The start of the last re-education, 1962
In the Aiud re-education camp, all the methods tried out a decade earlier in Pitești were used to overcome resistance, but with greater sophistication and perhaps more subtlety. Although there was no lack of physical aggression (those resisting re-education were subjected to an extremely harsh regime: hunger, cold, isolation, chains, etc.), beatings were not used.
And beatings were not used, not because the soul killers had become more humane, but for quite different reasons. In Pitești, all the targets were young and all had just been arrested. So they were all physically strong, and in order to bring them to their knees more easily, they first had to be physically ruined. Re-education at Pitești therefore began with constant physical torture, and within a few months even the strongest specimens were reduced to wrecks. At Aiud the situation was quite different. None of those to be re-educated were young, and most of them (apart from those arrested in 1958-1959) had already spent years in prison. So physically they were all at the lower limit of resistance. Then, in Aiud, the beatings were not used because those who initiated the re-education wanted to give it a legal and humane aspect. They wanted, you see, to recover the human material from the prisons so that, purified and reconditioned, it could be returned to society. In fact, they made a big fuss about it. Whenever Colonel Crăciun, who was in charge of this operation, inaugurated a new club (the collectives set up for re-education were pretentiously called clubs), he liked to point this out with a hidden irony.
“We have gathered you here to talk to each other and do your laundry as a family,” he would say. You can use all the words in the Romanian vocabulary against each other or against others in your debunking. But you are not allowed to criticise the regime and, above all, you are not allowed to beat each other up or kill each other.
We don’t want to repeat here what happened in Pitești, we just want to get the rot out of you so that, purified, we can give you back your societies”.
Those in charge of re-education therefore knew that they would not be able to overcome the prisoners’ moral resistance and remove the “rot” from them, as they claimed, with a stick. After so many years of imprisonment and inhuman treatment, the men of the prisons had become immune to physical suffering. The greater the oppression, the greater the moral resistance of the oppressed. And the oppressors knew this too…
In this context, I recall a conversation I had with a political officer a few months before re-education began. In order to test the mood of the inmates, the prison administration, and especially the political officers, regularly took us out for questioning and sometimes tried to have a little friendly conversation with some of us. I don’t remember exactly how the discussion started and how it developed, but at one point the officer in question, a captain I think, exclaimed somewhat irritably:
“How the hell can you stand it? What kind of dough are you made of that nothing can touch you? You force us to invent all sorts of punishments to get you, and you behave as if you have no instinct for self-preservation. Nothing impresses you anymore”.
“Nothing impresses us anymore,” I dared to reply, “because we have nothing left to lose. You have taken everything from us, and in taking everything from us you have made us truly free people. And we behave as such. He said nothing more. He looked at me for a long time and sent me back to my cell. I don’t know if the political officer in question understood what I was trying to say, but his superiors certainly did, because the Ministry of the Internal Affairs employed, in addition to the torturers and brutes who watched us, groups of educated people who observed and studied the prisoners’ behaviour. And their observations and conclusions were, of course, taken into account by those who designed and organised the re-education. They understood that in order to make us vulnerable again, they had to give us back some of what they had taken from us. And they began by giving us back hope.
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Re-education began in Aiud, as I have already mentioned, in the spring of 1962. But it had been planned and meticulously prepared long before that. According to some evidence, it seems to have been decided in the offices of the Central Committee and the Ministry of the Internal Affairs at the same time as the massive arrests of 1958-1959. After the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from Romania, the Romanian Communists took a number of measures to intimidate the population and prevent any attempt at revolt, on the one hand, and to prove to Moscow, on the other, that the Communist regime in Romania was consolidated and could cope with the “internal reaction” on its own. The measures taken at the time included arrests in the immediate aftermath. At the same time, however, they decided on the regime to be applied to all prisoners, so that when they were released (on time or, due to circumstances, before the deadline) they would not come out of prison with the aura of heroes, but stigmatised and compromised, so that they would no longer pose a threat to the communist regime.
To this end, the targeted prisoners were concentrated in three large prisons, according to their political affiliation and social origin: Aiud, Gherla and Botoșani. I don’t know how the re-education campaign went in the other prisons, but from this point of view, special attention was paid to the prisoners in Aiud, because it was here that the fiercest opponents of communism were imprisoned, most of them intellectuals.
In Aiud, preparations for this action began in the summer of 1958 with a change in the prison administration. The famous Coler was replaced by the no less famous (also) Colonel Gheorghe Crăciun. This change was not made by chance, but was extremely well thought out, because Colonel Crăciun was the best person to carry out the action that was being prepared.
(Demostene Andronescu – Re-education in Aiud)