After such preparation and under such pressure, Pavlov's conditioned
reflexes worked perfectly.
The students to be used as the "shock group" in cells whose
inmates were to undergo unmasking were selected by the committee because,
through their previous testimony, they were known to have close friends among
the new group and could more easily elicit information to be used a couple of
weeks later to intensify the effect of surprise at the moment of unleashing the
unmasking. Following this dramatic moment of shock, Turcanu would appear, raise
his cap, deliver his discourse, and at a signal, set off the lightning barrage
of bludgeons on the thunderstruck victims.
One cycle was closed, a new one opened. Those who had been tortured were now
torturing those who in their turn were being trained to torture others. This
rhythm increased as the number of trainees increased, and the experiment was
extended from Pitesti to other Romanian prisons.
By the time the amplification was decided upon, the Ministry of the Interior
was already sending political prisoners to the slave labor camps to be worked
to death in digging a navigable canal that would connect the Danube to the
Black Sea. The contribution that students could make to this extermination
process looked promising. The December 1949 cycle of mass unmaskings did not
provide enough robots to satisfy the demands of the canal administration. This
was mainly because Pitesti had to retain the old trainers to unmask the
increasing numbers being sent there from military tribunals all over the
country. The tempo of the unmaskings was therefore stepped up rapidly to satisfy
the increased demands at the canal. But also, the process itself was being
speeded up, as the directors found they could skip the two weeks of
psychological preconditioning usually given the trainees before the unmasking
was initiated. Better results were obtained, they found, by plunging the
victims directly into unmasking, thus preventing information from the outside
being circulated inside their cell. So when a new group of students arrived, it
was sent directly into unmaskings the moment after it was duly registered on
the administration's books.
The group of students transported from Cluj, mostly from the Law School, may
be cited as an example. They were unloaded into the prison early in July 1950,
among them several students whom I met later -- Inocentiu Glodeanu, Silviu
Suciu, Hosu, Pitea, and others. They were taken to Hospital Room Four, not
given any time to rest, or even for the "shock group" to elicit
information; they reacted violently and fought for hours, but finally were
overpowered by the much larger number of re-educators who imposed the norm of
the new "ethics," employing the usual methods of torture to
illustrate its validity. Of the four victims I came to know well, three had
sustained permanent damage to their lungs.
Because of this increased tempo of unmaskings, some errors were bound to be
made in screening detainees for transport to Pitesti. Thus it happened that
several youths who were not even students arrived. One had been an
"occasional" student named Opris from the slums of Bucharest, about
20 years old and by occupation a pickpocket. He had been arrested trying to
slip across the border -- probably because the Romanian people had become so
poor that his occupation no longer paid! His infraction was considered
political and Opris landed at Jilava, being put in the same cell I used to
have, No. 23 in the second section, in the fall of 1949. Here, he represented
himself as a congressman's son implicated in an anti-Communist organization,
but actually he was busy supplying information to Director Maromet. He was
tried, then sent to serve his sentence at Pitesti among the students. He went
through the usual unmaskings, but what was he to tell? He "unmasked"
his real occupation in the first session, even before being beaten. So he was compelled
to demonstrate how he plied his trade, being presented as a "victim of
bourgeois education. "
Strange also was the inclusion of lawyer D. among students, for his age
precluded a mistake and the Securitate had his complete dossier anyway. He was
arrested under suspicion of being a member of a resistance group led by Colonel
Arsenescu; and he was not brought to trial, but only sentenced to 10 years --
for defiance of authority! Perhaps the Securitate sent him to Pitesti hoping to
get more information from him via the Pitesti experiment than they had been
able to obtain through the extreme rigor of normal investigative methods.
The same thing happened to Eugen Bolfosu, the engineer, who was tried by the
Military Tribunal of Bucharest along with a group of students from the
Polytechnical School. By some coincidence, I traveled in the same prison van
with him from Pitesti to Aiud in the winter of 1951; but even though the trip
took two days to cover the couple of hundred miles because, contrary to habit, the
van stopped at various provincial prisons for "pickups", Bolfosu
uttered not more than three words the whole time, and these only when
questioned. Once arrived at Aiud, he was hastily isolated because he had been
brought from Pitesti prison. The political officer visited him several times,
but whether or not he said any more than while being transported I do not know.
He did appear three days later, but his silence was even more pronounced (if
this was possible) three months later when I met him in the workshop.
A high school student from Constanta was also sent to Pitesti by mistake,
and his subsequent transfer to Aiud was also strange, as high school students
were usually not sent there either. He, like the others from Pitesti, would not
speak to anyone about what happened there, even though there was considerable
freedom to talk in the workshop in Aiud.
Much later, I found out one reason for such reticence: Turcanu had given
instructions to all those transferred from Pitesti to Aiud to get in touch with
the political officer at once and tell him anything that might be useful later
on in unmaskings of the "old ones" (politicians of the traditional
political parties, and older Legionaries) which he himself was scheduled to
initiate at Aiud, where he thought he would soon be transferred. He cautioned
them that if they talked, they would face a new ordeal of tortures when he
arrived.