Great cruelties have occurred throughout history. But what happened in a Romanian prison surpassed all barriers of evil. Not even in the most macabre mind can one imagine the things that were done in the Pitesti prison. He “Pitesti phenomenon” either “Pitesti experiment” It was carried out from 1949 to 1951, during the time when the communist regime ruled in Romania. That regime, which was aligned with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was in power from 1947 to 1989. As one of the worst events in the country, what happened in Pitesti forever marked the history of Romanians. .
The method of this operation took to the extreme the intention of that opponents become faithful followers. Political prisoners could be of the National Peasant Party, the National Liberal Party, the Legionary Movement – fascists – or monarchists, even socialists. That is, anyone who did not fit into communism. There were also apolitical prisoners or former members of the police or gendarmerie. The “re-education” of them was based on killing the soul of the bodies, but not the human being.
Some historians claim that they were more than 600 prisoners, while others claim that there were 5,000 who went through the “experiment.” The concept of reeducation in Pitesti prison was nothing more than a succession of brutal and continuous excessive acts of torture. The beatings and beatings were the lightest things suffered by those who passed by. The purpose was the complete subjugation of those imprisoned. Furthermore, everything was taking place in secret.
When morbidity had already passed all limits, the prison method managed to go even further. The prisoners became the guards of the new prisoners. Thus, the same person was victim and perpetrator. He subdued and was subdued. Torturer and tortured. The guards had to know the old values and the new, only then could they ensure that the prisoners lost the values that did not coincide with those of the regime. That is to say, the “reeducated” finished the process when they became the torturers. They were to be in charge of torturing the new prisoners. This showed that the “reeducation” had been complete. Otherwise, if you do not want to do it, They did not finish the process and had to begin suffering torture from scratch.
According to the Romanian historian Tudor Curtifan, the idea of the experiment was developed by the Soviet pedagogue Anton Makarenko (1888-1939), specialized in juvenile delinquency. His theory involved the systematic torture of prisoners by other prisoners. He died in 1939 without ever knowing that his concept would apply. The Romanian communist regime, to implement the idea in prisons, needed a group of prisoners loyal to the regime. At this point enters the scene Eugen Turcanu.
He was a big, strong, ambitious and intelligent man. He became involved with Fraternities of the Cross, youth organizations of the Legionary Movement, a fact that would mark his life. He broke all ties with the legionnaires when they were declared illegal and immediately He later joined the Communist Party. There he began a political career that began on the rise, but would soon change course forever.
In 1948, in one of the mass arrests, several members of the Fraternities of the Cross were arrested. One of them He betrayed Turcanu who ended up arrested like the rest. He faced trial and was sentenced to seven years in prison. There he met Alexandru Nikolskisupreme commander of Secure yourselfthe secret police that operated at that time and that was in charge of conducting the aberrant experiment.
Nikolski presented him with the re-education project: Turcanu was the ideal character. He gathered a group and created the Organization of Detainees with Communist Convictions (ODCC), who were the first torturers. The Pitesti prison, at that time completely isolated, was the ideal place to launch this machinery of torture and attempted ideological reconversion.
The torture techniques at Pitesti encompassed the entire range of imaginable and unimaginable suffering: from cigarette burns to flesh necrosis of the buttock area, strangulations, broken teeth, impalements and nail extractions. There have been cases in which prisoners were forced to eat feces and, after vomiting, they had to ingest their own vomit. It was a scheme of brutality designed to completely break the detainees.
Hopelessness led many to attempt suicide in such a cruel environment. But There were no metal objects or anything sharp in the cells.. They had no forks or knives: the little food they were given was thrown into a container from which they had to eat without using their hands.
The extreme controls made it almost impossible for a prisoner to commit suicide, although there were desperate attempts cutting their wrists with their teeth, hitting their heads against walls and even ingesting soap. Constant surveillance thwarted these attempts. The only recorded case of suicide was that of a man who jumped from the fifth floor while he was transferred to the showers (they bathed occasionally to avoid pests). Since then, networks have been set up.
The reeducation process had four phases. In the first phase, known as “external unmasking”, the prisoners had to demonstrate their loyalty to the ODCC and the Communist Party. Furthermore, under torture, they had to reveal all hidden information During the first investigations of the Secure yourself that ended in arrests.
He “internal unmasking”, second phase, sought to make the detainees betray their own companions. They had to reveal names and details of benevolent inmates or guards who had “helped” them. These two phases were highly “effective”, since the guards obtained more information than they had. Even some, in an attempt to stop being tortured, stated things that were not true.
The third phase, thepublic moral exhibition”, aimed to finish mentally destroying the prisoners. Were forced to desecrate everything sacred, including their families and religious beliefs. Christians were even “baptized”: their heads were buried in jars of excrement. Others were mocked in acts that imitated religious rituals but with phallic symbols.
Finally, in the fourth phase of reeducation, the detainees had to torture their own friends. In this instance they became executioners through brutal coercion. The same end was the beginning of the torture circle.
This detention center was divided into four categories of prisoners. The first was for detained without judicial sentence, but they were serving between six and seven years in prison. The second category was convicted of minor crimessuch as lack of reporting or fraud, with sentences of three to five years in prison.
For its part, the third category was of people convicted of “conspire against the social order”, a category that covered the majority of prisoners with sentences of eight to fifteen years of hard prison. And finally, the category of leaders of groups or influential personalities in the student worldsentenced to between ten and twenty-five years of hard labor.
In 1950 The expansion of the experiment to other prisons begins, but at the same time this marked the beginning of the end. In the prison of Channelin an attempt to escape torture, an important political leader died: Ion Simionescu. He threw himself against barbed wire and the guards shot him there. When his wife found out, she spread the rumor. and complained to him Ministry of Interior. Although she was arrested, the government agency, which knew about the investigations of Secure yourself and torture, he had no choice but to open an investigation.
The solution, so that the regime was not stained, was to rewrite history and, of course, falsify it. The torturers were said to be agents of the Legionary Movement leader and exile Horia Sima.. The “new truth” said that following his orders, they tried to destroy the Communist Party through violence and thanks to the lack of vigilance of the guards in those prisons. Facts that would justify torture.
For the trial, which took place in 1954, the torturers linked, no matter how minimal the relationship, with the legionnaires, were selected. These were sentenced to forced labor. At the same time, in another secret trial in which there were only communist authorities, Turcanu and the members of the ODCC were shot, according to historian Mihai Dragnea.
In 2014 the Pitesti Prison Memorial where the old prison operated. Since 2018 there has been a permanent exhibition there that allows you to learn about the history of the “Pitesti Experiment”. The images of the tortured, the sordid cells and the dark pavilions remind us of those who suffered the abuse of the torturers of the communist regime. But above all they are a way to remember a part of history so that it is not repeated. Never more.
