Former Communist Prisons in Romania

Description

Former Jilava Penitentiary - Fort no. 13: 44°19'59.02"N, 26° 6'23.81"E

Former Râmnicu Sărat Penitentiary: 45°22'59.48"N, 27° 3'19.20"E

Former Piteşti Penitentiary: 44°51'54.03"N, 24°51'51.32"E

Former Făgăraş Penitentiary: 45°50'43.00"N, 24°58'25.65"E

Former Sighetu Marmaţiei Penitentiary: 47°55'36.72"N, 23°53'28.11"E

The former prisons of Jilava, Râmnicu Sărat, Pitești, Făgăraș and Sighetu Marmației illustrate in the most representative way the political detention system of the former communist regime in Romania, preserving and honouring the memory of the thousands of victims who suffered and died innocently, for their opposition to the communist regime. Established in 1945, with the takeover of power by the communists in Romania the so-called extended network of the "houses of death" aimed to rehabilitate through torture the prisoners in order to ensure their conversion to the communist ideology and functioned as a mechanism that included 44 main penitentiaries and 72 forced labour camps. In order to illustrate the mechanism the selection includes a maximum security, transit penitentiary used as a centralised sorting centre, two of the most representative places for the inhuman methods used and two penitentiaries that housed special categories of prisoners, important political figures and military staff.

The Jilava Penitentiary - Fort no. 13 was the sorting centre par excellence of the communist penitentiary system used for the centralization of political sentencing. The Râmnicu Sărat prison, referred to as ”the prison of complete isolation” or ”the prison of silence” was one of the harshest prisons of the communist regime, significant due to the dehumanising isolation methods that were once employed there. The Piteşti  Penitentiary was one of the most important extermination centres of the communist regime, beeing known, above all, for its employment of torture as a rehabilitation method. In the collective conscience, Piteşti remains, to this day, a reminder of the dehumanising practices that stood at the heart of the communist system. The Fășăraș Penitentiary is a mediaeval fortress adapted to the needs of the communist detention system that was used as centre for former military staff while the best known former penitentiary in Romania, the one inSighetu Marmaţiei saw the imprisonment of the most influential political figures of the time that opposed the communist regime.

1. Former Jilava Penitentiary - Fort no. 13

(Located 10 kilometres south of Bucharest and 3 kilometres northwest of Jilava town.)

Fort no. 13 of the Jilava Penitentiary was part of the belt of fortifications built in the last decades of the 19th century around Bucharest, as the main component of  a larger defensive system of the country, initiated and supported by King Carol I of Hohenzollern. Developed by the Belgian general Henry Alexis Brialmont and the engineer captain Ioan Clucer the system was made up of 18 forts, each of which was equipped with an artillery battery. The construction of Fort no.13 began in 1886, the works ending in March 1893, after repeated changes and adaptations of the plans in relation to the evolution of military requirements, the construction technology and materials and for economical reasons.

After the construction was finalised, it was used as a storage facility for munitions and as a military garrison until 1907 when a group of farmers was arrested and subsequently brought to this location for imprisonment. From that year on, Jilava was redesigned to function as a military prison until the 1^st of April of 1948 when it came under the administration of the Ministry of Internal Affairs' General Department of Penitentiaries.

Between 1948 and 1964, Jilava's imprisonment regime, as a maximum security prison, was focused solely on exterminating heavy opponents of the new communist political regime, as they were detained in special conditions. For instance, the insulating cells were rooms without natural light openings, placed underground, at a depth of 8-10 m.

The individuals confined in Jilava were either being investigated or awaiting trial, while dissidents from other penitentiaries were brought in for additional inquiries or in order to be transferred to other detention centres. Generally, a prisoner would spend a few months in Jilava. The only right that political dissidents had, according to the detainment and guarding regulations for prisoners, was that of going outside. Yet, even this single right was sometimes infringed upon.

After 1970, the cells of Fort no. 13 were decommissioned in part and some of the inmates, those not imprisoned for political crimes, were transferred to the new building of the penitentiary. In December 1989, protesters arrested in Bucharest were held in the cells of the old prison. After 1990, the old location of the penitentiary was abandoned and used as a warehouse, now being occasionally visited as a place of memory while awaiting planned future interventions that should restore the significance of the place

2. Former Râmnicu Sărat Penitentiary

(Located south of the eponymous city on Ion Mihalache Street approximately 200 meters from the train station.)

The endeavour for building the prison started in 1890 and it was completed in 1899. The morphology of the prison and the entrance pavilion (also with administrative role) was considered a model, given the planimetric and functional similarity of other later-built prisons in Romania with the Râmnicu Sărat ensemble (Tulcea, Craiova, Ocnele Mari). The “novelty” that the building brought in the Romanian detention system was the design of 35 cells, each for a single person as the prison was thought from the beginning as an ensemble with a strict regime.

In 1920, the so-called pre-trial detention centre was transformed into a penitentiary with increased level of security, with this step the outer wall being consolidated and the rest of it newly built. During 1948, the first passive rehabilitation methods for dissidents and non-political prisoners were implemented at Râmnicu Sărat and the prison started to have a different regime, dedicated to political dissidents. Moreover, between 1948 and 1953, peasants who opposed collectivization (the confiscation by the State of the agricultural land and other private properties) were detained here, some of them being assassinated. This also represents the period when the prison capacity increased with new detention courts and several raised capacity  rooms for up to 130 prisoners.

Throughout the entire detention period at Râmnicu Sărat, only one person would ever be incarcerated in each of the 35 cells, being prohibited for the prisoners to talk to each other or even with the guards.  Râmnicu Sărat was used to detain a series of political representatives, members of the Greek Catholic and Roman Catholic clergy, as well as other dissidents that the regime considered undesirable. The prison was decommissioned in 1963. The survivors were sent to other prisons or were placed under house arrest and remained under the close surveillance of the Secret Services.

In 1964, the prison was transferred to the Ministry of Agriculture and it was transformed into a fruit and vegetable storage facility of the Food Commercial Company of Râmnicu Sărat. In 1989 the company was privatised and 10 years later the former penitentiary was taken over by the Buzău County Council and given in administration to the Ministry of Culture. 2007 represents the year when The Institute for the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism and the Memory of the Romanian Exile became the new administrator, planning to bring into being here the Memorial of the victims of communism.

3. Former Piteşti Penitentiary

(Located north of the eponymous city near its outskirts. The Piteşti penitentiary was situated 300 metres from the Piteşti Nord flag station.)

Pitești Prison was built between 1938 and 1941 on the site of the former 19^th century city jail. At the time of its construction, the prison was the most modern one in Romania having a chapel, infirmary and centralised heating system. In the first years of operation, the prison received mainly common law prisoners, but also political prisoners.

The prison has become infamous for hosting the brutal action named by the Romanian writer and disident Virgil Ierunca “the Pitești phenomenon”. Students were tortured in order to denounce their own anticommunist activity, as well as all their acquaintances and they were also forced to dissociate themselves from their family, friends and all moral values and finally, in order to prove that they had truly become new individuals, they were asked to become aggressors for other victims. If the brutal inquiries performed in some security cells would last a few weeks, detention at Piteşti implied a long period of cohabitation with the oppressor. The main goal was to obtain information from the victims that would lead to further arrests of anti-communists, but also to destroy their personalities and render them incapable of later opposing the regime.

The experiment stopped in the summer of 1952 as a result of the confessions made by survivors and following Western diplomatic interventions. The phenomenon was not limited solely to Piteşti, but more so, due to the fact that some of the oppressors were transferred to other penitentiaries, it was extended through the communist detention system.

More than 600 students were tortured in Pitești and at least 11 died because of the violence that could not be contained. After the action was stopped in the summer of 1951, Pitești penitentiary was emptied of students and the number of political prisoners was considered to have decreased. Over time, the conditions of detention improved, and the number of political prisoners decreased, a large part of the political dissidents being transferred by the end of 1956 to other penitentiaries in the country. Following a decree of liberation of political prisoners in 1964, Pitesti prison only housed common law prisoners.

The penitentiary was relocated in a different town in 1977 and the building of the former prison became the headquarters of the Argeș county Industrial Construction Trust, a state-owned company. Other annexes of the penitentiary were demolished over time. In 1991, the Construction Trust was privatized. As a result, each of the several companies with private capital that emerged owned distinct areas of the building of the former prison. A section of the former penitentiary was transformed into a memorial museum by the Pitesti Prison Memorial Foundation, with a strong focus on the “Pitești phenomenon”, while also offering an insight into the rise of communism to power, the anti-communist movements, the 1980s and the fall of the regime.

4. Former Făgăraş Penitentiary

(Located in the centre of the eponymous city in Transylvania, 75 kilometres from Braşov.)

The old mediaeval fortress built during the 13^th - 15^th centuries was transformed in the 16th century into a castle with a strong external fortification and later on, in the 17th century updated to its current form. The fortress had 80 rooms on three floors, an outer fortification wall, and a moat. The four sides of the fortress, each equipped with a bastion and a cannon, surrounded the castle. In 1696, the ownership of Făgăraş passed to the Austrians, which transformed the fortress into a garrison, serving military purposes and losing its former elegance and grandeur. Between 1918 and 1948, the fortress of Făgăraș became a garrison of the Romanian army. From 1918 to 1923, the place was used as a camp for the White Russians, while in 1939, the Poles found a refuge in the fortress.

During the communist regime, the fortress was taken over by the General Directorate of Penitentiaries and was converted into a political prison, functioning as a penitentiary between 1950 and 1960. Documentary sources attest to the choice of the old mediaeval fortress as a prison based on its massive architecture, with thick walls varying between 2 and 3 metres, doors and windows covered with iron bars, but also due to the geometric construction that offered the possibility of connecting the guard posts. The detention spaces were organised in the castle, while the outer courtyard was intended for the prison administration.

In the first half of 1950s, there were 101 prisoners held inside the penitentiary, the number growing over the next years. Most of the prisoners were political dissidents from the Police and Security former staff in the interwar period, most of them being here in transit from and to other detention camps. In 1960, the prison was decommissioned, following, in the next decades, vast restoration works aimed primarily at restoring the appearance of the mediaeval fortified castle.

Currently, the old fortress hosts the Fagaras Country Museum ”Valer Literat”, which aims, in its future restoration project, to bring back to the collective memory including this dark period in the history of the fortress.

5. Former Sighetu Marmaţiei Penitentiary

(Located in the centre of Sighetu Marmaţiei in the northern part of Romania, several kilometres away from the Ukrainian border.)

Sighetu Marmaţiei Penitentiary was built between 1896 and 1897 by Hungarian authorities following the Austrian prison model which dictated that detention and sentencing centres should be built in close proximity to courthouses. The building itself was T-shaped and organised on three levels (a first floor and two additional stories). During its time as a prison, a number of 108 cells were maintained, 36 of which were individual cells and the others, accommodating four to six inmates. In this penitentiary, as in other places of confinement, there were also two punishment cells, known as "black".

From its construction and until 1944, the penitentiary was meant to accommodate non-political prisoners convicted for correctional purposes with sentences varying from six months to two years. During the period of Soviet military administration (November 1944 - March 1945), the building of the penitentiary detained Russian deserters and delinquents that were later transferred to the Soviet Union. After the end of the War, the town of Sighet received and sorted the war victims of German nationality. Between 1947-1950, local peasants who did not pay their mandatory quotas to the state, as well as some young people who had been active within the Brotherhood of the Cross, were brought and imprisoned in Sighet, as political prisoners.

From May 1950 until July 1955, Sighet turned into a political prison exclusively, where an important part of the political, cultural and religious elite of interwar Romania was imprisoned. Officially called ”Danube Labour Colony”, the code name given by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the prison was regarded as a special prison facility. The detention regime, defined by three main elements (hunger, cold and isolation), aimed at systematically wiping out prisoners.  During this period the Sighet prison housed: four Prime Ministers, presidents of the interwar democratic parties, five governors of the National Bank of Romania, dozens of ministers and secretaries of state, numerous academics and university professors, as well as 58 hierarchs of clerics. 53 of the 200 people detained here from 1950 to 1955 died while in custody. At first, the deceased were buried at night near the non-political inmates in the city’s cemetery or in the hospital's cemetery. The graves were not marked and remain unmarked to this day.

From July 1955, the Sighetu Marmaţiei Penitentiary became a prison for common-law offenders, with sentences ranging up to forced labour for life. At the end of the 1970s, it was placed under the authority of the Satu Mare Penitentiary, housing offenders with short prison sentences. From 1972 onwards it also operated as a penitentiary hospital.

The prison was closed down in 1977 and in 1993 it was transformed into a Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Resistance, institution that also holds an International Centre for Research into Communism and an Exhibition Space, both located in Bucharest. The former prison, which became the world's first memorial to the victims of communism, is now one of the backdrops to what happened under communism in Romania and the other countries of Eastern Europe, its exceptional significance being also recognized by the European Heritage Label, awarded in 2018.

Justification of Outstanding Universal Value

The Former Communist Prisons in Romania is a selection of 5 sites that illustrate the regime's detention system, an impressive network of penitentiaries and forced labour camps, organised for very specific purposes, according to precise criteria. These places of suffering functioned as extermination centres for all those that opposed the communist regime or for those deemed as potential threats. The harsh truth behind the communist regime was that in order to ensure its survival it had to resort to drastic measures to oppress the opposition, like isolation, physical torture, starvation, as well as insufficient medical care given to the prisoners, in disregard of human rights.  

Comprising a maximum security, transit penitentiary used as a centralised sorting centre, two of the most representative places for the inhuman methods used and two penitentiaries that illustrate the division between the categories of prisoners, important political figures and military staff, the Former Communist Prisons in Romania offers a comprehensive understanding of the way in which the detention network functioned, as well as of the different types of oppressive experiments. 

The Former Communist Prisons bear the symbolic remains of dozens of other penitentiaries, in Romania, that have permanently scarred the lives of those that did not wish to comply with the communist regime. The thousands of innocent people that experienced terror within these establishments testified to the oppressive and inhumane nature of the system. The dreaded prisons were for many their last home, for others their grave, and for most the suppression of any ideal of freedom and well-being. At the same time, other tens or hundreds of thousands were affected, either directly or indirectly (the families, relatives of the incarcerated, individuals who lived near these former prisons, the ones that knew about their existence but were pressured not to divulge the secret), their lives lived under the looming threat of ending up prisoners behind those same walls.

Criterion (vi): The five former prisons form Jilava, Râmnicu Sărat, Pitești, Făgăraș and Sighetu Marmației, are witnesses of the way in which the communist regime in Romania used terror to oppress all those that were opposing it. In this context, the penitentiary system in communist Romania, as well as in other countries that were part of the space controlled by the Soviets played an important role in the conversion to the communist ideology, a process that turned hundreds of thousands of people into victims. Starting from the classification of the detention units and ending with the decisions and directives regarding the regime of those incarcerated, the system applied a policy of social extremism, of physical liquidation through imprisonment or forced labour of large social categories, under the slogan of "struggle of class".

Statements of authenticity and/or integrity

The properties included in the series are, in general, complete and contain the main layers that illustrate their physical evolution and their use as prisons of the communist regime necessary to convey the totality of the series values. The ongoing and future conservation works are focusing on preserving the integrity and further understanding of these values. All buildings are protected as national historic monuments at the highest level.

The levels of authenticity vary from very high in Ramnicu Sărat or Sighet to mild in Făgăraș, some of the features that have been lost because of the former regime-s efforts to eradicate the traces of these atrocities being nowadays recovered through interpretation and presentation. This is also supported by thorough research, continuously bringing forward essential information for the completion of the understanding of the phenomenon as a whole.

Comparison with other similar properties

Despite the existence of a global administrative detention system, many of those places standing witness to terrors of oppressive and inhumane nature of different regimes, UNESCO’s World Heritage List and its Tentative List are still poorly represented today for this category. One of the most representative sites is Auschwitz Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp (1940-1945) in Poland, inscribed on the World Heritage List since 1979, as the principal and most notorious of the six concentration and extermination camps established by Nazi Germany to implement its Final Solution policy which had as its aim the mass murder of the Jewish people in Europe. Used as a prison, hospital for socially unacceptable groups and military base, Robben Island, inscribed in 1999 is an example of place that honours the memory of victims to oppression and racism symbolising the triumph of the human spirit, of freedom and of democracy. Recently, other states have undergone the initiative to commemorate their memorial sites that bear an outstanding universal value. Thus, in 2023, Rwanda inscribed on the World Heritage List the Memorial sites of the Genocide: Nyamata, Murambi, Gisozi and Bisesero, while Argentina inscribed the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory – Former Clandestine Center of Detention, Torture and Extermination. Each of these sites are unique and testify for different oppressive regimes or tragic historical evens, from places of torture, isolation or even extermination and genocide.

The Tarrafal Concentration Camp in Cape Verde is a site inscribed in the World Heritage Tentative list that bears testimony to the fascist regime of the Portuguese dictator Salazar and the inhuman treatments that left-wing and anti-colonial political prisoners were subjected to in the detention on Santiago Island. Another Tentative List inscription is the Cellular Jail, Andaman Islands, that bears witness to the attempts to suppress the freedom spirit through penal hardships which involved extreme solitary confinement through the use of the layout based on ‘Separate System’, brutal physical tortures and brutal punishments as one of the ways to crush these uprisings. This isolation from each other as well as from the mainland was intended to repress nationalist feelings amongst the prisoners and the people rebelling in mainland India.

The Former Communist Prisons in Romania are, however, unique and representative for the prisons of former communist regimes or dictatorships, existing throughout the totalitarian regime of the Soviet ”empire”. These places of suffering functioned as extermination centres for the opposition or for those considered as a potential threat to those regimes. The so-called extended network of the "houses of death" aimed to rehabilitate through torture the prisoners in order to ensure their conversion to the communist ideology and functioned as a mechanism that included 44 main penitentiaries and 72 forced labour camps. The selected sites illustrate how the communist regime applied a policy of social extremism, of physical liquidation through imprisonment or forced labour of large social categories, while preserving and honouring the memory of those who suffered and died while opposing a tyrannical system.