At Pitești everything was an ordeal

Țurcanu had left the room. The operation had been launched that same day in several rooms, all in the basement, and he was observing it unfold. Martinuș was now in charge. His first instruction:

“Attention, bandits! Remember well! Re-education, like rehabilitation, is our initiative, the prisoners’ initiative. The prison administration has nothing to do with it. Don’t try to involve them. If you try, you will pay with your life!”

The threat, later repeated by Țurcanu, proved to mean precisely the opposite.

The prisoners had been in position for more than a week. The stiffness in their legs, the rigid bones, the persistent pain—it continued relentlessly. More difficult to endure than the physical suffering, however, was the constant nervous tension: the unceasing awareness that someone sought to subdue you, to control you, to prevent the torturers—or even your own comrades—from finding an excuse to beat you or make you work. An opportunity for torment was seized whenever they wished. Even without direct beatings, existence itself became an ordeal.

Torture came in countless forms: the food you were forced to eat—either too hot, too fast, or while crawling; sleep, permitted only in shifts on command, with hands kept in full view; the physiological necessities, which had to be performed partially or in wholly unnatural positions; even breathing became torture when lying on your back and required to hold your head up until exertion drenched you in sweat.

My hips ached, my back was bruised, although I had never been struck. And then there were the other, almost unimaginable torments on the conveyor belt of cruelty. You were made to lie on your stomach, then on top of another prisoner, and another, until you felt like a worm crushed under a heel. Blankets—many blankets—were thrown over this tangled pile of bodies, making it almost impossible to breathe.

We were kept in this suffocating state until we passed out. During the investigations under Securitate, sleep was denied, and physical exhaustion was imposed through continuous maltreatment. Prisoners were forced to run around the walls of empty rooms, day and night, under threat of whips or trained dogs, until collapse reduced them to insensibility. There was no room for error—or for abuse, because the cruelty had already exceeded human comprehension.

For hours, sometimes day and night, prisoners were forced to scrub the mosaic floors, producing the same exhausting, dehumanizing effect.

(Viorel Gheorghiță – Et ego)