Sighet Memorial - The Oral History Department

The oral history department was set up in 1993 by Romulus Rusan, the director of the International Center for Study about Communism. The department aims to preserve recent memory through recording interviews with former political prisoners and those who had significant experiences during the communist regime. The oral history archive comprises over 6000 hours of recordings. Recordings are organised by cards, introduced in a computer database, for research. We encourage the participation to our oral history projects of young historians, students or high school. To this purpose, recruitment visits to universities have been organized, as well as oral history workshops (the first workshop was organized in March 1996). Some interviews form our oral history archive are published in the Oral History Collection (17 toms until now). We edited two audiobooks with eyewitness accounts fragments from our oral history archive: The Peasant and the Communism (2009) and Black Whitsuntide: The 1951 Bărăgan Deportations (2011). The eyewitness accounts fragments from our oral history archive are available in the rooms of the Sighet Memorial. The publication of the witnesses in the Memory of Nations Archive was funded by the Europe for Citizens Programme.

-