Trip to Sighetu Marmației

 After visiting an NGO, we headed north toward the Ukrainian border at the city of Sighetu Marmației, usually just called Sighet. It had two historical sites we wanted to visit: Elie Wiesel's childhood home and the Memorial of the Victims of Communism and of the Resistance.

Driving the 90 minutes up to Sighet was a delight. Wooden churches and gates, tall steeples and shepherds tending their sheep.

We learned a lot about the ghetto formed in Romania for the Jews in the country, then the eventual evacuation to Auschwitz.

Elie Wiesel was happy that his childhood home would be used as a Holocaust Memorial. “I am honored and deeply moved that my cherished home in Sighet has become a place Romanians and others can learn about the crimes of the Holocaust, and how the Jewish community was wiped out,” Wiesel said.

After our visit we walked a few blocks to the Memorial of the Victim of Communism. Originally, this was a prison built in 1897 and over the years housed locals or prisoners of war during both World Wars. But after World War II the communists who took over Romania began putting political prisoners here.

Each room of the 3-story barracks is dedicated to a different aspect of prison life, the communist takeover, and the resistance up to December 1989.

This first room showed the locations of other political prisons throughout the country. Since Sighet is so far away from Bucharest, they sent the most "dangerous" thinkers here.

This room depicted the ballot box and how elections in 1946 were stolen. One of the means was by trick drawers in ballot boxes.

This cell was for Iuliu Maniu who served as Prime Minister of Romania for three terms during 1928–1933. Arrested by the ascendant communist authorities in 1947, he was convicted of treason in a show trial and sent to Sighet Prison, where he died six years later.

Officially established by decree in 1948, the Security Police, the number of positions was 4,641. By 1951, the staff had increased to 15,280. The Interior Ministry tried to liquidate all opponents of the regime. It was this way the "administrative arrest" came into being: arrest without warrant, investigation, or trial. Hundreds of thousands were arrested and sent to labor camps. In the 1980s the Securitate conceived a methodical program of mass indoctrination using rumors, frame-ups, public humiliations, censorship, and repression of the slightest gestures of independence.

Despite the fall of Ceausescu on Christmas Day, 1989, the traces of this violation of the national consciousness persist today in the mentality of the public.

This little notebook contained some English words that a prisoner was studying.

"Article 209" of the penal code was the black hole of the communist justice system. A third of political convictions after 1948 were handed down on the basis of this article, which defined with diabolical ambiguity like "machination against the socialist order" or "machination against state order." On this pretext one could be convicted for taking part in an anti-communist organization, for refusing to join a trade union or collective farm, for poking the eyes out of an official portrait, or quite simply for telling a joke.

On the other side of the window was the courtyard. It was a nice warm spring day, but desperately cold inside. Most who were brought here died here. Overall, more than 2 million people were persecuted politically using coercive methods in the People's Republic of Romania. Over 600,000 were arrested and sentenced to imprisonment between 1945-1989.