"The most
terrible act
of barbarism
in the modern
world"

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The Genocide of the Souls. The Pitesti Experiment: re-education through torture

"The delirious imagination of Turcanu (the chief torturer - our note) was unleashed above all when he was dealing with students who believed in God and who strove not to renounce their belief. Thus, some were baptised each morning: their heads plunged into a bucket of urine and faecal matter, while the others around chanted the ritual of baptism. This would last until the contents of the bucket started to bubble. When the recalcitrant prisoner was on the point of drowning, he would be pulled up, given a short respite in which to breathe, then submerged once more." - Virgil Ierunca, The Pitesti Phenomenon, Paris, 1981, p.37.

"In the so-called act of depersonalisation, the students were forced, under torture, permanent and unimaginable torture, to betray all they held dear: God, their own parents, brothers, sisters and friends. They were constrained to drink urine and to eat faeces! The human being was thereby annihilated. Disgusted at his weakness, he would never be able to recover himself before his own conscience. The pain was beyond the power of human endurance." - Eugen Magirescu, The Devil's Mill: Memories of Pitesti Prison, Editura Fronde, Alba-Iulia, Paris, 1994, p.6

"Then they undressed me (...) What followed is indescribable... beatings on the head to induce stupefaction; beatings in the face, for disfigurement; thousands of blows to the back, below the ribs, in the plexus, on the soles of the feet. Dozens of faints and then all over again, for hours on end, and the eye at the peep hole always watching, always watching. They shattered my ribs, lungs, liver, kicking my bones, my kidneys with shod feet." - Eugen Magirescu, The Devil's Mill, in Memoria no. 13, p.38

"When the victim was a theology student or a person with a certain religious feeling, he was made to genuflect to the bare bottom of one of the 're-educated', to call that bottom an icon and to kiss it. He would have to label the Holy Virgin 'the great whore' and Jesus Christ 'the great idiot crucified on the cross'. If it was known that the victim loved his parents, Turcanu would provoke him thus: Tell me, X, how did you sleep with your mother? or, Tell me how you caught your father raping your sister? The victim, after enduring the purgatory of 're-education', was never abandoned, but was also drawn into the caste of executioners." - Ion Balan, The Prison Camp Regime in Romania, 1945-1964, Fundatia Academia Civica, 2000, p. 225

"Performances on religious subjects, black masses staged at Easter or Christmas, horrified the detainees. On such occasions, it was the theology students who were to suffer the most, dressed up as 'Christs', clothed in cassocks smeared with excrement. They were made to take 'communion' with urine and faeces, and instead of the Cross, a phallus was fashioned of soap, which all the others were made to kiss. Alongside them hymns were sung with scabrous words, in which the commonplaces were insults against Christ and the Virgin Mary. Sometimes the detainees would be stripped naked." – Alin Muresan, Pitesti. The Chronicle of an Assisted Suicide, Polirom, Bucharest, 2008.

"Sexual plays also performed at the orders of Turcanu, naturally. On Good Friday, he shared out the roles: the 'ass' is fellated by 'Mary Magdalene', 'Joseph' sodomises the 'ass', which in its turn stands with its muzzle in the lap of the 'Virgin Mary whore', concomitantly sodomised by 'Jesus'. The re-educated, headed by Turcanu, displayed a diabolical pleasure in mocking the faithful, nicknamed 'mystics'. Such scenes had a terrible effect on the victims, who as a rule found their only solace in faith. However, after participating in the black masses, their entire faith was shaken to its foundations... (...) " - Alin Muresan, Pitesti. The Chronicle of an Assisted Suicide, Polirom, Bucharest, 2008.

"...you were made to tug each other's genitals or one of them would put his penis in your mouth; if you soiled yourself during beatings you were made to eat your own faeces and to lick the dirtied long-johns or to eat another's faeces from your own mess tin, without being allowed to wash it after that; you were made to kiss each other's bottoms; you were made to urinate in each other's mouths; when you begged for water, you would be given urine from the bucket or they would urinate in your mouth, or others would spit in your mouth; you were made to spit in each other's bottoms and then lick it up; they would wipe a stick smeared in faeces from the WC on your mouth and in your mouth; you were made to stick your finger up your bottom and then suck it." - Costin Merisca, The Pitesti Tragedy. Jassy, 1997, p. 70-71

"With indescribable fury they began to hit him, with fists, cudgels and feet. And to toss him from one to another, until the bloodied wretch fell almost senseless and could no longer rise. After they had given him a few more kicks to the head, two of them picked him up and threw him on the bunk, making him sit with his hands in his pockets and his head bowed, according to the order. Then another followed, then another, as though in a devilish ring dance intended to annihilate the last speck of physical and moral resistance of those who entered into their rabid game." - Justin Stefan Paven, The Hell of Pitesti, in Memoria, no. 22, p. 66

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Appeal for the Unearthing of the Truth about the Most Diabolic Invention in History: The Pitesti Experiment
"... and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." - The Gospel according to John, 8:32

Good people,

The twentieth century set several world records for crime and horror: ten million victims in the First World War; fifty-five million victims in the Second World War; ten million people murdered in the name of Nazism; and over one hundred million people murdered in the name of communism. We must make sure that such catastrophes never happen again. The crimes of Nazism have been condemned in a just and exemplary manner. The crimes of communism (that continue to this day, shamefully for the civilized world) have to be condemned in the same way, in order to prevent their repetition. This is only possible if the whole truth is made available. Unbelievable as it may sound, nothing is known about the most diabolic crime of communism: the genocide of souls committed for the purpose of generating "the new human being". more text

This genocide, in its extreme form, was begun in Romania in 1949, at the political penitentiary of Pitesti, as an experiment unlike any before it: "the reeducation" of political prisoners through continuous torture, by physical or spiritual means, done even through the fellow convicts. "The reeducated" were obliged to auto-denounce themselves, to negate their identities, to denounce their own families, friends and loved ones, that is to "expose" them, to negate themselves, everything that was holy, to deride the belief in God and the sacraments. "The re-educators" were obliging them to participate in genuine antireligious and satanic rituals. Ultimately, "the reeducated" were compelled to become "re-educators" of others, therefore executioners. Those who refused to cooperate were obliged to be "reeducated" again, until they accepted the role of "re-educator;" if they continued to refuse, they risked their lives. Several tried to commit suicide in order to escape this inferno, but very few were successful. We cannot overemphasize the inability of language to accurately describe everything that these young anticommunists (around 2,000) endured, most of them still students at the time of their arrest.

In conclusion, the genocide of the spirits was not possible precisely because the soul is eternal. That was the hope of those condemned to die spiritually. Only the belief in God saved them.

"The Pitesti experiment" is almost unknown in Romania, even today. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the 1970 Nobel Prize laureate for literature, considered the experiment as "the most horrible barbarism of the contemporary world." The historian François Furet, Member of the French Academy, described it as "one of the most ferocious experiences of dehumanization that our era has known."

In order to expose this satanic invention, I have decided to realize a full-length documentary film that would benefit especially the testimonies of these last survivors, and the reconstitutions that could be made under their direct guidance. I made a proposal for such a documentary, which I hoped the Romanian government would support. But, the project has been rejected two consecutive times by those who want to bury the truth.

I am convinced this project has to be realized. I started its production using my own resources, filming the testimonial interviews with some of the survivors; I have selected for you a few samples of these, available on this project's web-site. The raw material of these testimonies of oral history represents an exceptional historical document (the expected length of these testimonies is about 150 hours).

The average age of the survivors are over 80 years old and the state of their health has been marked by the ordeal they have gone through. We have to film the remaining survivors (about 30 more) as soon as possible.

I emphasize that I was able to film, particularly for this project, two prestigious historians of the European communism period as related to the "Pitesti experiment," namely: Mr. Thomas Blanton (National Security Archives, George Washington University, Washington D.C., USA), and Mr. Stéphane Courtois (Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques, Paris, France), principal author of the volume "The black book of Communism" which documented the European Council's condemnation of communism.

Good people, please read the script of the proposed film and its concept, or the article published in the Romanian daily ZIUA, accessible through the web-site http://www.ziua.ro/news.php?data=2008-02-15&id=3481 ((the article includes about 90% of the proposed film script). You are going to become convinced that it would be inconceivable not to make this film as long as it is still possible. The history may repeat itself at any time, but, through the knowledge of the whole truth about its chronicle, its recurrence is excluded, because "the genocide of the souls" represents an essential accusation in the process against communism.

Please support the completion of this project that would contribute to prevent the repetition of the communist-state inferno. Your eventual contribution to the project would be mentioned within the credits of the film and of the future planned DVD cover. The VideoMedia Foundation, which is producing the film, is going to publish periodically any kind of support, the eventual donations, and the way these may be utilized.

Special thanks to Mr. Dan Calinescu from Toronto, - Canada, for the initiative of creating the web-site www.TheGenocideOfTheSouls.org conceived to make possible the realization of this project. I congratulate him for the collocation "the genocide of the souls" that he created to define the horrors that originated in Pitesti and continued elsewhere, then resumed under different forms, some of them persisting even today in the souls of those who lived in a communist state. With the approval of Mr. Calinescu, the new title of the film is "The Genocide of the Souls," and the initial one ("The Pitesti Experiment: Re-education through Torture") becomes its subtitle.

I should mention that after the completion of this film, my intention is to realize the following, on the same theme: a TV documentary program series, a book with fragments from the recorded testimonies, and a feature fiction film.

I thank in advance those who are going to make possible the realization of this appeal.

Bucharest, March 31, 2008.

With my best thoughts,
Sorin Iliesiu - film director, the author of the appeal for the national and international condemnation of the criminality and illegitimacy of communism - http://www.libertates.com/
en/content/view/40/7/

Translated from Romanian by Doru Lucian Iliesiu, assisted by Elisabeth C. Evans-Iliesiu

less text

Dear friends,

I am appealing to you for your help. You can be instrumental in the creation of an important documentary about THE GENOCIDE OF THE SOULS, also known as The Pitesti Experiment.

The director of the film, Mr. Sorin Iliesiu, started shooting it using his own money, while waiting for financing. Unfortunately, the financing never materialized, because of powerful interests who did not want this film to be made.

Only a very few survivors are still alive; all are willing to testify on camera about their ordeals. more text

This GENOCIDE OF THE SOULS was planned by the Soviets and executed by the Romanian secret police in the middle of the last century, at a prison in Pitesti. Young people opposed to communism were tortured, then forced to torture their friends - and were killed if they refuse to do it. There was no other generation faced with this dilemma. The only choice available to those young Romanians who refused to become torturers was this: suicide or death under torture. The GULAG Archipelago reached its peak in the Horror Archipelago of the Pitesti Prison.

Its purpose was to destroy, through physical and psychological torture, the spiritual foundations of the individual, erase 2000 years of Christian moral teachings, force the victims to act against their conscience - all in order to create a new "morality", rooted strictly in materialism. "The starry skies above me and the moral law within me" was incompatible with communism.

In the end The Pitesti Experiment failed - definitive proof that while Man can physically be destroyed, his soul is indestructible. The screenplay is the story of souls sent on an involuntary trip to hell, with the intention of burning their moral DNA, and their return to light.

This is why I believe this film is necessary and must be made.

Can one imagine that an Israeli director wouldn't get financing for a film recording the testimony of the last Holocaust survivors, or that the Polish government would privatize the concentration camp of Auschwitz and the camp owner would demolish two thirds of it, to profit from housing development?

In Romania something similar is not only conceivable, but possible. The film couldn't get financing. The former prison, where The Pitesti Experiment took place, was privatized. The owner already demolished two thirds of it, and the last standing building is in danger of being destroyed.

This film is not only about communism, torture and re-education; it's also a meditation on power and messianism, and what happens when the latter gets unrestricted use of the former, to create The New Man.

Without your help, this film won't be made. There is little time left to document the testimony of the last survivors. That is why I appeal for donations. We must raise US$183,260 in order to finish this film. Any amount of contribution is important and would be greatly appreciated.

With your help, this film will contribute to the fight for the elimination of all forms of torture.

Please consider a donation to VideoMedia Foundation.

And please, pass this on to your friends.

Gratefully yours,

Dan Calinescu, Toronto

less text

Website: Dan Dumitru Calinescu

You are the visitor
Website published on April 2, 2008

Appeal for the Unearthing of the Truth about the Most Diabolic Invention in History: The Pitesti Experiment "... and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." - The Gospel according to John, 8:32

Good people,

Dear friends,

Appeal for the Unearthing of the Truth about the Most Diabolic Invention in History: The Pitesti Experiment
"... and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." - The Gospel according to John, 8:32