Darkness in the 20th Century

Warning: This essay contains many horrific stories. It includes discussion of death, violent rape, torture, and every imaginable form of human darkness and depravity. If you are under 16 years old, I don’t recommend reading this. If you are older than 16—and if I have done my job well—this essay may be emotionally distressing. Despite that risk, and maybe even because of it, I urge you to take on the emotional burden of reading it from start to finish. I don’t expect you to shoulder the suffering of the 20th century; all that I ask is you bear witness to it. Many large numbers will be used throughout the essay. It’s difficult even for me to fully comprehend that these numbers were real people who had families and loved ones—people just like you and me. In addition to asking you to bravely witness the darkest parts of man, I also ask that you try to consciously imagine the numbers as people and not merely digits on a page.

“Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I shall endure.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here.” -Dante ¹

Pitesti 1949-1951

Prisoners of Pitesti Prison could expect nothing less than hell. But unlike the Inferno that Dante traversed, the religious Anti-Communist prisoners experienced a hell brought on by the sadism of man. Pitesti wasn’t made for sinners. Instead, it was made to break saints. Anti-Communist activists in Romania were put through an “experiment” to see if the human spirit could be broken—to show that even the most devout and most courageous souls could be crushed.

Subjects fit for the experiment were usually theology students who didn’t succumb to the normal means of indoctrination. Anyone who cracked under “normal” torture was spared from Pitesti. Only those who held firm in their views and faith would be damned to the prison.

By the time they arrived at Pitesti, the students were already starving and sleep deprived. They were put in a dark room for days or weeks and then subsequently transferred into a cell with another student who had already gone through the experiment. The cellmate would gain the trust of the student over a few days and gather information. All of the students were then brought into a room where a guard ordered them to denounce their old ways and embrace communism. Inevitably, these steadfast students refused. The guards and the cellmates who had already endured torture, pulled out clubs and began to beat the students. The students were too weak at this point to even try to defend themselves, as futile as it would be. Blood and urine pooled on the floor. The guards left the room and were replaced by more guards. The beatings lasted hours.

Beatings happened daily. Doctors were kept on hand to keep the prisoners from dying. If a prisoner went unconscious, the doctors would revive them in order to continue torture. Bright lights were kept on during sleeping hours and if the prisoner moved at all while sleeping, their cellmate would smash their shins with a club. Inmates would become so afraid that they rarely slept at all.

The prisoners were required to eat on all fours like animals. They were required to use the same bowl for excrement and for food. They were forced to urinate in each others mouths. They were forced to eat their own feces, and if they threw it up they were forced to eat the vomit. Inmates heads were submerged in buckets of urine and excrement as the guards chanted baptismal rites. Once the prisoners were close to death, their head would be raised, they would be given a breath, and then their head would be submerged again.

To break the students faith, black masses were held on days like Easter and Christmas. Prisoners were dressed up as Christ and smeared with excrement. In place of bread and wine, they would take communion with excrement and urine. Hymns were sang. The words were insults to Christ and the Virgin Mary. Guards made the students put on religious plays in which Mary, Joseph, Jesus, and a donkey took turns sodomizing each other. If the prisoners did not commit the sexual acts demanded of them, they would be sodomized with clubs. All of this was done to make the prisoners associate the religious symbols with suffering—to shake their faith and remove their only solace in this hell.

Everyone of the inmates would’ve preferred death but the guards made it a near impossibility. Given any chance, prisoners would take their own lives. One prisoner threw himself from the third story onto cement. Many students in one group of the experiment tore the veins out of their wrists using their teeth. The rest of the group had their teeth knocked out by the guards.

Once broken, the students would become spies and would torture the next group of prisoners, usually full of friends and people they knew from school.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called Pitesti “the most terrible act of barbarism in the contemporary world”.

Barbarism might be the best word to describe the first half of the 20th century and as Solzhenitsyn knew from experience, Pitesi wasn’t an outlier in terms of atrocities committed in the 1900’s.

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The Rape of Nanjing 1937

In December 1937, at the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Japan captured the Chinese city Nanjing. The following six weeks would be a demonstration of just how much brutality the human animal was capable of. It would be a precursor to what would come two years later when Germany invaded Poland.

After capturing Nanjing, the Japanese were told to kill all captives. The disturbing rationale for this was that the captives could not be fed and it would also eliminate any threat of a guerrilla retaliation. Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians were disarmed, escorted to buildings, and gunned down by machine guns. Japanese soldiers proceeded to go through the city gunning people down in the streets.

Two Japanese soldiers made it a contest to see who could kill 100 civilians first with a sword. The contest was openly documented in a Japanese newspaper in which the numbers were updated.

An estimated 50,000-300,000 were massacred in the six weeks after December 13, 1937.

Rape by the Japanese soldiers was extremely common. It’s estimated that between 20,000 and 80,000 Chinese were raped in Nanjing. American Missionary Revered John Magee estimated that at least 1,000 cases of rape were committed a night. Pregnant women were often stabbed in the stomach with bayonets.

Women, children, and elderly were all targets of the Japanese. Stories of forced incest are numerous. Sons were forced to rape mothers. Fathers were forced to rape daughters.

Most of the rape victims were killed immediately after being raped. Many women were killed from soldiers penetrating their vaginas with bayonets or bamboo sticks.

Reverend John Magee recounts the story of a family’s slaughter, “Mrs. Hsia was dragged out from under a table in the guest hall where she had tried to hide with her 1-year-old baby. After being stripped and raped by one or more men, she was bayoneted in the chest and then had a bottle thrust into her vagina. The baby was killed with a bayonet. Some soldiers then went to the next room, where Mrs. Hsia’s parents, aged 76 and 74, and her two daughters aged 16 and 14 [were]. They were about to rape the girls when the grandmother tried to protect them. The soldiers killed her with a revolver. The grandfather grasped the body of his wife and was killed. The two girls were then stripped, the elder being raped by 2–3 men and the younger by 3. The older girl was stabbed afterwards and a cane was rammed in her vagina. The younger girl was bayoneted also but was spared the horrible treatment that had been meted out to her sister and mother. The soldiers then bayoneted another sister of between 7–8, who was also in the room. The last murders in the house were of Ha’s two children, aged 4 and 2 respectively. The older was bayoneted and the younger split down through the head with a sword”.

Gunshots and screams were heard day and night.

The Armenian Genocide 1915-1917

Behind the cover of World War 1, the Ottoman Empire carried out the extermination of between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians. The state turned on its own Armenian citizens, who had nowhere to go, and went about a systematic and violent genocide.

The Turks began with the Armenian men. Men who were drafted to fight in World War 1 were conscripted to do physical labor such as digging trenches. Once the trenches were dug, they were shot and the trenches were used as mass graves. On April 24, 1915 all of the prominent Armenian men were rounded up, arrested, and killed. With the majority of males between the ages of 12-80 dead, the Ottoman Empire could move on to the women, girls, and small boys.

Women, children, and the few remaining men were rounded up in one Armenian town and forced to march for miles as a caravan until they reached a bridge. Under the bridge they were attacked with hatches, shovels, pitchforks and axes. The Turkish officials hacked away at children who screamed “mother help us please!”. They were smashed against rocks in front of their mothers. This went on for four to five hours.

Countless more death caravans were to come.

Ten to fifteen thousand violent criminals were released from prisons in order to carry out the genocide. Soldiers were ordered to play drums and trumpets to drown out the cries of children as they marched out of the cities and towns into the desert. Once the caravans were miles into the desert, the criminals went about murdering the Armenians. They slashed them with hatchets and crushed their heads with stones.

Then it was on to the next town. And then the next.

1900-1994

1914-1918: 20 million died in World War 1.

1918-1920: 50 million died from the Spanish Flu

1917-1922: 10 million died during the Russian Civil War. 40-50 Million put in gulags.

1932-1933: 3.5 million Ukrainians starved to death in the Holodomor

1939-1945: 75 million died in World War 2.

1941-1943: 12 million killed in concentration camps during the Holocaust.

1945: 150,000 killed by atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The development of nuclear weapons still poses an existential threat to all of humanity.

1945-1949: 6 million died during the Chinese Civil War.

1950-1953: 5 million died in the Korean War

1975-1979: 2 million died in the Cambodian Genocide

1994: 800,000 died in Rwandan Genocide

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“This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty—shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn’t ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child’s groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can’t even understand what’s done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and brother, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child’s prayer to dear, kind God! I say nothing of the sufferings of grown-up people, they have eaten the apple, damn them, and the devil take them all! But these little ones!”– Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

1-These are the words Dante sees at the gates of hell

Reading Material

The Anti-Humans by Dumitru Bacu

The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang

Armenian Golgotha by Grigoris Balakian