“And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.”
— Revelation 9:6
“Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric moved:
To rear me was the task of Power Divine,
Supremest Wisdom, and Primeval Love.
Before me things created were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I shall endure.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”
— Inscription on the Gates of Hell, Dante’s Inferno
For many, the end of World War II marked a return to peace. But for others, the suffering not only continued—it intensified. Hitler and Mussolini weren’t the only men who wanted the state to control everything. “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state,” Mussolini once said—and they certainly weren’t the only ones willing to inflict massive suffering to achieve that goal. When one evil ends, it leaves a vacuum—and that vacuum can be filled just as easily by more evil as by good.
The horrors of Nazi concentration camps and the bombings of civilians were over. To Americans, darkness had been defeated and prosperity lay ahead. But in Eastern Europe, where destruction and instability reigned, new forms of evil were quietly taking root. The West, weary from war, largely turned a blind eye. Perhaps most people were simply exhausted, or maybe they couldn’t fathom that atrocity could persist beyond the fall of Nazi Germany.
Immediately after the Red Army captured Berlin, Stalin and the Soviet Union began implementing their own brand of totalitarianism across Eastern Europe—a strategy long in the making. In a note to Stalin dated July 1920, Lenin wrote, “My personal opinion is that to this end, Hungary should be Sovietized, and perhaps Czechia and Romania.” The Communist utopia could only be realized, they believed, once it was adopted everywhere. The end of World War II provided the perfect opportunity to begin that process.
Thus, the Soviet Union set to work in what became known as the “Eastern Bloc,” which included East Germany, Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania. Most of these nations were politically destabilized after the war and easy prey for Stalin’s ideology. Reparations were owed, and as the victors, Soviet soldiers were the ones sent to collect.
As the Red Army marched through Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere, soldiers were shocked by the material wealth they encountered. Raised on Soviet propaganda that depicted capitalist countries as impoverished and miserable, many were unprepared for what they saw. One soldier wrote, “It’s obvious from everything we see that Hitler robbed the whole of Europe to please his blood-stained Fritzes.” That belief became a convenient moral justification for the widespread looting that followed.
They stole bicycles and clothing. They stole watches and furniture. They stole in Germany, in Hungary, and beyond. And what they didn’t steal, they often destroyed. For months, robbery and devastation ran rampant—justified as reparations.
With the looting and chaos came violent attacks on civilians. Revenge was on the minds of many Red Army soldiers. Women were frequently subjected to gang rape, and although it was not a top-down order, the leadership showed no interest in stopping it. Historian Anne Applebaum, in The Iron Curtain, notes:
“It is frequently and correctly observed that this wave of sexual violence was not planned, in Germany or anywhere else, and there is no document ‘ordering’ such attacks. Yet it is also true that officers such as Kopelev and Solzhenitsyn found that their immediate superiors weren’t much interested in stopping them, and both rape and random killings were clearly tolerated, at least in the early weeks of occupation. Though decisions were left up to local commanders, this tolerance flowed from the highest possible level. When the Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas complained about the behavior of the Red Army to Stalin, the Soviet leader infamously demanded to know how he, a writer, could not ‘understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?’”
This spirit of revenge would remain evident in the actions of the Soviet Union in the years that followed. In the next several years, the Soviets began covertly establishing communist governments across the Eastern Bloc.
They created secret police forces to target political enemies across Eastern Europe. In each occupied country, they placed local communists in charge of radio and media outlets. Radio propaganda was prioritized, as it could reach the broadest audience, including the illiterate lower classes. Independent organizations were then harassed or banned outright—church groups, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, German “anti-fascist” associations, and even local YMCAs.
Romania was one of the earliest Eastern Bloc countries to (forcefully) embrace communism. Early on during World War II, Romania allied itself with Nazi Germany, but as the Soviet forces closed in on them in 1944, they switched sides. In October 1944 an agreement between Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin was made. The Soviet Union would be given a 90% share of influence over Romania.* Through intimidation and fraud, the Romanian Communist Party won 68.9% of the vote during the election of 1946. This victory gave them the majority, 347 of 414 seats, in the Romanian Parliament.
On December 30, 1947, the Romanian Monarchy came to an end and the People’s Republic of Romania was declared. The new leader would be Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party.
This change of government didn’t go without resistance. The primary anti-communists in Romania were students and young intellectuals. The student counterrevolutionaries were almost always religious and from a peasant or middle-class background. They organized demonstrations, spread underground pamphlets, and in some cases even linked up with armed partisans hiding in the Carpathian Mountains. The student movement became one of the most visible challenges to communist power, which made it a prime target for repression.
In order to snuff out the resistance, arrests began to take place in 1948. On May 14, 1948, arrests were made at 3 of the most important universities in Romania: Bucharest, Iasi, and Cluj. In one night, over a thousand students were arrested (2% of the entire student population). The students were to be tortured and interrogated until sentences were given. In the rare cases where there was no evidence against the accused, they were given sentences of two to three years. However, most students were sentenced to five years of imprisonment, all the way up to hard labor for life.
To eliminate the influence of students on other political prisoners, the Romanian Communists sent the students to separate prisons and work camps.
The student of most interest was Eugen Turcanu. Turcanu was born Suceava County, Romania in 1925. At the age of 15 he acquainted himself with some high school friends who were affiliated with the Iron Guard. At the age of 20 (1945), he joined the Union of Communist Youth and at 22 the Romanian Communist Party while at law school in Iasi. Turcanu was assigned by the communist party to work on a railway in Bulgaria. After the completion of the railway, he was sent to a Communist diplomacy school to eventually hold a diplomatic post abroad.
This ambition would be smashed on June 25, 1948. Turcanu was arrested and sentenced to 7 years imprisonment. The official reason for his arrest is unclear, although it likely has something to do with his high school friendship with members of the Iron Guard. However, the real reason may be that communists saw Turcanu as the perfect instrument to use in the initial phases in the experiment to come.
In April 1949, Țurcanu was transferred to Pitești Prison in southern Romania. Once there, he held conversations with the prison director, Alexandru Dumitrescu. Țurcanu became an informant, identifying which prisoners were looked up to as leaders or role models—those who were the most steadfast in their convictions. In November 1949, the group of detainees that Țurcanu had singled out was separated from the rest of the prison population. These would become the first subjects of the Pitești Prison experiment.
The goal of the “experiment” was to see if the human spirit could be completely broken—to reduce the most devout and courageous individuals to something less than human. For the communists, proving that even the strongest souls could be bent and reshaped was vital. They sought a population of blank slates, people who could be molded to their ideology without resistance. The method was not simply to punish prisoners, but to turn them into tools against one another, destroying trust, loyalty, and faith in the process.
The first group of about ten students was brought into what was known as “Hospital Room Four,” a large room in a building designated for sick prisoners. Twenty other students, including Țurcanu, were already waiting inside. Prisoner transfers were common, so the ten newcomers thought little of it. Țurcanu positioned himself in front of the rest of the students and began speaking. One of the ten later recalled the speech to Dumitru Bacu, author of The Anti-Humans.
“We, a group of detained students, have 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 the Party. We consider you an obstacle to our desired rehabilitation because of your ‘anti-workers’ attitude. That is why we request you to renounce your previous convictions and 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.”
Dumbfounded, the students began to laugh and jest. In their minds, there was no way he could be serious. Not even the most brutal prison administrator would give such a ridiculous speech. Here were some of the most ardent anti-communists in Romania, now being asked to renounce their convictions and join a group of communists. It had to be a joke.
But it wasn’t a joke—and Țurcanu expected this reaction. He had brought these individuals to Hospital Room Four precisely because he knew they would respond this way. The subjects for the experiment had to respond this way. While the ten students joked, the ones already in the room with Țurcanu remained silent. They stayed that way until Țurcanu gave the signal.
He raised his hat, and at once his group retrieved belts, cudgels, bludgeons, and wooden boards hidden beneath the bunk blankets. Armed with these weapons, they immediately began raining down blows on the confused students, who quickly realized what was happening and fought back. They had the advantage of desperation—fighting for their lives—but they were outnumbered and unarmed. The only sounds in the room were the dull thuds of bludgeons against flesh and bone, and the groans of the students as they fell.
Despite the unfair advantage of the attackers, the students managed to incapacitate several of them. Watching through the door’s peephole, the warden finally intervened—he opened the door and brought in twenty guards. Țurcanu and his group immediately moved behind the guards, letting them take over.
For several hours, the guards savagely beat the students, who were unable to fight back. The students knew that if they struck a guard, they would be shot. Those who tried to run were intercepted and attacked by Țurcanu’s group. There was no escape. As time went on, the students stopped trying to avoid the blows. They were too exhausted to resist, and even if they had the strength, resistance was pointless. The floor became slick with pools of blood and urine. When the guards finally tired and left the room, Țurcanu and his allies continued the assault. Only when they too stopped were the students dragged back to their cells—bloodied, bruised, and broken.
Thus began the first stage of the “unmasking.” The communists wanted the students to confess that their entire lives had been a lie—that they did not truly believe in God, or love their families, or their country. Everything they had stood for was, according to their captors, nothing more than a mask that had to be stripped away. To prove the students were liars was to prove they were products of the bourgeoisie—and, as communists insisted, all bourgeois were liars.
The guards surveilled them constantly to make sure the prisoners would not commit suicide. What happened in Hospital Room Four and what was to come was much worse than death. Every one of the students in the “unmasking” experiment would’ve taken their life given the chance to do so. A handful of students in one group tore their veins out of their wrists with their teeth, and so to prevent the rest from doing so, the guards knocked the rest of the group’s teeth out. One student successfully ended his life by throwing himself off a balcony. Another student tried to eat a pound of soap. To his dismay, he didn’t even get sick. A student who failed to kill himself by slashing his wrists, dunked his head into a scalding food barrel. He didn’t die. Instead, he burnt his face and was beaten nearly to death.
The prisoners were woken up at five o’clock in the morning. Every cell had to be scrubbed by six o’clock. But simply cleaning was not difficult or humiliating enough, so the most fervent anti-communists were forced to carry the “re-educated” prisoners on their backs while they scrubbed the floors. Despite the constant beatings, the prisoners were required to stand at attention at six o’clock for the guards to do a headcount.
After the headcount was finished, the prisoners could use the bathroom. If a prisoner needed to use the toilet, they were escorted by a guard and given between thirty seconds and a minute—an arbitrary time limit upheld by the guard—and if thy failed to finish in time, they would be pulled out, beaten, and brought back to their cells.
Once back in their cells, the students were given breakfast. They were forced to go down on all fours and eat like animals. Typically, they were served a hot liquid in a mess pan, which they had to suck up using only their mouths, inevitably burning their lips. With no running water in the cells, those undergoing “re-education” were made to lick their bowls clean. After breakfast, they were required to sit on the edge of their beds with their legs stretched out in front of them and their hands placed on their knees. They had to keep their heads upright and were not allowed to move from this position until noon.
For lunch, the prisoners were given a piece of bread, which, like the hot liquid at breakfast, they were forced to eat on their hands and knees. Afterward, they returned to their positions at the edges of their beds. They remained sitting in this posture with legs outstretched until five o’clock, when a second headcount and inspection took place. Once again, at six o’clock, they returned to the sitting position for another three hours.
At nine o’clock, the lights went out and it was time for the prisoners to “sleep.” Even sleep, however, had its own prescribed position. The prisoners had to lie flat on their backs, with their hands outside the blanket. Another student was assigned as a guard to ensure they did not move. This student guard held a bludgeon and was required to strike the ankle of the sleeping student if they moved from the prescribed position. The student guard was expected to hit with force, fearing punishment if they did not. Inevitably, after being struck, the sleeping student could not return to rest. The fear of being hit again made sleep impossible, so both the “sleeping” student and the student on watch remained awake for most of the night.
The next day, the students were asked to renounce their old ways once again—and, once again, they obstinately refused. They were beaten repeatedly. During these beatings, the prisoners prayed for death; they hoped to be struck so hard that their hearts would stop, or at the very least to be rendered unconscious long enough to get some small respite from this unending hell. Yet doctors were kept on hand to prevent death. If a prisoner lost consciousness, the doctors revived them so they could endure more torture.
Students who showed the most resistance were forced to lie on the floor while other students were laid on top of them, one by one. Piled as high as seventeen, the weight crushed the student at the bottom. Because he had voided his bowels—thereby breaking the rules—he was forced to clean his underwear with his mouth.
Degradation like this was essential to reduce the students to animals and sever them from their past convictions. Connections to friends, family, and most importantly, religion had to be completely destroyed. To create the “perfect communists,” these students—the most noble and upright individuals in Romanian society—had to be broken down almost entirely.
Christian holidays and ceremonies were made into hellish nightmares for the prisoners. On Easter in 1950, one of the students was required to dress in white bed sheets and hang a phallus shaped piece of soap around his neck. He walked around the room as other students beat him with broomsticks. When he stopped at the end of the room, the students were forced to kiss the soap around his neck.
Every morning, the most faithful of the religious students would be “baptized”, that is, their heads would be plunged into a bucket full of feces and urine until they began to drown. The student’s head would be pulled out just long enough for him to catch his breath, then his head was forced back into the bucket. Everyone surrounding the bucket chanted baptismal rites,
Black masses were held where communion would be taken with excrement and urine in place of the bread and wine. Hymns were sang, the holy words replaced with insults of Christ and the Virgin Mary. Guards directed plays which the students were made to act in. They played the parts of Mary, Joseph, Jesus, and a donkey, and took turns sodomizing each other. Refusing to do so meant being sodomized with clubs by the guards. Every religious symbol transformed into a symbol of pointless suffering. There would be no solace in Christ—not in Pitesti. Not in Hell.
The prisoners were forced to write accusations about religious officials in Romania. They accused priests of stealing, gambling, and drinking too much. They wrote that they committed adultery, rape, and incest. They signed documents saying that the nuns had several abortions, and all the monks in Romania were American spies.
But it didn’t stop there. Under the threat of beatings, prisoners at Pitesti were forced to write the vilest things about their own family members. This served the double purpose of distancing him from his family and proving to the world that he was a monster, raised by monsters. Mothers were alleged to be prostitutes, and fathers were said to be thieves. One student recalled making up a story about how orgies were held in his house. They invariably created these stories to attempt to reduce the suffering they received in the prison. Every one of the prisoners knew the accusations were lies but pointing out someone’s lie only reflected your own. And so, they lied together.
After disparaging religious figures and their families, the students were forced to write autobiographies detailing their immorality prior to imprisonment. Once again, the information had to be fabricated. Each was required to portray himself as the most depraved human imaginable. Every vice and every sin ever committed by humanity was to be attributed to oneself. They confessed to acts such as incest, pedophilia, theft, and bestiality—anything that could be imagined.
This constant lying corroded the souls of those undergoing the experiment. Truth meant nothing. All that mattered was avoiding physical pain—even at the cost of spiritual annihilation. Under such conditions, the prisoners shed their humanity. Concepts like virtue and higher human ideals became irrelevant at Pitești. Beyond destroying the students’ ideals, the relentless fabrication created intense confusion. It became increasingly difficult to distinguish reality from falsehood. Soon, the lie became as real as the truth to those being re-educated—they forgot what was actually true. The experiment was proving successful: young men were being reduced to animals.
Unmasking and proving the student to be a liar was not enough. The communists sought to destroy any notion of salvation or hope outside the communist state. To reduce the individual soul to nothing, the students had to endure one final phase.
Typically, it took three or four months for a student to be fully “re-educated.” Some surrendered their former selves much more quickly—within weeks, or even days in certain cases—but those chosen for the experiment were selected for their steadfastness. Even the most courageous and faithful, however, could not endure the constant torture at Pitești indefinitely. After a few months, everyone inevitably broke. The only individuals who escaped re-education were those few who successfully committed suicide or died at the hands of their torturers.
After months of torture, the student was reduced to no more than a panicked dog. Under this constant fear, he was willing to comply with any demand at any moment, no matter how contrary it was to his former self.
Once a student was deemed sufficiently “re-educated” by the communist administrators, he was promoted to the role of “reeducator.” The students who had been the most anti-communist at the start of the experiment largely escaped becoming torturers, as Turcanu feared they could never truly be changed. But for the rest of the re-educated, it was now their turn to inflict indescribable suffering on prisoners who had not yet begun the unmasking. Those who graduated were assigned to torture former classmates or friends from school. The participation of the re-educated in perpetrating abuse was the final step and the ultimate confirmation that the experiment had succeeded.
The first group tortured the next group, and in doing so, trained them to torture others.
By September 1951, the experiment at Pitești was winding down. Most of the prisoners were sent either to labor camps at the Danube–Black Sea Canal, where they became dehumanized tools for canal administration, or to Gherla Prison, where the unmaskings continued. Their task was to carry out unmaskings on other prisoners, both at the canal and at Gherla. Inmates who had never even seen the walls of Pitești were dragged into barracks and beaten night after night. Within a few months, over 200 prisoners had been subjected to the unmasking process at Gherla.
On November 14, 1951, orders came to halt the unmaskings entirely. In December of that year, Turcanu and ten others were put in chains and sent away. They were put on trial as scapegoats for the Party, and on November 10, 1954, Eugen Turcanu and over twenty others were sentenced to death for the abuse of 780 prisoners and the murder of thirty. It is estimated that up to 5,000 prisoners were subjected to the unmaskings.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a survivor of the Soviet gulag camps and no stranger to brutality, called Pitești “the most terrible act of barbarism in the contemporary world.” It was a level of cruelty that only a human mind could imagine—and then bring to reality. The barbarism extended far beyond physical torture; it was the metaphysical suffering that made it truly unbearable. Many of those who survived Pitești were left with injuries that never fully healed. And as for their souls, it would take a long journey to recover from the Hell they had endured.
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