Artist Catalin Badarau covered by one of his works during an interview in Bucharest, Romania, on July 19, 2017:
[Photo: Vadim Ghirda / AP]
An art exhibition showcasing 11 sculptures that aims to remind visitors about the horrors that took place from 1949 to 1951 at southern Romania's Pitești Prison, where communists tortured and killed political prisoners in a gruesome reeducation program, went on display on July 21, 2017.
The so-called "Pitești Experiment" was perhaps the most depraved and brutal of all the brain-washing regimes set up by the communist authorities in Eastern Europe:
The experiment, implemented by a group of prisoners under the guidance of the prison administration, was designed as an attempt at violently "reeducating" the mostly young political prisoners, primarily supporters of the ultra-nationalist Iron Guard, as well as former members of the National Peasants' and National Liberal parties or Zionist members of the Romanian Jewish community. Religious inmates also included Christian seminarians. The experiment's goal was for prisoners to discard past political and religious convictions, and, eventually, to alter their personalities to the point of absolute obedience. Estimates for the total number of people passed through the experiment range from up to 1,000 to 5,000.
Journalist and anti-communist activist Virgil Ierunca referred to the "reeducation experiment" as the largest and most intensive brainwashing torture program in the Eastern Bloc. In even stronger terms, Nobel Laureate and gulag survivor Alexander Solzhenitsyn called it "the most terrible act of barbarism in the contemporary world."...
Detainees, who were subject to regular and severe beatings, were also required to engage in torturing each other, with the goal of discouraging past loyalties. Guards would force them to attend scheduled or ad-hoc political instruction sessions, on topics such as dialectical materialism and Joseph Stalin's History of the CPSU(B) Short Course, usually accompanied by random violence and encouraged delation (demascare, lit. "unmasking") for various real or invented misdemeanors.
Each subject of the experiment was initially thoroughly interrogated, with torture applied as a mean to expose intimate details of his life ("external unmasking"). Hence, they were required to reveal everything they were thought to have hidden from previous interrogations; hoping to escape torture, many prisoners would confess imaginary misdeeds. The second phase, "internal unmasking", required the tortured to reveal the names of those who had behaved less brutal or somewhat indulgently towards them in detention.
Public humiliation was also enforced, usually at the third stage ("public moral unmasking"), inmates were forced to denounce all their personal beliefs, loyalties, and values. Notably, religious inmates had to blaspheme religious symbols and sacred texts. According to Virgil Ierunca—anti-communist activist and member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania—Christian baptism was gruesomely mocked. Guards chanted baptismal rites as buckets of urine and fecal matter were brought to inmates. The inmate's head was pushed into the raw sewage. His head would remain submerged almost to the point of death. The head was then raised, the inmate allowed to breathe, only to have his head pushed back into the sewage. Ierunca further states that "prisoners' whole bodies were burned with cigarettes; their buttocks would begin to rot, and their skin fell off as though they suffered from leprosy. Others were forced to swallow spoons of excrement, and when they threw it back up, they were forced to eat their own vomit." The inmates were required to accept the notion that their own family members had various criminal and grotesque features; they were required to author false autobiographies, comprising accounts of deviant behavior....
According to the Romanian historian Mircea Stanescu, tens of people died in the "Pitești experiment", but its aim was not to kill the people, but to "reeducate" them.
More here.
Some day, perhaps, similar exhibitions will look back in horror at the atrocities being performed, today, in the prison camps of North Korea.
Comments