REMEMBRANCE IN TIME - Index of

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Remembrance in Time
commission or non-commission of certain crimes, and decided for or against sending the
case further for prosecution in a court of law. Although the existing legislation clearly
stipulated that the establishment of an individual’s guilt or innocence was the prerogative
of the courts of law, the aforementioned final reports of the Securitate already reached the
verdict. These reports had a standard ending note saying: “In conclusion [...] they are
guilty of …” 11
Most of the trials from 1948-1964, whose aim was to legalize terror, involved groups of
individuals. The individual trial of politically undesirable was a rare occurrence. This is
why the investigation in general and the interrogation in particular targeted groups of
individuals. The collective investigation of the repression subjects presented a number of
advantages. The first was the efficiency of the investigation and sentencing process of an
impressive number of individuals. The second advantage was that guilt was easier
constructed through the reciprocal contamination of those involved. Collective guilt had
additional seriousness and popular impact. A crime committed by a group of individuals,
to whom the investigators added an organized character, became more serious that a
crime committed individually.
The need for the collective treatment of subjects had a strong influence on the
interrogation techniques. The investigation of a group of individuals meant the
involvement of an entire team of investigators. The team was lead by a leading
investigation officer, who centralized the results and forwarded them to his superiors by
means of reports. The isolation of the suspects from the same group was recommended in
order to avoid their fraternization and access to information pertaining to the case.
Suspects were usually held in custody in detention cells in the Securitate buildings.
However, due to the limited space, their recommended isolation was difficult to put into
practice. It became easier when there was a penitentiary nearby, where the suspects could
be held in isolation. In order to prevent suspects from knowing the location of their
detention place and communicating among themselves during transport, they were
blindfolded with special tin glasses.
In order to break the resistance of suspects and obtain their self-incriminating
statements, the Securitate made recourse to physical and psychological pressures. The
alternation and dosage of these pressures is a fact that many victims noted in their later
testimonies. 12 Physical pressures did not involve only torture, which is one of the most
frequent elements in the memoirs of former political prisoners, but also food and sleep
deprivation, which led to the weakening of the suspects’ organism and obviously his
resistance capacity. The use of torture was a two-edged weapon because after the signing
of the self-incriminating statements the suspects recanted them. In certain cases, the
suspect’s vacillation between admitting and recanting these statements undermined the
result of the investigation. Here is an example of a piece of evidence that became
unusable by the prosecution: “I admit that until January 25, 1950, I had not admitted to
what Captain Desagă said about me, and on January 25 I said I had admitted only for fear
of torture.” 13
11 NCSAS Archives, Criminal Fonds, file P 484, v.1, pp. 10-11.
12 See the examples from Herbert (Belu) Zilber, Actor în procesul Pătrăşcanu: prima versiune
memoriilor lui Belu Zilber, Bucureşti, 1997, pp. 47-51.
13 NCSAS Archives, Criminal Fonds, file P 346, vol.1, pp. 6-7.