Patterns in Case Histories

Piteshti is a town near Bucharest where a special penitentiary regime had been set up in 1949. Piteshti prison was reserved for students who belonged to the strongest anti­communist opposition organizations.

From the texts of the patients and the therapists' accounts, one learns that during the first years of communist regime, when panic was at its height, this prison was used to transform political prisoners into torturers by means of brutal torture and thought control. While in other Romanian prisons the tortured inmates would come out alive and had a fair chance to recover after their experience in the penitentiary, in the Piteshti prison the outcome was very different. The prisoners underwent a process of so called cultural “re­education” and “rehabilitation” and were transformed, by means of brutal torture, into equally ruthless torturers. These culturally construed torturers were expected then to de­fend a culture of torture and mind control.

Upon their arrival, the prisoners were told to remain in the same position for ex­tremely lengthy periods of time. The only exception was when going to the lavatory. They were not allowed to move even in their sleep. This came to be known as the “posi­tion torture.”

Torture was both collective and individual. The inmates were submitted first to what was called external unmasking and afterwards to internal unmasking, which was the most difficult. What was called external unmasking began early during the incarceration. Without any preparation at all, small groups of prisoners would be put in a special, large, isolated room where another group was waiting for them.

The food was distributed by tzurcanu, the chief torturer, and the prisoners were obliged to put their dishes on the floor and eat without using their hands, like a dog. The torturers were frequently pushing the face of the prisoner into the hot soup with their feet while he was attempting to eat. Each prisoner could use the lavatory only once a day, for a few moments only. He would be pulled out after a short while whether he had defe­cated or not.

Many other humiliating techniques were used there. Each prisoner was regularly beaten and throttled to the point of near death without any explanation being offered. Friends were asked to slap each other. During the night, they could be beaten if they moved while sleeping. At a certain point, they were even forced to eat their own excre­ment.

After several weeks, even months, of humiliating and cruel treatment, they were asked to put down in writing everything they knew about their “criminal activities.” If one attempted to conceal anything, he ran the risk of having another prisoner from the same organization speak up and offer details.

The following stage in the process of cultural re-education and transformation into a torturer was designated by the name of internal unmasking. The prisoners were put in rooms with other teams of torturers with another leader who would announce the begin­ning of the “cleansing process.” He would repeatedly say, “You are all rotten from tip to toe. All this rottenness must be purified away, or else the working class will crush you” (A said). At a certain point, the prisoners were convinced that similar processes were tak­ing place in all prisons all over the country and a general state of hopelessness would take hold of them. If as Eco claims (1986: 130-132), “reality is the voice that sometimes says ‘No,’” in Piteshti, this voice was silenced. The prisoners had no reality testing. In listening to other members’ confessions, the former prisoners claim that they began be­lieving that those absurd confessions may actually be true. According to those inter­viewed, the prisoners were uprooted and taken from reality to another dimension of liv­ing in the world.

Soon, they were being asked to speak about their family, education, moral and reli­gious values, and such. They had to “confess” that their father was a rogue, that their mother was a whore and an adulteress and had sex with animals, that studying philoso­phy or going to church was a foul crime against the interests of the working class, and on and on.

When telling their stories, the prisoners were asked to give the most minute details.

At a later stage, the prisoners were asked to tell their dreams. When they said that they did not dream, they were beaten, and were told that it was impossible not to have dreams. If they told that they dreamt about an “offensive” practice or desire (such as go­ing to a church, or being a bourgeois prime minister and putting all the communists into jail), they were beaten severely as well. If they said that they dreamt of the sun represent­ing the final victory of the working class they were beaten because they were “caught trying to cheat the re-educators.”

In this fashion, the prisoners were put in a continuous double bind and punished without ever being told the rules of re-education, nor the conditions of absolution from punishment. This unrelenting assault on the self was meant to break it down completely and reshape it according to a new ideology, a method of thought reform that does not al­low for personal freedom or compromise.

The accounts offered by former prisoners indicate that no one, or almost no one, could resist. The denunciation of the father, the mother, and religion seem the coronation of the process. At a certain point during torture, the tortured individuals were asked whether they would be willing to become torturers. They would have to agree whole­heartedly and tell how they “wished” to become “re-educators.” At this point, they were told that their words are not enough, and that their words had to be backed up by their deeds.

The chief torturer, tzurcanu, and the other torturers were hoping for big rewards from the communist government. However, in 1952, when the Russian troops withdrew from the Romanian territory, they were brought to Bucharest and a mock trial took place. Twenty or more leading re-educators were brought to trial and condemned to death on the spot. All prisoners were charged with plotting against the communist State. Those re­educated in Piteshti were also put to trial and accused of belonging to an anti-communist plot. Between 1952 and 1954 they were sent to another prison and underwent two more years of torture to confess that they were anti-communist fascists who organized the ter­ror in Romanian prisons in order to compromise the communist regime, and that they were being helped by fascist organizations in the West. A small number was condemned to imprisonment for life.

In 1964, all the survivors were set free.