THE ANTI-HUMANS STUDENT RE-EDUCATION IN ROMANIAN PRISONS by Dumitru Bacu (c) 1971, Soldiers of the Cross, Englewood, Colorado The original Romanian manuscript, under the title, Pitesti, Centru de Reeducare Studentesca, was published at Madrid in 1963 IN MEMORIAM Dr. Simionescu Serban, Gheorghe Gafencu Limberea, Paul Oprisan, Constantin Onac et ceterorum INTRODUCTION I PROLOGUE II SIGNS III THE BEGINNING IV THE PRISONS OF SUCEAVA AND PITESTI V HOSPITAL ROOM FOUR VI THE COLLAPSE VII THE CONDITIONED REFLEXES VIII A ROUTINE DAY IX THE CATHOLICS X THE STAGES XI THE DESTRUCTION OF PERSONALITY “THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY” XII THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREPARATION XIII VERIFYING THE METHOD XIV “PROFITABLE” USE OF TIME XV AMPLIFICATION OF THE EXPERIMENT XVI THE FIRST RESULTS XVII PAUSE FOR ESCALATION? XVIII THE ESCALATION XIX THE EXTENSION INTO OTHER PRISONS (THE FIRST PHASE) XX THE DEMON PERSISTS XXI DESPERATE ENDEAVORS XXII THE UNLEASHED DOGS XXIII THE SECOND PHASE XXIV INHUMAN PENALTIES XXV THE POWER OF COMPASSION XXVI REUNIONS XXVII ENDLESS ISOLATION XXVIII THE TRIAL XXIX AT JILAVA AS WELL XXX A LAST WORD POSTSCRIPT INDEX INTRODUCTION by Warren B. Heath The author of this book, a Romanian born in Greek territory, went to Romania for his university education and there became a member of the anti-Communist organization that flourished in that nation before and during the tragic and fratricidal Second World War. After the Bolshevik conquest of Romania, the Soviets, undoubtedly on orders from their masters, maintained a pretense that their occupation was merely temporary and further disguised their purposes by keeping on the throne as King of Romania the legitimate heir, a young man who was merely a puppet in their hands, but served to give to the people an illusive hope that Romania, though devastated and impoverished, might again become a free nation. In this hope, of course, the Romanians (like many other captive peoples) were encouraged by the governments of the Western nations that had won the military victory. Those governments, especially in the United States, maintained a pretense that they were not the servants of the Bolsheviks’ masters, and, whenever they deemed it expedient to administer a little verbal paregoric to their own population, manufactured oratory about “defending the Free World” and “containing Communism.” Americans, who were so charmed by those phrases that they did not notice what their own government was doing, cannot blame the Romanians (or the others) for having supposed that the official verbiage was an indication of national policy. During the early years of Soviet occupation, therefore, the Romanian people entertained delusive hopes of eventual liberation, and the author of this book accordingly remained in Romania, his true fatherland. When he was at last arrested and imprisoned on suspicion of holding opinions inimical to Bolshevism, he, luckily, suffered only the excruciating tortures and hardships that are normal in what is called a Great Society. During his imprisonment, however, he had by chance an opportunity to learn of an experiment conducted on a select group of young men, and he had the acumen and patience to discover precisely what that experiment was. In this book he discloses for the first time the facts about a practice of which the peoples of the West still know nothing. Bacu speaks only of what he knows of what he witnessed with his own eyes and learned from the lips of men who had, despite themselves, been stripped of their humanity by an infallible scientific technique. His subject, therefore, is what the Bolsheviks secretly did to human beings in the prison at Pitesti[1] from 1949, when the experiment began, to 1951, when it seems to have been temporarily discontinued for some reason unknown. What is described in these pages is not, however, an isolated event. Everyone who has had experience in military intelligence dealing with the Bolsheviks, or who has made a close study of information that is available from little known but authentic sources, will recognize in Bacu’s pages a detailed description of a technique that the implacable enemies of mankind have used in many lands perhaps in all countries that are officially Communist for many years. The military intelligence agencies of Western nations have long known that a film demonstrating basic Pavlovian procedures was produced in Russia for training the Bolshevik secret police in 1928, and that the intelligence service of at least one nation succeeded in obtaining a copy of that film. After the notorious “purge” trials in Russia in 1936, when the masters of that country for some reason thought it advisable to exhibit to the world their ability to elicit the most incredible confessions from highly-placed and hardened Bolsheviks, intelligent observers naturally wondered what means could have been employed to produce such amazing results. Certain Western intelligence services sought to ascertain what means had been used, and eventually ascertained them in sufficient detail to show that the essentials of the method were precisely those that Mr. Bacu has described for us. Military intelligence services naturally do not publish what they have learned by their secret and often perilous operations. Perhaps the first hint of the new method given to the general public came from George Orwell, who, in his 1984, portrayed the internationalists’ Utopia and described some parts of the Communist technique, eliminating much that was too realistic for the taste of the reading public at that time, and replacing it with some episodes that could give a dramatic touch to what was in reality unspeakably vile and interminably monotonous. From 1984, however, an alert reader could have surmised much that was left unsaid. Since then, confirmatory evidence has become available from many sources, often fragmentary, for victims who have the stamina to tell what was done to them may nevertheless be understandably reticent about the worst aspects of the degradation imposed on them. They often censor their reports, to avoid harrowing unendurably the feelings of a humane reader or arousing total disbelief in tender-minded individuals from whom miseducation or innate sentimentality has concealed the ultimate horrors that lie hidden in creatures anatomically indistinguishable from human beings. It almost never happens that we have a report from a survivor who at the time observed and interviewed the piteous victims of scientific bestiality, but, by a lucky chance, himself escaped the traumatic and mind-destroying shock of the torments they had undergone. That is what makes the book here translated from the Romanian unique. Bacu, to whom we owe our only authoritative report on the “Pitesti Phenomenon,”[2] was such a survivor. In these pages, the reader will, for the first time, have at his disposal a fairly complete account of Bolshevik techniques of dehumanization, including some details, here mentioned as delicately as possible, of which we do not like to think. On these, Bacu does not insist, but you will see their import. One aspect concerning which he is silent is the sexual torments that form a standard part of the Bolshevik method. That is a large omission, but scholars who have had the fortitude to study the works of the celebrated “Marquis” de Sade[3] and his peers will readily perceive what was involved, while a specific report here would not only sicken most readers, but would prevent the distribution of this book through the United States mails.[4] This account, as I have said, deals with prisons in Romania, but the procedures used there have been and are used wherever the anti-humans have gained control. Identical procedures, together with such improvements as may have been suggested by their experiments and delights in Romania and other captive nations, will be used everywhere that their power is extended including, of course, the United States, if that nation reaches the goal toward which it is presently moving at a vertiginous speed. If the Americans succumb, they will remember this book as a prophecy that was completely fulfilled. * * * * * Apart from its value to Americans as foreshadowing things to come certain to come, if the operations now in progress in the United States are carried to a successful conclusion this book, although not couched in the technical terminology of psychology and psychiatry, should be of absorbing interest to everyone who, regardless of his political desires or prognostications, is sincerely interested in study of the human consciousness. It delineates the result of a crucial experiment that could not have been performed on Occidentals outside Soviet territory. This book is a landmark in the broad field now generally designated by a term adapted from the Russian, psychopolitics. Psychopolitics, a technology rather than a science since it is a practical application of data obtained by research in several sciences, may be defined as the art of controlling a nation by controlling the minds of the politically dominant majority of its population. As a designation, psychopolitics is preferable to psychological warfare, which, though correct, is often taken to mean only operations directed against an enemy nation in the course of armed conflict. An excellent example of such propaganda attacks is President Wilson’s famous “fourteen points,” a group of fairy-stories about the peace and justice that the American Santa Claus had in his bag for good little boys and girls in Europe.[5] That high-sounding nonsense, which seemed plausible to persons addicted to idealistic fantasies and romantic fiction, is credited with having broken the will of the German people and induced them to surrender in 1918, after which, of course, it was easy to inflict on them suffering and starvation, Bolshevik outbreaks, and finally a monetary inflation so enormous that the international people then in Germany could “legally” appropriate most of the property in Germany that they had not already acquired, “legality” being observed by handing a few American dollars to famished and despairing Germans in return for land, buildings, or factories worth a thousand or a million times that price. The “fourteen points” are justly regarded as one of the great triumphs of psychological warfare, but under modern conditions verbal bombardments, unlike artillery fire, cannot be aimed in one direction. Clever as the “fourteen points” were, we may legitimately wonder whether they would have made the German populace simper, if the populace had not been made susceptible to such gabble by the long and patient work of enemy aliens and their hirelings. What is more significant, substantially the same drivel was used, through Wilson and other mouthpieces, to pep up the American people and make them glad to furnish cannon fodder and money to “make the world safe for democracy” by devastating Europe in a “war to end wars.” Wilson’s ideological barrage was directed against Americans as much as against Germans, and we may wonder which nation, in the long run, was the more damaged. Under modern conditions, psychological warfare is necessarily waged by a government against its own subjects and only secondarily against a foreign country, and the real beneficiary is invariably the international nation that controls both sides in the war that it has arranged for its own purposes. Only if we keep that fact in mind can we use the term psychological warfare correctly. The tactical and strategic use of psychopolitics that the Soviet recommends to its allies and agents in the United States and other nations of the West yet uncaptured has been set forth in a remarkable document of which several copies appear to have reached the United States in the 1930’s and later. It is most widely known and generally available as a booklet, Brain-washing, a Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics, with an introduction by the Reverend Mr. Kenneth Goff, who was a member of the Communist Party in the United States from 1936 to 1939, and who had studied psychopolitics in a special Communist training school in Milwaukee. He states that the textbook, although issued for the use of English-speaking students in Lenin University, was also “used in America for the training of Communist cadre.” An almost identical text was obtained from a confidential source in 1955 by a Professor Charles Stickley of New York City and published in that year.[6] A quite similar text, with only minor variations, came into the possession of Mr. Louis Zoul, the well-known author of Thugs and Communists, who published in The Soviet Inferno the greater part of the text divided into short sections, each of which is followed by copious corroboration from many sources, such as Anatoli Granovsky’s I Was an NKVD Agent and Captain Robert A. Winston’s The Pentagon Case, as well as letters from individuals who escaped from Cuba and other proletarian paradises.[7] In the publications before Mr. Zoul’s, the text is preceded by a commendatory address, evidently delivered at Lenin University by Lavrentiy Beria, the Jew who was Head Butcher in the Russia satrapy from 1938 when he liquidated another Jew, the unspeakable Yezhov until 1953, when he was in turn liquidated by another and even more ferocious Jew. The date of the oration is not given, but it would seem to be earlier than 1938 and to come from the time when Beria, in addition to feeding his blood-lust in Transcaucasia, was presiding over the manufacture of “historical studies” for the use of educated simpletons in the United States and elsewhere. The “synthesis,” which deals with the uses of psychopolitics rather than techncal details, is obviously a condensation and omits most of the Marxist jargon with which admittedly Communist publications for the general public are almost invariably larded.[8] It does, however, maintain the pretense, discarded only on the very highest levels, that psychological warfare against Western nations is directed from Moscow in the interests of Russia, and that the goal is the destruction of “capitalism.” The text, though candid enough in treating the American people as enemies who must be destroyed or enslaved, was evidently designed for students who would forget that the Bolshevik capture of Russia was, of course, planned, financed, and directed by the Schiffs, Warburgs, and other wealthy Jews then living in the United States who used their control over the governments of Germany, Great Britain, France, and the United States to ensure the Bolsheviks’ triumph over the Russians.[9] The students were also expected to believe or pretend that “capitalism” included the international lords of finance, who have always found their Soviet colony an extremely profitable investment both in itself and as a means of exploiting their control over the money and banking of nations that are told that they are “free.” The text of Brain-washing[10] deals primarily with means of inducing insanity or idiocy in selected victims and is thus directly relevant to the Pitesti experiment described in the present book. It is not, however, a complete treatise, even in outline, of psychopolitics; it barely alludes to very important weapons of psychological warfare. We cannot digress to discuss those weapons here, but no one should overlook the efficacy of scientifically produced propaganda[11] in the United States, where it is virtually a monopoly of the Jews, who, through advertising, can control the ever diminishing number of newspapers, periodicals, and broadcasting stations that they do not own outright. The best strategic propaganda is produced by manufacturing impassioned argument and violent controversy on “both sides” of a given question, so that the public accepts as unquestionable fact everything that both sides” in the contrived controversy seem to take for granted. Propaganda, if properly used, can always control a majority of a given population, but will always be ineffective against both the critical intelligence of independent minds and the faith of a religion that the propaganda line openly contradicts. Although the minds can usually be hired, and theologians can be employed to “modernize” the religion, there will always be troublesome exceptions, even after a century of strenuous effort. In the conquest of a country by psychopolitics, the exceptions must be put under physical restraint and either liquidated or made harmless imbeciles or, if possible, converted into useful zombies. This is the problem with which the text of Brain-washing is principally concerned, and with particular reference to the United States, where naked terrorism through the government was impossible in the 1930’s, and is not yet feasible, even today. The principles expounded in the text and the methods suggested are indisputably authentic: they are the standard Soviet application of the discoveries made in Russia, before the Bolshevik conquest, by Dr. Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, whose scientific talents the shrewd Bolsheviks were able to take over and put to their own use.[12] You will find the essentials stated in the text. The “synthesis” of the textbook on psychopolitics recommends and prescribes for use against Americans a propaganda campaign for “mental health” to obtain from the stupid Americans acquiescence in legislation to authorize the “legal” kidnapping of troublesome Americans and their incarceration in prisons (to be called “hospitals”) in which “trained psychiatrists” of alien origin and their brutish assistants can induce insanity, Imbecility, or, if necessary, death by means of scientific tortures, especially “electric shock therapy” (which can be used to break the backbone), or mind-destroying drugs, such as the now famous L.S.D., which was only later produced by the Weizmann Laboratories in Israel and shipped to the United States for surreptitious sale to adolescents and children whose minds had been given a preliminary conditioning in the public schools. In the 1930’s, the “mental health” scheme would doubtless have seemed preposterous and ridiculous to the stolid and happy-go-lucky Americans, if they had heard of it. It has now, however, been almost completely implemented, and has already been used in a considerable number of cases, a few of which have attracted some little attention, especially that of the abduction of General Edwin A. Walker, which failed because he had prominent friends who acted before he could be destroyed, of Frank Britton, who had dared to criticize Jews and was effectively silenced, and of the journalist, Fred Seelig, who, through a miscalculation, was prematurely released and had time to narrate his experience in print before he died.[13] We may expect, however, that the procedure will be used with increasing frequency and less secrecy, and that soon it will be mere routine for Americans who make themselves obnoxious to their masters (for example, by claiming that the “United Nations” or the Federal Reserve System or the Marxist income tax is “un-Constitutional,” or by pretending that God’s People do not have a right to use lesser breeds for their own profit and fun) to be hauled to Springfield, Missouri, or some other equivalent of Pitesti on the western side of the Atlantic, and there, with “loving care,” be restored to “mental health” as vertebrate vegetables. Despite the panoply of refined techniques, such as surgical operations on the brain (“lobotomy”), excruciating electrical torments, and subtle drugs, it is noteworthy that even in the United States at the present time the favored procedure is to subject inconvenient Americans to a kind of physical degradation of the same kind as that used at Pitesti, though, for some reason, less intense and systematic. A typical case is that of the American journalist, who, having come upon evidence that compromised the nest of homosexual perverts in Washington, was kidnapped by a U. S. Marshal and hustled to Springfield, Missouri, where he was stripped and thrust naked into a small cell, of which the floor and three sides were of rough concrete, while the fourth was a ponderous steel door. There was no furnishing of any kind in the cell, and only two openings, one a round hole in the floor leading to a sewer, and the other a ventilator, through which were sent blasts of frigid air alternating with shrill, deafening, cacophonous, and rhythmically disoriented “music,” intended both to damage the auditory nerves and to make sure that the poor wretch in the cell could not possibly fall asleep as he stretched his naked body on the rough concrete. Naturally, the victim’s skin, abraded by the concrete, soon developed open sores, and his despairing mind eventually took refuge in periods of total stupor that even the howling din coming through the ventilator could not break. After being deprived of food and water for three days and nights, the victim was forced to obtain them by crawling on his hands and knees in minimum time to a pot placed on the sill of the briefly opened door.[14] In the United States it has thus far been necessary to use a certain amount of discretion and pretense in the destruction of anti-Communist nuisances, but in Romania, after the completion of the take-over, more effective secrecy made precautions less necessary. The Pitesti experiment dispensed with such complicated and expensive paraphernalia as electrical apparatus, brain surgeons, and specially prepared drugs. It used only the simplest tools, everywhere procurable: clubs, the bestiality of degenerates, the weakness of human nature when attacked by Pavlov’s methods. The results of the experiment were, as you will see, impressive and appalling. They proved that no one could resist the techniques of the Anti-Humans, but whether the experiment was entirely a success is a question that must be left to your decision on the basis of your estimate of what the experimenters hoped to discover or prove, while a critique of their methodology must be left to the few Occidentals who have expert knowledge of psychobiological processes. What no reader of this book can fall to perceive, if only for a moment before he tries to forget the “unthinkable,” is the unspeakably vile and sadistic lusts of the contrivers of the experiment at Pitesti appetites so foreign to everything that he regards as human that the creatures who are animated by them can be described only as the “enemies of mankind,” or, concisely, as the Anti-Humans. What is described in this book happened in Romania after the Bolsheviks discarded the pretense that they were tender-hearted humanitarians bringing “equality” and “civil rights” to the downtrodden victims of the wicked “Fascists” and “anti-Semites.” Before and even after the Anti-Humans stopped dissembling, some Romanians were, by foresight or good luck, able to escape westward, and even to make their sufferings known, as Mr. Bacu has done in this book, to peoples not yet imprisoned. When the United States has progressed to the point reached by Romania in 1948, there will be no place on earth to which Americans can flee, and there will be no one to hear their screams. * * * * * All that remains to be said to introduce Mr. Bacu’s book to American readers can be expressed in a few pages giving such information about Romania as will enable Americans to appreciate the human drama the pathos and the tragedy of this narrative. Romania was for centuries, even while it was under the comparatively mild and humane oppression of the Moslems, the easternmost land of the West. The nation was born of the Roman conquest of Dacia (101-106), and there Rome left an imprint that has thus far been indelible and a spiritual heritage that survives in the heart of the people. The civilization of Romania was the civilization of the West. The names of men and places may be unfamiliar to your eyes, but the people you will recognize as your own kind and their thoughts will be the thoughts of the Christian West. There is, however, one peculiarity of Romania that requires some preliminary explanation, for it is the very opposite of what contemporary experience in the United States and, for that matter, in most Western nations to varying degrees makes us take for granted. The persons whom the Bolshevik beasts selected for dehumanization were a clearly defined group: university students. That was because in Romania, in sharp antithesis to what we see in the United States today, university students were a highly respected elite and included men who combined the vigor and ardor of youth with unsurpassed patriotism and a lucid conservatism, intellectual and religious. This fact, which will seem so paradoxical to Americans today, was the result of two concurrent factors. Romania was essentially a land of peasants with limited industrial and commercial classes. The four universities, at Iasi (founded by Prince Cuza in 1860), Bucharest (founded in 1864), Cluj (1872) and Cernauti (1875), each divided into several faculties (theology, philosophy, letters, science, law, and medicine), were open to all who had completed their studies in a lyceum (liceu, translated ‘high school’ in the present book). The lyceum had relatively high standards, requiring, for example, the learning of French and German as well as either Latin and Greek or English and Italian, and weeded out the intellectually incompetent.[15] Only a small fraction, therefore, of Romanian youth entered the universities, and consequently a considerable prestige was attached to the very word student (i.e. university student, since a pupil in a secondary school was an elev). It suggested a considerable intellectual ability and a serious purpose, for the students in Romanian universities were, for the most part, the children of hardworking peasants or of earnest professional men; the scions of the wealthy more often than not went abroad for their education. To this fact we must add a second, that will be even more astonishing to the American reader. The Romanian universities were as much centers of ardent patriotism and conservatism as American colleges, in the period of 1920-50, were centers of internationalism and socialism. The prevailing atmosphere of staunch conservatism also distinguished Romanian universities from other European universities. For this there were several reasons. Romania was essentially an agrarian country and a large percentage of the studenti had had closer contact with the realities of life than was usual in Germany and France. More important, Romania was a small nation with a clear consciousness of its national individuality as a Western nation, tracing its origins to the Roman conquest of Dacia, and encompassed by peoples of Byzantine, Slavic, or Oriental traditions. It had stubbornly maintained that consciousness through centuries of alien domination, attaining a precarious and transient independence in 1600, only to fall again under the rule of the Turks. After numerous interventions by Russia, the enemy of Turkey, and after many episodes of valiant resistance to both Russians and Turks, Romania, formed by the union of Wallachia and Moldavia, gained autonomy in 1859, but remained under the suzerainty of the Turkish Sultan, and did not become fully and formally independent until 1881. Independence so recently attained and constantly threatened remained in the Romanian mind the precious guerdon of nationality at a time when the larger nations of Europe were taking themselves and their prosperous perpetuity for granted. Romania, moreover, had Russia on its eastern frontier Russia which, in 1812, had seized and annexed Bessarabia, a region containing a large population of Romanian blood. After the International Conspiracy captured Russia in 1917, Romanians could not fail to know what the beasts did in Russia and especially in Bessarabia. Moreover, it was the Romanian army that in August 1919 occupied Budapest and freed Hungary from the unspeakable vermin led by Israel Cohen, alias Bela Kun. The Romanians knew what Bolshevism was, and whence it sprang. In the United States, separated from the reality by thousands of miIes and an infected press, many stupid or cunning professors could gabble about a “noble experiment” and a “people’s regime,” but in Romania such nonsense, so utterly at variance with observed reality, was recognized as either asinine or criminal. To these considerations must be added another equally important. Although, as was to be expected, Romanian universities naturally tended to imitate the far older and venerable universities of the great European powers, especially Germany and France, there was a significant difference that limited the more deleterious aspects of that influence. The faculties of Romanian universities, especially Iasi and Bucharest, were predominantly composed of Romanians, whereas, of course, elsewhere in Europe university teaching had been invaded by large contingents of the international people. Before the Treaty of Adrianople in 1829, the Jews, for the most part, had ignored Romania, an impoverished land under Turkish rule, and had by preference swarmed into nations where the prospects of easy pickings from the natives were far more attractive.[16] After 1829, hordes of Jews came over the borders, but, despite various efforts by France and Germany to procure for these intruders in Romania the privileged status they enjoyed elsewhere, Jews were, for all practical purposes, debarred from citizenship until 1923, when the Romanian government then in office yielded to the pressures of the “great powers.”[17] It thus happened that in Romania, unlike France and Germany, the universities were still largely staffed by men who in mind and spirit belonged to the nation, and they were not dominated by an alien race whose members can, with the facility of chameleons, take on the color of whatever the environment in which they choose to reside. In Romanian universities, therefore, patriotism was intellectually respectable, and, on the whole, taken for granted until 1918. After 1918, although faculties remained largely Romanian, the situation became confused. Some professors seem to have been either bemused by the glib patter of Marxism, a “doctrine” cleverly designed to addle mediocre brains that can be fascinated by pseudo-intellectual verbiage, or intimidated by the Bolsheviks’ boast that they represent a mysterious but irresistible “wave of the future.” Many others, perhaps fearing for their comfort or lives, concealed their real sentiments and remained silent or took refuge in ambiguous pronouncements. A few, however, fearlessly maintained Romanian traditions and asserted their intellectual integrity. They provided the inspiration for the patriotic and conservative movements among the university students. The reaction of the students was doubtless hastened by a simple sociological pressure. The Jews, although they were numerically only a small part of the population even after the great influx at the end of the World War, swarmed into the universities and began to jostle out the natives. According to the official statistics, for example, in the spring semester of 1920 at the University of Cernauti there were enrolled in the College of Philosophy 574 Jews and only 174 Romanians; in the College of Law, 547 Jews and 234 Romanians. At the University of Iasi 831 Jews were enrolled in the College of Medicine as against 556 Romanians, and in the College of Pharmacy, 229 Jews and 97 Romanians.[18] These are, of course, some of the most striking disproportions, but everyone will see why, especially in such academic institutions, young Romanians, finding themselves a minority amidst a throng of pushing, versipellous, and disputatious aliens, and doubtless also often finding themselves eclipsed scholastically by the mental agility and Oriental subtlety of the Protean race, should have turned ardently to patriotic movements. There was a further development that will be even more astonishing to the American reader. It may be that before the First World War in Romania, a largely peasant nation but recently emancipated from Moslem control, Christianity retained a greater vigor and commanded a more general piety than in other countries of Europe, though it would be difficult to make an accurate comparison between Romania and, for example, Brittany, Bavaria, or Piedmont. Romanian universities were, of course, profoundly affected by the intellectual climate of the great European universities and necessarily reflected the dominant attitudes of thought, from German “idealism” to the “religion of humanity” preached by Auguste Comte in his more lucid intervals; from the stern pessimism of Schopenhauer to the graceful and universal irony of Anatole France. To a very large extent the intellectual life of Europe was dominated by the attitude that Christianity was an historical phenomenon characteristic of an age whose passing one might view with joy, indifference, or regret, but which, whether for better or worse, was passing ineluctably away: religion was a waning superstition that still had power only over the uneducated. These currents of European thought necessarily affected educated Romanians, who, as a matter of course, read and wrote French fluently and, in many cases, German also. Romanians will, no doubt, variously estimate the direct effect on their intellectual life of the dire and immediate menace of Bolshevism in the period that followed the First World War. Certainly all intelligent Romanians could see that their enemies were anti-Christian were in both word and deed frantic enemies of the Western World, whose culture had for fifteen centuries been specifically Christian, and whose nations had been so distinctively set apart from others by their religion that they had been little conscious of the underlying racial unity of the West. In the 1920’s, it must be remembered, Bolshevik propaganda was stridently anti-Christian, denouncing religion as “the opiate of the people,” signalizing its victories by massacring ecclesiastics, defiling shrines, and converting churches into stables or warehouses, and teaching militant atheism in its schools.[19] It was not until much later that the Bolsheviks could implement on any extensive scale their other and complementary technique of utilizing renegade ministers and priests to spread the germs of Bolshevism under the guise of a “social gospel” or “ecumenical Christianity.” Until 1930, at least, the established Christian churches were almost universally regarded as a bulwark against the International Conspiracy. Furthermore, in 1919, the multitude of Jews residing in Romania, deeming a Bolshevik victory imminent, had prematurely and indiscreetly dropped their pretense and appeared openly as the instigators of “proletarian” riots and sabotage, and the suborners of violence and treason, not troubling to disguise their eager anticipation of a glorious butchery that would put the natives in their place. Thus the fundamental and necessary hostility between Christianity and the various doctrines of Judaism again made Christianity the symbol of Romanian nationalism as opposed to its foreign and domestic enemies. In these circumstances, it was only to be expected that Romanian patriotic societies would be specifically Christian, but some, I suspect, used Christianity primarily as a symbol of their purpose. The first of the patriotic organizations was the Guard of the National Conscience (Garda Constiintei Nationale), founded by Constantin Pancu, a simple steelworker whom his fellows elected their leader, primarily to expose the nonsense of the “proletarian” propaganda with which the Bolsheviks were trying to confuse and utilize Romanian laborers for the invariable but concealed Bolshevik purpose of ultimately reducing them to brutalized slavery. In 1923, the National Christian Defense League (Liga Apararii Nationale Crestine) was founded by one of Romania’s most distinguished scholars, A. C. Cuza, Professor of Law in the University of Iasi, with the discreet support of the internationally known historian, Prof. Nicolae Iorga, who is, perhaps, best known in the United States for his History of the Byzantine Empire, which has appeared in several English editions.[20] A league headed by scholars of such eminence naturally had great prestige among university students and educated men in general and it became a force of very considerable political importance, particularly after it merged in 1935 with the political party headed by Octavian Goga, prominent poet, litterateur, and statesman. Although the National Christian Defense League sought the support of the sincerely religious, its inner direction was rationalistic, basing its avowed hostility to Jews and Bolsheviks on historical and scientific grounds. From all that I can learn, Professor Cuza’s creed was essentially the elegant scepticism of Renan. Professor forga’s historical works treat Christianity with a cold objectivity. And Octavian Goga, if correctly quoted by Jerome and Jean Tharaud, seems to have held at heart a view of Christianity similar to that set forth in Nietzsche’s famous Genealogy of Morals.[21] The greatest influence over the Romanian students at this juncture was undoubtedly exerted by Corneliu Z. Codreanu, the son of a teacher in a Moldavian secondary school. Born 13 September, 1899, he prepared himself in law at the University of Iasi, where he studied under Professor Cuza, and he later studied abroad in both Germany and France. A man of iron will, exalted faith, and ardent patriotism, Codreanu, after participating in the Guard of the National Conscience from its inception and in the National Christian Defense League, founded on 24 June, 1927 the Legion of Michael the Archangel (Legiunea Archangelului Mihail). The organization’s principles an unlimited love of country, a code of personal honor and moral intransigence, the reciprocal loyalty of knighthood, and rigorous subordination of body to spirit were all based by the founder on an absolute faith in Christ. The Legion was “indissolubly united under the aegis of God” and its members pledged themselves to sacrifice themselves without limit or reservation for God and Country. This was the movement that by its high and noble idealism attracted to itself all the young elite of the Romanian universities, won their unqualified allegiance, and largely dominated the thinking of even those who stood aloof or opposed it. This is why the Romanian university students were, in contrast to those of other Western nations, profoundly Christian. I have been assured by Romanians that in many cases the students’ firm religious convictions were shaped not so much by their families or by their churches as by the inspiration of Codreanu and the rigid Christian discipline he imposed on all his followers. There can be no doubt but that, from a strictly religious point of view, Codreanu’s movement represented the greatest and most intense revival of the Christian faith in any nation during the Twentieth Century. Its influence on the spiritual and intellectual life of the elite among young Romanians was enormous and transcendent. That is what makes the Legion unique among the nationalist movements of our age. The combination of ardent faith and intense nationalism produced a generation of heroes. The Legion, also known as the Iron Guard (Garda de Fier), sent an expeditionary force to Spain in 1936 to combat the international vermin there and earned the enduring gratitude of the Spanish people. And when the war with the Soviet began, the members of the Guard, taken from the prisons to which they had been sent by the Antonescu dictatorship in an effort to suppress their movement, formed the very flower of the Romanian army and were distinguished for their valor and devotion in all the actions of that war. This is not the place to summarize, however briefly, the career of Codreanu[22] and the convulsed history of Romania after the precipitate and illegal return to that country of Prince Carol, a royal débauché who, after many offenses, had been disinherited and exiled by his own father. Carol, accompanied by a Jewish harlot to whom he was completely subservient, returned to Romania in 1930, dethroned his own son to reign in his stead, and, finding no other way to check the rising political power of the Iron Guard, overthrew the Constitution in 1938 and made himself dictator of Romania. Codreanu, arrested on patently false charges, was, together with thirteen of his lieutenants, taken from prison on the night of 29 November 1938 and, in the early hours of the next morning, murdered in the forest of Tancabesti at the orders of the royal degenerate.[23] Carol, with the support of the lords of international finance, ruled Romania by a combination of fraud and violence until September 1940, when the Iron Guard drove him and his Oriental leman from the country, and restored his son to the throne. The gruesome murders in the dark forest of Tancabesti that night in November 1938 were one of the fateful and decisive events of modern history. King Carol, who gave the orders, himself acted on the orders of his masters, the hidden and malevolent powers that, through their puppets in the governments of Great Britain, France, and the United States, were relentlessly herding the peoples of the West toward the catastrophic and fatal war that Germany was trying so desperately to avert. Carol’s owners were, of course, the powers that had installed the Bolsheviks in Russia twenty-one years earlier, and the destruction of the Iron Guard, the only organized and formidable anti-Bolshevik force in Romania, left Carol free to carry out (as he did less than two years later) the plan to surrender Romania’s fortified border in Bessarabia to the Soviet and thus open to the Communist hordes the passes into the Balkans and southeastern Europe. King Carol’s commitment to subject Romania to the Soviet as soon as the projected war began was, of course, known to the French government and doubtless in other circles even before he gave the orders for the murders of Tancabesti, which thus changed the strategic balance of Europe and were a preliminary to the dire and appalling disaster that was in fact, as Prince Sturdza has so aptly termed it, the Suicide of Europe.[24] It may even have been the decisive turning-point. No diplomat and statesman of the Western world was more farsighted and sagacious than Prince Michel Sturdza, whose long career as an ambassador in many capitals of the Western world and corresponding contacts in the highest circles of many governments gave him excellent sources of information, while his personal position during the European disaster enabled him to observe and judge with a dispassionate lucidity that could scarcely have been attained by even the intelligence services of the great nations that were destroying one another in the interests of their common enemy. Honest historians must therefore accord great weight to Prince Sturdza’s conclusion that: It was Codreanu’s murder that prompted Hitler to a radical tactical change in his foreign policy a change loaded with the most fateful consequences not only for Germany but for the entire world of Western Civilization ... Hitler made two speedy decisions: The first was of military character, the occupation of Czecho-Slovakia ... The second was a bold political decision ... he would negotiate an understanding and an economic arrangement with Soviet Russia.[25] By this estimate, Corneliu Codreanu, although he could not have known or even imagined it, carried with him the destiny of generations then living and yet unborn, and the crowned hireling whose hand struck him down was, although his clotted mind could not have guessed it, one of the most pernicious traitors of all time. By any estimate, Codreanu was a great man. The most eloquent attestation of the nobility of Codreanu’s character and the purity of his religious faith is the deep veneration for him and loyalty to his memory felt by his surviving followers. Thirty years after his death, twenty years and more after failure and the loss of their country, they are exiles in foreign lands and menaced even there by the ubiquitous power of the anti-humans and the ever accelerated conquest of the Western world by its furtive enemies. But for their Captain and his vision they still feel the devotion that twenty-nine Romanian writers express in their contributions to the recent volume, Corneliu Codreanu, prezent. The students of Romania, patriots and Christians, were selected by the anti-humans as victims of the process described in this book, not so much because they were the objects of the beasts’ most venomous hatred, as because they provided material for an experiment that would confirm the universal validity of a technique that the world conquerors had elaborated long before and thus far used with uniform success. The anti-humans rightly judged that if the courageous and devoted youth of the Iron Guard, exalted by the most ardent Christian faith, could not resist the application of a fiendish science, no humans could ever resist. That is what makes this narrative so tragic. The Legion took its motto from Seneca: “He who is willing to die need never be a slave.” Aye. But what of those who are not permitted to die? WARREN B. HEATH New York City, 1968 1) -With the exceptions of names of places (e.g., Bucharest) and persons (e.g., King Carol) that have well-known English forms, Romanian proper names in this volume are given in their Romanian spelling, but without the diacritical marks that are used in Romanian. To avoid excessive expense in setting type, the use of these marks had to be restricted to actual quotations from Romanian and the index, to which the reader is referred for the exact form of names and titles requiring diacritics. 2) -[Mr. Heath wrote before the publication, late in 1969, of Dr. Ion Carja’s Intoarcerea din Infern: amintirile unui detinut din inchisorile Romaniei bolsevizate (Madrid, Editura “Dacia”), a less detailed and explicit book in its description of the methods used. Editor.] 3) -Donatien Alphonse Sade (1740-1814), to whom we owe the word sadism, was condemned to death by French courts for rape, murder by poison, and almost unbelievable torture of persons whom he kidnapped for that purpose, but the execution of the sentence was delayed by strange influences until he was liberated from prison by the French Revolution, during which he was honored and admired for his orations about “equality” and “brotherhood.” Napoleon had him put in an insane asylum. 4) -[Mr.Heath did not anticipate the full effect of decisions by the Supreme Court in Washington. The mails and the newsstands and the public schools are now open to every conceivable obscenity that the Jews in the United States find it profitable to publish. American publishers would probably enjoy the same immunity. Editor.] 5) -It is probably true, but irrelevant, that Wilson half-believed himself when he spun his rhetorical fantasies; if he did, he was selected for the presidency precisely because he had that capacity for self-intoxication. Colonel Curtis B. Dall in his excellent book (F. D. R., Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1967, p. 137) reports that a prominent Jew, who had been an eye-witness and a kind of errand boy for his elders, boasted that in 1912, while Wilson was being trained for the presidency, Bernard Baruch, one of the great Jewish satraps stationed in the United States, used to lead Wilson about, “like a poodle on a string,” and make him recite at Democratic Headquarters, while Baruch’s fellows were egging on Theodore Roosevelt, whose candidacy, of course, ensured the popular votes for Wilson needed to make Wilson’s appointment seem “democratic.” We may be sure that Fido Wilson learned how to sit up and speak “new freedom,” “make the world safe for democracy,” and the like to the satisfaction of his masters and trainers before they had him perform before the footlights for the edification of Americans who imagined that they had selected (elected) him as their Leader. What Fido thinks while he responds to his cues and performs on the stage is of interest only to Fido’s biographers and to psychologists. 6) -Mr.Goff’s booklet is available from Soldiers of the Cross, $1.00. It is hard to tell which of the many other printings are still in print. One, containing an excellent introduction by Eric D. Butler, the well-known Australian publicist and editor of the New Times of Melbourne, was published by the Victorian League of Rights in Melbourne, Victoria, in 1956, then priced at 4/-. Another, with a foreword discussing the Soviet textbook as an obvious source of the “mental health” agitation in the United States, was published at about the same time by the American Public Relations Forum, Burbank, California; $1.00. 7) -The Soviet Inferno is published by Public Opinion, P. O. Box 4044, Long Island City, New York; 2nd edition, 1967, $2.00. 8) -Marxist doctrine, though very useful for befuddling low-grade minds (which normally accept as profound any highly touted mass of intricate verbiage that they are unable to untangle), is believed only by the lowest ranks in the Communist hierarchy. As Duane Thorin perceived when he was a prisoner of the Communists in China (A Ride to Panmunjon, Chicago, 1956; p. 39): “Intellects that failed to see through the falsities of communism were so arrested that they were of only limited use in the totalitarian state.” Persons with such inert minds are, naturally, not promoted to really responsible positions, no matter how hard they work or how sadistic they are. The policy of denying them promotion, which is certainly sound from an organizational standpoint, has led to some defections which are of no real consequence, since the dullards do not know very much to reveal and they are easily replaced although, where circumstances make it convenient, such tools are usually scrapped and liquidated when they begin to show discontent or claim promised rewards as you will see in Chapter XXVIII of the present book. In the middle echelons of the organization, comparable to companygrade and field-grade officers in an army, the ambitious career men, naturally too intelligent to take their own propaganda seriously, are careful to use the official “ideology” even among themselves, partly for exercise in unremitting hypocrisy, and partly because they find Marxist dialectics a game as entertaining as chess. This sport, which may be played for high stakes, gives rise to clever syllogisms about “deviationism,” “Stalinism,” etc., which often trap the players. A good example may be found in the work of the Soviet physician, J. Landowsky, available in a Spanish translation, Sinfonía en rojo mayor (Madrid, 1949), of which one chapter has appeared in English, translated by George Knupffer, Red Symphony (London, 1968). 9) -Pretense is often dropped on the highest levels in talks with outsiders who are too well informed to be deceived. Prince Sturdza, in the authentic text of his memoirs (see the footnote on p. xxxv below) pp. 346 f., reports that when he came to New York in 1929 to obtain a loan for the Romanian government, he had to plead his country’s case with the mighty Jewish lawyer who represented the great international banking houses of New York that had directed the Bolshevik seizure of Russia. This lawyer, known as Louis Marshall (a good Scottish name!), was, as Prince Sturdza says, “a second Bernard Baruch, less conspicuous but just as influential as the famous proconsul of Judaism (rather than Jewry) in the United States.” (A proconsul, it will be remembered, was in the Roman Empire a governor sent into conquered territory to direct and supervise the native governments, which were allowed some autonomy in local matters that did not directly affect the interests of the Empire.) Marshall, like other great potentates, disdained to play a comedy with the suppliant: he took Prince Sturdza to the window, pointed at Wall Street and said with lordly bluntness: “Look what we can do for a country we like; in Russia we have show the world what we can do to a country and government we hate.” Prince Sturdza adds, “Mr. Marshall, a few days later, reiterated that statement to Mr. Gheorghe Boncescu, the Financial Adviser of our [Romanian] Legation [in Washington].” Marshall naturally thought it best to profess a liking for the United States, a country which he and his fellows were about to afflict with an “economic depression,” neatly arranged by a squeeze through their banks, to ruin influential natives, appropriate their property through foreclosures, and create the atmosphere of crisis and poverty that would facilitate the “election” of their talented servant, Franklin Roosevelt. 10) -The word brain-washing is “an English translation of a Chinese euphemism,” according to an article by Professor Revilo P. Oliver in the Birch magazine, American Opinion, November 1964, pp. 29-40. This article is an excellent discussion of the whole subject in brief compass, and gives some telling examples of tricks used in public schools and newspapers, but unfortunately fails to treat the strictly scientific (psychological) principles of propaganda, which can (and indeed must) be used to create “public opinion” in modern circumstances. The techniques of propaganda are no more “Communist” than rifles or airplanes; like all weapons, they work for whomever uses them, but do not hit the target, if they are not well aimed. In all wars, victory goes to the side that has the best weapons and uses them most expertly. 11) -The best technical treatises on the subject are in French: Jean Stoetzel, Esquisse d’une theorie des opinions (Paris, 1943), and Jacques Ellul, Propagandes (Paris, 1962). One cannot too much emphasize the fact, ignored by Professor Oliver and other American writers, that the techniques of propaganda, like the technology that makes possible television and computers, have no political or social content. The results that are obtained by means of a television station or a computer depend entirely on who uses it for what purpose. It is true that all technological advances place the people who are too stupid or lazy to use them at a hopeless disadvantage. A nation that neglected or refused to use airplanes, for example, would necessarily be defeated in war and disappear (except as a political fiction, if that suited the purpose of the conquerors), but that is not the fault of the Wright Brothers and General Sikorsky. The effectiveness of propaganda, in the strict sense of that word, depends largely upon what is technically called pre-propaganda, i.e., the ideas injected into the minds of children by their education. In the United States, the public schools were early converted into a very efficient machine to stunt the minds, pervert the morals, and destroy the self-respect of children, but the Americans seem pleased with the results, even after they have had a preliminary view of them in the unwashed derelicts, sexual perverts, drug-addicts, and crazed revolutionaries that their public schools are systematically producing at their expense. It seems likely, therefore, that the Americans no longer have either the intelligence or the will to resist their enemies, and will dumbly acquiesce in the fate prepared for them. Since the number of Americans who are still permitted to have liquid capital is very small, the ever increasing number of foresighted refugees who are fleeing from the United States to other countries is significant, though statistically small. 12) -For an account of the way in which this was done, and a transcription of the preliminary negotiations with Dr. Pavlov, see Dr. Boris Sokoloff’s authoritative report in his book, The White Nights (New York, 1956), especially pp. 66-72. 13) -Frederick Seelig, Destroy the Accuser, with a foreword by Westbrook Pegler and a commentary by Dr. Revilo P. Oliver (Miami, Florida, Freedom Press, 1967). This book, which I have seen, has become unprocurable, and I do not have a copy at hand. The author is said to have died of heart failure in Valparaiso, Indiana, not long after his book was published, and a letter to the publisher was returned to me with the notation “unknown”! The book, as I remember, contained some details about the eagerness of the staff at Springfield to start torturing General Walker, who was kidnapped through the complicity of Federal judges (compare Judge Petrescu in Chapter XXVIII of the present book) while the author was a prisoner there. 14) -The unfortunate journalist was almost certainly Frederick Seelig, but, for reasons stated in the preceding note, I have had to quote from the article in American Opinion, November 1964, p. 31, mentioned above. The writer of that article, Professor Oliver, does not give the victim’s name, but the circumstances make the identification certain. One wonders how (or why) Oliver’s article was printed in a Birch publication. 15) -Romanian children began the formal study of their first foreign language, French, in the year corresponding to the fifth grade in American public schools. By the time that they reached the point that corresponds to the first year of high school in the United States, Romanian children were reading Cicero in Latin and mastering trigonometry. Such progress is, of course, merely normal in serious educational institutions. The public schools in the United States, on the other hand, are designed to blight native intelligence and produce a nation of nitwits that can be easily manipulated and fleeced by professional “educators” and other shysters. 16) -A concise account of this aspect of Romanian history will be found in the opening chapters of L’Envoye de l’Archange by the distinguished French authors, Jerome and Jean Tharaud (Paris, 1939). 17) -Strictly speaking, Romania, coerced by a scarcely veiled threat of invasion by Germany and Great Britain, in 1879 repealed the article in her constitution which, like the constitution of the State of Pennsylvania that was framed and adopted under the leadership of Benjamin Franklin, restricted citizenship to Christians. After 1879, the legal privileges of citizenship were available to all Jews, provided that they either (a) had served in the armed forces of Romania or (b) applied for such rights and were found on investigation not to be guilty of political or moral subversion and corruption. Naturally, only a few thousand thus obtained the legal status of citizens, and it was not until 1923 they could all swarm into Romanian politics and begin to take over the country “legally” by manipulating greedy politicians. Everyone knows that the Jews are, as they themselves frankly boast, an international race or “peopledom” who never become in fact citizens of the nations in which they find it profitable to dwell. As Albert Einstein said, “There is no such thing as a German Jew, Russian Jew, or American Jew: there are only Jews.” Hundreds of the most accomplished and intellectually prominent Jews throughout the world have frankly said the same thing, and all the admitted Zionists have proclaimed it year after year, but, unaccountably, the people of the Christian West perversely refuse to believe them and then secretly complain to one another in private that Jews are not good Christians and not good Englishmen or Americans. Although Europeans do understand that a European who lives in China is not a Chinaman, most of them have a curious mania to pretend that a Jew who resides in Europe is a European and even a mania to punish other Europeans who will not join in the absurd pretense. The Jews, whose leaders have told the truth often enough, can scarcely be blamed for taking advantage of the folly of the peoples whom they despise and exploit. 18) -These figures are quoted from official sources by Prof. Ion Gavenescul in his Imperativul momentului istoric, pp. 67 ff. 19) -Hence the cliche, “atheistic Communism,” that is still used in many conservative circles in the United States. To recapture the patriotic outlook of the 1920’s, the reader will do well to turn to R. M. Whitney’s fundamental Reds in America (New York, 1924), in which accurate analysis of Bolshevik plans (including the plans for the “Civil Riots” agitation of the 1960’s) accompanies an implicit confidence that Christian Churches will remain Christian! 20) -Professor Iorga became Prime Minister of Romania for a time in 1931. An estimate of his conduct in office is beyond the scope of this notice. [His History of Romania, translated by Joseph McCabe, was published in London in 1925. Ed.] 21) -This sufficiently explains why there could be no cooperation between the Christian Defense League and Codreanu’s Legion of Michael the Archangel, and it is not necessary to endorse the suspicions of Professor Cuza expressed by Ion Mota in an essay, “Legiunea si L.A.N.C.”, in the volume Corneliu Codreanu, prezent! (Madrid, 1966). 22) -For non-partisan and critical accounts of Codreanu’s career, see Paul Guiraud, Codreanu et la Garde de Fer (Paris, 1940), and the distinctly unsympathetic work by the brothers Tharaud, L’Envoye de l’Archange, cited above. Brief appreciations by his followers will be found in Vasile Iasinschi’s Facing the Truth (Madrid, 1966), and in two volumes of essays by various hands, Corneliu Z. Codreanu in perspectiva a douazeci de ani (Madrid, 1959) and Corneliu Codreanu, prezent (Madrid, 1966). On the significance of Codreanu and his movement in the history of Europe during the climacteric years that ended in what may have been the Suicide of the West, see the work of the distinguisbed diplomat and scholar, Prince Sturdza, cited below. 23) -The method of the murders was singular and remarkable. The fourteen men were taken in buses to the forest and there each of the men, who had been bound in an odd way, was strangled with a rope thrown over his head by a gendarme stationed behind him for that purpose. Then, to give some color to the official story that Codreanu and his ranking Leqionaries had been “killed while trying to escape,” each corpse was shot in the back several times before it was thrown into the waiting grave. Prince Sturdza, in the Romanian text of his memoirs (Madrid, 1966; pp. 133 f.), asks the inevitable question: “Let us ask ourselves why there was that resort to strangulation, a procedure that was awkward and complicated in the circumstances, instead of a bullet in the back of the bead, the simple and usual method and the obvious one to have used, since an hour later, to simulate an escape, the lifeless bodies were riddled with bullets.” (There is the further consideration that the bullet, unlike strangulation, would not have left the marks that were detected by autopsy when, after the flight of Carol, the bodies were exhumed and the officers who had carried out the murders under orders testified what they had done). Prince Sturdza then points out that the elaborate and peculiar way in which the victims were strangled corresponds in every detail to the method by which Jews are instructed to kill their enemies in a passage of the Talmud that he quotes (p. 134). Needless to say, this part of Prince Sturdza’s book, like many others, was omitted in the heavily censored English translation cited in our footnote below. 24) -Prince Michel Sturdza wrote his brilliant analysis of the origin of the Second World War in French: La Bête sans nom enquête sur les responsabilités (Copenhagen, 1944). Unfortunately he chose to publish his memoirs, which include a comprehensive study of the European catastrophe and are an absolutely indispensable source for all serious historians, in Romanian: Romania si sfarsitul Europei amintiri din tara pierduta (Madrid & Rio de Janeiro, 1966). It is a misfortune that the observations of one of the wisest and most experienced diplomats of Europe perhaps the only one who witnessed events from a peculiarly advantageous position, recorded them with philosophical detachment, and then was free to publish his book without being constrained by a need to apologize for himself or for a political party or government at the expense of historical truth were written in a language that so few of our people can read. To make the work generally available, a wealthy American hired the John Birch Society to perform the technical work of supervising translation and printing and to distribute the book when it was published: The Suicide of Europe (Boston, 1968). The choice was unfortunate. The greater part of Prince Sturdza’s book was accurately and even ably translated, although the material was drastically rearranged and often curtailed: for example, the concluding paragraphs of Prince Sturdza’s text (p. 323 of the original) were reduced to a few lines and buried in a footnote at the bottom of page 23 of the English version. But the text was diligently censored to eliminate every statement, direct or indirect, that could offend the Birch Society’s Jewish masters. A great many passages of historical importance were “lost” as the contents of the book were shuffled around, and in what was left, for example, the word evrei (“Jews”) is almost invariably translated as “some people” or “certain individuals,” wherever it could not conveniently be ignored. And, naturally, a long passage was interpolated to commend and advertise the Birch business. But even in this mutilated form, The Suicide of Europe is a very valuable book and must be recommended to everyone (except the few who can read the original) who wishes to understand the age in which we live. 25) -The Suicide of Europe, pp. 120-23; in the original, pp. 137 f. These two sudden shifts of policy made it seem to the rest of the world that Germany had acted in bad faith at Munich and that even its opposition to the Soviet was insincere; that certainly facilitated the work of the international lords who finally forced on the West the suicidal war which, as the British historian, H. R. Trevor-Roper candidly admits, “Hitler would have done anything to avoid.” By far the most complete and accurate study of the complicated diplomatic manoeuvres and intrigues that were needed to start that war is the carefully documented treatise by Professor David L. Hoggan, which, since it has been mysteriously “delayed” by the American publisher who had it set in type many years ago, is thus far available only in the German translation: Der erzwungene Krieg (Tubingen, 1963). Much less complete, but valuable, are the late Professor Charles Callan Tansill’s Back Door to War (Chicago, 1952) and Professor A. J. P. Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War (New York, 1962). The facts are indisputable, but many Americans believe that the devastation of Europe and the slaughter of millions of Europeans was admirable because it pleased Jews. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CHAPTER I PROLOGUE “One commits crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The line that separates them is not clear. But the Penal Code distinguishes between them on the concept of premeditation. We are now living in the era of premeditation and perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer those helpless children who plead love as their excuse; on the contrary, they are adults and their alibi is an irrefutable one: ‘Philosophy,’ which can be used for anything, even for transforming murderers into judges.” These words were written by Albert Camus in the preface of his novel, The Rebel. He, for all his masterly discontent, did not know that in a country not too distant from his own France, one engendered and nurtured in the spirit of French thought, in fact, Romania, the paroxysm of a whole series of crimes was reached in secrecy after August 23, 1944 crimes of a nature so different and unnatural that neither Camus nor any other Westerner could have believed them possible, or even have imagined them. An operation to invert and reverse human nature is something that defies the imagination of any normal human being. Except for the victims and their torturers, only a few, a very few, persons, who have had the opportunity of informing themselves, can give credence to those crimes, and furthermore can understand the deeper significance lying beneath the physical facts. It is true that the last four decades constitute an era of crime, crime coldly and logically calculated, even justified as rational. Such crime now dominates the whole world. It enters into everyday preoccupations. It has become something normal, often commonplace. It has come to be accepted as natural, so that people no longer take cognizance of it or comprehend the real threat to the very existence of humanity. No one can have the patience to compile a list of all the crimes consummated in these four decades, nor could he do it in a lifetime. They would have to encompass the civil war in post-Czarist Russia with its forced collectivization, the crimes of which have since become well known and recognized as such by the world’s leaders. They would have to include the Greek civil war in which the Communists ravaged whole regions; also the so-called “People’s Tribunals” that came into being after the war; the bombing of defenseless cities and hospitals; the present camps of slavery and death in all countries under Communist control; Budapest in 1956. But all these are but a few chapters selected from the long story of unleashed evil. They prove either that man has come to feel the necessity to kill as intensely as he has felt the desire to live, or that through a logical perversion of a desire to accomplish an ideal he can easily and with scarcely a twinge of conscience be made to murder the very persons to whom he once intended to give happiness destroy them in the conviction that this is what he must do, that there is no other way. All such crimes have one characteristic in common: they are perpetrated in the name of humanity, the class struggle, the liberation of the people, the right of the strongest, all at the discretion of the individual. They all have the same goal: the biological destruction of the enemy, a principle applied by Stalin with fanaticism. The dead cannot defend themselves, nor can they accuse. Such crimes have long been notorious and endlessly repeated. They have become commonplace and trite. But there is a deeper horror one of which the world as yet knows nothing. What happened in the prisons of Romania after the nation was subjugated by the Soviets enlarged the domain of crime beyond what people believed possible. Crime has been expanded beyond the biological limits and placed on other coordinates and in a dimension heretofore unknown. Perpetrated in cold blood and cynically, with sadism never met before, crime now aims not to destroy the body, but the soul. The biological destruction of an adversary no longer satisfies, or pleases; or maybe it does not pay any more. The wrecking of the victim’s mind and soul is more appealing and more useful: the destruction of human characteristics; the reduction of man to a level of total animality; a definitive dehumanization that transforms what was human into a docile, malleable protoplasm, instinctively responsive to all the trainer’s whims a zombie. What is about to be told is, I believe, a unique experience. But it did not spring from fancy, from a brain that had passed beyond the threshold of rationality. In order for it to be possible, a distinct evolution was necessary on a plane of thought, on a philosophic plane, through a long period of upheavals, of breaking down and replacing all values in which man has so far believed. It was necessary that “speculations of pure reason and physical determinism converge with human sciences from which man is virtually eliminated.” (G. Thibau, Babel ou le vertige technique) What up till now was considered an unassailable truth that man is a divine creation has been replaced by a desiderate taken as truth that man is a creative divinity. The old values and the concept of man have been discarded. In the light of new realities and relationships, the experimenters crystallized the entire materialistic harvest of the last centuries into a venom worthy of the concept which spawned it. It was necessary that God be dethroned, and that in His stead man be exalted; not an actual man but a hypothetical one, one existing only in the imagination of his creators. The divinization of matter resulted in the confusion of man and matter, with man’s submission to matter. This last conclusion permitted the experiment to be made without inhibitions. When no difference is recognized between a piece of iron subjected to shaping and a man subjected to psychological experimentation, the same working methods may be applied both to iron and to man and the same desired result will be obtained. By virtue of such reasoning, stripped of all human sentiment, it was possible to have toward man the same attitude the sculptor has toward a piece of marble. He carves away to produce from amorphous rock a model existing in his imagination. It does not matter if he is not successful there is plenty of marble; and if the treatment applied to man is also unsuccessful, again it does not matter of men there are more than enough. One single thing may seem paradoxical that men have dared treat others of their own kind as though they were unlike themselves. Those of whom I shall tell arbitrarily considered themselves different from their fellow men and felt justified in subjecting them to unprecedented treatment. They assumed for themselves the role of creator but denied this to others, as if the latter were kneaded from a different and inferior matter. This was possible because the normal sense of values had become so distorted that even the experimenters themselves were not sure but that a deed conforming to the “principle” today would not be declared tomorrow a crime and they be punished accordingly. But until then, for them the crime was legal. What is worse, they even proclaimed it a salutary act. They gave the torturer an educator’s certificate, and his victim, by virtue of the same contorted logic, they accused of being an odious criminal. What were the methods used and what were the results of this experimentation in which the fashioning of a new kind of man was attempted, a man of whom even the most primitive savages would be ashamed? Only the simple facts can tell us. They, above all other considerations, remain irrefutable proof of an era in which disdain for the human condition has reached its lowest level, greatly exceeding anything thus far found in concentration camps. This is a characteristic of the Twentieth Century, and the contribution of Soviet Russia to the history of mankind, to the history of the nations she has been subjugating, that of having given, through Communist methods, the name to this century: the “Century of Crime.” -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CHAPTER II SIGNS It was in 1951 that I had the first indications that something of a very disturbing nature was taking place. This was exactly the time at which the experiment reached its paroxysm in utmost secrecy. It was completely unknown to those who remained outside the immediate circle of involvement. I had been condemned, and was serving my sentence in the Aiud penitentiary when one morning I was taken by two officers and transported to the Securitate[1] in Cluj without being given any reason. My anxiety was only natural in a penitentiary regime in which one could never know for certain whether or not his fate had been decided. I was particularly disquieted now by the fact that I had engaged in no anti-Communist activity in Cluj: I had never been there. My first night in Cluj I spent in a vain attempt to adjust to a cell six and a half feet long and two feet wide. The second night I was taken out into the searchroom and there I found myself in the company of three other prisoners, who had been brought from the prison of Gherla. I knew them. Two were students from Bucharest; the third was a worker. Although we had been tried separately, the two students had been engaged in activities connected with mine. We were placed in an automobile and taken to the depot. At eleven that night we left for Bucharest on a fast express train, guarded by two Securitate officers and a guard-sergeant. Bound in pairs by handcuffs, we were kept in a compartment that was unlighted to prevent our being recognized by other travelers. It was night. Now and then the moon shone through the car window lighting the faces of the three. They were strange faces. I had passed through many prisons in Romania; I had met thousands of prisoners, but never had my eyes rested on such faces. Beneath the pallor common to all prisoners their faces reflected an exceptional physical weakness. And over the emaciated faces a shadow of terror a fixed expression of terror which stemmed from some uncommon experience gave all three a frightening appearance. When, late in the night, the student who was handcuffed to me fell asleep from exhaustion and rested his head on my shoulder, I could no longer suppress a reaction to the fear that overcame me; I moved my shoulder to wake him up. His head, illuminated by the light of the moon, appeared to be that of the corpse of one who had died surprised by a horror so hideous that it had accompanied him into the world beyond. In former times he had been a swimming champion and a man of courage. Speech among ourselves was strictly forbidden. Every now and then our eyes met, and there I could read the same terror that was impressed on their faces a terror akin to madness. As we passed through Predeal, the worker, who sat opposite me, asked me unexpectedly, “Your mother is a small dark-complexioned woman, is she not?” His accurate description of my mother surprised me; he had never seen her for the simple reason that she had never been in Romania.[2] I did not answer him. Later he spoke to me again, but this time about another matter. “Have we passed Pirinei?” “We are approaching Sinaia,” I answered, convinced though that he was not hearing me and that he was present only in body. The two students hardly spoke. In the morning we arrived in Bucharest. We were taken into the depot’s police office which was an indication that we were to continue our trip. Our escorts left us for a few moments. It was then that one of the two, the one shackled to me, began to extol Communism! It seemed that what he had to say was directed to the other two, not so much to convince as to demonstrate that he could correctly repeat a learned lesson. And he seemed in a hurry to prevent the other two from being first. He uttered the hackneyed meaningless words repeated by the Communists on all street corners, but coming from his mouth they took on for me a profound significance. I was amazed to hear him speak thus because I knew him well and knew how he had felt about Communism. And it was generally true of all prisoners that life in prison tended to strengthen the convictions we had held previously. And then he uttered a flagrant lie claiming that there was decency in the officers of the Securitate. Again at night we resumed our travel toward Constanta I recognized the railway line. When the sergeant, a farmer from the Apuseni Mountains, asked with some hesitancy, “Do you believe in God?” the same student hastened to answer that neither he nor any of his acquaintances had ever believed in God. This statement came from one who, I knew well, was educated in the Christian faith. This time again I read terror in his eyes. Again he answered with the same haste as though to prevent a statement from someone else that might be disastrous, and his eyes seemed to express the same desire for approval by the other two prisoners. But they only looked into emptiness. The sergeant lowered his head. He certainly had expected a different answer. “Why were you arrested?” the other student was asked later by one of the Securitate officers. “I was a member of a terroristic organization at the Faculty[3] of Letters in Bucharest. I was so fanatical that during the interrogation I denounced no one not even the greatest criminals in the group.” And then, as if feeling embarrassed (or “unmasked” as I was later to learn) he endeavored to correct his statement “not even the most responsible of the group, those who led the secret organization.” My bewilderment was shared this time also by the two officers who, as myself, heard perhaps for the first time from the mouth of a political prisoner such a characterization of his own activity. No one could possibly answer my own unspoken questions. The other two were still staring into nothingness. How could I suspect at that time everything they had gone through, conditioning them to make statements of which, a few minutes earlier, I would not have believed them capable? Then we arrived. In the search room, taking advantage of a moment when the guards were not present, I asked the oldest, “What position are you going to adopt during the investigation?” “We must confess the whole truth. What’s the use of suffering torture now that everything is lost? The Communists have won the game and are on the right track.” I did not listen any further. His answer was a non-sequitur; I was trying to develop a posture which would avoid implicating our friends in activities which had been a subject of previous interrogations, and which we could anticipate would be again taken up in the forthcoming questioning. But he was broken. There followed the isolation, hunger and terror of the unending inquisition. Alone in my cell, completely cut off from mankind except for my stone-faced investigators, I began to forget the three. Every now and then the officers reminded me of them by reading statements concerning matters of which only they and I had known. But my own suffering did not allow me to dwell too long on this; it remained an ominous enigma that troubled me from time to time. Later on, in the summer of 1952 I again came into contact with individuals who reminded me of the puzzle I had partly forgotten. Other prisoners, transferred from the forced labor camps on the Danube-Black Sea Canal, brought news that increased my suspicions regarding an entire category of prisoners who had once been most dedicated and most faithful defenders of the nation’s freedom the student body. Accusations were brought against them which to the unknowing observer seemed utterly revolting. And yet the men who told me could not be lying. For they were speaking from experience, of what they had themselves suffered. The “re-educated students,” they said, beat them, denounced them, were spies for the secret police, increased the work norms, and tortured any who could not meet them. All these were accusations of an enormous gravity. I wanted to believe that because the majority of these men were simple and untutored they erred, making generalizations on the basis of their own personal experience, for I had known the students in a totally different light. But further news, instead of refuting what I hoped was not true, actually confirmed aspects which entered the domain of the tragic. This time it was a student who spoke to me. I had known him in years past at the Polytechnical School in Bucharest. At first he would not speak; he was afraid of everyone. But when I told him I came to Constanta from Aiud where, up to a few months previously, nothing out of the ordinary had happened, he loosened his tongue. It was from him that I found out for the first time about the “unmaskings.” All the students who were at Pitesti passed through these “unmaskings.” He told me it was impossible for him to explain, but that something terrifying took place there. They were tortured in such a manner that all absolutely all students became informers, so that they were robbed of their manly nature and became simple robots in the hands of political officers. They were de-personalized. “Who did the torturing?” “The ‘re-educated’ ones.” “Who were these ‘re-educated’ ones?” “Other students who preceded us in ‘re-education’, in ‘unmasking’ as it is also called.” “Who began that and where?” “I know neither for sure, but I believe it to be a general phenomenon in all prisons. And wherever it has not yet occurred, it will, sooner or later. It is said that the initiators were three students from Iasi: Turcanu, Titus Leonida, and Prisacaru.” He stayed a little longer in our cell, but he avoided talking any more. “If they ever hear I have been talking, I am a man sentenced to death,” he whispered as he was taken out of the cell. A month later other acquaintances completely verified what had happened in the canal labor compound. “Beware of the students as you would of Satan in person, even if they come under a mask of friendship. They are perfidious. They have done a lot of evil and some continue in their wrongdoing.” “Why is it that everybody talks thus about students? What happened to them that they became so depraved? For you know well that they were not like this before.” “I do not know and I do not want to know what happened to them. I am telling you only that they bite badly on the sly. Beware!” We did not know at that time and perhaps he is still ignorant of the fact today that in the process of degradation, their souls were killed. They had passed through hell. I learned more from another youth who had passed through the Pitesti prison. He talked to me about the “unmaskings” in a more precise manner. He mentioned students whom I had known and what they had become after they passed through there dispirited, broken, transformed individuals. But he could not explain through what kind of inner crisis he himself had gone in order to reach that stage. The ordeal through which he passed was, as he told it, a sequence of tortures truly unique as to length and depth. But what he told me was still inadequate to permit me to fathom the depth of the transformation of soul that had to take place to produce such results. His fragmentary story brought to my mind another case of several years past which struck me as unique. In February of 1951, on our way to Aiud, the group of prisoners, of which I was a member, were lodged in transit at Pitesti, where we awaited the prison van in which we were to be transported on the last leg of the trip. I was surprised by the thoroughness of the search to which we were subjected there much more strict than the one at Jilava. And Jilava was considered the toughest prison in the whole of Romania. Then followed a rigid isolation. I could not see even a single face of another prisoner in the Pitesti prison. Occasionally at night, but more often during the day, indistinct groans reached my ears from beyond the wall separating us from the prison proper. I attributed them to the usual tortures found in all prisons. On leaving, a young man from this prison was added to our group. He was an engineer named Eugen Bolfosu. For the next two days, the time it took us to reach Aiud, he spoke but rarely and then only in monosyllabic answers to my questions. But on his face was imprinted the same terror I later read on the faces of my travelling companions from Cluj. Having arrived at Aiud, during the search the engineer was asked from whence he came. When he uttered the word “Pitesti”, he was immediately isolated for several days. Later he was taken out, and I met him in the prison shop. He would riot tell me the reason for his isolation. The Aiud political officers knew what was happening in Pitesti, and the engineer dared not talk lest he suffer the consequences. Or perhaps he was at that time a simple robot who acted only at the command of the “politruks.”[4] I asked the young man who had passed through Pitesti if he had met engineer Bolfosu previously. He told me they had gone through the “unmaskings” together and that he also had been sent to Aiud a little later, but that before leaving Pitesti they were specifically warned by the prison director not to talk. An indiscretion could cost them a return to Pitesti if unmaskings were not to be started at Aiud as well and thus a new passing through the awful ordeal. Who could disregard that threat without his flesh trembling? * * * * * My detention in the cellars of the Securitate of Constanta ended in May 1953. Following twenty months of inquisition I was sent to the Gherla prison to continue serving my sentence. I arrived there on the morning of May 6. I was immediately isolated, but in an hour or two another prisoner was introduced into the cell. He arrived from Bucharest, where he had been taken for a supplementary investigation, from Gherla, a month earlier. We knew each other. He asked me: “Have you been here before?” “No, this is my first time.” “Beware of the students as you would of Satan. If you do not, you shall experience very unpleasant surprises. And moreover, you will suffer much needlessly.” “Why, sir, is this the case? What have the students done, or rather, what has been done to them that they have reached such a state? You are not the first person to warn me.” “Personally I cannot explain it to you. Something has happened to them which for me is inexplicable. And I certainly know them, for it has not been long since I was a student myself. I simply cannot understand the nature of the profound transformations which were forcibly induced. I do know they were tortured; yet torture alone cannot account for their behavior. All of us have passed through the hands of the Securitate and, after some more or less serious lapses, we recovered. But the students persist on an infernal path. It is said they went through ‘unmaskings’. What the ‘unmasking’ consisted of, only time and perhaps the recovery of some students could explain to us. But I am wary, and that is why I advise prudence.” After fifteen days of quarantine, I was taken to the prison’s shop for work. They put me on the night shift from six in the evening till six in the morning. The first prisoner I met there, or rather, to whom I was introduced by a supervisor, was a former student of philosophy. After he asked me the reasons for my condemnation and my place of origin inevitable inquiries addressed to all newcomers in any prison he told me with an impassive voice, while he avoided looking at me, “Beware of me! I am a student. And this ought to tell you much. Beware not only of me but of all students, especially of those who are your friends. They can hurt you much more because you cannot perceive behind the mask each of us wears the vast abyss that now separates us from what we were not too long ago or what we wanted to be.” Here, then, was one of them, one of those “unmasked”, who put me on guard against himself as well as against others like him or possibly worse. But for him to have done this, there must have yet existed in his soul a vestige of dignity and courage. Did he succeed in his comeback? Did he escape the catastrophe without a definitive mutilation? This was a puzzle which I was only later to unravel. “Why do you warn me? I have nothing to hide. I serve a sentence for the attitude I adopted against the regime. What importance may details have? And why do you sound a warning even against yourself?” “Because, if the ‘unmaskings’ are going to be repeated, I will not be able to keep quiet upon questioning, and I am afraid that you would talk before I do. An unconfessed detail can cost one his life. For by now we have been brought to the point of fearing for our lives. We have become more cowardly than you can imagine.” I was afraid to pursue the discussion any further. Who could tell me that this was not a subtle trap set for me into which I might let myself fall, the more easily deceived by his frankness? I let the passing of time bring the facts to light. But with this student I made friends rather quickly. Shortly afterwards the ice thawed completely, opening up an exchange of communications without reservation. It was from him that I obtained the first elements of an explanation. For he was, in spite of his youth, a thinker possessing a rare power of analysis. What happened there at Pitesti could not be described in simple terms. In this, as in many other instances, language is inadequate to express all we want to say. For this reason we often have the impression that something is missing from the whole story. This void can be filled only by the voice of our own soul as we try to live in our imagination what others have lived through in reality. It is a profound drama touching the most delicate fibers of the human spirit, having origins that transcend the material manifestations of the everyday conflict. Little by little this drama became my overwhelming preoccupation. During the three years I remained in prison and for two more after my release, until 1959, my preoccupation was to penetrate as deeply as possible into the secrets of this phenomenon in order to comprehend it. Investigating discreetly, gathering even the tiniest admissions and hints, listening to the revelations of those who had been victims, only to become torturers themselves later on, I came to comprehend the tragedy that had been consummated within the prison walls of Romania, and to understand how a psychological experiment, as novel as it was criminal and degrading, could, over a period of time transform humanity into inhumanity. Several scores of students with whom I discussed what happened to them and whose confessions of their own experiences and personal ruin I heard, provided me with the basic information. The present work is a composite picture of their tragedy. It has been written to call attention to the “Pitesti Phenomenon,” but is by no means an effort to exhaust the subject. As incomplete as it is for the magnitude of the subject exceeds the powers of any single individual I bring this book as a witness to my brothers in exile so they may more clearly visualize the hell unleashed over their fatherland and over all the countries engulfed by the Soviet Empire. What happened in Romania could have happened probably did happen in every other captive country, the authors and perpetrators of the terrors being one and the same people in all lands. This is a testimony from behind the curtain, from beyond the tomb. I leave to the victims the right to judge. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1) -The Bolshevik Secret Police in Romania took over the name of the Security Service of Free Romania. (Translator’s Note) 2) -Bacu lived in Macedonia, where he was born and received his secondary education, going to Romania when he entered the University of Bucharest. (Tr.) 3) -European universities are composed of faculties, which correspond roughly to the colleges of American universities. The Faculty of Letters dealt with the classical and modern languages and literatures and the other studies commonly called the Humanities. (Tr.) 4) -Political bosses in a Communist regime. (Tr.) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CHAPTER III THE BEGINNING The inauguration of the Communist regime in Romania was the result of historical circumstances in which the Romanian people undoubtedly played the least important role. Whether it was short-sightedness or self-interest that caused Communism’s advent in Romania, has now become a question for history to answer; to search today for the determinants of this tragedy is perhaps useless, or in any event merely academic. One fact, however, is certain. The Romanians not only did not want such a regime, they did not even dream that something like it was possible, because perhaps as in no other European country no Communist Party had existed in pre-war Romania, not even a Communist problem. The clandestine Communist organization, according to both its boss and the files of the police, had a total of 820 members and almost half of those were agents of the state police! I met many of them in prisons, sentenced after 1945 for “crimes against humanity”! The surprise which benumbed the nation at first, later gave way to anxiety. The public in its entirety reacted from the start against Communist violence, which was initially supported by the short-sightedness of political parties and adventurers, but later on only by the Soviet battalions and secret police. The downfall of the monarchy on Dec. 30, 1947 marked the starting point; it was the signal for a Communist offensive on all fronts to destroy the foundations of the nation and replace them with Soviet tyranny. This new state of affairs compelled the Romanian citizen to choose between two alternatives; one being collaboration with the Communists, offering honors, a life free from want, and high position; the other carrying the risk of joblessness, incarceration in the cellars of the Securitate, or even loss of life itself. Instinctively or deliberately, the great majority chose the second, even though they could not influence the course of events in their favor. The fight was so tragically unequal. On the one side we have the live organism of Communism, perfectly disciplined, with strategy perfected over three decades of subjugating the Russian people. This force was small in number, to be sure, but the stakes were high, and knowing the risks, it was not disposed to make any concessions that might weaken its position as victor or “jeopardize its legal status.” It was in fact a foreign body determined to embed its fangs in the arteries of the Romanian nation. On the other side of the conflict we have an organically unblended community, discouraged by the loss of a war, with the feeling of an unjust defeat yet in its heart, and aware that it had been left to make the best of things by its own means the attitude of the Westerners being more than manifestly one of disinterest in what happened in Romania. In view of this unfavorable attitude of the Western powers, and because of a lack of leadership to channel its efforts toward a possible and advantageous solution, a mass reaction was impossible. To this, one could also add not too small a dose of naivete, especially among politicians, who many times believed the opposite of the obvious. They believed, for example, that the Communist occupation and the imposed regime were but transitory stages and that sooner or later everything was going to revert to normal, without the slightest effort on their part. While the people’s zeal was being wasted in fruitless effort, the Communist Party was winning victory after victory, and the politicians were making deals behind-the-scenes or forming tentative governments in anticipation of the arrival of the Americans! In the face of the new events, one observed a change in the make-up of the populace. To the ranks of several hundred Communist conspirators and their international brethren was gradually added a stratum of individuals of uncertain background, in large part roustabouts and creatures from the more degraded and contemptible sectors of humanity. To these were added in quite large numbers members of the minority groups who were now installed in government jobs, most of the time without having the slightest competence. Contrary to the professed principles of “class struggle,” the Communists that were brought in from the Soviet Union (Ana Pauker, Bodnarenco, Chisinevski, Tescovici, Moscovici, et al.,) encouraged ethnical dissension and the centrifugal tendencies of national minorities, thus arousing and exploiting strongly anti-Romanian sentiments by favoring non-Romanians for admission into Party membership and appointment to low-echelon administrative positions. On the “counter-revolutionary” front stood the flower of the Romanian nation, with the front ranks occupied by students and young intellectuals, mostly of peasant or middle-class origin. The young people had been anti-Communist for years prior to the direct confrontation with the invaders for the Russians have always been looked upon as such possibly because of the national instinct, or their education, or a natural pride. The reasons for this anti-Communist posture are as various as are the forms taken throughout the whole anti-Communist struggle. Confronted by this situation, the Communists adopted measures which they deemed appropriate. Completely disregarding all principles of social ethics, human decency, and the Peace Treaty of Paris, which supposedly guaranteed freedom of speech, they unleashed a wave of arrests. Every social stratum of Romania contributed its share of victims, but the hardest hit were the students. How many of them passed under the “protection” of the police, one cannot tell. From 1948, then, until the present time, violent repression of discontent has continued, its intensity depending on the perspicacity of the Securitate’s informers or on increase or decrease of the people’s resignation to their fate. For manner and magnitude, the arrests of the night of May 14/15, 1948 remain memorable. For on that one night, in the three most important university centers (Bucharest, Iasi and Cluj) no fewer than 1,000 students were arrested. This figure represents about 2% of all students at the time. The methods of torture most commonly used by the Communist Secret Police were freely applied in the interrogation of prisoners. For months, the military tribunals pronounced sentences prepared by the Ministry of the Interior in advance of the “trials”, either behind closed doors or in public for the benefit of journalists and Party activists. Sentences ranged from hard labor for life down to five years’ imprisonment. Sentences of only two or three years were extremely rare and given only where there was no evidence at all against the accused. Using a method long practiced in the U.S.S.R., that of segregating prisoners according to their professional background and intellectual capacity, the Communists in Romania grouped the students in a category apart from the others, and designated as their place for detention the prison at Pitesti. This measure served another purpose, also that of preventing them from exercising their influence (which was considerable) over the great number of peasants and workers who continually swelled the ranks of political prisoners. The influence of the students in Romanian society after the Second World War was as great as it had been before the war. One single fact is worthy of note here. Among the large numbers of arrested students, hardly any were of minority origin! The “class struggle” theory here was undeniably violated. According to the theory, of course, the enemies of Communism would have included large numbers of the foreign ethnic groups that enjoyed a favored economic position prior to the takeover and had presumably suffered correspondingly great economic losses with the liquidation of “capitalism.” Also it is worth noting that, just as the wealthy resident aliens had aroused no apprehension in the Communist rulers, so the sons of rich Romanians were conspicuously lacking among the students arrested. The basis for this remarkable discrimination may lie in a conflict between two worlds based on motives entirely other than those taught in Communist classes in Marxism-Leninism and in the “history” of the Party and the working-class. During the trials, sometimes relatives of the accused were permitted to see him once more, but after sentence was pronounced, the doors were locked behind him, and tight secrecy deprived the family of all news of him, until he was released if ever he was. Oftentimes prisoners had been dead for years while the family waited and waited at home for news, hoping that after 10 or 20 years they might be re-united with the loved one who had disappeared. It was to be expected that such rigorous secrecy would prevent leakage outside the prison walls of any report or even rumor of the crimes committed within. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CHAPTER IV THE PRISONS OF SUCEAVA AND PITESTI When the wholesale arrests of students began, the Moldavian region was one of the hardest hit. Since the university in Iasi, Moldavia’s capital, had for a long time been a major center of all student movements of nationalistic character, an extremely large number of students in the Faculties of Letters, Law, and Medicine of that university were immediately seized and confined. The former Suceava Fort outside the town was used as the place of temporary imprisonment for these students, inasmuch as both the Securitate’s investigating offices and the trial chambers were within the fort, so the prisoners could be produced at a moment’s notice by the penitentiary officials. Living conditions in the fort (later transformed into a disciplinary prison) were considered among the most severe of all the prisons of Romania, excepting perhaps only Jilava. To the inhuman treatment and indescribable sanitary conditions (the fort is permanently humid and without sunlight for most of the day) was added psychological terror produced by the presence of inquisitors who were notorious for their sadism and their cruelty in torturing prisoners. One of these officers was the Commissar Pompilian, whom the Communists had inherited from the old regime; another was a certain Fischer from somewhere in the vicinity of Iasi, where he had been a small shopkeeper until he was transformed into a police officer overnight. Ostensibly for administrative reasons, but in reality to prepare for the coming experiment, the Moldavian students were kept in this fort for quite some time, even after their trials, and were only later transported to Pitesti. Among them must be mentioned one, Turcanu, a student of law originally from around Radauti, who from the very first played the leading role in the tragedy. Turcanu had been a member of the Communist Party in Iasi; after his record had been verified by the Soviet occupation of Romania, he was assigned to lead a “voluntary” team, part of an “international working brigade”, on a railway construction project in Bulgaria. After completing this probationary work to the satisfaction of his masters, he was sent to a school of Communist diplomacy and destined for a diplomatic post abroad. Then, ostensibly, his brilliant prospects were shattered by a sudden arrest. The reasons for his trial and subsequent imprisonment at Suceava are obscure. While a high school student, he knew that some of his classmates were members of an anti-Communist organization, with which, it was said, he had sympathized or even associated himself. Later at college he continued to maintain friendly relations with those former classmates in high school who were now his fellow students in Iasi, and were continuing clandestinely their fight against Communism. Whether Turcanu came to the university as a Communist or joined the apparatus there, his superiors must have known at the time that he was maintaining his acquaintance with the unsuspecting anti-Communists, but that fact was “discovered” while the Communists were preparing him for a diplomatic career and provided the legal pretext for a formal trial at which Turcanu was sentenced to seven years in correctional prison for “conspiracy.” The real reason for sending him to prison was a subtle one. He was considered by the Communists to be sufficiently reliable to become their principal instrument in the initial phases of their experiment. It is significant that both before the beginning of “political re-education” at Suceava as well as throughout the experiment, Turcanu kept in direct and constant touch with individuals who were not members of the Securitate’s inquisitorial staff at the prisons. These individuals, who usually came from the Ministry of the Interior in Bucharest, must have been of superior rank to those stationed in the prisons. From his first days in the prison, Turcanu began to apply a plan previously formulated by the officers of the Securitate, who were themselves no more than instruments in the hands of their masters. The initial phase of the plan consisted of a campaign of so-called “re-education” of the students a process calculated to “integrate” the students into the Communist society; in other words, forced political indoctrination. From the beginning, Turcanu had as close collaborator the college student Titus Leonida, also from the northern part of Moldavia, as well as another youth, Bogdanovici, who had been still in high school. The first step was the completion of statistical tables showing the origin of those imprisoned at Suceava, their property, education, political affiliations, and other items of personal information. The purpose of these statistics was to show that the great majority of students were merely victims of the bourgeois reactionary education and that, considering their social status, or “social class” as Communists say, their place was not in the ranks of those opposing “Socialism” but, on the contrary, alongside the Communists. If for reasons of opportunism, some peasants went along at the beginning of this indoctrination, the great majority of the university students reacted against the “re-education” propaganda with so firm a rejection that no doubt was left in the minds of the “teachers” that such methods were futile. Neither promises of liberation from prison as a reward for “re-education”, nor promises that they would be given holdings from the land that had been taken for distribution to the peasants could shake the convictions of the prisoners. They knew the realities of Communist rule too well to degrade themselves by playing in such a farce. To the lectures based on Communist pamphlets which political officers placed at the disposal of Turcanu and his accomplices, the students responded with ridicule and mockery. The Communist songs in “meetings of political re-education” were turned into improvised parodies so clever and devastating that after a time the political officers forbade Turcanu to allow singing at all. Practically speaking, the “re-education” period at Suceava ended in failure, and Turcanu’s activity was suspended when the prisoners were at last transferred from Suceava. That preliminary phase had been designed simply to test the “fanaticism” of those who were thus selected for the real experiment that was to begin at Pitesti. Since they came from the same region, many of the students at Suceava had been acquainted even before they entered the university and most of them knew one another, so contacts were easily kept. At Pitesti, however, they were mingled with hundreds of students from all the other universities of Romania. The various groups thus assembled at Pitesti were of quite diverse social backgrounds and political principles. The great majority of them were either Legionaries,[1] or members of the National Peasant Party; a few were members of the Liberal Party, and there were several groups united only by their loyalty to the monarchy. There was also a goodly number of small groups, lacking a clearly stated political position the so-called “mushroom” organizations likened to the growth of mushrooms following a rain. The proliferation of such groups was a consequence of the climate created by the Communist Party itself. These groups also differed among themselves in the degree of their dedication to the anti-Communist cause the criterion, incidentally, by which the “dangerousness” of the accused was judged, and the basis on which the Communist Securitate determined his punishment. Thus it was possible that for one and the same offense the sentence could be five, or twenty-five, years, depending upon the investigating officer’s own estimate of the degree of the victim’s “fanaticism.” The regimen of detention at Pitesti was very severe. In the world outside the prison nothing was known of what was taking place within the walls. The Communists brazenly called the Pitesti prison “The Center for Student Re-education,” a clever title which actually did tell the truth, but ambiguously, the man in the street understanding one thing by “re-education,” and those who were implementing it, another. Rumors whose origin could not be traced, but which certainly emanated from the Ministry of the Interior, were designed to create the impression that the lives of students were not endangered; that on the contrary, truly humane conditions were created for them; that in addition to decent food, they had at their disposal lecture halls, movies, courses of professional readjustment, entertainment, and other privileges. Since there were no other sources of information, people somehow began to believe these rumors, particularly the parents of the prisoners who hoped against hope that they might soon see their sons again; but this hope was illusory. The prison at Pitesti was relatively new as compared to other prisons in Romania. Built by King Carol’s regime, it was meant to shelter dangerous common criminals. Transformed into a political prison by Antonescu in 1941, it reverted to its original purpose after 1944. In 1947-48[2] it was used for the first time by Communists as an internment center for the National-Peasant Congressmen arrested for their anti-Communist attitude in Parliament. A little later it was called the “Center for Student Re-education,” under which name it was operated until 1951. Situated to the northwest, outside the town limits, close to a small river and far from any dwelling, it was a location almost ideal for torture, since no scream from within its walls could be heard by outsiders. In this “Center,” ideal for experimentation, were brought together all students arrested up to the fall of 1948. They were divided into four categories according to the classifications given when sentenced. Category I consisted of students “retained” without even a pretense of legality, on the simple basis of their political sympathies; for lack of proof of any offenses they could not be convicted of anything. This did not prevent, however, their imprisonment for as much as six or seven years! Category II consisted of those sentenced to “correctional” prison terms for minor offenses: sheltering persons suspected of anti-Communist sentiments, or failure to denounce them; favoritism, membership in the Communist Party without activity on its behalf, or simply suspicion based on some reported statement! Most of these 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 to keep its spies and agents busy and to force the Communist cadres to be perpetually vigilant for signs and dissatisfaction or “deviationism.” The sentences of those in this category varied from three to five years of “correctional” imprisonment. Category III consisted of individuals condemned, with some legal justification, for offenses classified as “plotting against the social order.” These received sentences of from eight to fifteen years of imprisonment under a severe regimen. The greatest number of students fell into this category, which contained those whose activity was discovered but not in all cases confessed. Those in category IV were sentenced to from ten to twenty-five years hard labor. They were fewer than in category III. Here one found group leaders, men who had been charged with special assignments, individuals of the student world having an unusual influence over those around them, and members of groups that were thought to be prepared for armed resistance. In theory, this was the classification according to the gravity of the offense that is practiced in prisons all over the world. But in practice, this classification and segregation served to isolate the categories from one another, isolating the less “contaminated” from the “fanatics.” Thus separated, the “minor” categories, deprived of their former leaders, were less able to resist the pressures to which they were subjected. This was especially true in the second category, which contained a large number of unstable individuals who were somehow predisposed to submit more or less easily or, at worst, to offer less resistance. Until the beginning of 1949, prisoners in the first three categories were allowed to correspond with their families. once a month they were permitted to write and receive a few censored lines and a food package of three to five kilograms according to their category. Those in category IV were excluded from both privileges. The food given prisoners was very poor. While a minimum of 1800 calories was officially specified by the administration, the food actually given to students, as to all other prisoners in Communist Romania, was normally limited to 700-800 calories, although on very rare occasions as much as 1000 was given. Within a few weeks following arrest, the effects of this substandard diet, aggravated by punishments inflicted mercilessly, could be seen very clearly. All, especially the sick, became so physically weak that, when not coerced, they would commonly spend hours on end in almost total immobility to avoid using energy. Thus, for those fortunate enough to receive them, packages of food from the outside were the most precious of gifts. Medical assistance in the prison was practically nonexistent. It was limited either to dispensing an aspirin, irrespective of the ailment, or to strychnine shots for those whose nerves were shattered, a mere token treatment, and usually the number of injections was limited to from two to four. During this preliminary period, the prisoners of the first three categories, who could receive monthly packages of food from their families, devised an ingenious system to help the prisoners of the fourth category, who, sentenced to hard labor, were denied all communication with the outside. The latter were incarcerated on the top floor of the building. Thus the prisoners below, by having a rope lowered from the windows above, could send up small quantities of food, especially to the sick and infirm. This was done, however, at great risk, for those caught were sent to “cazinca” a special room in the prison’s cellar full of dirt, with walls permanently dripping with moisture. The prisoner was stripped down to a minimum of clothing and left without food for a period of time that depended on the whims of the warden or political officer and which usually was in direct proportion to the degree of “fanaticism” of the prisoner. And as the “cazinca” never lacked for prisoners, an increase in the number of tuberculosis cases was soon observed. It was under these conditions that the Ministry of the Interior, after the preliminaries were judged adequate, decided to begin the real experiment. Food packages and correspondence with the outside were permanently discontinued. The guards’ terrorism increased in intensity. Torturings in the prison basement increased in frequency, oftentimes for reasons patently trumped up. Threats, with mysterious meanings implied, frequent visits of the warden and political officers to the cells, unexpected searches at all hours of day and night, and prohibition of every kind of activity under stiff penalty, were signs of fast-approaching changes. * * * * * The group from Suceava, accompanied by Turcanu, had recently arrived at Pitesti. Within the small circle of advocates of “re-education” at Suceava, a schism had occurred. Bogdanovici son of the prefect of Iasi County who had threatened to disclaim him and deprive him of his name if he refused re-education continued to champion a system of re-education by persuasion, limited to Communist ideological lectures and study of printed brochures supplied by the prison administration. He later confessed, just before he was executed, that his aim was to limit brainwashing to theoretical discussions and thus, by averting brutality, protect the students from compromising themselves; he hoped, he said, to deceive the organizers of the experiment and to tergiversate in anticipation of possible liberation. On the other hand Turcanu and Titus Leonida professed the necessity of a system of “re-education by force”, a system which by its very nature was elastic and unrestricted, and which permitted any means for attaining its objective. It is, of course, understood that no decision concerning the means to be employed could have been made without a formal order from the prison’s administration. The proposal to use physical means was much more complicated than the Bogdanovici approach, for its purpose was not simply torture in order to elicit true or even fictitious confessions from individuals; its avowed purpose was to change the convictions of one thousand students hostile to the Communist regime. Turcanu and his collaborators would not have dared even to think of doing such a thing without knowing in advance that they had the total support of the Securitate and thus of the Communist Party, and it is not likely that they did more than pretend to advocate as their own a procedure they had been instructed to use. Just before he began to implement the “re-education by force,” Turcanu, we learned, had been visited several times by emissaries from the Ministry of the Interior, with whom he held private discussions for hours on end.[3] Also, he himself was absent from Pitesti for days, and no one knew whither he had gone or for what purpose. What was the subject of his discussions and what promises he received could not be learned even by his closest collaborators. Once the tragedy began to unfold, his role appeared clearly and hideously. He was a simple agent carrying out an assigned mission. The first act was the formation among the prisoners of an ostensibly spontaneous and voluntary organization known as “the Organization of Detainees of Communist Convictions.”[4] It was obvious that this organization was officially approved: its members claimed to be Party members, and their actions were to be for the “benefit of the working class.” The organization being thus established, the process of implementing the instructions given by the Securitate was begun. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1) -I.e., The Legion of St. Michael the Archangel, which was undoubtedly the strongest, most resolute, and most devoted anti-Communist and nationalist organization in Romania. (Tr.) 2) -Until they deposed young King Michael (Mihai) on December 30, 1947, the Soviet maintained a pretense that their occupation of Romania was merely temporary, pending the conclusion of a treaty with Austria, and accordingly the full rigor of Bolshevik rule was not applied to Romania until 1948. (Tr.) 3) -[It may be well to remind the reader at this juncture that the primary function of the Ministry of Interior in Romania has always been exercise of the police power of the state, officially to maintain internal security, and also, under King Carol, to thwart and paralyze the political opposition. The nearest analogue in the United States is the office of the Attorney General (to which the F.B.I. is subject), and one can imagine the power of that department, if it had direct jurisdiction over all the state, county, and municipal police forces in the nation. When the Bolsheviks took over, they found ready for their own use a highly centralized government with a powerful police system, and they needed only to replace the Romanian officials with domestic traitors and imported alien terrorists. Editor] 4) -Hereafter referred to as O.D.C.C. (Tr.) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CHAPTER V HOSPITAL ROOM FOUR On the northern edge of the prison building, on the ground floor, there is a room bearing the number 4. Initially it was meant for the sick; that is why it retained the name and was known to the prisoners as “Hospital Room Four.” This room, fairly large, was selected for beginning the experiment for it was secluded from the cells in which the students were confined. Here is the description of what happened there given to me by a student who was among the first victims. “One evening we were taken from a ground-floor cell, where we had spent some time, and walked to Hospital Room Four. We were about ten students, all from ‘correction’.[1] In Room Four we found another group of students already there about twenty including Turcanu and Titus Leonida. We suspected nothing untoward, for transfer of prisoners from one room to another was quite frequent and had become almost routine. After six o’clock, the time at which the cells of the prison were normally secured for the night, Turcanu stood up and menacingly posting himself in front of us, began to talk. “‘We, a group of detained students,’ he said, ‘decided to rehabilitate ourselves in the eyes of the workers’ regime, for we realize that what we did was against the interests of the working people and Party. We consider that you are an obstacle to our desired rehabilitation because of your “anti-workers” attitude. That is why we request you to renounce your previous convictions and to join our group. If you will not do this in a normal manner, we will use against you all means at our disposal. We are determined to carry out the action to its end and will crush any resistance.’ “As I was unfamiliar with what had happened in Suceava, at first I thought this was a joke in bad taste. I had never heard such an impertinence, not even from the most fanatical men of the prison administration. I never was one of the ‘strong’ ones, and to this day I cannot understand why I was selected among the first ones to be worked on. You can imagine the answer I gave together with all those who had been brought with me into Room Four by the chief of our section. A sane man, we thought, could not utter such stupidities. So we took his speech as a joke, and began to jest. “Turcanu expected such a reaction, for he knew quite well the student mentality and convictions. That is why he was prepared. All those who were with him in the room when we arrived, remained quiet, waiting. All of them had handy, hidden under the nearby bunk blankets, a bludgeon, cudgel, post, belt, or board, supplied naturally by the administration, for it would have been impossible for anyone to procure them otherwise. “Our reply gave Turcanu the opportunity to start. He furiously raised his cap, and then at once, at that signal, the bludgeons and cudgels were brought out from under the blankets. Every one of them was armed and, without warning, struck the one of us nearest him. As a matter of fact they had so placed themselves by prearrangement that each had a victim handy. Taken by surprise, we were confused. But we came to our senses immediately and began to defend ourselves each as best he could. In desperation, we started to attack. We were at an advantage, in fact, for we were defending our own skins while the others struck by command. As they later admitted, they really had not expected that matters would go so far. We began to disarm them. In the room one could hear only the whacks of the bludgeons and the groans of those stricken. In the confusion one could not distinguish the original groups. All were striking to defend themselves, and the fight turned into a life and death struggle, in which each man fought furiously to overcome his antagonist. After a while the situation became less confused. Although they were twenty against our ten, all those who had attacked us were sprawled on the floor, Turcanu included. This was definitely not what the devisers of the experiment had expected, so intervention was needed to prove to us that all opposition was vain. “During the entire fight the warden, Lieutenant Dumitrescu, had watched through the peephole in the door. When he realized that Turcanu and his minions had been worsted, he brusquely opened the door, and, surrounded by some twenty prison guards, his leading subordinates and officers of the Securitate, he entered the room. All were armed with cudgels, even the warden. Silence ensued. Only a muffled groan could be heard now and then. The director ordered everyone to stay where he was. Then followed a dialogue between the director and Turcanu. “‘What is happening here, you bandits?’ (The term ‘bandit’ was the epithet with which prisoners were addressed by the prison administrators). Turcanu took a step forward and replied: “‘Sir, we, a group of students, realizing that we had sinned against the working class, opposing its well being and that of the people, decided to rehabilitate ourselves in the eyes of the Party. We therefore considered it necessary to respect the wishes of the prison administration, to do all that is asked of us, and to re-educate ourselves in a Marxist spirit, in order to shorten the period of our detention, and to be of use to the working class after our release. But when we began to discuss our intentions, the bandits who are here with us sprang upon us with their concealed bludgeons and tried to kill us. We defended ourselves as best we could. We therefore beg the administration to protect us from these criminals and to ensure our lives and safety.’ “There followed several exchanges of questions and answers in which the warden, simulating astonishment, asked Turcanu for further explanations. Then he turned brusquely to us and said: ‘So that’s it, bandits’? “That was all! At his signal the guards all attacked us, while Turcanu’s group quickly slipping around behind the warden, left our group fully exposed. “Who could raise his hand against a uniformed official? We were already bruised and exhausted, and we well knew that such