I return to A. Camus's words quoted in the first chapter: "Philosophy
can change murderers into judges. "
The tragedy of the Pitesti prisoners, too, has its fatal denouement like any
other drama.
There exists an ineluctable "truth," naturally Communistic, that
anything that serves the Party is "just," is appreciated and
encouraged. If later, for reasons never sufficiently clear, this
"just" no longer serves some new Party line, it immediately becomes
"unjust" and is condemned, "reproved with indignation. " I
do not think examples are here necessary. The numerous "ideological
leaders" who took the road to exile or the firing squad in the Soviet
Union during the last decade alone are sufficient proofs of this policy.
Throughout my years in prison, I often shared a cell with former Party members.
Among them were some who had done great service for the Party and had spared no
effort to apply "the line. " They were made scapegoats and classified
with the enemy without the slightest hesitation. In response to their protests
at such treatment, they always and everywhere received a stereotyped answer
something like this: "For your good accomplishments the Party will raise a
statue in your honor; for the bad ones, you are paying right now," even if
what they had done was simply carry out with strict fidelity the Party orders
before they changed direction.
In the case of unmaskings, it was only logical that those who voluntarily
offered themselves to start the experiment should have been rewarded with
freedom at the end of their term of service. Rewarded they were, but with the
fire from an automatic pistol!
The whole experiment had been born out of evil and lies. It was through
wickedness and deception that it had to end. But in order that everything might
be consummated within the framework of "Communist legality," and bear
the imprint of "justice," a trial was staged. In the dock sat the
victims; official representatives of the Party, the real implementors of the
crime, sat on the bench.
There had been many so-called "sensational" trials. The Communists
saw to it that people became accustomed to them and, seemingly to keep the
memory fresh, would stage another every now and then. To Westerners, this may
seem an odd way of administering justice, but of course, they are used to
"bourgeois" justice and do not comprehend the higher form of Marxian
dialectics.
Even the most cynical of assassins seeks a loophole in his indictment and
even a madman does not receive a death sentence with joy, but under Communism
everything can be easily arranged ahead of time by means of torture and lies,
such as "a publicly admitted mistake is half forgiven. " That is,
until the compromising declaration is obtained from the victim! The rest is
only too well known; when the hangman's noose tightens around one's neck,
anybody is willing to make a small concession if it will save his life --
rather the hair than the head, as the proverb goes.
In the Communist type of justice the trials are not to find proof of guilt
as such but to provide a pretext for a condemnation demanded by the Securitate
-- a condemnation not of any deed, but of a person as a potential enemy
or as no longer useful. Thus the Bucharest Tribunal that tried Turcanu and his fellows
was seeking a justification for condemning those who for three years had done
nothing but execute with zeal the orders given them by the initiators of the
experiment. How the declarations of the prisoners were obtained is not known,
but we do know the general methods employed.
The initial intention, according to what transpired unofficially, was to
stage a public trial with newspapermen and "indignant" workers'
delegations, with photographers and plenty of publicity. But something made the
Tribunal change its mind, possibly the pre-trial interrogations of the various
witnesses who were to testify. There was some risk of an upset, and the Party
could have then been exposed in its true light just at the critical moment when
it wanted to conclude the drama of its experiment with a "legal"
finale.
Why did they feel a trial necessary? Liquidating those who "knew too
much" could have been accomplished more simply and quietly, at night
somewhere, for "trying to escape while under escort," a procedure
that was not new and had produced satisfactory results some years earlier when,
on the night of November 30, 1938, Codreanu and thirteen of his followers were
assassinated by King Carol's henchmen. Did they need a justification in legal
form for concluding an unsuccessful experiment and eliminating those who might
talk inopportunely? Perhaps in time we shall know.
At any rate, the "show trial" to teach the people a lesson never
took place, but instead hearings were held behind closed doors, attended only
by prison directors, interrogating officers, and Communist political
personalities little known or completely without any contact with the people.
One was able to learn very little of what went on in the secret proceedings
and nothing at all of what the accused had to say. Some aspects of the trial
were learned from Party members who could not keep their mouths shut and from
the forty witnesses, who were all prisoners who had passed through unmaskings
or were victims of some sort.
By collating this information with various slips of the tongue on the part
of political officers in the prisons, the course of the trial can partly be
reconstructed. Witnesses testified separately, none being allowed to be present
at any proceedings except the one at which he answered the questions asked him
by the Tribunal's president. They were not told who were the members of the
Tribunal, whose names were never made public, but they could see that the
judges and the prosecutor were superior officers, perhaps from the cadres of
military justice.
[1]
It would seem impossible for the Communists to find a way of exculpating
themselves, but, no matter how absurd it sounds, they found one: they alleged
that the unmaskings at Pitesti had been initiated by the leaders of the
nationalist student group!! Crimes were committed against the prisoners by
these nationalists in order to blame the Communist regime and discredit it in
the eyes of the people and of international opinion!
The military prosecutor demanded punishment of the "nationalist"
defendants for crimes against humanity, for all the crimes were blamed on them.
And to bolster the monstrous lie and make it hold together, they implied that
there was someone from the outside who must have given directives to those
inside the prison who were "in the conspiracy. " It was then no
problem at all to prove that there must have been a responsible person who
established the liaison between the leader from abroad and those in prison.
Several persons were considered for this role, among them a lawyer from Iasi,
but in the end they decided upon a student. If my memory serves me well, he was
named Simionescu; in any case, whatever his name, he was tortured for months in
the Ministry of the Interior, and kept continually in leg-irons and handcuffs,
to force him to recite the testimony dictated by the Securitate.
[2]
But Simionescu refused. Had they really insisted very much, and been determined
to produce the testimony they wanted, they could, of course, have done so; all
they would have needed was time to brainwash the unfortunate individual whom
they chose and teach him his "confession. " But a sudden -- and
inexplicable -- urgency did not allow time for proper preparation. After three
years of pre-trial investigations and interrogation of over a hundred prisoners
who had passed through unmaskings, the case was brought to trial with a haste that
can be explained only by a sudden need
[3]
to dispose of it as quickly as possible.
In the end, allegations of the responsibility of persons outside the prison
were discarded or suppressed, leaving the only responsible head Turcanu!
Prisoners put in the dock as defendants at this trial were: Eugen Turcanu
("And lo! his name led all the rest!"); Alexandru Popa, nicknamed
Tanu; Martinus; Constantin Juberian; Cornel Pop; Levinschi; Doctor Barbosu,
official physician of Gherla prison, now become useless and therefore
dangerous; and several others.
The trial was started in October 1954, but it is not known how long it
lasted. Testimony of the 40 witnesses for the prosecution took several days.
Sentences were pronounced around the middle of December, but news of the trial
did not reach our prison till February or March 1955, coming first through
Jilava or some other prison from which a prisoner was transferred. I learned it
from a person in the prison's infirmary, who transmitted the news by a hand put
through a crack in the window shutter. Later, several prisoners confirmed the
report, as did, indirectly, the Military Tribunal of Bucharest when it
published the death notice of-one of the condemned.
The witnesses testified under heavy guard and were "closely
counseled" by the officers interrogating them at the Ministry. As before
mentioned, they were introduced into the hearings one at a time, so they knew
nothing of the over-all proceedings.
Nothing was withheld during the hearings. The smallest details of the
unmaskings were fully described, from the beatings to the ordeal of the
mess-pan filled with feces; from the torturous squatting to the insulting of
everything the prisoner held dear. But accusations were brought only against
those who had actually inflicted the tortures, and who now sat in the dock as
the accused. In reality, everyone present knew that they were merely the front
men for the real culprits.
Among the witnesses were two workers from Gherla, one of whom, it will be
remembered, pleaded with the inspector to end the unmaskings, and the other,
who attempted to commit suicide by slashing his wrists in the isolation cell
with broken glass from the window pane. They told of the promises made to them
by the officers to whom they reported the state of affairs, and of the fact
that their subsequent tortures became more brutal and bloody than before. The
president of the Tribunal tried unsuccessfully to divert their answers by
claiming that they were not relevant to the questions asked, which pertained
only to the defendants and the crimes they allegedly had committed.
The testimony of the defendants is not known. Whether they defended
themselves by revealing the identity of those who were really responsible or
assumed the entire responsibility themselves, hoping thus to win the indulgence
of the Securitate, is of little importance, for they were not there to be
tried, but to be condemned. It was reported specifically of Turcanu that he had
admitted everything and had assumed complete responsibility for the crimes
imputed to him. It did not matter whether he did or not; his fate had in fact
already been decided, and the presiding judge was the only one of those on the
bench who could be identified by any of the witnesses; a student, one who had
been previously arrested during the Antonescu administration, recognized him.
The judge's name was Alexandru Petreseu and he was considered one of the most
sinister characters ever thrust from the law schools into Romanian society. In
his way, he was unique. A career military judge, he was Director-General of
Penitentiaries during Atonescu's administration. The Legionaries knew him well,
for often their fate had been in his hands before his decision was reviewed by
Antonescu. Although publicly a strong supporter of Antonescu's dictatorship, he
was also a secret collaborator with the Communists, facilitating their
penetration into the Lugoj prison to aid Burah Tescovici, alias Teohari Georgescu.
[4]
Apparently about to be purged in 1948, as were all of his colleagues, he found
himself elevated to the rank of general (he was a colonel) because he agreed to
preside over the tribunal that condemned Iuliu Maniu. In addition to scores of
death sentences attributed to him, he was credited with more than 100,000
man-years of imprisonment pronounced in trials of Legionaries alone.
In the habit of blindly executing all the orders of the Securitate, Petrescu
naturally in their 1954 "trial" pronounced the prescribed sentence:
death for all defendants. The only sentence about which there is some doubt is
that of Doctor Barbosu; it is not known whether he was condemned to die or be
imprisoned for life. However, both sentences are practically equivalent in
Communist prisons.
The sentences were carried out. One of the victims, Martinus, was later
called as a witness for a subsequent trial, but in response to the order for his
appearance in court, a death certificate was produced, showing that he had died
in 1955.
All those tried were, naturally, identified as "Fascists," or
agents of the American espionage apparatus. It is not clear on what basis the
persons selected for trial and execution were chosen; certainly persons equally
notorious for equally monstrous ferocity such as Titus Leonida, Diaca, Coriolan
Coifan, Hentes, and Bucoveanu, were never brought to trial, although they were
the peers of Turcanu and even the superiors of Pop in sadistic accomplishments.
Exempt from trial also was one of the worst offenders, Ludovic Reck, a
Communist, condemned to prison because he had been also an informer in
Antonescu's police force.
[5]
With the help of Hentes and Juberian, he murdered Flueras by beating him with
sandbags till he spat out his lungs.
Also missing from the trial as defendants were: Captain Goiciu, Captain
Gheorghiu, Lieutenants Dumitrescu, Avadanei, and Mihalcea, whose direct
responsibility for the unmaskings was much greater than that of the students
sentenced to death, whom they had had under their control and who had done
nothing without their supervision and collaboration.
Because of "technical reasons", it is said, a second
"trial" was staged, with the same kind of defendants, the main one
this time being the student Gheorghe Calciu, nicknamed Ghita by his
"friends. "
He was moved from Gherla in the spring of 1954 to the Ministry of the
Interior for investigation. At the time of his departure he was still a
convinced re-educator. I do not know how long he remained so, but exactly two
years later I had a unique opportunity to learn -- directly from him -- about
his passing through the hands of the Ministry and the reception they gave him.
In 1956, in a cell of the main section of the Ministry on Victoriei Street,
in fact right next to the room of the officer-on-duty at the front of the
building (also called the Section Chief's office), I found an inscription
scratched on the wall, possibly with a needle, in Morse code, which shook me
considerably. The sentence read:
"Gheorghe Calciu, I was brought here to be murdered; I am
innocent."
Close by, also scratched in the wall, toward the left corner nearer the door
but not visible to anyone looking in through its peephole, I read the
following:
"Gheorghe Balan, I am completely innocent."
[6]
In regard to Calciu's trial, some fragmentary information leaked out. I
learned about it shortly before I left Romania. The trial was held in the
summer of 1957, also in Bucharest, and also before a military tribunal. Someone
who witnessed it in an official capacity leaked a few details which prove a
good deal, and place Calciu in quite a different light from Turcanu.
The presiding judge was the same General Petrescu. Following the reading of
the accusation, Calciu was called upon to answer, or rather to confess his
"crime against humanity. " To the amazement of all, but particularly
of the investigators, the defendant defied the entire tribunal and threw back
in its face the truth without any reservations. Calciu accused those who were
in fact responsible for all the crimes committed. His diatribe was so
unexpected that the tribunal's presiding judge, at the request of the
investigators assisting at the trial, suspended the proceedings till a later
date. This postponement had as its aim the utilization of the known
"methods of persuasion" frequently employed by the Securitate, this
time to compel Calciu to retract his accusation and "assume the entire
responsibility for the crimes committed. " The trial was resumed the very
next day, perhaps because Calciu had agreed the night before to modify his
attitude. But despite the promise he probably gave under torture, the next day
he was even more categorical. In consequence, the trial was abruptly postponed sine
die. It is likely that Ghita Calciu never was tried and sentenced, but died
a "natural" death, a frequent phenomenon in prisons.
When I left the prison in 1956, the prisoners still heatedly discussed the
tortures inflicted on students and other prisoners. There still remained
isolated in various prisons several cases of which one can say that they have
never recovered.
After the experiment at Pitesti, the methods of torture were no longer the
same. Other means of extermination, more scientific and more rigorous, drained
away the minds of political prisoners, reducing them to the condition of
animals.
In order to explain more fully the system of lying and the paradoxical logic
that made a crime into a moral deed, an enormity into a virtue, I shall relate
a conversation I had in the winter of 1954 with a director-general in the
Ministry of the Interior. (If he was not the Director-General, he was, at
least, a very important personage in the regime. Prisoners are not told either
the name or the position of the individual interrogating them. )
After being switched for almost two months from one investigating room to
another, one night at the beginning of March, I was taken into a room on the
sixth floor and brought face to face with this very important person who tried
to convince me of some "truths" which I had refused to recognize.
Since this was not a run-of-the-mill type of investigation, but rather a
discussion pro and con on various subjects, I took advantage of a propitious
moment to ask him "whether it is true that at Pitesti were committed some
quite strange acts that caused the maiming and even death of some of the
prisoners. " Taken aback, he could not control an expression of shock, and
immediately asked me:
"What do you know about the happenings at Pitesti?"
"Personally," I hedged, "I could not learn much except some
allusions by several students in a discussion a long time ago," and I
hoped he would not press the question. He seemed satisfied with my answer and
seemed disposed to enlighten me.
"As a matter of fact," said he, "it was quite a simple
matter. A group of arrested students, agents of American imperialism, stubborn
and retrograde mystics, started to torture their colleagues, in order thus to
compromise the prison's administration and consequently the Party. "
"But as I understood it," I said, "this category of
'retrograde' students represented approximately eighty per cent of all the
students in prison. Whom did they fight?"
"They fought among themselves."
"To what purpose?" I asked. "I do not quite follow how this
would compromise the Party. "
"They received instructions from outside," he explained,
"from those who are abroad and lead teams of spies and saboteurs; by
torturing one another, the victims could accuse the Party as the culprit.
"
"Nevertheless," I persisted, "this seems almost unbelievable,
with prisons having such a very strict system of internal supervision. How was
it possible for these horrors to take place without the immediate intervention
of the Ministry?"
"We knew nothing of what happened there," he replied. "When
we finally learned about these happenings, we took the necessary steps and
punished the guilty in order to discourage others from doing likewise. "
This was the kind of answer I had expected, for I already knew what had
happened at Turcanu's trial. However, I could not keep from replying somewhat
brusquely:
"I have been a prisoner for seven years and have passed through almost
all the country's penitentiaries. Either isolated, or in common cells, never
could we make the slightest move without being seen by the guards in the halls,
and I do not count the many and various searches made unexpectedly in the
middle of the night. The rigorous surveillance to which we were subjected made
impossible even the use of a sewing needle without the consent of the guard.
How could all these things have happened without the political officers being
immediately informed by the guards? Or is it that you had not one person of
trust in all these prisons, where the acts which you have just described took
place, not a single one to inform you of what was going on?"
"The prison administration was in the hands of some opportunists,"
he said, "enemies of the people who had infiltrated with the express
desire to do harm. They collaborated with the bandits; but they, too, have now
been punished as they deserved. "
I said nothing to this, and did not tell him any more of what I had learned
about the Pitesti experiment. Nor did I mention that I knew that the
"opportunists" he mentioned in the prison administration not only
were not penalized, but had received promotions to higher positions; or that I
knew that Turcanu, before coming to Gherla, had forwarded his notorious
memorandum to the Ministry of which my interrogator was a member; or that, on
the basis of extorted confessions during unmaskings, scores of trials were held
after the confessions had passed through the hands of the Ministry; or of so
many other details known to them only because they had been reported to them by
the re-educators -- or that, of course no remedial steps were ever taken.
Several months later I was freed.
Behind me I left the bars of various penitentiaries, Securitates, forced
labor camps, and "centers for re-education" where tens of thousands
of prisoners languish and suffer with no kind of amnesty in sight to lighten
their punishment. Above them all, like the sword of Damocles, hovers the ever
imminent danger that another experiment similar to, or even more
"scientific" than the one at Pitesti may be staged at any time. I
left behind tens of thousands of fellow Romanians imprisoned under the care of
the same directors-general, subjected day and night to a program of gradual
animalization, and the undermining of physical and moral health through total
inactivity, darkened cells, constant malnutrition, isolation, a severe routine
and chains -- always chains on wrists and legs!
Those who bore part of the responsibility are now in their graves. But they
are not the most guilty.
Some of the re-education's victims too have left for a juster world (for not
even in hell do such cruelties take place). Perhaps there they will find
understanding and maybe forgiveness.
On the other hand, still alive, though maimed and sick, are those who for
the last ten years have been suffering in isolation, as have the re-educated
who recovered their original equilibrium, now broken and isolated from every
contact with the world.
Let us hope that some day these prisoners will have to be listened to;
[7]
let us hope that the criminals who put and keep them there will one day be
brought to justice, namely:
General Nicolschi, head of the investigation brigades in the
Securitate;
Dullberger (later Dulgheru), head of the mobile brigades and transport;
Jianu and Tescovici (alias Georgescu), both former Ministers
of the Interior;
Draghici and Borila, Ministers of the "People's"
Securitate;
Keller, Goiciu, Mihalcea, Avadanei, Gheorghiu, Dumitrescu, Kirion,
Archide, Gal, the guard Cucu, Niki, Mandruta, Ciobanu -- all
implicated in responsibility for both the torturings and the terror inaugurated
by the O. D. C. C. in prisons and labor camps.
To the bar of justice may all these come, and let us hope that the passage
of time does not deprive them of the power of speech! (Various purges of the
Party have been known to bring about such a condition!)
Naturally, there are people who do not want to believe that the events which
took place at Pitesti and the other prisons were a scientific experiment, and
claim that the supporting evidence is circumstantial and not conclusive.
Consequently, two theories have been advanced. One, the more widely held, is
that the Communist Party merely wanted to annihilate the Romanian Nationalist
Movement, which could only be done by destroying the young who carried the
Legionary ideas and traditions and were thus a link between past and future.
But the unmaskings contributed nothing to the consolidation of the Communist
regime itself, for most of the anti-Communist resistance was already behind
bars, and the unmaskings in prison did not greatly help to round up the
remnants of opposition outside. The results did not justify the effort -- could
not possibly have justified it. And this is why:
The years of imprisonment, with their savage privations and long duration,
had already killed or neutralized a large part of the youth of Romania. The
majority of those who passed through prisons and were released alive were in
broken health or too experienced to expose themselves again to useless
suffering. The terror, the memories of imprisonment, the deportations to
Baragan, destroyed for all practical purposes any possible reactivating an
effective resistance. This is a verified fact. And the several thousand men inside
the prisons certainly could not change what had been decided by the great
Dividers of the World at the "Conference Tables" where Europe was
dismembered.
In the event the Party should fall from power at some future time, the
crimes perpetrated in the prisons would have made its record only so much more
monstrous. The physical extermination of the students of Romania, or even of
all the political prisoners, would have resolved nothing, for the People is a
living organism that perpetuates itself by biological continuity. Its potential
will be restored, if it is allowed to exist and reproduce itself for a
sufficient length of time; the vacuum created by massacres will be filled by
the People's fertility. Killing or incapacitating an entire section of the
population does not necessarily destroy an idea, for an idea is generated by
the very biological structure of the nation in question, not by a type of man
belonging to a particular class or generation. Then, too, there is the purely
psychological factor. The persecution of an idea, especially by aliens who have
infiltrated and seized the nation that generated it, imparts to this idea only
a greater popularity.
The other theory was one held especially by many students -- that of pure
irrational revenge. The student movement had been throughout four decades,
until the collapse of the Romanian State, the most consistent enemy of
Communism, the only formidable obstacle to the growth of Communist power. Our
enemies, repeatedly frustrated over the years by the student movement,
naturally accumulated in their minds a boundless and infinite hatred that
easily found expression in retaliation by ultimate brutality the moment they
achieved political power. Thus the "Pitesti Phenomenon" served only
to prove further the utter and inhuman depravity of the Bolsheviks.
But if that had been the purpose, why was the insane fury halted short of
total fulfillment of its lusts? There was no economic, military, or (given the
total secrecy) propagandist reason why any Legionaries should have been spared
the dehumanization, and certainly no reason why any of the victims should have
been permitted to recover their minds and even to recount what they had
experienced. The only plausible or even intelligible reason for halting the
application of the unmasking technique at that time is that the purpose of its
application had somehow been accomplished.
Re-education, therefore, cannot have been designed expressly to destroy a
resistance already become powerless, or even to inflict the utmost horrors in all
whom the anti-humans most hated. The aim of the experimenters seems to have
been that of determining, on the basis of scientific data, the extent to which
a man could be robbed of his personality and be completely and irreversibly
restructured. The ultimate recovery of the majority of the victims proved that
the transformation thus affected was not irreversible.
|
1) |
I. e., corresponding to the office of the Judge Advocate General in the
United States Army. (Tr. ) |
|
2) |
It is noteworthy that only ordinary tortures were used, without recourse
to the techniques applied at Pitesti, and strange that the Tribunal did not
think of using one of the re-educated for this purpose. The inefficiency of
Bolshevik underlings is often astonishing. (Tr. ) |
|
3) |
Presumably orders from above. (Tr. ) |
|
4) |
Burah Tescovici (1908-?), a Jew who early adopted the Romanian name of
Teohari Georgescu to conceal his origin, became an active Communist agent and
conspirator in 1929, if not earlier, and was considered one of the most
dangerous aliens in the country. After the Soviet occupation of Romania, he
became one of the four chiefs of the Communist Party in Romania and
collaborated closely with the repellant and infamous Jewess, Ana Rabinovich
(Pauker). He became Minister of the Interior in the "Romanian"
government in 1947, and was purged in 1952. (Tr. ) |
|
5) |
See ch.
XIII above. |
|
6) |
They were probably accused of being "Fascists" and "in the
pay of the American imperialists," terms which were synonymous in the
Bolshevik propaganda in the occupied countries of Europe -- charges of which
the two men were, of course, innocent, but to which Communist methodology
required a "confession," even when the "trial," as here,
was to be kept secret and so could not be used in local propaganda. The need
to extort such "confessions," known to be utterly false by all concerned
and utterly useless in secret proceedings, is one of the most curious and
significant traits of an alien mentality that the West can describe only as
psychopathic. (Tr. ) |
|
7) |
This hope, formed in 1958, was, of course, in vain. (Tr. ) |