Nicolae Purcărea

In our cell this was the most common beating. But they also forced you to scrape the floor, to sit on one leg for hours, to make genuflexions, so jump like a frog, to carry heavy bags or another student on your back… At a certain point everybody had to jump on you and you choked at the bottom. They used all kinds of torture methods. Their methods were meant to cause physical pain, but also a psychological one, because the two went hand in hand. The humiliation was just as terrifying and painful, if not even more than the physical pain. The latter passed in a couple of days, if they stopped hitting you, but the humiliation lingered, it heaped in your soul until your head was ready to burst with pain…

We asked ourselves: we were so ugly, so hideous, so deformed, so disfigured, that even Quasimodo seemed prettier. Without teeth, with a swollen eye, with a fractured jaw… We were so ugly that we thought we each had a mask on our face, as we didn’t resemble to what we once looked like. It was like we all had a hideous carnival mask. And even though time passed, other beatings came with it. For instance, if they slapped you on the face, you had to change your „mask” again. You would leave your teeth wherever… Your tongue was burnt, your lips as well, because they made you eat like a pig: they put the kettle on the floor and you had to lick it, even if the so called soup was hot. They didn’t care what you had it the kettle – you had to clean it. And the kettle became a universal instrument: you would eat off of it, you would wash your clothes in it, you would use it for other things… (physiological necessities – n.n.) But you had to eat everything that was in it.