Fenomenul Piteşti by Virgil Ierunca

A harrowing account of the Communist regime’s “re-education” experiment at Pitești Prison (1949–1951), where systematic torture, humiliation, and forced betrayal were used to annihilate identity, faith, and solidarity among political prisoners. Drawing on testimonies, it details the stages of demasking and the coercion of inmates to torture one another, exposing the apparatus that enabled it and reflecting on the experiment’s psychological devastation and enduring moral implications.