Pitești – a diabolical experiment
All forms of torture were carefully calibrated and stopped only when the prisoner was near death. The methods were numerous and varied: beatings, starvation, being forced to sit in a fixed position for 17 hours a day—legs stretched horizontally, hands on knees, torso at a 90-degree angle—any slight movement was punished with a bat; being forced to drink urine or eat the dirt in the cellar where they defecated; drinking heavily salted water and then being left to suffer from thirst; and countless other inventions of the sick minds of the torturers.
Those who gave in were compelled to “debunk”, that is, to reveal everything they had not confessed to the prison, to betray fellow prisoners who had helped them, or to expose guards who had behaved badly. To complete the psychological destruction, everyone was forced to mock the memory of what they held most dear in front of the entire cell.
For instance, a prisoner who loved his mother or wife had to slander them before everyone, uttering the most obscene and absurd statements. Everything that had been bright and good in the tortured person’s conscience was sullied and filled with filth.
Theological and pious students—derisively called “mystical bandits”—were forced to apostatize, to deny God, and to blaspheme everything belonging to the Christian faith. At Christmas and Easter, they were compelled to sing obscenities and unspeakable insults against the Savior and His Mother to the tune of Christmas carols or the Promodel. They were also forced to participate in blasphemous processions, to perform “liturgies” with the filth of the needy, and then “share” it among themselves. Some were “baptised” by being immersed in excrement. These horrors reveal the extreme Satanism of the re-education process.
After debunkings themselves to demonstrate that they had been re-educated, prisoners were forced to become torturers, persuading others to “renounce all bourgeois rot” and adopt communist ideology. This was genuine brainwashing under terror. Those unable to endure the continuous torment, with no opportunity for suicide and under constant surveillance, succumbed and became hardened, transforming from victims into executioners. Even after re-education, the terror persisted, for the slightest act of solidarity with fellow prisoners would trigger renewed torture. Living under perpetual fear, suspicious of one another, they constantly broke down without hope of recovery.
Another profoundly sinister aspect was that all hidden thoughts and secrets—crucial fulcrums on the path of inner collapse—tormented prisoners so intensely that they eventually felt compelled to dismantle themselves, experiencing relief akin to that of confession, even though these confessions were later used against them. This created a strange psychological transformation, producing profound mutations in the personalities of the tortured. Prisoners began to deny their prior beliefs and accept what Țurcanu imposed, convinced they were being helped. In this process of brainwashing, the mind was “enlightened”, a distorted sense of relief took hold, and the prisoner earnestly sought to bring others to the same stage of “enlightenment.” For those who have not endured such demonic states, these experiences are almost incomprehensible.
Most torturers themselves inflicted suffering under the reign of terror without undergoing the full re-education process. The system was designed so that, under constant torture, very few resisted completely; most were forced to compromise, to varying degrees, depending on their personal resilience.
From a spiritual perspective, both those who orchestrated this experiment from the shadows and those who executed it were nothing more than instruments of the Devil in the destruction of souls. Father Gheorghe Calciu, who also endured Pitesti, remarked:
“To understand what Pitesti was, we must go beyond the facts and reach the roots of evil, the inner workings of perversion and its metaphysical dimension. I believe that Pitesti was a diabolical experiment. There were battles between good and evil, in which the riders and the victims were mere instruments. It is a diabolical experiment that took place in our country more than anywhere else in the world.”
(Monk Moses – Saint of Prisons, pp. 108–111)