Suicide attempts. The Ministry of Internal Affairs tracks the effects of re-education on students

At some point – I don’t remember the circumstances – it was discovered that Scutaru (a good friend) had swallowed a piece of glass with the apparent intention of committing suicide. Scutaru was placed in the custody of a guard whose job it was to watch him carefully as he ate his meals in the bowl from which he ate.

He was forced to search the faeces by feeling the entire contents with his fingers. To find the piece of glass when it was removed from his body and to present it to the head of the “re-education” committee. I don’t remember what the result was.

I have seen prisoners found to have swallowed needles in the hope that they would pass through the bloodstream to the heart and die. But they didn’t.

About six or seven days later the needle came out of the body through the rectum and it was very small. It had small fossilised nodules at both ends. Later, the medical students explained to us how this phenomenon occurred: The corrugated walls of the stomach catch the sharp metal object and try to dissolve it with the gastric juices present. When this fails, it deposits salts at the end, producing a harmless slime. Then it turns it over with the other end and makes one there too. This is the only way it can get to the intestines to be eliminated from the body.

The Home Office watched closely the experiment he was doing on the students’ skin.

There were people who were taken to the Ministry of the Interior at the age of 7-8 months to be examined specifically to determine the effects of the terror in Pitești prison on them. The Ministry of the Internal Affairs wanted to know how long the resistance would last and whether there was still a germ of resistance in this little forest.

The investigators told some of them:

– We are going to plough the land so that the buds of legionnaireism will never sprout on its surface again.

We are going to change the mentality of the masses, we are going to change the thinking of the intellectuals, we are also going to change history, which you believe in so much, which is inexorable and which will one day bring you to the surface.

(Octavian Voinea – The Massacre of the Romanian Students)