Gherla – Kingdom of death (en)

Gherla – Goiciu’s hell

This prison is located in the town of the same name, on the river Someșul Mic, south of Dej. This place of torture has given the town a bad name. No one in Romania has not heard of Gherla. Those who have had the misfortune to know the hell there see Goiciu all the time. Only the name is human, the rest is a beast, a wild animal that only knows how to hit, curse and hit again. His fame was known before he came here. The prison of Galați knew him to the full extense of his maddness. This […]

A normal day in the workshops

Since Zeller had warned us that the debunkings in Gherla would continue and that we students would expose all the “bandits” in the Romanian People’s Republic, our prospects were very bleak. This meant that, for us, this cruel fate would only end with our execution, as in Stalin’s time. We were not taken to the workshops during the week announced by Țurcanu, because the selection had to be made. Those who had not been proposed by Țurcanu for work were taken away from us and taken to the torture chambers. In the room where I was, the head of the […]

The informers

After a week’s work, some of us were taken to the torture chambers for reasons known only to them. Țurcanu knew that they still had something more to pay from Pitești. And he kept his word. Some moralists of the Christian Church claim that most of the words spoken by people are liars, in relations between individuals, in the family, in collectives, in ideologies, in literature, in history, in false science and in state politics. How much truth there is in this statement! If we lived the truth, there would be the Kingdom of God on earth, but we live […]

The end of the debunking process

After what Colonel Zeller said in Pitești, that the debunkings would continue, either in Gherla or elsewhere, in freedom (repeated by Țurcanu in Gherla and experienced by us in the torture chambers), no one believed that the tortures would ever stop. But since everything in life has a beginning and an end, closer or further away, and since nothing happens without God’s will, the debunkings stopped on 1 January 1952. This happened after Teohari Georgescu, Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca were removed from the government. Gheorghiu Dej, with Stalin’s permission, thus took over the leadership of the party and the […]

The closing of the workshops of Gherla

After Stalin’s death in March 1953, forced labour with political prisoners began to lose its importance. By the end of 1953, work on the Canal, in Salcia, in the lead mines of Maramureș and in the large prisons had ceased. Everywhere, diabolical rules were imposed, beyond power. Bolshevism tried to hide its murders under a cloak of legality. Natural causes were invoked in every accident. In one of Gheorghiu Dej’s meetings with Stalin (according to Marin Preda’s testimony), when asked how to get rid of bourgeois reactionists, Stalin “advised” Dej to create channels, camps, prisons, where he would use the […]

Compromising the debunking process

It is said that “the year does not bring what the clock brings”. And, in truth, not even the most optimistic dreams would have led us to believe that we, who have gone through the trials and are still going through them, would no longer be tortured and forced to be informers and cause so much harm to our fellow human beings. Sacrifice is the weapon to overcome hatred and hypocrisy. If until the sacrifice of these young men we were living the abominable sin of hypocrisy, their sacrifice lifted the veil from our faces. We were still hated, despised […]

Some aspects of the Gherla extermination prison

The torture of political prisoners was a constant practice, either by depriving them of food or by beating them for no reason other than the desire to torture the defenceless. Often, the cell door would open and the administration would burst in and start beating people, to trample them. I saw the same system applied in Aiud, Galați, Jilava… So it was organised torture, according to the rules. From morning to evening you were not allowed to lie on the bed, but only on the edge of it, with your eyes on the door, or to walk around. If you […]

Description of Gherla prison

Gherla Prison is located on the road from Dej to Cluj, on the banks of the Someș River. It was built during the reign of the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa. It is a fortress surrounded by a deep moat, which receives its water from the Someș River. It had two one-storey buildings, the Zarca and the Section, with larger and smaller cells and rooms. After 1848, the lords of Transylvania built a third prison in the shape of a U, with a capacity of thousands of inmates, with rooms and cells, thick wire netting, as in Pitești, and a one-metre […]

Director Gheorghiu

When we arrived at Gherla, Captain Gheorghiu was the director, an old man with white hair, a labourer by trade. He was said to be a master mechanic, and everyone who knew him spoke ill of him. He had fallen in with the Communists before 1944, or maybe after, and believed, like other honest workers, that they were the ones who would bring justice and heaven on earth. I don’t know why this nice man wanted to be a prison warden, especially in Gherla.[1] During the eight months I knew him, I never heard him speak badly to the inmates […]

The departure of Țurcanu and Popa Țanu

Five or six months after the arrival of the students from Pitești in Gherla, during which time the demolitions and the work in the workshops continued, other categories of prisoners were brought here, with different beliefs and workers specialised in a particular trade (I have already said that everything that was made in the workshops of Gherla: carpentry, mechanics, painting, button making, etc., was for the Soviet army. The work was supervised by the organisational office, the head of which was Țurcanu).

The administration of Gherla prison

GHERLA is a large prison that was originally built as a barracks for soldiers and officers during the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but now serves mainly as a prison for anti-communist workers and peasants. In addition to the workers and peasants, hundreds of intellectuals also died here. Three are the notorious communist commanders who carried out the programme of destroying opponents of the regime: – The first was called Lazarus. He was a Jew who had sided with Communism with all his being. He had a simple method of committing crimes without leaving any traces or being accused of murder. – The […]