Memorial of the Victims of Communism and of the Resistance

The prison building in Sighetu Marmației was built in 1897 by the Austro-Hungarian administration as an ordinary prison. During both world wars it also held political prisoners, and after 1945 it was used to process prisoners of war and deportees returning from the USSR. Between 1948 and 1950 students, pupils and peasants from the anti-communist resistance in Maramureș were imprisoned here. On the night of 5 to 6 May 1950 more than a hundred former dignitaries from across the country were brought to Sighet: ministers, academics, economists, officers, historians and journalists, some sentenced to heavy terms, others held without trial. In October and November 1950 about 45 to 50 Greek Catholic and Roman Catholic bishops and priests were transferred here, followed in August 1951 by members of the National Peasant Party. By July 1955, when some prisoners were released or moved, 54 of the roughly 200 prisoners had died, among them Iuliu Maniu (1953), Gheorghe I. Brătianu and Constantin I. C. Brătianu. The prison was decommissioned in 1977. In 1993 Ana Blandiana and Romulus Rusan proposed to the Council of Europe that the ruin be turned into a memorial, and the Civic Academy Foundation took over the building. The museum opened on 20 June 1997; in the following years more cells became museum rooms, the last, "Pupils in Detention", opening in 2015. Today the museum has about 60 rooms with objects, photographs and documents on communist repression. In one inner courtyard is the Space for Recollection and Prayer, designed by the architect Radu Mihăilescu, whose walls are engraved with the names of almost eight thousand people who died in Romanian prisons, labour camps and places of deportation; another holds the bronze group "Procession of the Sacrificed" by the sculptor Aurel I. Vlad. The memorial also includes the Paupers' Cemetery, about 2.5 km from the town, where the prisoners who died are believed to have been buried in secret. The building is a class A historic monument (LMI code MM-II-m-A-04675). The memorial was declared an ensemble of national interest by a law of 1997 and received the European Heritage Label in 2017. Its research branch, the International Centre for Studies into Communism, founded in 1993 by Romulus Rusan, is based in Bucharest.