The beatings were associated with a series of other ordeals afterwards: you would be forced to sit on the side of the bunk bed and forbidden to sleep or you would sit with your arms stretched up – if you lowered them, they would start hitting you… There are things one cannot tell. Not because they’re embarrassing of humiliating, but because they destroy you as a human being altogether. It felt like it was the end of the world, it was apocalyptic. The beatings to the soles weren’t easy to endure: they would hold you down and hit you on the soles with their clubs. And Ţurcanu would throw you down and jump up and down on you with his feet; he would hit you in the liver… those were terrifying knocks. You didn’t get to feel how brutal they were, because you would pass out from the pain.
After we entered the room, we saw some students who had books, on the right side of the bunk beds. This was extremely unusual, I had never seen such a thing in prison. They had books on subjects of communist propaganda and I recall that one of the most important was Anton Semionovici Makarenko’s “Flags on the Tower”. I thought that they had loosened up the repressive mechanism and that they would allow us to read. The hell they did, because the second day, at Ţurcanu’s order, the ones we found in the room aligned, formed a passage and started to hit the others with their clubs, broom sticks and cudgels. At first, there was a certain response from the victims, but they were all soon beaten up (myself included) until there was no answer and we started to follow their orders, which consisted in a series of painful ordeals.
I was beaten up for about a month. After these beatings, they would send you in different other cells and they would call you from time to time: “Well, did you think about things, you bandit?”. And if they found out something about you from another student’s declaration: “Were you trying to hide this from us?” or “Did you lie on purpose?”. And then you would get another beating. Some of the things were devilish, fiendish, apocalyptical, because there was no way you could resist. There was no way out of this mess. Some went so far as to kill themselves, in the beginning, jumping through the hole between the stairs. That is why, later on, they put wire nettings on every floor, to prevent other suicides.
You didn’t get to feel how brutal the beatings were, because you would pass out from the pain.
Gheorghe Stănică
zdroj: Arhiva Consiliului Naţional pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securităţii, Arhiva Centrului de Studii în Istorie Contemporană
zdroj: Arhiva Consiliului Naţional pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securităţii, Arhiva Centrului de Studii în Istorie Contemporană
Stáhnout obrázek
Gheorghe Stănică was born April 23rd 1922 in Giurgiu, in southern Romania. After feeling followed by the Securitate in early 1948 and finding aut about a series of colleagues being arrested, he decided to hide out for a year and three months. He was finally arrested on August 17th 1949 and sentenced to 4 years in prison. He was imprisoned in Jilava, Piteşti, but also in the forced labour camps from the Danube-Black Sea Canal (Poarta Albă, Peninsula, Galeş). In early 1950 he was tortured while serving his sentence, in the so-called „Piteşti phenomenon“. Gheorghe Stănică was set free on May 27th 1954 and graduated the Faculty of Constructions aged 44. He was married and had two daughters. He passed away in Aprili 2012, in Bucharest.
