The scene takes place in the Gherla prison yard, several months before
Turcanu and his collaborators were transported to the Ministry of the Interior.
An inmate walks in an inner courtyard surrounded by the four walls of the
buildings, an area of several hundred square yards. His hands clasped behind
his back, his head bowed, he was deep in his own thoughts when some noise made
him lift his head and look up. That instant, Martinus appeared in front of him.
"Bandit," said Martinus, "you look skyward, believing that
the Americans will come from there?"
The inmate lowered his head without a word.
"Bandit, why do you lower your head? You look at the ground because you
despise me, is that it?" A prison guard who stood nearby watched and
smiled.
The inmate was ready to answer, since he did not know this fellow Martinus,
did not know at the time what was going on on the fourth floor, and besides he
did not like being addressed in this manner. But one of his cellmates who did
know was able to restrain him with a look. In a cautious whisper he said,
"Don't answer. This is the most powerful man here, below the director. He
can do anvthing to you. "
The inmate stared after the departing Martinus, who did not wait for an
answer but wrote down the victims name to be scheduled for unmaskings. He had
guessed by the inmate's silence and look that he was another "enemy of the
working class"!
In the same courtyard, at the hour when the night-shift goes to work, two
pallid-faced inmates were talking. A student slowly edges closer to eavesdrop
on the pair. There is some racket in the yard, due to the unrest of several
hundred prisoners who have been waiting for more than an hour for the roll call
before going into the workshop. The two continued their conversation, unaware
of the eavesdropper. The next day one of the two was ordered to report to the
political officer. When he arrived, he was given a round of slaps in the face.
Surprised, he asked why.
"Bandit," he was told, "you dare ask why! Do you not want to
come to your senses? What were you discussing about Hitler last night as you
stood in line waiting to go to work?"
After more slaps and kicks, more yelling and swearing, the desperate inmate
frantically tried to recall everything they had talked about, and finally
remembered that his friend had asked him why he looked so ill. He had answered
that he had an "icter recidivist," which is Romanian for
"return of an attack of jaundice. " The eavesdropper heard instead Hitler
redivivus (Latin for "Hitler revived") and had reported to the
political officer that the two had been discussing politics, which was
forbidden, and hoping for the return of Hitler!
Any information reported by the re-educated was accepted as absolutely the
truth and the denounced inmate had not the slightest possibility of defending
himself successfully. It is not that the political directorate of the prison
believed that the re-educated ones never lied, but whether their reports were
true or not, they provided an excuse for punishment, which is all the officers
were after anyway. They considered each inmate a personal enemy who deserved
nothing but extermination, by any convenient means, but preferably through
routine procedures.
So long as the entire shop and technical office leadership was entrusted to
the students, the oppression by the administration was not exercised directly,
but through student intermediaries. They were the ones directly responsible for
whatever went on in the workshops, the quality and quantity of products, for
discipline and for output. Whoever did not show enough zeal was considered an
opportunist, indifferent to being a leader, and consequently sent "to work
down below," which is the Communist term for being downgraded from a
function, but here really meant to be sent down to work under infernal
conditions.
Large numbers of the re-educated could not be employed as administrators
because, contrary to the prevailing bureaucratic practice, the positions were
few. Those students who did not excel in re-education practices were sent to
work side by side with the rest of the prisoners. And in order to get promoted
to a desk job, which some of their colleagues held, they almost killed
themselves working, exceeding the norms by truly phenomenal percentages. Other
workers began to exceed their quotas, not so much to get into the good graces
of the political officer as to be left in peace by the re-educated.
Thus began a hellish competition. The "norm-setters" had a very
special mission: to observe the quota production as closely as possible and
report within twenty-four hours any increase. Next day, the increased
production became the norm, and the cycle began anew. It was not too long
before the initial quota was exceeded by 250%, which then became the new
minimum quota! To show you how difficult work became under these conditions, I
shall give one example out of thousands that occurred in Gherla prison.
In the winter of 1952, an order of tubs for washing clothes was received
from the military. The riveting of the sheet metal lining the tub on the inside
was initially timed at 92 minutes. A prisoner was expected to put out eight
units in his twelve hours of work. Three months later the re-educated reduced
the time to 30 minutes, a speed-up of 300%. When I was put on shop work, my
quota was 28 tubs in 12 hours. During the summer of 1953, this was increased to
38 in 12 hours. A worker who riveted 10 tubs in one shift during the winter was
considered as exceeding the quota; by summer, if he did 35, he was punished for
not meeting his quota, and put on half-food rations.
The student informers and the sadistic administrators cooperated efficiently
in keeping always full the incarceration cells, the black room, and the
isolation holes -- the three ordinary means of punishment. I shall describe
them for you.
Incarceration cells. These were tall, narrow, box-like structures
about 6 feet high and 16 inches square. A prisoner was forced to stand in one
for from eight to fifteen days, except when he was taken out for work each day.
If, as frequently happened, the numbers of prisoners exceeded the number of
box-stalls available, two prisoners at a time were squeezed into each vertical
coffin and locked in. To force their bodies in, the guard had to use his fists,
kicks, and much swearing before getting the door finally pushed tight enough
against their bodies to be locked.
By the end of the first two days, the prisoners' legs turned into stumps,
with no feeling in them, and the body, due to lack of mobility, restricted
circulation, and the kidneys' inability to function normally, took on a queer
shape. But this form of punishment ran its normal course, as I have said, in
from eight to fifteen days, with prisoners extracted for the 12-hour work
period each day. In graver cases, however, the director decided the victim
should spend all his time, day and night, in the box except for two trips to
the lavatory.
The worst feature, perhaps, was that these boxes were set directly on
concrete flooring so that in sub-zero weather the wretches locked within were
turned into frozen mummies.
Hardly any one was able to pass twelve hours at a stretch in one of these
boxes without passing out. This was caused partly by a lack of air. The only
source of air provided was a small opening of a few square inches in one side,
but if there were two men in the box, the back of one covered up the hole,
making breathing more and more difficult. Fortunately, as more boxes were built
by the prisoners themselves, the boards were loosely fitted with a space of one
to three millimeters left between them through negligence, or through ...
foresight, allowing a little air to reach the victims.
When all boxes were full to capacity (and never in the three years of the O.
D. C. C. terror were they unoccupied, not even for a few hours), the prisoners
were crammed into a black room.
The Black Room. Every prison in Romania had one or more. The rooms
were called "black" because they had no windows, air or light, with
only one door into the corridor of the prison. About nine feet square, they
were designed to hold two prisoners, but director Goiciu would put as many as
thirty or even more unfortunates into this small space. Prisoners were stripped
to underwear and if necessary crushed one over the other in this permanently
vitiated atmosphere, with but a single uncovered bucket, no bed, no blanket, no
water, nothing to lie on but the cement floor or the bodies of those no longer
capable of standing up. Nobody could sleep. If in winter this crowding was
somehow bearable because the bodies warmed each other, in the summer it became
an indescribable inferno.
No water was allowed in this black room, on orders of the director, and the
stench in the place became unbearable. In order to get to the bucket an almost
impossible effort was necessary and consequently many renounced it. And
terrible scenes took place in this writhing mass of suffering men. In order not
to urinate on the floor, out of a sense of decency, the prisoners actually
fought to get places near the bucket, even though there the stench was
unbearable. Summers brought on an endemic attack of boils, winters caused
pneumonia that became galloping tuberculosis. The spirit of irony among the
prisoners was yet alive however. They christened the two places of torture "mon
caprice" (the incarceration box) and "mon jardin"
(the black room).
Isolation. A third form of punishment, more grim and more dangerous
than the others, was the regimen of isolation. An entire floor of the old
prison was reserved for those whose guilt was considered too great for a
sentence of only ten days in an incarceration box, or three weeks in the black
room. Isolation carried a sentence of three months or longer, and though the
prisoners were apparently separated from the floor reserved for those dying of
tuberculosis, the brooms for housekeeping, the barrels of water, and the
clothing to be laundered, were all thrown together so that germs could be
spread freely over both floors. The isolation prisoners were permitted a walk
of 15 minutes every day; the rest of the time the yard was used for the sick
"who had more need of fresh air." This deliberate mixing of the sick
and the healthy was nothing other than premeditated homicide. But who could
make even a gesture of protest?
Nevertheless, knowing the great risk to their health, the prisoners
committed premeditated acts of gross disobedience in order to be sent to
isolation; at least they could sleep or lie down all day there. But things
changed. A re-educated inmate was responsible for ending this prisoners'
paradise. While in isolation, he reported to the director that prisoners coming
there did so on their own initiative, in order to get out of working in the
shop. Immediately, food rations were cut in half, and to the most recalcitrant,
cut to one quarter; beatings for no reason were initiated, on invented charges;
and because the political officers were accountable to nobody there, they
turned the torturing of prisoners into a daily ritual of entertainment.
The contribution of the re-educated was to supply a constant stream of
occupants for the incarceration box, the black room and the isolation floor. Of
their victims so punished, more than 75% contracted tuberculosis, and ended in
the cemetery. The director permitted the prison doctor to transfer a prisoner
to the T. B. section only after blood appeared in his sputum. But by then his
fate was sealed.
I shall give you one example.
A youth of about twenty years named Onac, a peasant from the Bihor region,
had been condemned because he "wanted to overthrow the regime," but,
having the strength and the pride, it seemed, of the very mountains where he
was reared, all the harassment of the administration, all the provocations of
the re-educated could not budge him. His determined posture made him hated by
the stoolpigeons and he told them off at every opportunity; while they in turn
kept their eyes on him, looking for the first opportunity to denounce him to
the director.
One day, as they walked toward the shop, this opportunity came. Onac, to
again show his contempt for one of the informants near him, turned to one of
his friends saying, as he pointed up to the corridor bell, "This bandit
ought to be hanged by the bell's tongue, for he is one of the worst. " Since
Onac was imitating the manner and language of the re-educated, the informant
could see that they were talking about him and reported Onac's remark in this
twisted fashion:
"The director is going to be hanged on the bell's tongue when the
Americans arrive!!"
Without any further investigation, Onac was given 15 days in the box. It was
winter. Dressed only in shirt and underpants, he was there only a few days
before contracting pulmonary congestion and the doctor, also a prisoner,
prescribed the available drugs and wanted him sent to the infirmary. But
instead, the director threw him into the black room, where his congestion
turned into pneumonia, then into galloping tuberculosis. In less than two
months after his incarceration, mountain-strong Onac met his death. When it was
known he would die, he was moved into a cell serving as a morgue in the yard of
the tubercular prisoners. Here he was visited by the student who caused his
plight. The remorseful student, face to face with the dying man, and kneeling,
tears in his eyes, asked for forgiveness. But the dying young giant now wasted,
only stared at him, without a word.
He died the next morning, a sad and foggy morning, the kind of which there
are many in prisons. His corpse was left on the cement floor of the morgue where
he died, for two more days. In the evening then, after prisoners were locked in
their cells, amidst a heavy silence in the courtyard, a guard and two common
law prisoners carried him to his grave -- not in the nearby cemetery, but on
the bank of the River Somes, in a spot where only prisoners were thrown. He was
denied a Christian burial. The hole had been dug that morning but by evening
was full of water because the river level had risen, soaking the banks up to
the grass roots. When they threw him in, the water splashed out on the bearers
-- like a last protest against injustice by what was left of this gallant boy.
Onac's case was not unusual or remarkable. Every prisoner who survives will
have an Onac of his own to tell about. More than one -- perhaps thousands; the
differences are only of nuance. The cause of their deaths, however, will be
always the same: they were the victims of other victims.
It was summer of 1953. Together with us in a cell at Gherla was, among other
prisoners, a student from the Polytechnic Institute. The noon meal was just
served, with everybody holding his mess-pan (there were no tables in the
prison), when another student, who was the last to come in, said jokingly,
"With the last transport yesterday, Turcanu was brought back. " His
words fell into the silence like a bombshell; the three students who shared
this cell lowered their mess-pans, seized by panic, the one from Polytechnic
being so frightened he dropped his to the floor and just stood there
bewildered. His face became all of a sudden waxlike and he was incapable of
uttering a single word; it seemed his entire being was seized with a weakness
that paralyzed even his thought. All three boys looked at each other, waiting
it seemed for something to happen to show them it wasn't true. Actually, it was
not true at all, and the jokester said so. But this did not help matters much.
For three days and more, in spite of the endemic hunger they suffered as
prisoners, the three students could eat nothing. At every slightest slamming of
a door they shuddered and looked up in terror, expecting Turcanu to enter and
resume the unmaskings.
Later on, one of them told me that they were so terrified because they were
just beginning to emerge from the madness of Pitesti and realized that the O.
D. C. C. would never forgive an abandonment of the "principle of
re-education." Several months after this occurrence, one of the students
with whom I had discussed problems in general as well as what had happened to
them, warned me that if unmaskings were resumed we had better hide nothing we
told each other; that as far as he was concerned, he would do just that.
"For you," he said, "as a matter of fact, it will of course be
much easier, because you know nothing of the reality of the experiment proper,
while I will be considered a traitor. "