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BUCHAREST, Romania -- A new exhibition in Romania’s capital spotlights the harsh reality of interrogations carried out by the country’s notorious communist-era secret police.
Held at the National History Museum of Romania in Bucharest, the exhibition is called “A.REST 1989.” The Securitate Video Archive uses video footage to reconstruct how detentions and interrogations worked under the Securitate, the sprawling network of spies that enforced Nicolae Ceausescu’s rule, until he was overthrown and executed in December 1989.
The exhibition features original videotaped recordings of interrogations of four detainees investigated by the secret police, shown on grainy, wall-mounted monitors in the museum’s central hall. All were recorded in 1989 by the Criminal Investigations Directorate of the Securitate.
In the middle of the exhibition space is a reconstructed cell furnished with a small bed, an empty metal bowl and cup, which evokes the isolation that detainees might have felt. It also highlights the Securitate’s extensive reach and power under communism and the investigation techniques they used on suspects.
Many of the recordings reveal coercive questioning and intimidation tactics that often drift into the absurd, as detainees are ground down or left bewildered. During one such back-and-forth, a woman whose husband had allegedly defected tells her questioner: “I no longer have the strength to fight. I need logical arguments, not this nonsense.”
“In the world of Securitate ‘justice,’ detainees or those under arrest were merely prisoners, captives in the operational labyrinth of manufactured guilt,” the organizers say, adding that the exhibition can serve as a belated “memorial plaque” to victims. “The victims, thus, gain a voice and a place."
The exhibition runs until mid-September and is a collaboration between the National History Museum, Romania’s National Council for Studying the Securitate Archives, or CNSAS, and the Ministry of Culture.
The organizers said the 26 videotapes held by CNSAS are “a remnant, the accidental result of the disorderly and violent end” of socialist Romania, recorded by the criminal investigations technical department in 1989.
Oana Demetriade, a historian at CNSAS and exhibition curator, told The Associated Press that she initially wanted to use the videotapes to make a documentary for students and school kids, but decided to pursue an exhibition instead.
“The project grew organically through the discussions I had with architects and designers,” she said. “From the very beginning, the first discussions I had with my husband who works at CNSAS and everything I found in these tapes made me go ‘wow!’ … They were being watched in cells non-stop.”
“That’s what this whole archive brings new,” she added. “How it gets here and how people, those who are arrested, in the end, are repeatedly threatened, yelled at, threatened with beatings, threatened with the family suffering, and so on.”
Also exhibited are artifacts such as a printing press that belonged to journalist Petre Mihai Bacanu, which was confiscated by the secret police in early 1989. Bacanu and several associates used the press to print an anti-Ceausescu and anti-government newspaper.
“How could we, after 45 years of socialism, still be afraid of people’s opinions, even of their thoughts?” Bacanu says during an interrogation in February 1989.
Another item exhibited is a pair of glasses that were used to stop detainees from “seeing where they were going or identifying” other persons.
The detention facility had spaces for two different types of detention, says Mihai Demetriade, also a historian at CNSAS and an exhibition curator along with his wife.
While “preventative detention” was used in political cases alleging crimes against the state, “operational detention” units were used to lock people up in what he described as a form of kidnapping — to imprison and silence potential dissenters during sensitive moments like a congress or visiting foreign dignitary.
“We are not talking about the testimonies of victims after the fall of communism, nor about documents, nor about books, nor about manuscripts,” he said. “We have something not open to manipulation … a live recording of events that occur in interrogation rooms or cells. It’s hard to fight against something like that as a denialist.”
“This space is important because it proves how rapacious, tough, aggressive the communist dictatorship remained even in the last moments of the communist system," he added.
In recent years, as nationalism has risen in Romania, so too has a nostalgia for life under communism during the Ceausescu years, especially among young people who typically have limited or no memories of life in the country before 1989.
Cornel Constantin Ilie, manager of the National History Museum of Romania, says the new exhibition can help expose the realities of that period in Romania’s history and “reach the minds and, why not, the souls” of visitors.
“It is an exhibition that puts you in front of facts that cannot be ignored,” he said. “It’s very important because we must not forget and we must not repeat. … What we see in this exhibition is an ugly face of history, it is a story in which human freedom, human dignity were suppressed.”
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McGrath reported from Leamington Spa, England.
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