Prison life was filled with work in the shops, with discussions between
students or with other re-educated prisoners, with constant hunger, and with
fear of the administration. Some prisoners counted the days, others did not.
But here again we were taken by surprise, and the monotony of prison life was
broken by a typically illogical proceeding by the Communist management.
On the fifth of December, the day preceding St. Nicholas' Day, 1953, I was
working in the tinsmith shop located in the yard of the main building. When we
were let out for lunch, those who worked in the technical bureau went out with
us and I had managed to gain the confidence of one of them, a former pupil in a
trade school and rightly considered one of the most dangerous informers among
the re-educated prisoners. Stopping for a moment near me and looking around to
be sure he was not observed by any fellow informer, he whispered, "A great
screening of the prisoners is in the making and all those considered 'bandits'
will be confined to their cells for the whole day. Only those considered
inoffensive or devoted will go out to work. "
"Where did you get this information?" I asked.
"From Lieutenant Mihalcea."
"What do you know about me, did you see the list?"
He did not answer, but only bent his head.
The next morning, St. Nicholas' Day itself, just a little before opening the
doors to let us out for work, Eugen Munteanu, the real head of the labor and
wages office, entered our cell and announced that only those hearing their names
called out should step out and go to work. Mine was not called. This measure
was not a clear-cut punishment; we were locked in the cell, but nothing further
was done to us! So those of us whose names had not been called considered it a
great favor, especially now that winter was coming. Most of those left in the
cell had arrived at Gherla from the canal labor camp or other prisons after
unmaskings had been abandoned -- in other words, they had not undergone the
experiment. The majority of the re-educated prisoners, however, continued to
work in the shops.
The Ministry's orders in reality had provided that all work was to stop
completely in order to reorganize the prison internally, but since various jobs
for the military still had to be completed (we worked exclusively for the
Military units of the Ministry of the Interior), it could not be stopped.
Besides, we had ten vans for transporting prisoners under construction for the
Ministry's own use and these had to be delivered by February, 1954. So, though
many were idled, quite a few had to be left working.
The transition of this state of idleness was accompanied, as was to be
expected, by transfers to other cells, and by deprivation of walks, of
mattresses, and, naturally, of the meager food supplement given us when we were
working. But this situation also did not last very long. Only two months later
another shift was made, this time of a more severe nature.
It was the morning of February 20, 1954, and still dark, when everybody,
whether working or not, was routed out and assembled in the lobby of the
prison's first floor. In between floors netting had been suspended and on it
placed hundreds of yards of straw matting, so that no one could see to the
other floors. We could not imagine what was going to happen. A large number of
surly officers and militia sergeants, some of them new and unknown, walked
among us, forbidding any kind of talking. Accompanying them was Director Goiciu
and the two political officers, both Hungarian, carrying a pile of papers on which
presumably were written the prisoners' names.
The atmosphere was unusually tense. A fear which seemed to be contagious
could be seen on all faces. Even the faces of the re-educated prisoners were
contorted as if reflecting there the terror of their souls. The terror that was
on the face of the student in cell X when the joke about Turcanu's coming back
to Gherla was told, was now to be seen on the faces of all the re-educated
prisoners. I happened to be standing by a student with whom I was on friendly
terms. He was one who had experienced a recovery from unmasking. Taking
advantage of a moment of lack of vigilance on the part of the officer who was
near us, he passed into my palm a very beautiful cigarette holder carved out of
an ox horn. Then he asked me the question I had anticipated but for which I had
no answer:
"Do you think the unmaskings are going to be resumed?"
What could I say? I tried in two or three words to calm him, maybe rather to
calm myself. The approach of an officer prevented, however, any further speech.
More than two hours went by with us still standing around in the lower hall
that morning and with nothing happening, except that certain non-commissioned
officers from the main prison ofnce came in, reported something to the director
in a low voice, and left again. Some time after seven a. m., a strange roll
call of prisoners was made, names being called in alphabetical order. Then, in
accordance with their "political hue" as shown by their dossiers and
reflected in the length of their sentences, the prisoners were divided into two
groups, one composed of those with sentences of ten years or less, the other of
those with longer terms. No importance was attached to type of punishment, as
some in each group had been officially condemned to hard labor, while others
only to correctional confinement.
Thus, on February 20, 1954 began the permanent isolation which even today is
in force and which constitutes one of the most terrible methods of slowly
killing the soul and wrecking the nerves.
One by one, in the order in which they had been called, the prisoners
disappeared up the stairs that morning, to which floors we could not tell,
where officers were waiting to lock them up in their cells. From that day on I
was not to see again many of my prison comrades and good friends; and I did not
see them again, even though for several years I lived under the same roof with
them. Many it will be impossible ever to see again for they will have preceded
me into the Great Beyond.
I was sent, along with about 35 or 36 others, to a cell on the fourth floor.
Almost half my companions were re-educated prisoners! When we got to the cell,
we all tried to find a spot close to the window or to a friend, or lacking
this, closer to an acquaintance. In such moments of uncertainty, every prisoner
tries to be close to someone he can trust, under the illusion that perhaps this
time it will do him some good! Each one, when he found a place, put down beside
him the handful of clothing yet remaining after years of imprisonment.
The shock of this maneuver had brusquely and profoundly impressed those who
had passed through unmaskings. Even a large number of those who had begun to
snap out of the lethargy into which they had sunk recoiled abruptly, adopting a
"wait and see" attitude, with the obvious intention of sliding back
to the side of those who had steadfastly maintained themselves as
"convinced" re-educated.
Even on that first day of isolation, St. Nicholas' Day in December 1953,
many of the re-educated students, who had been willing to discuss things and
had begun to shed the "re-educated" posture, were stimulated to
reconsider. Those who had taken part in unmaskings, particularly as heads of
committees, thinking that a new period of re-education was about to begin,
prepared for work! As a starter, they began by threatening former colleagues
who were now openly opposed to a resumption of re-education. But to show you
how well-conditioned reflexes still worked, even after two years, let me cite
the following:
The student A. B., who proved himself a decent enough fellow after
unmaskings were abandoned, and denounced no one, staying in the good graces of
the administration by working like a slave, changed on December 6th, suddenly
denouncing his own uncle, who had been permitted to visit him just a few days
before!
"Why did you denounce him, when nothing justified you whatsoever?"
I asked him later, when he told me about it.
"If unmaskings were to begin again," he replied, "the first
accusation against me, which would be sufficient in itself to put me again
through the whole works, would be that I had not denounced anybody. So, after
December 6, being convinced that unmaskings would soon re-commence, I began
taking my own precautionary measures. "
After February, the more severe isolation period began, when political
officers punished the slightest offences, prisoners who had been through
unmaskings were sure the system was being re-instated. In our cell, on the very
first day, for instance, the viciousness of the political officer, Sebesteny,
proved itself on the back of the cell leader he himself had chosen! Just
because at the time he entered the cell, the leader did not call
"Attention!" loud enough, Sebesteny punished him with 24 hours in
leg-irons and hand-cuffs in the notorious incarceration box. When the victim
returned next day to the cell, his hands were covered with blue stripes and
both legs were bleeding from the irons.
His return triggered a dramatic development. Some of the prisoners were
ready then and there to re-constitute a re-education committee within the cell.
This did happen in other cells where the re-educated were in the majority with
no one to oppose them and rally the non-re-educated prisoners to establish
order. But our cell was more evenly divided, and three groups were formed
almost from the start. The two extremes were represented by the Pitesti group
and those openly opposed to them; in the center were the timorous ones, who did
not take sides but awaited developments. At heart they were with us, but they
were afraid of betraying themselves to the re-educated.
The first three or four days we spent in mutual surveillance. We were
waiting to see what the administration's next move would be, and the
re-educated were waiting for a go-ahead signal from the political officer to
recommence the unmaskings! Since we were familiar with the sequence of the
unmaskings, we decided that should they be resumed, in no case would we let
ourselves be caught off-guard, and that we would defend ourselves even to the
death, committing suicide if possible. So we kept in a group in one corner by
the window, with our backs protected by the walls.
Our taut nerves were close to snapping. Every time the door opened, all eyes
turned that way, but for different reasons! Expecting the command, we prepared.
When we could see the administration was limiting itself to keeping internal
order, needless to say with an extremely severe regimen, we decided to take
advantage of the situation by taking the initiative. We started by approaching
first the timorous group, which we needed to add to ours in order to match the
number of re-educated prisoners. Since they were afraid to talk with us, we
contrived to discuss the situation so they could overhear us but did not need
to respond. In a matter of a few days most of them appeared to be more
favorable toward our group. We sarcastically called these discussions
"ARLUS meetings," which was a direct allusion to the Communist
propaganda organization camouflaged under the title, "The Association for
the Strengthening of Cultural Ties with the Soviet Union. " These
"ARLUS" discussions were not at all in a serious vein, but made up of
many jokes about Russians, putting the Communists to ridicule on the one hand,
and on the other to show that we were not afraid of the re-educators.
The result was quite positive. We had known even before imprisonment that
jokes with a political slant hostile to Communism were quite effective, and
that if anything could keep hostility toward the Russian invaders alive it was
the anecdote. The danger that humor represented to the Party was recognized, as
witness the extensive repressive measures taken against it; there were
Romanians sent to prison for ten years only because they told a joke ridiculing
Communism.
After a while the situation changed: there were now only two groups in our
cell. The timorous had become courageous and joined our open discussion before
the entire cell. Among the re-educated whom I knew was a Hungarian, who
reported to Messaros, the political officer, everything that went on in our
cell. Why steps were not taken to stop us or investigate remains a question.
Only once, when I was called out as a result of my admitting to a guard that a
chess game found in the cell was mine, he gave me to understand that he knew
everything being discussed in the cell, and it would be better for me not to
fall into his hands. Upon my denying it, he even told me the name of my
denouncer.
Among the re-educated in our cell, the most dangerous at that time was one
Gheorghe Calciu, a former medical student nicknamed "L'Eminence grise
[1]
of Director Goiciu. " He was one of the most devoted and determined
products of re-education, and to some extent he took Turcanu's place. But in
the cell, he was not at all on the defensive, as were the others in his group,
he was in fact relaxed, almost jovial. He went so far, one afternoon, as to
recite the well-known poem by Makarenko, the "Pedagogical Poem!"
[2]
Without going into the cultural value of this verse, the very fact that he
would dare to mention a Soviet writer in the cell, even one very much
appreciated by the Party, brought laughter, at least for the time. Everyone
began comparing Makarenko's "pedagogy" to Turcanu's, and the
unmaskings at Pitesti were then and there labeled "Pedagogic Poem. " It
wasn't very long before Turcanu was being called, in the cell, "Evghenii
Simionov Makarenko," and if someone wanted to know whether you had passed
through unmaskings, he asked if you had read the Pedagogic Poem. This allusion
implied, of course, that the system of re-education was also of Soviet origin.
If Calciu could no longer even "in part" apply his re-educative
methods in our cell, still he could not be prevented from keeping under perfect
control those who had been his collaborators in the workshop. He did not stay
in the cell very long; he was taken out by the political officer and sent to
the infirmary. After his departure the atmosphere cleared completely, and the
rest of the re-educated, little by little, without being pushed, or even
challenged, began to find themselves. The month of May came, and with it an
almost complete healing of wounds with the integration of almost all who had
undergone unmasking, into the normal monotony of prison life.
The few who held out through despair or stubbornness, were left to grind
their teeth in impotent anger -- and alone.
Although our cell attained peace, the same could not be said of other cells.
Where the re-educated felt they could still apply some of their nefarious
methodology, there were quite serious disorders. In one cell, the re-educated
severely beat the cell-mates who defied their orders; in others where they were
few and tried to act as informers, they were themselves beaten and isolated by
being completely ignored, as though they were not there at all.
It is possible that some offences of the re-educated were occasioned by the
others' lack of tact. I talked with one who continued to denounce even after
the February isolation, and I asked him why he was doing this when no one
forced him to. He replied, "It is well that a wounded dog be left alone in
peace to heal his wounds by licking them. If no one can help him, it's best
that nobody irritate him, lest he bite, out of pain or despair. "
There were some real family dramas. Take, for instance, the two brothers M.,
who both had been through unmaskings. The younger was sent to the canal labor
camp with a light sentence, the older to Gherla, where he became head of the
labor and wages service. After the canal was closed down, younger M. was sent
also to Gherla; but now he was completely healed of his wounds. The older
brother, however, continued to maintain himself "in position," and
considered his young brother a "bandit and saboteur. " Consequently
he punished him by cutting him off the list for food ration cards!
Nevertheless, the younger brother wanted to convince the older of the
absurdity of continuing his role, but this he could not do because their cells
were in opposite ends of the prison. As a desperate stratagem, he declared a
hunger strike and told the director he would not eat till he was moved into the
same cell with his brother. In reply, the director had him put in irons, in
isolation, where he persisted in his hunger strike and continued to lose
weight. The administration told him -- falsely -- that the Ministry of the
Interior alone could make cell assignments, and that the matter had been
referred to it. Several days later they told him his brother had been
transferred to another prison and he would have to give up his hunger strike.
But the price he had to pay was high: he ate only once in three days, slept on
iron bars without a mattress or cover. A categorical disposition of the case by
the Ministry of the Interior interdicted the sharing of the same cell by
members of the same family, and the interdiction was zealously extended to
apply to known friends as well as relatives.
Personally I had to deal with a case as painful as it was strange. A student
of mathematics from the Polytechnical School of Bucharest, condemned to 25
years, who still maintained his posture of re-educated even after the
isolation, was caught by a guard with a soap tablet on which he had made some
mathematical calculations. He was given 40 days in isolation in a cell
adjoining ours. I tried to talk to him by means of adapted Morse code, but he
did not know these signals. I noticed that the windows of his cell and ours
were at right angles to each other, and not far apart. As a heavy shutter
protected us from the eyes of guards in the courtyard below, and I placed a cell-mate
as guard at our door's peephole, I was able to converse with the engineering
student at the window. He was obsessed with the idea that the Russians were
all-powerful and was convinced they would rule the world.
"You will see," he said, "maybe later, but certainly, that
the Russians will conquer the entire world. It cannot be otherwise. " And
again: "The West is morally decomposed; it is a swamp in which everything
that is pure drowns. The Russians will bring their punishment, for the West,
when it had the power, made no use of it when it could; now it is too late; the
Russians are a sort of destiny!"
He was a man of superior intelligence, but all my efforts to show him that
everything he had been saying was only a reflection of his subconscious terror
ended in failure.
Several days later I, too, was put in isolation for 10 days to sleep on iron
bars in a heatless cell (this was February, 1955) and for what reason? The
excuse was that I was accused of having written on the wall paragraphs in
several foreign languages, including German (a much decried language at the
time, of course), and since I was the only member of the cell who knew German,
I was guilty. When I was returned to the cell after isolation, I could not
learn if the fellow in the other cell had changed his thinking or not, because
he had been transferred somewhere else.
Penalties inflicted by Director Goiciu on students were incomparably greater
than those given non-students. He was constantly trying to regain some of his
lost ground, but in vain. Contempt for him only increased. If an ordinary
prisoner received two weeks of isolation, a student prisoner got twice that,
plus a severe regimen. Take the case of the student Petre N., for example, who
had the temerity to stand up to the political officer when the prison van
delivered him to the Gherla depot. He was immediately sent to isolation with
20-pound leg-irons for a month in the dead of winter in addition to the severe
regimen. When he had served out his time, the political officer asked him if he
did not regret his impudence at the depot.
"Your regulations," replied the cold, starved student, "do
not include any punishment strong enough to match the utter contempt I have for
all of you. " So uncertain of itself had the administration been that the
official merely gnashed his teeth and turned his back on the student, leaving
him in peace.
After things returned to normal, I tried many times to compare the way a man
behaved after he recovered from re-education with the way he had behaved before
undergoing unmasking. At first sight, I could not see a great deal of
difference: the same self-contained bearing, the same serious preoccupations,
the same goodness and benevolence. But unseen was a real abyss between what he
had been and what he had become. The unmaskings left scars on the surface, and
down deep there was still an open, bleeding wound. I could but wonder about a
meeting between such men and their victims, if they were to meet in freedom --
even though almost all prisoners understood the drama and did not harbor
resentment against those who had denounced or tortured them. Man can forgive,
because he must; but he can never forget, for forgetting is not in his power.
What was done cannot be undone; and the persecutor can forget no more than the
victim, whether or not he did it against his will, against his faith.
I could not but wonder whether these men would ever be able to return to
normal living, or would be able only to simulate having done so, remaining in
the depths of their souls forever ruined, crucified on their own helplessness.
|
1) |
A sardonic allusion to Father Joseph, the outwardly austere and
unassuming, but wily and feared, confidential coadjutor of Cardinal
Richelieu. Romanians translate this "gray eminence" as "The
Brain. " (Tr. ) |
|
2) |
Anton Semenovich Makarenko (1888-1939), a Soviet poetaster, was best known
for his "Pedagogical Poem," a dreary effusion in Russian verse
filled with the factitious (and fatuous) sentiment that characterizes all the
"literature" manufactured for the Bolsheviks as part of
"proletarian culture. " The "Pedagogical Poem" was first
published in 1935, and has been frequently reprinted in Russia. The humor in
the reference to Turcanu in the next paragraph lies, of course, in using the
Russian form of Turcanu's first name (Evghenii for Eugen),
alluding to his ancestry with a middle name that resembles Makarenko's, and
then giving him the Soviet hack's last name. (Tr. ) |