Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Resistance

Nearly two years ago I spent a few hours inside one of the world's foremost museums documenting the reign of terror in the Eastern Block: the Terror Museum in Budapest, Hungary. It was overwhelming and incredibly haunting. The museum is housed in the former Nazi and then Communist headquarters, and it creates an atmosphere quite unlike anything I've ever experienced. While not necessarily a similar sort of institution, I got the same feeling I imagine I would get if I visited a former concentration camp. The last part of the museum includes a visit to the torture and prison chambers in the basement that left chills running through my mind for days.

I never thought I would experience that sort of thing again...

Sighetu Marmaţiei was the site of one of the most notorious- and gruesome- prisons in communist Romania. It held political prisoners, dissidents, intellectuals, and anyone who the regime believed could be a challenge. Between the years of 1948 and 1952, 51 of the 180 prisoners held at Sighet died. It was one of the sites of the "re-education" program, an experiment in mind control that used horrific methods. The 2010 edition of the Lonely Planet guidebook to Romania describes it as such:

"Under an experimental system known as 're-education,' from 1949 to 1952, political prisoners were subjected to intolerable levels of abuse as a way of breaking down their identities in order to make them more amenable to the communist system... In the first stage prisoners were subjected to demeaning acts like scrubbing floors with rags between their teeth or having to lick toilets clean. Religious prisoners were humiliated through acts such as being baptized with buckets of urine. Next, prisoners were forced to betray fellow inmates who'd shown them any kindness or sympathy and then to renounce their own families. The point here was to sever any existing bonds of love or loyalty. In the final stage of the program, prisoners were forced to prove their succesful 'regeneration' by inflicting the same acts of mental and physical abuse on new prisoners. Failure to follow through meant having to spend weeks in a tiny isolation cell...."

It's sick, what happened there.

This former prison is now a museum... I spent time in the "black room," the tiny isolation cell mentioned. I closed the door and started my watch and came close to not breathing. I left when I started to panic... I lasted 57 seconds.

It's sick, what happened there. It's sick and awful and makes me question humanity in general.

And then I walked out into the sunshine, breathing normally, and wondering how I got so lucky to be born at a time and in a place of freedom.

Detachment

I was recently talking to someone about my fears concerning the amount of emotional attachment I feel towards certain things, and whether or not this emotional attachment will somehow take away from the physical act. I was struck by the profound nature of his answer, in my scrambled brain at least.

The basic message was that an entirely different and more intense set of emotion is produced when accompanied by a physical act. Close your eyes and imagine that you hit your thumb with a hammer, and describe the feelings you have. Now, go get a hammer and hit your thumb. The feelings will be much different, much more intense, right? These might be similar emotions to those described earlier, and we can always imagine the pain. However, nothing except the physical act of hitting yourself in such a way can produce the same sentiments. This made a great deal of sense to me, and certainly relates to more than the original subject of discussion.

This applies in converse ways concerning the upcoming year. First, from the standpoint of one living in the United States and looking forward to this journey. The emotional anticipation I feel is nothing compared to the feelings I will experience when physically there. The mixture of joy and excitement and anxiety I feel now concerning my classroom will only be compounded when I am actually standing in it. This translates to everything I will come to know in this new place. Even imagining the intensity of these emotions is overwhelming at the moment.

Secondly, I am beginning to wonder about my feelings towards the physical I experience in the States, once these things are removed. The touch of a friend, the sounds of my city, the smell of home. Does this principle work both ways? Will my emotional attachment to these things be somehow diminished because of the lack of physical stimulus, or will the store of physical memories I carry sustain the intensity of these emotions?

I ache to know, and remain afraid of the answer.