34 - In Aiud Penitentiary

Summary

I didn't understand why they took us off the train at Teiuş and not Aiud. We discovered the secret at the penitentiary, a few weeks later. The authorities were afraid of a legionnaire attack on the station in Aiud. From Teiuş we were taken in a truck, face down and watched by four guards. In front of us and behind there were two other trucks full of gendarmes. The whole operation was supervised by Colonel Popescu, general director of State Security. All the stations we passed were full of gendarmes. The eleven of us, weakened and exhausted by the cheap theater, had never even imagined how dangerous we were.

The famous zarcă of the Aiud penitentiary—where hundreds of prisoners found their death—was the old prison building, where inmates from the new building were sent for supposed acts of indiscipline. It was built in the beginning of the century—1903, I think—by the Hungarian prefect of the time, Count Teleki, owner of the lands and castle in Uioara, around fifteen kilometers away from Aiud. A similarly grand jail was erected in Gherla, the second largest penitentiary in Transylvania, built, just like the one in Aiud, for the poor Romanian peasants who couldn't forget Horea, Cloşca, and Crişan's revolt, or Avram Iancu's revolution. After 1918, both jails were found to be too large, because the only prisoners were regular inmates with long sentences. However, under the Stalinist regime, the two jails proved to be too small, and that is why they were packed, just like the county jails attached to courts, with prisoners with short sentences or for those held during trial. The irony was that Aiud was also the place of detention for Count Adam Teleki, son of the former prefect, who had erected the newer part of the prison, which as a child I had thought of as a “frightening grave.” The younger Count Teleki earned our respect, on the one hand, for his fair behavior toward Romanians during the Hungarian occupation of 1940–45, and on the other, for his dignity in bearing the conditions in prison. Adam Teleki had displayed the kindest of sentiments, inspired—in his own words—by the kindness of our nation.