The Sighet Memorial is a site of memory with a special significance: it represents par excellence the voice of the victims of communism. In the words of Ana Blandiana, who together with Romulus Rusan conceived and, step by step, built up the Museum collection within the Memorial: “There are countless perspectives from which the history of communism may be considered. But this one, the history of communism seen from the perspective of the victims – not few in numbers – of communism, seems to me to be essential. It is very important.” Moreover, she emphasises: “This museum offers truth and models. Models of life, ethical models. I believe that from this Memorial, a place that marks and commemorates the authentic sufferings of many, you do not come out depressed. I believe that you come out strengthened and illuminated. When I am in Sighet, at the Memorial, I like most of all to stand by the door and to see the faces of the people going in and of those leaving. And those leaving come out as if after an existential experience. I believe that the people who go in there see the light in the darkness, see the meaning of all that suffering, see that there have been strong characters that they can take as models.”
It is interesting to note that the present Museum operates in an old prison from the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was built in 1897 according to the same architectural plan of detention zones as in the prisons of Satu Mare, Oradea, Arad, Aiud, Gherla, and other towns and cities in Transylvania. This former prison has not remained a symbol of the pre-First-World-War incarceration system, but has become, as it is presented on the website of the Memorial Museum: “the setting for a museum dedicated to what happened under communism in Romania and the other countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The cells have been transformed into museum rooms, each with its own theme or chronology of the political malformation that brought suffering and death throughout the twentieth century, both inside and outside prison walls” (http://www.memorialsighet.ro/memorial-en/). Within the prison camp system of communist Romania, the Sighet prison was the place where some of the most important political figures of the pre-communist period ended their days.
Until it became the model prison of repression during the communist regime, the Sighet prison was mostly a place of detention for common-law prisoners. However, during the First World War, and again during the Second, when Northern Transylvania, including Sighet, was under Hungarian rule, it was used for political prisoners, including Polish revolutionaries, priests of national churches, and deserters from the Hungarian army (including, but not only, Romanians). In the interwar period, when the town was part of the Kingdom of Romania, it functioned as a common-law prison. After the coming to power of communism, for approximately two years from 1948 to 1950, Sighet was the place of imprisonment for pupils, students, and peasants from the Transylvanian armed resistance movements. Between May 1950 and June 1955, the prison of Sighet was raised to the status of “maximum security,” and some 200 former ministers, members of parliament, journalists, army officers, bishops, and priests were brought there in conditions of strict secrecy. Of these, fifty-four died in detention and were buried in as yet unidentified places, most of them in the Paupers’ Cemetery. Between 1955 and 1975, the prison returned to its common-law use. In 1975, it ceased to be used as a place of detention, serving only, from time to time, as a warehouse for salt, vegetables, or tyres. As it is situated right in the centre of the city of Sighetu Marmaţiei, prior to being taken over by the Civic Academy Foundation, the prison had come to be, among other things, a favourite location for the local prostitution networks. “Until 1993, when Ana Blandiana and Romulus Rusan submitted the Museum project to the European Commission, the building had become an insalubrious ruin. It was, however, the place where the first memorial in the world dedicated to the victims of communism was to be born,” says the presentational text about the Museum (http://www.memorialsighet.ro/scurt-istoric-al-cldirii-inchisorii-din-sighet/).
Ana Blandiana recalls the birth of the idea as follows: “When I was at Yad Vashem, I was at first shocked that there were films there of executions and countless traces of evil presented to those who visited that Memorial. The Germans had filmed a lot and had left a lot of traces. It may be that the bureaucracy of evil was more rigorous there. Well, here we didn’t have so many traces. A great many traces had been erased. Consequently, for us to heal ourselves, we needed to know what communism was, and also to know what it had been. For me, in those years, one of the great shocks was what my husband, Romulus Rusan, together with his research team, found out about the peasant revolts of the 1950s. I had no idea that they had happened, let alone how many there had been. They discovered more than a hundred revolts against the communists by peasants whose land had been taken from them. We didn’t know anything about this. We thought the resistance had been minimal. But no, no – there were over a hundred peasant revolts. And we used to say that ‘polenta doesn’t explode’… Se we had to discover what happened and let everyone, or as many people as possible, know what really happened, how brutal it was. First of all, then, there was discovery, and then, of course, recognition. And then discerning the meaning of what happened, getting a clearer view of things, a moral clarity with regard to what communism was. And then pedagogy. I have always said that the Memorial is not a road to the past, but a road to the future. A means towards understanding what has been, which explains what is and helps us with regard to what should or should not be.”
The objects that are today in the Sighet Museum have been collected gradually, as a result of research carried out by the International Centre for Studies into Communism. This institution, which preceded the Museum, was created in 1993, initially as a Department of Oral History of the Civic Academy, the non-governmental organisation that preceded the foundation of the same name and played an essential role in articulating political pluralism in the first phase of the transition to democracy in post-communist Romania. Under the leadership of Romulus Rusan, despite being in a permanent funding and staffing crisis, the Centre succeeded in producing projects for the renovation and equipping of the Museum, together with the database necessary in order to fill it with content. Already in 1993, “the International Centre for Studies into Communism […] began the carrying out of oral history interviews and the collection of photographs, documents, objects, letters, newspaper collections, books, textbooks, albums, oral history recordings, together with – on a different level – the organisation of workshops, seminars, symposia, meetings between the victims of communism and historians from Romania and abroad, the publication of books, and the assembling of exhibitions comprising testimonies, studies, statistics, and documents concerning the anticommunist resistance and its repression” (http://www.memorialsighet.ro/scurt-istoric-al-muzeului/). The research initiated by the Centre is reflected in the portfolio of publications that it has built up in its almost twenty-five years of existence.
Of all the publication that reflect the research carried out in order to establish the Museum, “Analele Sighet (Sighet annals) is the first and beyond doubt the most disturbing and original of the collections published by the International Centre for Studies into Communism, in those tumultuous early years, when the Sighet Memorial had barely come into existence and was seeking its place in the prison building that was still in the process of reconstruction,” states Romulus Rusan in a presentational material. The texts published in ten volumes in this collection, over the course of ten years, total 7,388 pages, and constitute, in Romulus Rusan’s words, “an atoll of non-forgetting, the foundation that has given permanence and durability to the Museum, and implicitly to the Sighet Memorial. Their recollection, over the years, will show us where we have come from and where we have got to.” In these substantial volumes we find the names of hundreds of personalities from Romania and abroad who have presented papers on various occasions in Sighet or have left their testimonies regarding life lived under communism. The “Sighet Annals,” Romulus Rusan adds, “show in concrete form how, step by step, the Memorial was born and grew. A sort of effort of pathos was perpetuated in the genesis of the database, of the accumulation of unpublished documents, in the publication of books and, in parallel, in the conception of the sixty exhibition rooms. At the symposia we met hundreds of people, and they gave us their stories; their contributions led to syntheses, and syntheses to conclusions.” The first of this series of ten volumes dates from 1994 and has the title Memoria ca formă de justiție (Memory as a form of justice), and the last is from 2003 and is entitled Anii 1973–1989. Cronica unui sfârșit de sistem (The years 1973–1989: Chronicle of the end of a system) (http://www.memorialsighet.ro/prod-cat/ro/libraria/analele-sighet/).
Recalling how the Museum was born and grew, Ana Blandiana again draws a parallel with museums dedicated to the genocide against the Jews: “I spoke earlier about whether we had models when we set to work. There could not, I was saying, be a model in a direct sense. But after seeing a number of museums of the Holocaust, one idea became clear – namely about what we should not do. We wanted to arrange things in such a way that while going round the rooms, a visitor to the Museum should not have the impression that suffering is or becomes a banality. In no circumstances should the Museum generate boredom; it should not be linear, monotonous. Our wish could be achieved, on the one hand, by making a thematic arrangement within the Museum. And that is what we did. No room resembles another. Each tells a different story. Moreover, behind each room is a detailed study made by our historians, from the Foundation.” While the research was in progress, the Museum was opened on 20 June 1997, with the adoption of Law 95/1997 for the functioning of the Memorial of which the Museum is a part, together with the other places in Sighet dedicated to the memory of communism. The presentation on the Museum website emphasises the gradual development of the permanent exhibition, as research into the communist period progressed: “Each cell became a museum room, in which, provisionally at first, and later in a permanent form, following chronological order, are presented the main themes of communist repression, of the destruction of a state based on the rule of law and its replacement by a construction of totalitarian type” (http://www.memorialsighet.ro/scurt-istoric-al-muzeului/).
It should be mentioned that within the Sighet Memorial, in addition to the Museum exhibition, a number of sites of memory have been set up, according to a profoundly religious vision of the carceral experience, such as was emphasised by the majority of former political prisoners of the communist period. In the first inner courtyard, on the same level as the corridors that make up the ground floor of the building, is the sculpture Cortege of the Sacrificial Victims, which has become the iconic image of the Sighet Memorial. This statuary group is the work of the sculptor Aurel I. Vlad, and comprises eighteen human figures walking towards a wall through which they cannot pass, directed by the hand of a figure with no head. The wall that blocks their way suggests the fact that for those who became innocent victims of the communist regime there was no future. In the immediate vicinity of the sculpture there is also a mirador (a watchtower for supervising the prisoners). Between the first and the second inner courtyards there is a long wall faced with an andesite plaque on which are inscribed the names of approximately 8,000 people who died in prisons, labour camps, and places of deportation in communist Romania. In the second courtyard there is a space for remembrance and prayer. This space is the creation of the architect Radu Mihăileanu, and constitutes an architectural response to a sentence that may be read in almost every prison memoir: “I would not have survived if I did not believe in God.” The entrance to the Museum itself is marked by a gallery of political prisoners and deportees, including thousands of portraits. As Ana Blandiana puts it in the interview she granted the COURAGE researchers: “The victims are and will be unchanged. There are a multitude of photographs of them – they will remain in the memory of Romanian communism. And they must remain in our memory. In the physical sense.” Finally, the visitor’s attention is drawn by the two sculptures by Camilian Demetrescu, who donated them to the Museum, Resurrection, and Homage to the Political Prisoner, and by the graphic panel on which St. John’s Gospel chapter 8 verse 32 is translated into thirty-two languages: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”
Some two and a half kilometres from the building that houses the Museum, the “Paupers’ Cemetery” has been arranged as another part of the Sighet Memorial. The motivation behind this moving project was the following. “Those who died in prison were buried at night in secret, in various cemeteries, and starting from 1952, here, on the banks of the Tisa (at the border with the USSR). As the graves could not be identified, a landscaping project was thought up in which the outline of Romania is drawn with fir trees, with the location of the town of Sighetu Marmaţiei marked by a cenotaph-altar overlooked by a massive cross decorated in Byzantine style. Inside the cenotaph are deposited urns – bearing the Romanian folk motif of the ‘soul bird’ – in which an endless succession of people from all over the country have deposited a handful of soil from places of execution, from mass graves, or from other graves of victims” (https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/exhibit/memoria-ca-form%C4%83-de-justi%C5%A3ie/wR5Qnm4U?hl=ro) In 2012, to give even greater weight to this subsidiary ensemble belonging to the Sighet Memorial, a monumental gateway, the project of the architect Ştefan Radocea, was erected at the entrance to the Paupers’ Cemetery. Based on the Biblical motif of the “ladder of life”, it includes a bell tower and a small platform from which it is possible to take in the entire memorial landscape of the Cemetery.
In recent years, the Sighet Museum has been visited by an average of 110,00 people per annum. 2017 saw an absolute record in the number of visitors. It is one of the most well-known memorial buildings in Romania. A third of the visitors to the Museum are middle school or high school pupils (http://www.memorialsighet.ro/program-de-vizitare/).
