The Sighet Prison, located in the city of Sighetu Marmației, Maramureș County, Romania, was used by Romania to hold criminals, prisoners of war, and political prisoners. It is now the site of the Sighet Memorial Museum, part of the Memorial of the Victims of Communism.
History
Beginnings
The prison was built in 1896-1897 by the authorities of the Kingdom of Hungary. Following Austrian practice, it was situated close to the courthouse in order to facilitate prisoner transport. From its opening until 1944, it housed common criminals with sentences of six months to two years. T-shaped, the building had a ground and two upper floors. Of the 108 cells, 36 were individual and the rest fit four or six people. It was built of brick and reinforced concrete, with doors of fir wood. The thick walls were some six meters high and topped by guard towers.
While Northern Transylvania was under Soviet military administration from November 1944 to March 1945, the building was used for interning Soviet deserters and delinquents, subsequently returned to the Soviet Union. After the end of World War II, ethnic German war prisoners passed through Sighet, some on their way to forced labor in the Soviet Union, others returning home from there. Between 1947 and 1950, common criminals formed the majority of detainees. However, political prisoners began to appear: peasants from the surrounding Maramureș region who refused to hand over food quotas to the state, and local youth who had been active in the Iron Guardist Frățiile de Cruce associations. From the latter category, among the earliest arrivals were eighteen pupils from Dragoș Vodă High School, accused of demonstrating against the new communist regime; they were incarcerated in August 1948 and kept until May 1949, after which they were tried in Cluj and sent to prisons in Pitești, Gherla, and Târgșor, or to the Danube–Black Sea Canal.
Elite extermination
On the night of May 5/6, 1950, a Securitate secret police operation led to the arrest of some 80 high-ranking politicians from the 1918-1945 period, largely from the National Peasants' Party and the National Liberal Party. The operation involved 228 agents acting in 38 teams of six. After a brief stay at the Interior Ministry in Bucharest, they were taken to Sighet in vans, arriving on May 7. It is believed that the prison was chosen for its geographic isolation and proximity to the Soviet Union; in the event of an anti-communist revolt, the prisoners could be whisked across the border. Another advantage was its division into cells, facilitating isolation. On May 26, the group of Romanian Greek-Catholic bishops and priests arrested in October 1948, previously held at Dragoslavele and Căldărușani Monasteries, arrived. In August 1951, they were joined from Galați by the prisoners sentenced at the Maniu-Mihalache trial. Other imprisoned politicians and Greek-Catholic clerics arrived until 1952; detainees at Sighet numbered 89 by that August. Only the Maniu-Mihalache prisoners were at Sighet following a public trial, held in November 1947. The rest were there on orders from the Interior Ministry or the Securitate; no charges were filed, and their status was that of temporary pre-trial arrest. At least 53 detainees died at Sighet between 1950 and 1955. They were buried at night by common criminals in the city cemetery or on the hospital grounds in graves that remain anonymous. The deaths were recorded in a report signed by the doctor and warden; no death certificates were issued. Coffins were used in 1950-1951, then stopped being used due to a lack of wood. Interior Ministry officials gave orders that strict secrecy be preserved as to the individual gravesites. Death certificates were finally issued in 1957 and placed in the detainees’ personal files. They were not sent to the families, who were notified on a case-by-case basis.
Prisoners were awakened at five in the morning and had to be in their cells at eight in the evening. Lights were turned off at night in multi-prisoner cells but left on in single cells, in order to enhance surveillance. The prisoners were under constant watch, each cell visited every ten minutes, day and night; guards wore noiseless shoes so their approach would not be heard. Inspections were carried out at least three times a month, generally towards midnight. Prisoners would be rousted from bed with insults and blows, the entire guard corps carrying out a minute search. Prisoners performed menial tasks: peeling potatoes, washing clothes, chopping wood, sweeping. Some of these, such as washing apples or cleaning bathrooms, were done for their humiliation and for the guards’ amusement.