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 methods he had already tested to get rid of all reactionists. Dej, a diligent student, followed his father’s advice to the letter and unleashed the most drastic extermination of the Romanian elite.

After the debukings, the survivors of the tortures, no longer under the pressure of those tortures, slowly recovered.

Not being sure that the debukings had stopped for good, we did not trust each other to talk about our conscientious problems; we understood each other only by our looks and even more by our intuition.

The work in the workshops continued, however, and despite the effort, often beyond our strength, and the exaggeratedly high standards, we still preferred the workshop to the cell because it gave us a little more freedom, the opportunity to move around, to meet each other, to feel less shackled. Here we saw each other every day, greeted each other and asked each other about our health. But far from confiding in each other. The drama they’d experienced had dampened their enthusiasm.

It was foreseen that after the end of the work in the workshops, a new period of imprisonment would begin, with the prisoners locked up again in cells, with another form of demobilisation, with cold, hunger, searches, black cells, cellars, dustbins and severe confinement, especially in winter, with half-baked food every three days and dressed only in shirts and underwear.

Many died as a result of these harsh conditions.

These punishments were inflicted on political prisoners according to the criteria of deviant guilt, such as: looking out of the windows through “blinds” (boards put in the cell windows so that nothing could be seen from outside), lying on the bed or on the clothes peg during the day, writing on the walls with pieces of wire, writing on coloured bottles provided by ordinary prisoners or taken from doctors’ surgeries and emptied of their contents, writing on the soles of boots (with the help of soap from the bathroom and D.D.T dust). Communicating in Morse code through the radiator pipes was the most serious offence, as it compromised the prison’s secrecy.

From 1953 until our liberation in 1964, this cellular regime completely isolated us from the rest of the world. We had no family ties, were not given food or clothing, and never read another line of print. All this ground us down, made us sick and killed us by the thousands.

(Dumitru Bordeianu – Confessions from the Swamp of Despair)