Suceava – The seed of re-education (en)

The merciful and devout Christian people of Suceava and the surrounding villages had a beautiful custom: on Saturdays and major feast days, they would come to the prison gates bringing food, clothing, and other provisions for the inmates. From the very first Saturday—after the arrests of May 15, when the prison began to fill with us—these pious Christians appeared at the gates with baskets of food. On the feast of St. John the New of Suceava, the city overflowed with believers from the surrounding countryside, even from as far as Maramureș. Many of them attempted to bring food to the […]

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The cells and rooms of the prison, from the basement to the second floor, had wooden floors. The building itself had been constructed by the Austrians during their rule in Bukovina, between 1775 and 1918, and had long served as a place to confine Romanians who demanded freedom. The entire basement consisted of cells, while from the ground floor up to the second floor, one side of each corridor was lined with cells, and the other with rooms measuring between 5 by 10 meters and 10 by 10 meters. The furnishings were minimal, almost primitive: a straw mat with a […]

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For me, the very word re-education carried such a sinister connotation that I could not define it. How could one re-educate oneself? And what exactly was I to re-educate? Was it my way of life, my way of thinking, my faith, my worldview, my dream, my struggle? What was I expected to drive out of myself? My faith in God and my love for Him? Was I to replace His Gospel with proletarian ideology, charity with hatred and class struggle, truth with lies, sincerity with hypocrisy, harmony with terror, mercy with violence? Should I banish God from my soul and […]

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Preparing the ground and the atmosphere. Young people were handed over to the old commissars, left over from the time of King Carol II and the Antonescu regime. They had to prove their loyalty to the communist regime… They all had a “bug in their head” for which they could be arrested. In order to keep their posts, they resorted to senseless bestiality against those arrested. Some of the detainees were beaten to death during the investigation. These bastards were joined by the new cadres. They were officers, fresh graduates of the NKVD security schools in Moscow. They were all […]

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