Silvia Mitricioaei

Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

silvia.mitricioaei@yahoo.com

 

 

Bodies and Human Beings

Women in Communist Prisons

 

 

Abstract: The present paper deals with the women who were imprisoned for their political beliefs in Communist Romania, the dilemmas and traumas inherent in the process of remembering and recording their suffering. The main focus of the study is the way the internees were seen by their guards and how the internees, in their turn, saw them. This perspective, quite common within the power struggle mechanisms, shapes and regulates the experiences of these victims. The worse enemy in prison is not the guard, the investigator or the system itself but fear. It is the fear which takes complete hold of the individual, fear of oneself in fact. All the situations the internees had found themselves into led to self-knowledge. It was not the system, which could be known to a point, that was unpredictable, but their inner self.

Keywords: Romania; Communism; prison; women; torture; Lena Constante; Adriana Georgescu; Lucreţia Jurj; Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla.

 

 

The present paper deals with the women who were imprisoned for their political beliefs in Communist Romania, their dilemmas and traumas. The main focus of the study is the way the internees were seen by their guards and how the internees, in their turn, saw them. This perspective, quite common within the power struggle mechanisms, shapes and regulates the experiences of these victims. Bourgeois”, “member of the Iron Guard”, “member of the Peasant’s Party” were not only offensive words, as most people used to think. By this very characteristic, appellations isolate and stigmatize. Counterexamples, represented by the ones susceptible to oppose the system, were needed in order to lead to the emergency of the “new man”.

Following the orders received from superiors, the average communist party member did not consider the oppressed as one of his fellow human beings, but a deviation from the norm. They thought that the ones judged and sentenced to years in prison fully deserved their punishment. The existence of these victims was accepted as normal by the members of the party. By developing a sort of defense mechanism, they came to consider the guilty ones no longer human, and they completely dissociated themselves from the latter. “The means of dehumanizing the enemy, according to Bogdan Ficeac, are used by the executioners, most of them ordinary people, in order to make possible the annihilation of the enemy without any hesitation or remorse”[1].

Once turned into outlaws, “the enemies of the people” were easy to punish. And the worst punishment was to inculcate their guilt upon them. The public confession of the guilt, as it was attempted in the Piteşti experiment, would have led to their reintegration de facto within the masses. Whenever the method of reintegrating them was not working, the extermination was the favorite method to be applied.

Incarceration aimed at changing the attitude and then the mentality of the imprisoned. But rehabilitation couldn’t be accomplished by the use of words exclusively. Brainwashing also needed through physical torture. This was the interface through which the executioner, who had full control over the internee, could reach to his spirit, his mind and his innermost beliefs. The spirit is lead to the ‘path of virtue’ by tormenting the body[2]. Under this cover, the atrocious tortures the internees were subjected to were directly proportional to the sadistic imagination of the investigators and to the dissatisfactions and the repressed frustrations of the guards.

 

1. “Some sort of watery soup made of cabbage leaves”

 

The easiest way to punish the body of the enemy is not by killing him, but by depriving it of water and rest. Malnourished, exhausted, the body would not obey the mind any longer. “They tortured the human nature within me, Lena Constante confesses. They activated a mysterious mechanism. If they had asked me to confess that I had stolen, killed, assassinated my parents in order to be allowed to sleep, I would have done so. I would have signed anything; my death sentence, above everything else”[3].

Dina Balş gives an account of yet another shattering extreme experience: “Probably because of the hunger I started to forget basic things. The day I couldn’t remember my own mother’s name, I was panic stricken. One full day and night, I reeled in mind all the feminine names I could remember until, by chance, one of the girls talked about Joan d’Arc and so I remembered that my mother’s name was Ioana”[4].

If in the case of the imprisoned, depriving them of food aimed at alienating them, in the case of the ones deported in Siberia, deprived of the basic living conditions was meant to facilitate their extermination. While crossing the Urals, the deported were decimated. Where food was concerned: “we received food once every 24 hours, tells Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla. At other times, we were given some sort of watery soup made of cabbage leaves”[5]. The last stop, the deportation area meant cold, impossibility of finding food and the hostility of the locals. As the deported were strangers who didn’t speak the local language, they were liable to be insubordinate and commit crimes, and thus, the persecutions continued incessantly.

The Romanians who went into hiding in the mountains met with a different fate. Most of the times, they were seen as heroes by those who helped them. They were offered food, clothes, and shelter. Lucreţia Jurj, a young woman who followed her husband in the Apuseni Mountains, tells of how the opposition groups were helped out and how their senses had sharpened due to the fact that they were hunted down. When her group was spotted, at the moment of their arrest, the smell of the food eaten by the militiamen had been the alarm signal: “The only words I got to say were: it smells like food out here. They had sat there and had eaten and I could smell it”[6].

The ultimate symbol of malnutrition was the piece of lard and the cheese the internees received while they were transferred from a prison to another in trains. But the most treacherous methods were used in order to starve the internees. The coffee surrogate they received each morning on the one hand, the animal eyelids and hoofs on the other hand were coveted by everybody. And when food deprivation no longer yielded results, they resorted to the opposite, extreme solution. Copious meals, especially in the case of political internees who had a decisive role in investigations, could contain hallucinogenic substances. They only consented to changing an internee’s diet when nourishing food represented the temptation of liberty for the latter, when he/she was diagnosed with pulmonary disease or just before the trial. In every cell, the internees who agreed to cooperate were privileged. The decision to cooperate gave birth to discontent which represented another means of psychological torment. Nevertheless, solidarity compensated for it; there are numerous confessions about presents consisting of food and meals the internees prepared for each other.

 

2. Hygiene and disease

 

Weak and underfed, the internees were deprived of the basic sustenance means to maintain corporal hygiene. When it comes to this subject, the confessions of the former internees are most evasive, especially when the brutal way of the guardians of invading their intimacy can only lead to such censorship. The weekly showers, used mainly as a means of torture, no longer achieved their preventive role. With just a sordid soap bar and a single towel, the internees could not oppose the system and the animal desires of the guards.

Their most intimate moments led to humiliation, as they could not retort to the inquiring glances of the guards. Considered inferior due to gender differences, they were submitted to a twofold process of dehumanization: they were first used by the guards and investigators to satisfy their sexual desires, sometimes against rules and regulations; secondly, it was them who were behind the bars and the peep-holes.

Beyond the tortures and the investigations, the internees used the most common daily activities as ritual gestures in order to prevent alienation. They did not fear filth because it could lead to disease; the fear of disease and the fear of filth gave rise to different attitudes. Filth was not so much the cause of disease as a purpose pursued by authorities. A wretched internee was either prone to depression or came to desire the improvement of the situation. In both cases, the result was the internee’s collaboration with the investigators. On the other hand, sickness meant weakness, and the internee had to do everything to avoid it because delirium and unconsciousness could be skillfully manipulated by the investigators.

Thus, unlike the filthy communal showers, washing their bodies in private in their cells acquired some sort of ritual value. The small quantity of water they received every for this purpose was minutely shared. The filth they wash away after their release from prison acts as a return; what they try to escape is not the physical filth but the moral trauma caused by incarceration. One more time, the body becomes an intermediary and a substitute for the soul. Another common duty in prisons, the transport of the buckets full of feces, had as purpose the ultimate humiliation of the imprisoned. The stench, the disgust were doubled by the satisfaction of the guards. In their narrow mindedness, they classified the internees as ”boyard woman”, “bourgeoise”, and considered their humiliation as a duty. The higher in rank an internee seemed to be, the greater their contempt and their desire to harass her.

The two unusual examples, Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla and Lucreţia Jurj, illustrate two other perspectives upon personal hygiene: while the latter, fugitive in the mountains with her husband, had to confront only the weather conditions, for the peasant from Bucovina displaced beyond the Polar Circle, the cleanliness of the body was one of the most important demands of the unwritten law of the village. During her long journey across Siberia she came upon Eskimo inhabitants who, to her amazement, never washed their bodies during their entire life. “They would have never taken off their clothes in order to wash their bodies with water, she wrote”[7].

In prison, disease meant extreme exclusion. The sick received but rarely the help of his cell mates. Petty vanities served very well the interests of the system. There was no place for charity neither in prison nor outside of it. The “new man” mustn’t be charitable but must selfishly care only about his small fortune, the new idea of equality meaning in fact that everybody should be equally poor and anonymous.

Contrary to every prediction, solidarity did pay off. Most women that made confessions about their incarceration remember about cases when sick women were looked after by their cell mates. The support was most of the times a moral one, as they did not have any drugs; the doctors and the prison’s personnel could only understand life in terms of dead or alive. Moreover, most of the internees were diagnosed with tuberculosis, some of them being placed in wards specially intended for the tubercular patients. This was the “privilege” of the political internees which came to be incarcerated with the real felons. During a medical call, Adriana Georgescu, whose incarceration was haunted by disease, was sharply reprimanded: “With you, everything is upside down. You’re just a bloody reactionary!”[8].

According to the new regime everything was either black or white, the political inmates had a sick mind, since the truly diseased similarly deserved their illness because of their unhealthy habits. Nicole Valéry-Grossu recalls the brutal pleasure one of the guards took of having these two categories of internees put together in the same ward and having involuntarily used a trope: “Thus, said the guard, the politic women will stay with the syphilitic woman, and at their turn, will become syphilitic. And the syphilitic women will become politic”[9].

 

3. “Shrunk into themselves, into their old age”

 

Marked as victims, the sick interacted not only with the political internees but also with the elderly women. In prison, old age did not equate wisdom but the decline of the body. Senility, compulsive gestures, disease would functions as mirrors of the future for the younger internees. Old age was thus the ultimatum for the internees who lost all hope of regaining their freedom.

After having been imprisoned for a long period, Lena Constante had to deal with the old age of some of her cell mates. Coming from the outside, the details of old age seemed even more frightening, especially when she could see them is some of the younger internees. “Imprisoned in a communal cell, she noticed, women shrunk into themselves, into their old age, into their illnesses and their desperate loneliness”[10].

The lack of respect towards old women raises the problem of loneliness, goal and means of being of the “new man”. One of the punishments the internees were submitted to was the interdiction to work. Without any physical activity to distract their attention from their physical degradation, the imprisoned women and especially the old ones could not think of anything else but of the drama they were experiencing. Thus, each internee ran the risk of becoming a prisoner of her own mind, after all the more dangerous form of incarceration.

On the other hand, the way the women organized themselves, their stories and their selflessness evidenced their humanity. The incapacity of some of these women to help the others would manifest itself physiologically; the moral wickedness would somehow materialize.[11] Especially in the case of Lena Constante and her loneliness,

“this mechanism found echoes at the level of the imagination and the dream. When the tree in front of the prison, that she imagined to be the house of a goblin, was about to be cut, a symbolic transfer takes place: “my goblin, shaken by the shock, waved his green arm at me and maybe he said good bye or maybe he asked my help and I couldn’t do anything to save him and the saw moved to-and-fro into my flesh, into my heart”[12].

Their emotional response is not in either case be put on the account of mental disease. These responses represent the awareness of the effects of totalitarian regimes over the human being. Humanist principles or, in the second case, a free imagination were had no place in the system, where uniformity and submission were the dominant features.

 

4. “An equal number of invisible men”

 

Women in communist prisons were deprived not only of the minimum hygiene conditions but also of the communication with men, in their double role of other and lover. The guards, be they men or women, had no gender. It was vital for the internees to feel this way about their guards. If women-guards were considered humane, the men who guarded them were not seen as belonging to the masculine gender, moreover they were no longer seen as belonging to the human race. Their brutal actions, the power they had been granted and that they did not know how to use, their hideous, indistinct faces, are clearly separated from the faces of the men they had left home or that they had met in prison. Annie Samuelli remembers about a man she had met during the transfer by train from one prison to another: “it was for the first time since my arrest that a man looked at me in that way without contempt, without disgust, the first man who didn’t want to lie to me, threaten me, or hit me”[13]. He compensated for the brutality of the guards and the manipulation of the investigators.

Inside the prison, communicating through the Morse code with the men in the other cells offered the women the opportunity to be coquette again. The scene the same woman relates is highly emotional. Even the combing of their hair before these “discussions” could intensify their femininity[14]. The men embodied in such situations the father, the brother and the lover at the same time. These small subversive actions, the shared secrets created a strong connection between men and women.

In a similar account Lena Constante, who found out that Harry Brauner’s cell was next to hers, compares her feelings with those of her fellow internee, and the manner she chose to communicate with him, writing with her own blood, acquired mystic significance. Later on, when obliged to take a stand in the nearing trial, the woman questioned the morality of her actions, projecting her inner debates on her fellow internee.

The women also projected on men the social characteristics that they desired for the other women internees. The men endured every torture without complaining, were always informed about the latest political changes. Behind the prison walls, men seem real heroes, and the women are aware that is the result of their imagination.

“In every cell, besides the women there is an equal number of invisible men whose physical and moral characteristics, always amplified by their imagination, are the topic of almost every conversation”[15].

 

5. “My sparrow story is quite brutal”

 

Maternity was another particular problem for women in prisons. Some of the internees already had children, others gave birth in prison. The confession of Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla is illustrative in this respect. Deported to Siberia, separated from her old mother and her husband, with three small children, she had to start life all over again. She had to endure insults, hunger, cold and shortages in a doomed place where, according to popular beliefs, the roosters never crowed. What gave her the strength to make it through was the love for her children and the trust in family values. Her confession begins with the story of her childhood and her family and ends in the same way. The last sentence of her confession, bearing the mark of her old age, comes as an irrevocable sentence:” the love for my family gave me strength to fight all hardship and to save our life”[16].

In the cities, where the unwritten laws of nature no longer coordinate lives and attitudes, the situation of most of the internees is less optimistic than that of Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla. Their families and their lives were cruelly manipulated because family values were labeled as a bourgeois thing and thus, scorned. The children of the communist era had to sacrifice everything for the country, the one that took care of their well-being.

If in Orwell’s novel 1984 the portrayals of children betraying their parents seem utopian or exaggerated, the confessions of these internees testify to cases where entire families were imprisoned because the children informed on or testified against them. In such cases, as in others where orphan children were indoctrinated in the spirit of communist dogma, the dramas of the mothers of these children are beyond belief. Suddenly, those decrees whose purpose was to tear families apart no longer seemed incredible or absurd. But the internees intuitively knew that the investigators used the love for their families against them, to further torment them. Each woman had something to defend outside the prison: relatives, a lover, children. It is at this point that the blackmail started and the method never failed. The atrocity became unbearable when the internees found out, from false sources that their relatives had been arrested or killed.

It was not only human laws such as civilization and family that were abolished through a regressive process. Nature’s laws were abolished too. The trees from the prison yard were cut, any form of life was either camouflaged or destroyed. Even the birds which nested in the surroundings were sadistically killed, their singing being deemed as conducive to relaxation. The image of the birds, parents and offspring, had multiple significances for the internees: they associated their organization and attachment with family relations, their flight with liberty; beyond the bars, the birds lead a normal, happy life.

 

6. “A word as heavy as a blow”

 

The worse enemy in prison is not the guard, the investigator or the system itself but fear. It is the fear which takes complete hold of the individual, the fear of oneself in fact. All the situations the internees had found themselves into led to self-knowledge. It was not the system, which could be known to a point, that was unpredictable, but their inner self. All confessions, without exception, come to a point where they theorized upon fear. And each theorization has a close connection with the body.

Fear can be projected outside the body, as Lucreţia Jurj did: “I remember how the gun fires shed light around me. I know for sure that when I entered the woods I checked my dress to see if it didn’t have holes in it.”[17] In this case, the fear of death is filtered by the fear for her body and lessened by the pretext of the dress, as an external delimitation and a symbolic shield for the body.

Obliged to use language in order to survive life in prison, Lena Constante tries to tame fear by putting it into words[18].

“How could I voice this fear? I would need a unique word, she said (…) A word as heavy as a blow (…) The fear that twisted the chest, somewhere in the upper left, in a spot where – usually – there’s nothing. The heart, a word made out of flesh. A word made out of blood. This word doesn’t exist”[19].

Varvara, a Russian woman from the story of Adriana Georgescu, defines the fear created and exploited by the system. The highest degree of fear is the fear of oneself. And overcoming one’s fear equals liberty[20].

 

7. Conclusions

 

The dehumanization process that the political internees in the Romanian communist prisons were subjected to can be considered exemplary. The ‘victim’ label, the trauma they experienced both inside and after their release from prison, the frustration caused by their status as outlaws, the lucidity about the direction of the totalitarian society inside which they were manipulated and made into mere pawns, all these call for a careful analysis (perhaps one informed by trauma theory) of the victimization process. Women seem to provide the most appropriate cases in point for the illustration of some of the repressive methods used by the totalitarian terror machine. Motherhood for example can be exploited by the grey eminences of torture only in the case of women. Although this is just one example, there are countless aspects of the situation, from anatomical limitations to emotional traits.

 

 

Works Cited

Balş, Dina, Drumuri pustiite, Bucureşti: Cartea Românească Publishing House,1993.

Cernat, Paul, Un enfer du corps: le Goulag Roumain, in “Euresis”, nr. 3-4, 2006

Cesereanu, Ruxandra, Gulagul în conştiinţa românească. Memorialistica şi literatura închisorilor şi lagărelor comuniste (eseu de mentalitate), II^nd edition, revised and complete, Iaşi, Polirom Publishing House, 2005

Constante, Lena, Evadarea imposibilă. Penitenciarul politic de femei Miercurea Ciuc 1957-1961, „Biblioteca memoriei” collection, Bucureşti, Roumanian Cultural Foundation Publishing House, 1993

Constante, Lena, Evadarea tăcută. 3000 de zile singură în închisorile din România, 2^nd ed. , Bucureşti, Florile dalbe Publishing House, 1995

Ficeac, Bogdan, Tehnici de manipulare, V. ed, Nemira Publishing House, Bucureşti, 2004

Georgescu, Adriana, La început a fost sfârşitul. Dictatura roşie la Bucureşti, II^nd edition, revised, foreword by Monica Lovinescu, Bucureşti, Memoria Cultural Foundation, 1999

Jurju, Cornel and Cosmin Budeancă, Suferinţa nu se dă la fraţi…: mărturia Lucreţiei Jurj despre rezistenţa anticomunistă din Apuseni (1948 – 1958), Dacia Publishing House, Cluj-Napoca, 2002

Nandriş-Cudla, Aniţa, 20 de ani în Siberia. Destin bucovinean, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucureşti, 1991

Samuelli, Annie, Gratiile despărţitoare, II^nd edition revised and completed, translation Adriana Arsenescu, foreword Micael Ghiţescu, Bucureşti, Fundaţia Culturală Memoria, 2001

Valéry-Grossu Nicole, Binecuvîntată fii, închisoare….O fostă deţinută politică din România vorbeşte, translation Mioara Izverna, Bucureşti, Univers Publishing House, 1997

www.memoria.ro

 

 

Notes