Maria Theresa’s Zarca

If it were written above Dante’s Inferno: “Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate!” (“Leave all hope, you who enter!”), above the entrance to this dungeon was Aiud Main Prison.

Considered the most severe in south-eastern Europe, it was very similar to the one described by Dante in his book ‘Inferno’. The cell block was a T-shaped building with four floors, each with 78 cells and two large lounges. Inside the prison, there was another prison called Zarcă – a building with a ground floor and a first floor, with a total of 70 cells – built by order of the Empress Maria Theresa, for the fate of the poor Romanians from Ardeal region. Samuel Brukenthal, the governor of Transylvania and also one of his lovers, who founded the museum in Sibiu that bears his name, was responsible for this.

Since 1929, Zarca had been declared unhealthy, but this fact was not taken into account. When I arrived there in 1950, the walls of Zarca were damp to a height of 1-1.5 metres and mouldy in places. From the summer of 1953, blue shutters were fitted over the windows in the shed and the two wards, and wooden blinds of the same colour were fitted in the cellar, so that we could not see into the yard. Only through the cracks could we see a small patch of sky, towards which we often looked and felt a little freer. For over 200 years, poor Romanians filled these cells with harsh punishment. The greatest men of the Romanian nation, university professors, scientists, former ministers, men of culture, politicians and 34 famous generals, heroes of the last world war, died there. At that time I had no idea that I would spend 18 years of hard imprisonment in Aiud, 8 of them in this prison alone.

I was assigned to cell 199, on the second floor of the north wing, with the Turda Gorge in the distance. In a room 4 metres long and 2 metres wide, in the left-hand corner there was the rubbish bin and in the right-hand corner the water basin. To our great joy, 8 people stretched out on the pine floor from the window to the door. We had a very old, gnawed and torn blanket to use as a mattress and veil.

We stayed there for almost two years. The meals we were given reached 600 to 700 calories a day, water was rationed – about 32 tablespoons per person, out of which we drank, washed dishes and washed our hands and faces. After a while we could barely stand up, clutching the walls with difficulty. Our thighs were gnawed and full of pus, and our muscles had atrophied, leaving only the skin to cover our bones.

According to the civilian doctor Ranca, the Aiud prison doctor (who later died in suspicious circumstances, accused by the communists of protecting certain prisoners), from September 1949 to the end of August 1950, 625 prisoners died of starvation and were taken to Râpa Robilor (the prison’s mass grave).

(Grigore Caraza – Bloody Aiud)