The reaction began with prisoners who escaped unmasking because the process
had been abandoned. Some, who had been fortunate enough to escape that hell,
knew nothing of the unmasking technique and could not understand what really
had happened. They knew nothing of the terrifying moulding of a "new
man" or of the depth of the inflicted wounds, which many of us believed
could never heal. Others, who had come into direct contact with students and
personally experienced the nature of the monsterman that had been created over
a period of five years, nevertheless asked themselves in astonishment when
given time to think, "Can these things really be true?"
What constitutes a still greater paradox, however, is that a large number of
victims, even among the students, could not see that they had been used as
guinea pigs in an experiment. They regarded what had happened as nothing more
than a passionate unleashing of the hate normally generated by the Party's
ideology, or as a sort of drunkenness that broke the dams of reason when the
Romanian Communists found themselves the beneficiaries of an undreamed-of
victory.
The body of prisoners who had not been re-educated fell into several classes
according to the way in which they viewed and judged the phenomenon.
The majority did not comprehend at all what it was all about; they perceived
only the physical aspects, the beatings or overt wrongs done directly to them,
and they judged the whole phenomenon in those terms, which after all were of
only secondary importance. Most of these prisoners came from uncultivated
backgrounds and were by nature disposed to interpret everything only through
what they could see with their own eyes. Their reasoning was quite simple:
"Yes, I know they suffered; I myself was tortured during my investigation,
and perhaps I wronged others. But why did the students not stop their nefarious
activity immediately, when they were dispersed to workshops or work colonies?
Why did they continue to serve the administration and harm other prisoners? Was
it just to feather their own nests?" Discussion with these persons was
quite difficult. Their attitude was a simple one, without subterfuge and not
openly hostile. To the query, "What did you do to help the students come
back to normal?" they would answer, "They were better educated than
we and therefore better able to understand what was happening to them. How
could I risk my skin when I knew that if I got close to one of them in good
faith, he would immediately denounce me as an enemy of the administration, and
then where would I be? I'd have to suffer the consequences!" And they
would cite the example of workers who initially wanted to help but were
betrayed.
A second class, small in number, was made up of those who, prior to their
arrest, had generously collaborated with the Communists, hoping thus to be
forgiven their membership in various political parties. In any discussion,
these men deliberately created confusion between their own voluntary acts of
collaboration and acts resulting from conditioned reflexes. Their reasoning was
even more elementary than that of the simpler folk. "Man's soul is
weak," they explained, "and subjected to fear and pressure, to hunger
and the uncertainty of the morrow; it gives in; it cannot stand fast in a
position of resistance when faced with and pressed by the forces in power.
"
There was yet a third class composed of individuals who all their lives had
done nothing but seek positions of vantage. They posed as victims, with a
thinly disguised intent of making themselves heroes of resistance, then,
equipped with a record of imprisonment, they intended to make political hay out
of it, in some cases, as agents provocateurs. This class avoided contact
of any kind whatsoever with the world of the re-educated.
But a few of those incarcerated at Gherla -- their numbers increased as time
passed -- tried to understand the phenomenon and the real motives for the
experiment. They understood what you could call counter-re-education, adopting
an attitude of uncompromising hostility toward everything that smacked in the
least of the spirit of re-education. This brought them into conflict, not with
the administration, as would normally have been the case, but with the
re-educated students so strongly affected by the experiment that they seemed to
have identified themselves with it. Any questioning of the new truths they
professed with such fanaticism constituted a new torture almost unendurable --
perhaps as painful morally as their unmaskings.
Endeavoring to clear a path toward re-establishment of contact with all the
re-educated who had been consumed in the inferno at Gherla was a work that
often was punished by incarceration -- which, in a Romanian prison, meant
confinement in a cubicle whose dimensions are such that the prisoner is forced
to remain in a slightly stooped, standing position; he can neither sit nor lie
down nor stretch up.
Thus much time had to pass before the atmosphere changed sufficiently to
make living together in cells bearable, and reciprocal mistrust was dispelled.
And in the meantime, the suffering caused by the re-educated was great.