Preparatory actions – The period of the great petrification

After the first actions of the new commander of Aiud, we, the prisoners of this prison, immediately realised that he had come there with a precise mission. We felt that something was waiting for us, but we did not know what it was. We had all kinds of thoughts.

Some “analysts” with more prison experience did not exclude from their calculations the possibility of starting a re-education campaign, because after the “Pitești experiment” re-education had become a kind of obsession of the prisons. And they were not far wrong, for re-education was not to begin for another four years. For the time being, only the preparations were being made.

The first thing Colonel Crăciun did after taking up his new post was to reorganise the prisoners into cells. Whereas before the allocation of cells had been somewhat random, this time the groups of four, five or six people who were to live in the same cell were carefully put together according to criteria that we could not really understand. In this composition, the alphabet, age, emotional affinities and adversities were also taken into account. In any case, this new distribution of prisoners in cells was not random as it had been in the past. Later, another detail was noticed, namely that in each cell, as far as possible, a “piteștean” (a prisoner who had passed through Pitești) was placed, not necessarily as an informer or collaborator with the administration of the time (the vast majority of those who had passed through Pitești were piteșteans), (The majority of those who had passed through Pitești, once the aggression against them had ceased and they had been dispersed among the great mass of other prisoners, had recovered from this point of view), but because they were counting on the fact that, when the re-education began, they would be the first to accept it and thus influence the others. This is what happened. Among the first to accept re-education were indeed many of them, and when re-education collectives (so-called clubs) were formed, some of them were led by them. No wonder it happened that way. These people who had been brainwashed and completely depersonalised in Pitesti, even though more than ten years had passed since their misfortune, still had some reflexes. For one thing, many of them were overly submissive. If a guard ordered them to stand on one leg, they would stand on one leg for a whole day, unsupervised by anyone. Then they all showed an almost animal fear of authority. Under these conditions, most of them were easily persuaded to accept re-education and to cooperate with the re-educators.

With this new allocation of prisoners to cells, a long critical period began for the “inhabitants” of Aiud, which some have suggestively referred to as the “period of great fear”. Why the “standstill”? Because for almost two and a half years, nothing has moved in Aiud. For almost two and a half years, people have had to live in the same formation, and this has had a negative effect on their state of mind, because two or more people living in the same place for a long time makes it impossible to live together. This was also the aim: to degrade relations between people and to weaken their nervous resistance and therefore their moral resistance. Real dramas took place behind closed doors. Well-balanced people, who had previously been friends or merely respected each other, became incapable of enduring each other, and even hated each other. Each attacked the other with their own tics, taboos and automatisms, and were in turn attacked by the tics, taboos and automatisms of the other. It took a great capacity for understanding and an even greater capacity for self-control to be able to control the feelings that were going mad. But more often than not, to their credit, people managed to overcome their resentments and, by overcoming them, managed to survive. Most of the time they lay dormant, and when they did flare up they were quickly assuaged by the mediation of those within. Fortunately, in almost every cell there was a more sympathetic sufferer who played the role of “peacemaker”. And who, by virtue of his moral position and stature, was able to assert himself and impose himself. I must point out that in many cells this role was played by the “piteșteni”. These people, because of the terrible experiences they had lived through, had a different view of life in general and, above all, a special understanding of the psychology of people in extreme situations.

Then there was something else. Whatever the disadvantages of living in these closed spaces called cells, the prisoners in Aiud, especially in this situation, had to face together a much greater and more dangerous aggression: the aggression of the enemy beyond the door. In order to do this, it was imperative that everyone overcame their resentments and acted in solidarity.

With the new cell allocation, the prison administration introduced an extremely harsh regime. The vigilance of our guards increased considerably. Almost every ten minutes, the “eyelid” of the visor through which we were being watched was raised, and the slightest deviation, or alleged deviation, from an abnormal rule was severely punished. From five o’clock in the morning, when the alarm went off, until ten o’clock at night, when the curfew went off, the prisoner was not allowed to do anything. He was not allowed to lie in bed, he was not allowed to speak except in a whisper, he was not allowed to look out of the window, he was not allowed to engage in any activity, manual or intellectual, that would make the time pass more easily.

The prisoner had to feel the passage of time painfully. Every moment had to be a bite. And if it wasn’t, or if it seemed to the beggar on the other side of the door that it wasn’t, then he would bite and prescribe three, five or seven days of solitary confinement or blackout. He punished himself a lot, and he punished himself for everything. I have seen people punished for being caught praying or smiling to themselves or to a memory. I have seen people punished for humming a tune or reciting some lyrics. And all of this was designed to weaken the prisoner’s physical and mental resistance so that when an alternative was offered, he would accept it. But it would be another two years or so before he was offered an alternative.

(Demostene Andronescu – Re-education in Aiud)