Rooms 84-87 - Iuliu Maniu, a father of democracy. / (4-87-es termek: Iuliu Maniu, a román demokrácia atyja.
On the passage to the left of the passageway, above the Brătianu rooms, a number of other rooms, linked by arches, are dedicated to Iuliu Maniu, one of the fathers of Romanian democracy, who, like Gheorghe Brătianu, also died in Sighet penitentiary, in 1953. Thanks to his exemplary attitude in public life, Iuliu Maniu became between 23 August 1944 and July 1947 a symbol of democratic resistance to the country’s communisation. However, a show trial was held, in which he was accused of high treason. On 11 November 1947 he was convicted to life imprisonment, hard labour, at the trial of the National Peasant Party leadership, which followed the Tămădău incident, in which the leaders of the party were duped into attempting to flee the country. The photos and documents present familiar moments as well as aspects of Maniu’s political activity before 1918. A panel highlights the important role he played in the events that led to the Great Union. Further on, the images show how in the inter-war period and the Second World War, Iuliu Maniu opposed any form of authoritarian regime. The exhibition comes to a close with a presentation of several snapshots from his post-war political activity, from the time of the 1946 elections, as well as images and declarations from the National Peasant Party trial, which ended with sentences totalling hundreds of years. The value of the exhibition, created by the International Centre for Studies on Communism, is enhanced by the presence of objects that belonged to or were used by Iuliu Maniu, donated to the Sighet Memorial by Misses Clara Boilă from Cluj, and Aurelia Ghinea, Flavia Bălescu and Rodica Coposu from Bucharest. In front of the Iuliu Maniu room there is a group of photographs on the subject of Corneliu Coposu, one of the most important continuers of Maniu’s legacy. The objects, photographs, letters and documents evoke the professional and political career of the man who in the 1990s revived the National Peasant Party and the spirit of its historical leader.
Sighet Memorial Museum, part of the Memorial of the Victims of Communism and of the Resistance (Memorialul Victimelor Comunismului şi al Rezistenţei), was created on the basis of the former Sighet prison in 1993, restoration was completed in 2000. Each prison cell became a museum room, presenting the chronology and the different aspects of the totalitarian system in Communist Romania. We visited the museum in August 2015.
Máramarosszigeti börtönmúzeum, a kommunizmus romániai áldozatainak emlékhelye. A múzeumot 1993-ban alapították, az épület felújítása 2000-re fejeződött be. Az egyes cellákban mutatják be a kommunizmus történetét és egyes aspektusait. 2015. augusztusában jártunk a családdal, észak-erdélyi kirándulásunk alkalmával.
Sighet Prison was built in 1897 by the Austro-Hungarian authorities, on the occasion of the “First Magyar Millennium”. After 1918, it functioned as a prison for common criminals. After 1945, the repatriation of former prisoners and deported persons from the Soviet Union was done through Sighet. In August 1948 it became a place of imprisonment for a group of students, pupils and peasants from Maramures, some of whom still live in Sighet. On 5 and 6 May 1950 over one hundred dignitaries from the whole country were brought to the Sighet penitentiary (former ministers, academics, economists, military officers, historians, journalists, politicians), some of them convicted to heavy punishments, others not even judged. The majority were more than 60 years old. In October-November 1950, 45-50 bishops and Greek-Catholic and Roman-Catholic priests were transported to Sighet. The penitenciary was considered a "special work unit", known under the name of "Danube colony", but in reality was a place of extermination for the country's elites and at the same time a safe place, not possible to escape from, the frontier of the Soviet Union being less than two kilometres away. The prisoners were kept in unwholesome conditions, miserably fed, and stopped from lying down during the day on the beds in the unheated cells. They were not allowed to look out of the windows (those who disobeyed were punished by being forced to sit in the "black" and "grey", lock-up type cells, with no light). Finally, shutters were placed on the windows, so that only the sky was visible. Humility and ridicule were part of the extermination programme. In 1955, following the Geneva Convention and the admission of communist Romania (RPR) to the UN, some pardons were granted. Some of the political prisoners in Romanian prisons were set free and some transferred to other places, while others were kept under house arrest At Sighet, out of around 200 prisoners, 52 had died. The prison once again became an ordinary law one. However, political prisoners continued to appear in the following years, and many were kept secretly in the local psychiatric hospital. In 1977, the prison was closed, and the buildings were turned into a broom factory and salt warehouse, finally becoming an abandoned ruin.