned reflexes
reflexes that will go on functioning automatically long after the subject of
the experiment has passed through the fire and become himself a torturer of
others.
|
1) |
The author uses "Bulgarian," "Hungarian," etc., to
refer to the family background of an individual, even though he may have been
born in Romania. This has been common practice in Romania -- to distinguish
ethnic origins. |