Emil Sebeşan

After the arrest from the Securitate, where I was beaten in so many ways that it’s hard to believe, I found out that if you don’t react or concentrate on the beatings you receive, you get over them a lot easier. I used to think about something else than the fact that I was being hit. For instance, I saw how the blood blenched out of me on the wall when they knocked me and I wondered: “Is that my blood?” But I soon received another knock and the confirmation that it was indeed my blood. But I went further: “Yes, it’s my blood. Yes. It will last some more.” But it was almost as if I didn’t feel the knock anymore… Almost. I don’t know… But I had this belief that I will get over it easier.

No matter how terrifying the Piteşti phenomenon was, they couldn’t get everything out of us. There were certain things... It was already routine for us to only declare what we had heard before, what had already been declared by others. We simply reconfirmed things, but we didn’t give out any new names – as much as we could, because some of us couldn’t resist; they had too many pieces of evidence and they confronted us. Sometimes they would confront each other: “Which one of you lied?” They had to beat each other up and in the end they would find out who had lied or had refused to give away information.