Before I continue with my two-part assessment of the events at Abu Ghraib, I want to discuss another instance of torture that recently came to my notice. This instance comes out of Romania, to which I have felt some affinity since visiting last spring and summer.
Beginning in 1942, Eugen Ţurcanu and other prison officials in Piteşti, Romania, experimented with “Re-education,” a new method of systematic physical and psychological torture that targeted university-student opposition to the Communist regime. Re-education’s own name betrays it: educated, freethinking Romanian university students were tortured and reeducated in Communist ideology, were induced to betray other political dissidents, and finally were forced to become torturers themselves. Although 780 prisoners underwent Re-education and thirty more died during it, strict regulations and government secrecy prevented widespread public knowledge of the conditions and torture at Piteşti (Deletant 41). Nevertheless, following the closing of the prison in 1952, fragmented oral histories of Re-education circulated in other Romanian prisons (Deletant 29). Dumitru Bacu’s book The Anti-Humans: Student Re-education in Romanian Prisons, published in 1963 and translated into English in 1971, synthesizes some of these personal accounts to present the first comprehensive picture of prison life in Piteşti. An adequate assessment of Bacu’s book would require a longer study, but in this essay, I will address the validity of Bacu’s book as a primary source, focusing on his discussion of prison conditions at Piteşti and, more specifically, Re-education.
To contextualize the information presented in The Anti-Humans, some brief background of Bacu might prove useful. Born in Greece in 1925 to Romanian immigrant parents, Bacu chose to attend university in Costanţa, Romania, where he joined an anti-Communist group that was prominent before and during World War II. Following the war and during the subsequent Soviet occupation, the Securitate, or Romanian secret police, arrested Bacu in 1949 on “suspicion of holding opinions inimical to Bolshevism.” Stories of Re-education circulated during his imprisonment, and though Bacu was subjected to other tortures, he himself was not “re-educated.” (2[1]). After listening to “re-educated” students, however, and witnessing other tortures himself, Bacu combined his observations in The Anti-Humans, which both provides his own eyewitness accounts and retells stories from survivors of the Piteşti experiment (17).
These accounts of Piteşti detail an intricate prison system that punished those accused of everything, from minor “offenses” to what the regime considered serious subversive acts. The Securitate categorized these prisoners according to the seriousness of the charges on which they were arrested. Those in category I, for example, were “retained” without due process for transgressions as simple as being suspected of joining the Communist party for opportunistic rather than ideological purposes. They received the shortest sentences, which might still be as long as seven years (26). Category II inmates had committed minor “offenses,” such as quartering anti-Communists, and might receive up to five years. Bacu also notes, however, that though some students in category II were arrested based on something more substantial than suspicion, most “had no political orientation and were victims of their own refractoriness, of special circumstances, or of the ‘subversive’ organizations fabricated by the Ministry of the Interior.” Category III consisted of individuals that evidence proved were “plotting against the social order,” and it carried a sentence of up to fifteen years. Finally, the Securitate reserved category IV for notoriously subversive students, namely, those thought to pose a threat of armed resistance. Their sentences were ten to twenty-five years of hard labor. This classification system ultimately had a dual purpose: it not only differentiated between students according to the seriousness of their threat to the regime, but it also separated leaders from their followers, thus making the latter more susceptible to the torturous pressures within the prison (26).
Regardless their classification, the incarcerated students experienced inhumane treatment and conditions, of which Re-education initially was not a part. Guards kept food rations dangerously low; though health officials prescribed a daily 1,800-calorie diet, prisoners received at most 1,000 calories of food, and typically were given as few as 700—800. Malnutrition thus weakened inmates almost immediately, forcing them to “spend hours on end in almost total immobility to avoid using energy” (26). Even more scare than food was medical assistance. Those whose nerves shattered from physical abuse received shots of strychnine—a potentially lethal sedative typically used as a plant and animal pesticide, and which can cause muscle convulsions and asphyxia (Sharma). For all other ailments, the guards administered a single aspirin (26). Lastly, Bacu notes that contact with the outside world was limited to those in categories I—III, who were allowed one monthly food package from families.
But here Bacu also emphasizes the solidarity of the Romanian spirit. Students who received packages often lifted food with ropes to category IV prisoners on Piteşti’s top floor. If caught, they risked detainment of unspecified length in the “cazina,” a damp dirt cellar, the implementation of which corresponds with an increase in cases of tuberculosis (26). But the students’ unified spirit proved difficult to uproot, and the Securitate therefore eliminated outside communication and implemented Re-education.
To describe the introduction of Re-education in Piteşti prison, Bacu relies on the anonymous personal account of one of its first victims. He and about nine other unsuspecting prisoners were transferred one evening to a new cell, “Hospital Room Four” (28). Upon entering, they found twenty Securitate under the guise of prisoners—including Ţurcanu, one of the experiment’s masterminds—who waited until lights out to explain that they were reformed students and demand the prisoners either swear allegiance to Communism or face the consequences. When the prisoners expectedly refused, the Securitate grabbed the weapons hidden under the blankets and assaulted them. The beating continued “for several hours,” until the “floor was full of urine and blood. Prostrate and bleeding, [the prisoners’] bodies were strewn on the floor like corpses on a battlefield” (29). After an “extremely minute” strip search, the Securitate left them, “[bodies] made passive and void of volition” (30).
This “unmasking” process was only the first step of complete Re-education. What followed were the “routine day[s]” of Re-education, which Bacu returns to his own narration to outline. At five each morning, prisoners awoke to clean and scrub the cell while “piggybacking,” or carrying on their backs, at least one of their torturers (37). Following inspection, rooms were “open” so that prisoners might “wash and . . . clean ‘the bucket,’” or use the toilet, an especially humiliating ordeal since prisoners unable to finish in one minute (at most) were beaten and forced to wait another twelve hours (37-8). Breakfast consisted of a meager serving of cornmeal soup or tea, which students, hands bound behind them, slurped “hog-like” from mess-pans off the floor (38). The food was purposely scalding so that prisoners would burn themselves, though they were beaten if they did not lick the pans clean. Besides “noon meal,” the rest of the day passed in the unmasking position—prisoners on the bed’s edge, legs stretched, hands on knees, head lifted—and guards administered beatings for any slight movement (38). At six was “Lights out,” ironically named since the lights stayed on perpetually. The sleep position was as rigid as that of the unmasking, and the punishment for moving was equally severe. “It was a desperate waiting, endless, unnatural, for in their heats they had known for a long time that they were utterly helpless and at the mercy of their torturers,” Bacu writes; even night, therefore, brought no respite (39).
Bacu likens the effects of this scientific, methodical “conditioning” to “Pavlovian effects” (33). The prolonged, monotonous torture presses the prisoner to doubt his “moral and intellectual foundation”—his faith both in a just god and a just country—and physical abuse then re-trains him in “good” behavior: “He will submit, as animals do, to biological impulses” (33). He fears the torture he knows will result from continued dissent of the Securitate, so he becomes a torturer in order to escape. The officially re-educated prisoner then is assigned to befriend new prisoners, document their subversive sympathies, and then re-educate them himself: “Several months later I myself did to others what had been done to me,” one victim tells Bacu (29). The Re-education process was thus complete.
To conclude, I find Bacu’s The Anti-Humans to paint a shameful picture of carceral life under the Communist regime, and give a voice to more than eight hundred victims previously unknown to the not only to the West but much of Romania itself. For this, it is telling in two ways: In Bacu’s time, it informed Western Europeans, and later Americans, of the atrocities suffered by their Eastern neighbors. But even now, it serves as a prescient warning of the possibilities—and in some cases, such as the North Korean prison camps, realities—of the ruthless treatment of political and ideological subversives under totalitarian regimes.
Works Cited
Bacu, Dumitru. The Anti-Humans: Student Re-education in Romanian Prisons. Englewood: Soldiers of the Cross, 1971. Internet Archive: Digital Library. Internet Archive. Web. 05 Feb. 2015.
Deletant, Dennis. Ceauşescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965-1989. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1995. Print.
Sharma, R.K. Concise textbook of forensic medicine and toxicology, 1st Ed, Elsevier, 2008, 1—23.
Vatulescu, Cristina. Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010. Print.
Follow Us!