One Of The Most Terrible Experiments In Dehumanisation That Our Epoch Has Known.The Genocide Of The Souls…
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Methods of brainwashing used in communist prisons in Romania. “We were skeletons, bones dressed in leather”
After 69 years, the survivors of the Pitesti experiment, the place where everything began, talk about the anguished torments and the terrible torture methods that they were asked to give up their ideals, principles and faith in God, and embrace the new communist ideology.
The new man, created by torture
Few know that at the beginning of communism there was a place of absolute terror in Pitesti. Romania was the scene of a phenomenon that attempted the creation of a new man using re-education through torture that specialists and historians would later declare to have been unique in the world: the Pitesti experiment.
The action of Pitesti was unique not only because of the methods of torture that surpassed any kind of imagination, but also through the methods of reeducation that involved such terrible stages that the detainees were taken to the point where they were either the victim, the aggressors of their own comrades . Otherwise they were sometimes tortured to death.
“Particularly on Sundays or Easter, Christmas, they sing laughing churches, the former theologians sing and put their heads in the urine and feces. Others asked her to eat faeces. It seems unbelievable, but it was , ” says a survivor.
“We were skeletons”
Radu Ciuceanu is today President of the National Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism. After the revolution he did research because he wanted to know the truth. He was arrested in September 1948 because he had initiated and ruled an anticommunist organization. He was sentenced to 15 years of heavy dungeon and went through the prisons in Craiova, Pitesti, Jilava, Targsor, Gherla, Dej and Vacaresti.
” The soccer game was like that: you were naked, pushed into a circle, and you were clinging to a cloth and you were thrown from one side to the other, you no one. You were unleashed and the great fun was trying to defend yourself because the blows came from both the top and the bottom and the neck. “
“We were skeletons, some bones dressed in leather,” says Gheorghe Plop, one of the survivors. “It was a brainwashing.” That’s what most of those who have gone through the “Experiment of Pitesti” call it: brainwashing to get rid of their ideals, family, friends, and ultimately faith in God.
When they reached this point, they were forced to show off: to say everything they did not recognize in the investigation, and to provide information that allowed the Securitate to make new arrests.
Re-education centers for political prisoners
Thousands of Romanians were arrested during 1948 because they were hostile to the regime. Many of them were students or students. The Communist Party wanted to eliminate some resistance groups whose anti-system ideas were increasingly present among the population.
In 1948, when the Securitate led by agents in the Soviet intelligence services was set up, 3019 were arrested as part of the Brothers of the Cross, the Legionary Movement, or who simply spoke to the system impot.
Gheorghe Pintilie, head of the service, then spoke of prisons as rehabilitation centers where detainees could use their communist ideology. His idea was drawn to Suceava and was cultivated by a detainee, Eugen Turcanu, who offered to become an informer and propagate communist ideas in prison.
After being sentenced to seven years in correctional prison, Turcanu was transferred to Pitesti in 1949 with a group of students, some of whom were willing to compromise in order to escape the prison. Students from all over the country reached that year in Pitesti, in a small, small prison, away from the city.
How did torture re-education take place in the communist dungeon in Pitesti. “In the cell I was shaking my soul”
Tache Rodas was 17 years old and was a student when he was first arrested for belonging to the Brotherhood of the Cross, the youth organization of the Legionary Movement. He was released after two years in 1944, but re-incarnated a few months later. In 1945 he escaped from the Slobozia camp and stayed home until 1948 when he seized the Securitate. He was sentenced to five years in correctional jails and imprisoned in Pitesti.
Gheorghe Plop was already in Pitesti penitentiary when students started to come. He had been arrested twice. The first time he was 17, for joining the Brotherhood of the Cross and condemned to hard labor for life, but pardoned two years later. He was reinstated in 1948 and sentenced to eight years of heavy dungeon. During the same period, Gheorghe Bagu, who was in the last year of college and who was detained after one of his friends denounced that at a party participated in talks against the Communist Party, was brought to Pitesti. He received two years in prison.
Methods of reeducation invented by the Soviets
“He turned me into a large room without fire, with nothing. There were only feces on the ground, something unthinkable. He pushed me there in the dark, nothing was seen, “
Bagu says about the first day in the penitentiary. There he met Gelu Gheorghiu, a Politehnica student who had been arrested for having housed several members of the Cross Brothers in his home. Also in Pitesti was brought Radu Ciuceanu, arrested in September 1948 for a year before he had initiated and led an anticommunist group affiliated to the armed resistance group led by Iancu Carlaont.
In Pitesti, as well as in Suceava, Turcanu continues his informative activity, but the low level of information sent to the Securitate causes the bosses to give him free hand to use any means to reach his goal. The method of re-education using other detainees belongs to the Russian pedagogue Anton Makarenko, who relied on collective work and less on the beating.
Beat, the supreme argument
On December 6, 1949, in room 4 of the hospital, Turcanu had organized an action whereby detainees could express their views on the new regime. Gheoghe Bagu remembers he spoke that day. “I said,” We’ve come here, we’re all wrong, re-educating, getting away. “ But they did not want to accept. One, called Berj, seems like a priest, a young student, a theology student, what he did as he started to beat him, he swelled his head, completely disfigured him .
” That was the moment that triggered the general beating . Turcanu’s supporters tossed their legs under their beds and began to strike the others, immediately receiving the help of the guards.
“The director came and put everyone on the cement and bare skin to sit on the cement and face down. And the director, with three guards and Turcanu, beat like beans, until all the blood was made by all, on the floor. And they chuckled and when I heard that I was racing in that shit, I was passing away from the cell 7 my soul was shaking , ” remembers the surviving uine.
A few days later, on Christmas, room 4 was playing carols. At one point, Turcanu came in and shouted: “They!” The detainees hurt other detainees, asking for information about their anti-party activity. After two days of terrible beating, many could not go anymore and did not even know what they were saying.
“He had the eyes of an assassin”
In prison, Turcanu had a special regime. He had access to all the cells, decided the place of detention of the newcomers, and the leadership and guardians protected him. “What surprised me,” remembers Radu Ciuceanu, “was the color of his eyes – he had the eyes of an assassin. I noticed a paranoid behavior. ” Turcanu “had a criminal dementia , ” confirms other survivors.
The techniques of torture invented by Turcanu and his were no longer used anywhere in the world until then: genoflexions with their hands up and down, were headed in the feces to choking and removed at the last moment. After returning, they were back again.
They were put on the edge of the bed with their eyes fixed on their thumbs for 16 hours. If they were moving they were hit. The restroom was allowed to sit for only 20 seconds. They slept on cement, and another 15-20 detainees climbed over them. He was put on the cement and looked at the bulb for 24 hours.
That was the position they were eating. Other detainees were put to head to head. The victims were no longer able to react, so most of them did the mechanic they were asking for, and their lives took place between beatings and writing statements. There is no rest time.
“The Pitesti Experiment”, hell that even terrified the PCR chiefs. Detainees were forced to torture their friends
Weakened and hungry, prisoners entered what was called the re-education process. S ub terrible tortures were forced to make unmasking, starting with the external phase, they provide information about people at large on which to make new arrests. The best friends were taken out in front of others and forced to palm up to exhaustion.
Stages of re-education
As I did the self-destruction they made it tens and hundreds ,
” says Radu Ciuceanu. “I took all the party members I knew. I took all those who died, I took two fictitious armament points from Retezat. “
Gelu Gheorghiu says that:
” re-education was done like this: you were afraid to say what you did not say to the Securitate. You are confronted with others. After that he came to help you, and you and those bandits, and tell us.
Whoever did not succeed at this trial went on fighting further. It binds you up, raises your knees with a bunch, puts you on two tables, raises you with a string and pulls so the feet are up and kicks you on the soles with the rag and then up and down your ass until you get mad. “
After making statements about those at large, the detainees entered the second stage, the internal demonstration, which involved the disclosure of information from detained colleagues. The unmasked, sometimes the best friend, reached into Turcanu’s hands. Gelu Gheorghiu says that for most people, the hardest torment was to be forced to watch their friends hang out. He himself tried to cut his hair.
The most terrible stage in the re-education process was, however, the unmasking of the interior, which was supposed to declare the most horrible things about family, friends, or faith. Its purpose was to bring the detainee into a state of complete dehumanization that would be ashamed of him and to oblige him to keep the secret of what had happened.
For holidays, those who did not fall for faith were the actors of incredible scenes. Those around Turcanu were singing religious songs with obscene content, and detainees were forced to reproduce them. They were later shared.
“He made us made of bread or soap, phalluses and other scarlet items, to make us share . “
Some of the detainees also said they were headed in the bucket they were doing. Especially those who finished theology were tortured like this.
The only escape of torture: to become torture
Torture does not just consist of beatings, and what makes the “Experiment of Pitesti” unique is that the detainees were under permanent terror because the victim was permanently in the same cell with the aggressor who did not give him a moment of respite. Physically weakened, humiliated, sometimes tortured by the best friend, many have succumbed and become aggressors in turn. And that went to the reeducation category and finally escaped torture.
Gheorghe Plop remembers that one night when overseeing another detainee who did not accept re-education, he realized that the preservation instinct, in his case, had defeated him.
“Ala demanded my water. I spent a lot of time giving it, not giving it away. They give it water and when it ends with resistance I will say I gave it water. “
Tache Rodas was one of those who had all the humiliation. He suffered terrible torments, but he did not surrender.
Witness and participant in the horror of the 4th room of the hospital, Tudor Stanescu, became a monk, remembers that after he was put in the cells he was drawn by the language of other detainees, becoming aggressors.
“Everyone pulled out belts, sticks, sticks and began to beat us. The beating lasted more than half an hour, an hour. Blood filled and then tortured. I was slain for two weeks with my boots. We were forced to go to Indian knees in our knees and wearing our clothes to rub the mosaic that was like glass. “
Torture, stopped by the Communis party
Those who died as a result of their torture were executed – over 100 per month, according to the survivors – were in common graves. The beatings rushed to Gherla after Vintila Vais managed to get in touch with Securitate officials and the Communist Party in particular, who did not know about the outburst, and who spoke about atrocities in prisons.
Radu Ciuceanu claims he encouraged Vais to do so.
“We knew the regime wanted to join the UN and you could not join the UN as long as the feuds in the country are eating feces.”
His statement is also reinforced by guardian Tiberiu Gabor, who admits that Vais’ complaints have triggered investigations. The party ordered an investigation and, in the midst of internal struggles in the party, re-education in 1952 ended.
Tiberiu Gabor witnessed the trial, and in his CNSAS records his statements show that:
“the detainees were beaten with bedbeds that were underneath. They were pushing the needle to the blood, they were standing with their face on the wall, these were the methods that I knew. “
“With regard to the beatings on the third floor they had the approval of the Inspection Bureau who knew all the beats.”
“There have been cases when detainees who died due to beating and before the opening were taken out by the guard commander and the chief of staff with two detainees and were going to the death room.”
The investigations would find guilty 21 detainees from the Turcanu group who were then transferred to trial in Vacaresti prison. In the investigation, they were forced to declare that they acted on their own initiative in order for the Legionary Movement to compromise the Communist Party in prisons.
Turcanu did not give up, especially when he realized that a scapegoat would be removed. 6 months refused to speak. Finally, on November 10, 1954, the Military Tribunal sentenced to death 20 of the inmate students for “acts of group terror” and “the crime of conspiracy against the People’s Republic of Romania”.
They were executed in Jilava 10 days later. In a separate trial, several officers of the Gherla and Pitesti Penitentiaries, as well as Securitate officials from the second esalon, who knew about the tortures to which the detainees were subjected, were brought to the accused box. They received between 5 and 8 years in prison, but they were pardoned shortly.
Editor’s Note: Every Romanian must know his Saints, martyrs, heroes and honor them. The Saints of the Romanian Prisoners suffered tortures, suffered torment, and many died for Christ and for the Romanian Nation. Holy Martyrs, pray for us. Hristos a Înviat!
1 Comment
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