I never understood how such a book that told the truth about
life in the west escaped his publishing censoring goons. I was going to finally
find out as I was going to meet Romulus Rusan and his equally famous and lovely
wife, the poet Ana Blandiana.
Romulus Rusan told me that his editor revealed to him that,
of the 100,000 plus copies of his first edition book that were sold in
Ceausescu’s Romania, probably half of the readers immigrated to the U.S. He
could not understand why Rusan was not arrested by the communist regime. His
wife joked that they must have labored under a lucky star, under divine
protection.
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| Romanian Ambassador at Washington Romulus Rusan and Ana Blandiana (Photo: Ileana Johnson, June 3, 2015) |
I met Ana Blandiana and Romulus Rusan at a Romanian Embassy
serata honoring their literary work and their untiring efforts to bring to
light the horrors of communism in the First Memorial to the Victims of
Communism at Sighet, Romania. A true labor of love, their work began in 1993
with the acquisition of the Sighet Prison, a condemned ruin.
The former prison built in 1897 to incarcerate common
criminals, was used during First and Second World Wars for political inmates,
priests, Polish revolutionaries, and Romanian deserters. During the period of
1948 to 1950, resistance fighters from Maramures, peasants and students, were
imprisoned here.
Between May 1950 and July 1955, it served as a
maximum-security facility, holding ministers, members of Parliament,
journalists, officers, priests, and other religious leaders. During this time,
54 of those held died while in custody and were buried in unmarked graves. In
1955 the prison became again a jail for common criminals with more creature “comforts.”
Because of a decree in 1975 which ruled that prison sentences had to be served
in the workplace, the prison was closed and abandoned.
Ana Blandiana and Romulus Rusan petitioned the Council of
Europe to open a museum in the former prison which had become, as they
described it, an “insalubrious ruin.”
 |
| Sighet Museum (photo: Wikipedia) |
With funds from the Civic Academy Foundation, the
International Centre for Studies of Communism, and the untiring efforts of Ana
Blandiana and Romulus Rusan, the former prison became the first museum of its
kind in the world, dedicated to the victims of communism in Romania and in all
former communist countries of the Iron Curtain.
Each cell became a separately-themed room with its own
chronology of death and destruction of the human body and spirit caused by the
most oppressive form of dictatorship in history – communism.
After the Civic Academy Foundation was established to create
the museum at Sighet, the 175 founding members chose Ana Blandiana to be
President.
The exterior of the building was repaired with help from Hanns
Seidel Foundation and from private donations. The actual repair work commenced
on July 1, 1996 and the Memorial was inaugurated on June 20, 1997.
Former political prisoners, Orthodox priest Constantin
Voiculescu and Graeco-Catholic priest Eugen Popa, held the religious service to
consecrate the Space for Recollection and
Prayer.
I was amazed that a husband and wife team was able to bring
to life such a significant memorial with limited resources and a gargantuan
effort, yet the west is still struggling to raise funds to build a similar
museum.
In addition to the Civic Academy which is attended by
students and professors from Europe, the International Center for Studies into
Communism, the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Resistance, the
Sighet Museum has been visited to date by more than one million people.
The Cortege of the Sacrificial Victims by Aurel I. Vlad
(Photo: Widipedia)
The symbolic statuary entitled “The Cortege of the
Sacrificial Victims” by Aurel Vlad depicts humans walking in various stances of
resignation, heads bowed down or raised to the sky, some with hands up,
begging, imploring, appealing to a higher power, and wondering why. When it
rains, the rivulets make the statues appear as if the victims are crying.
Sighet prison cells
(Photo: Wikipedia)
Dozens and dozens of rooms in the museum tell the horrible
stories of the most oppressive period in Romania’s modern history:
-
More than 10,000 trials were held according to
the Communist Party template – accusations of
‘treason,’ ‘plotting against the social order,’ ‘espionage,’ ‘sabotage,’
‘diversion,’ ‘inimical attitude,’ ‘public instigation,’ ‘fraudulent crossing of
the border,’ ‘omitting to make a denunciation,’ and ‘dissemination of forbidden
publications;’ they were always followed by hard prison time and sometimes
death.
-
More than 2 million people were persecuted
politically using “coercive methods,” with hundreds of thousands arrested
administratively, without trial, some up to ten years.
-
600,000 Romanians were arrested and sentenced to
prison between 1945-1989
-
200,000 Romanians were deported to forced labor
camps.
-
Destruction of traditional parties, National
Peasant Party, National Liberal and Social Democrat Party, and installation of
one party, the Communist Party, replacing a multi-party democratic regime with
a one-party state.
-
Repression against the Romanian Orthodox Church,
Graeco-Catholic Church, Protestant and Evangelical churches.
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Installation of the dreaded Securitate by decree in August 1948, following the infiltration by
communists of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1944.
-
Use of political detainees in hard labor camps
for various building projects.
-
How individual farmers were forced into
collectivization, the peasants’ resistance, and their swift repressions.
-
The sovietization of the population, forced
submission into communism by purging, beatings, and confiscation of personal
property.
-
Orchestrated by communist organizers like Emil
Bodnaras, Ana Pauker, and other Moscow agents, the army, the police, and the
justice system were forcefully transformed into communist arms of the police-state.
-
Firing and assignment to manual jobs or labor
camps of any teachers opposed to the communist regime; those remaining and the
new teachers had to become the “new man” through violent ideological and
propaganda subjects, becoming tools of the Marxist-Leninist education based on
Soviet-style textbooks.
-
Ethnic repression, accusations of “Zionism” and
the maltreatment of gypsies.
-
Deportation of 44,000 people to the Baragan
steppe; 1,700 of the deportees died; the oldest person was deported at the age
of 95 and lasted until he turned 100.
-
Anti-communist resistance in the Fagaras
Mountains and Western Carpathians.
-
Women who gave birth in prison and their
children were removed and sent to orphanages; 4,200 women, mothers, wives, or
daughters of political prisoners were also imprisoned as “dangers to the social
order.”
-
The famous historian Gheorghe I. Bratianu was
imprisoned at Sighet for twenty-four months and died there in April 1953; on
August 6, 1953, the Interior Ministry decided to increase the prison sentence
of a dead man by 60 months.
-
High school students were deported and served
time in communist prisons for either running into the mountains to join the
partisans or defacing/tearing up official posters and portraits, telling jokes,
writing epigrams, and drawing cartoons.
-
Doctors and medical students were imprisoned for
refusing to adopt communist jargon and for not rejecting “all that was western.”
-
Room 9 is the cell where the famous Iuliu Maniu
died in 1953 (1873-1953); his cell was left untouched, with thick bars and the
broken bed with wires sticking out from the dirty mattress; Maniu, the architect
of the unification of Transylvania with Romania in 1918, the former Romanian Prime
Minister, leader of the National Peasant Party and of the National Romanian
Party, former Parliament member in Bucharest and Budapest, attorney for the
Graeco-Catholic Church, landowner and
leader of the Democratic opposition, a man who dedicated his entire life to
public service, died alone in his frigid cell, without a candle or the presence
of another human being.
-
Those who died in prison at Sighet from 1952 on
were buried secretly at night on the banks of the River Tisa at the border with
the former USSR. (Romulus Rusan, Museum Archives and Guide, 1993-2014)
Horrible details about the prison life had emerged slowly
from those who survived, from guards, and from those forced to clean and sweep
the hallways and the prison courtyard. They would sometimes exchange a few
words with political prisoners who were stronger and able to stand up and
speak. Those who became very ill were usually isolated and deprived of medical
treatment until it was too late to assimilate extra food such as potatoes, and
they expired.
The food served was inadequate for survival. The communist guards hoped the prisoners would die quickly of
malnutrition and starvation. Cardinal Iuliu Hossu of the Cluj Graeco-Catholic Church
wrote in his memoirs that the “soup was water with a piece of vegetable
floating in it.” It was considered a delicacy to find a “hard piece of a cow’s
hairy lip” bobbing in this watery soup. http://www.romanialibera.ro/aldine/history/cum-a-murit-iuliu-maniu-la-sighet-215636
The inmates received no medical assistance. Knowing that dying
men and women were unable to metabolize the extra calories, the guards would give
them extra food. And if the lack of proper nutrition and medical care did not
kill the political prisoners, the bitter cold of northern Romania exacerbated
by the thick walls most certainly caused hypothermia and death.
The Sighet Museum is a living monument to the cruelty of communism
and to the inhumane treatment that millions of innocent citizens were subjected
to by tyrants and their failed ideology, an ideology concocted by a dangerous
man named Karl Marx whose theories ultimately destroyed the human spirit,
imprisoned free men, and killed over 100 million worldwide in the name of collectivism,
equality, and social justice. http://www.memorialsighet.ro/index.php?lang=en
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