The horrors of Romania’s communist prisons seek a place on UNESCO’s world heritage list

At the former communist prison in Jilava, about six miles outside Bucharest, Niculina Moica pushes open the heavy, rusty gate at the entrance. Devastated by memories, but also by the decrepitude of the sinister place where she was held for four months when she was 16, the octogenarian honorary president of the Association of Political Prisoners of Romania warns before entering the macabre jail: “Its walls enclose the unfortunate memory of the thousands of political prisoners who suffered the most rancid repression that the communist dictatorship began in the late 1940s with the imposition of a terrifying Stalinist regime.”

Now, this fortress, which was used to defend the Romanian capital in the 19th century and later became a symbol of political repression between 1948 and 1964, is on the list of five penitentiary centers that the Ministry of Culture submitted to UNESCO in mid-April to be considered as world heritage sites. EL PAÍS was able to visit Jilava and two other prisons, Sighet and Pitesti, thanks to the Romanian Cultural Institute (ICR). Everything points to them being included on the coveted list, according to the relevant authorities. The ESMA, the largest torture center during the Argentine dictatorship, and genocide memorial sites in Rwanda — Nyamata, Murambi, Gisozi and Bisesero — became part of this select group in September of last year as part of a United Nations strategy to recognize places that reflect suffering and violence in order to influence the memory of the recent past and, thus, try to stop the horrors of the present, such as the rise of dictatorial ideas.

“It’s a shame that a past that constantly looms over society has been treated with neglect,” says Moica, who believes that its inclusion would also help stop the prison from deteriorating. “It’s a shame,” she repeats, looking at the dilapidated façade. The corroded scrap metal beds and gloomy, terrifying corridors can only be visited with the authorization of the prison administration. “In other parts of the world these places are open to the public!” cries the former dissident, who spent five years behind bars after being sentenced to 20 years and hard labor in 1959 for participating in an anti-communist youth organisation. Both Moica and the few other survivors of the former prisons are fighting to transform these places into “crucial testimonies of the reality of the regime,” she explains. “Because of the way we were tortured and the inhumane conditions we endured, such as the beatings, the scarce and disgusting food they provided us with, and the cold we suffered.”

The cells at Jilava are buried 10 meters underground in a hill, creating a gloomy and disturbing aura. “They were dark and damp; it was like we had been locked in a hole,” recalls Moica, who arrived on Christmas Eve in a freezing drizzle: “I thought they were going to shoot me.” After each visit to the prison, she takes a quick shower to wash away the feeling of impurity. During the dictatorship (1945-1989), there were 44 prisons and 72 forced labor camps that housed more than 150,000 political prisoners, according to the institute responsible for investigating communist crimes, which estimates the number of citizens convicted in that period to be around 600,000. Although some penitentiaries still house detainees, many have been closed, demolished, or bought by private companies. Only two of them, with the help of private funds, have been converted into museums.

Historical memory

Current Minister of Culture Raluca Turcan criticises her predecessors for neglecting the past and refers to it as a “moral duty” to make future generations aware of painful events in Romania’s recent history. “The former communist prisons of Sighet, Pitesti, Jilava, Ramnicu Sarat, and Fagaras, which represent the phenomenon of communist oppression, are symbolic places that preserve the memory of the victims of the totalitarian regime. Their inclusion in the UNESCO World Heritage would recognize the importance of historical memory and education about political repression, thus ensuring the preservation and transmission of these lessons to other generations,” Turcan says.

On the Ukrainian border, almost 375 miles north of the Romanian capital, lies Sighet prison, a detention center for common prisoners that was transformed into a maximum-security prison in the early 1950s. During that time, 200 public figures were transferred there in the most absolute secrecy, including former prime minister Iuliu Maniu, who died in his cell, other senior politicians, journalists, military personnel, and priests. “We know that 54 people died, although they were buried in places still to be identified,” says Andrea Dobes, a museologist at the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and the Resistance, pointing to a chilling punishment cell. “Prisoners considered recalcitrant were shackled in the center of the dungeon, their feet were held on a grille submerged in water, and they were kept in a cage. Naked and barefoot, hungry and cold, and sometimes tied up, they were forced to stand all day in the dark,” Dobes explains.

The Sighet prison, which was used as a warehouse for salt, vegetables, and tyres before being abandoned, is now the largest museum in the country dedicated to the communist dictatorship. More than 130,000 visitors a year come across a description of political anomalies that brought pain and death, says Dobes. But its creation required years of struggle by its founder, the poet and essayist Ana Blandiana, who will receive the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature this month in Spain.

It all began after the fall of communism in 1989, when the European Council encouraged Blandiana to present a project to build a place to “relearn memory.” “The greatest victory of communism was the creation of the man without memory, a new man with a brainwashed mind, who was not supposed to remember anything of what he was, what he had, or what he did before; that is why the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and the Resistance represents a way of countering that victory and resurrecting collective memory,” Blandiana stresses. During the pandemic, the author discovered four notebooks and a diary written a few months before the fall of the regime, which ended up in a best-selling book, especially among younger people. “As I read the pages, I was surprised that the dictatorship was much worse than I remembered; I realized that the memories had been sweetened.”

On a smaller scale, but with the same purpose, the Pitesti Prison Memorial brings to life through testimonies the experiences of some 600 students who were physically and psychologically tormented between November 1949 and May 1951. A KGB agent implemented the so-called “Pitesti Experiment,” which consisted of forcing students to be not only informants, but also torturers. One of the victims ended up becoming one of the main perpetrators of the atrocious experiment, the most terrifying in the Eastern European bloc. “If it is included as a world heritage site, no one will question the importance of these places,” says Maria Axinte, who started the project on her own initiative 10 years ago. “They were tortured and forced to disown their families, friends, and principles to prove that they had become new people and aggressors of other victims,” says Axinte, before displaying a room where satanic acts were practiced, now transformed into a place of religious worship: “It was a diabolical operation of depersonalization, self-destruction, and moral murder.”

The Pitesti Experiment ended after a criminal investigation under international pressure, and a pseudo-macro trial, between 1953 and 1954, without its true creators being convicted. However, the method of mass subjugation through psychological blackmail and subliminal aggression continued under the regime. The former prison, classified as a historical monument last year, welcomes around 10,000 visitors each year. But its 34-year-old founder still regrets “the lack of interest from the state and the lack of understanding” of a past that shapes the mentality of citizens.

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