CHAPTER IX

THE CATHOLICS

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.