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| THE RAMNICU SARAT PENITENCIARY, THE PRISON OF SILENCE 22/02/2010 |
| (2010-02-22) |
| Last updated: 2010-02-23 13:44 EET |
Communism reinvented prisons and turned imprisonment into a form of punishment. People were thrown into prison for absurd crimes, for the imputation of being themselves. Communism by far surpassed the coercive confinement area suffocating the individual Franz Kafka created in his works. Survivors of communist prisons have told harrowing things, that even fiction writers could have hardly imagined.
The Ramnicu Sarat prison, in Buzau County, was only an island of the Romanian Gulag’s archipelago. Before it was turned into an extermination site, the prison had played the classical role of correcting people’s mistakes. The prison was built in late 19th century as a prison for common-law convicts. In 1901, King Carol I himself visited the prison.
Yet the place became famous for the first time in November 1938, when Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the head of the Iron Guard, and other Romanian far-right leaders were dragged out of the building and assassinated on the way to Bucharest. Following the assassination of the then Prime Minister Armand Calinescu, in September 1939, the prison became famous again, as it was there that 13 other heads of the Iron Guard were executed.
But it was not until the communist years that the Ramnicu Sarat prison acquired ill fame as one of the harshest penitentiaries. The communists imprisoned there the peasants who withstood forced collectivization. After the Sighet penitentiary had been closed, actually the dignitaries’ place of confinement, and in the wake of the 1956 anti-Communist revolution in Hungary, most survivors were transferred to Ramnicu Sarat. The leaders of the National Peasant’s Party, among whom Ion Mihalache, Ilie Lazar and Victor Radulescu Pogoneanu died in Ramnicu Sarat.
Prominent figures of Romanian democracy after 1989, such as Corneliu Coposu and Ion Diaconescu, did time in Ramnicu Sarat. Cosmin Budeanca, an expert with the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes in Romania and coordinator of the Ramnicu Sarat prison’s museum project has more:
“The penitentiary in Ramnicu Sarat was not a big one, unlike those in Gherla, Aiud or Jilava. It was rather small, with a maximum housing capacity of 300 convicts, if 4 people were confined in one cell. But during the communist regime, with few exceptions, only one person was incarcerated in a cell. The place will be remembered for the fact that it was a penitentiary of silence. Communication was impossible and all survivors mentioned that. After long years spent in complete isolation, just like Corneliu Coposu, convicts forgot how to speak. Coposu found it very hard to regain his ability of verbal communication. Convicts were taken out for a walk one by one, the food was very bad, cold was everywhere, and medication was almost nonexistent. We can speak about an extermination regime, enforced deliberately, and not by mistake”
The prison will also be remembered for having a direct connection with the Soviet Union. During the Stalinist years, up until the early 1960s, such a connection was of maximum priority, because the Iron Curtain had fallen down and the Soviet Union alongside its allies started waging the Cold War with the West. Cosmin Budeanca again.
“It was a prison for the elite. Sighet and Ramnicu Sarat had wide gauge railway lines, linked to the wide gauge railway system of the Soviet Union. Thus, it would have been quite simple to transport convicts to the Soviet Union, if a conflict had broken out between the Soviet Union and the West. The fact that prominent leaders were moved to Ramnicu Sarat following the uprising in Hungary makes me believe this. Besides, the prison was located just 200 meters from the railway station and a train took only an hour, an hour and a half to reach the Soviet Union. The Sighet penitentiary was located close to the border, in case similar events to those in Hungary happened in Romania. It was a small prison, easy-to-control, with no information leak occurring, because of a small number of convicts.”
In the 1960s, the communist higher-ups changed the destination of the Ramnicu Sarat prison. One of the two National Peasant leaders, Ion Mihalache died in 1963. The other leader Iuliu Maniu had died 10 years before, in 1953, in Sighet. The small number of convicts remaining in Ramnicu Sarat were transferred to other places, before the general amnesty of 1964. The prison was used as a warehouse until 1989. It is now preserved “in situ”, in order to become a memorial of repression through silence.
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