Nicolae Lițoiu

"The food was horrible. What do you mean by horrible? I mean in terms of calories... we used to joke about it: „This food has calories until it gets cold. After it gets cold it has no calories left." The food consisted in a thin soup, a lot of cabbage and sometimes a bit of beet or a handful of rice. Sometimes there was also a piece of bacon with hair on it floating in the soup. Beans were more nourishing. In the evening, we were usually given pearl barley, unsweetened, only with salt. There was also rice. Those who didn't work got about 1.3 pounds (600 g) of polenta, a cube of polenta made of unsifted corn flour. I think for each ten grains of corn flour, there were five grains of sand, because your teeth would crackle. It was terrible. Before, when I arrived, they gave us so-called turtoi (flat bread), which was a mixture of water and corn flour, baked in a greased pan, apparently, with grease or oil. The taste wasn't that bad, but it had a disastrous effect on the digestive tube. It was probably infested with salmonella or something, because of the unhygienic food handling (in my case, I started feeling the effects after about a week). Apart from that, we also had the so-called „ciric”: 125 grams of bread (0.27 lbs). It was basically a bread cut in eight. A bread weighing about 800 grams (1.76 lbs) or so. I don't know if the numbers are correct, but I don't think it was larger than 1 kg (2.20 lbs). It was rye bread. Well, that was like cake for us. You would eat it, drank water and then say you ate something delicious (laughing). Those of us who didn't work got packages once every three months. And only five kilograms (11 lbs). If you worked, you were allowed to receive a package every two months. The effects of the flat bread were disastrous in my case. At my height and weight of about 101-102 kg (223 lbs) now, just imagine how I looked weighing 65 kg (143 lbs) less."

"Yes, one of the things they found great pleasure in: to check you after washing. They would take us to the shower once a week. Well, your pores open up when you wash, right? Just imagine. Hot water. They wouldn't let us combine it with cold water. So the shower was as short as possible. After that they would let cold water run. So it was a contrast. One prison mate, Victor Totu, fell in the bathroom because of this contrast and the lack of food. His heart started beating fast and he fell down. R: He felt sick. I: We helped him out of the bathroom. They also had checks. Every now and then.... Every month or one month and a half, we would take our mattresses and everything else we had out of the cell. On the hallway. We would lie facing the ground, not on the mattress, but directly on the cement floor. They would take us to the showers. And then, warmed up as we were, they would force us to lie on the cement floor. They would hold us like that until you felt sick, there on the cement floor. It's a miracle from God that I didn't get sick. I suffer from rheumatism, but nothing more serious than that, I don't have lung problems or something else."