Centre for Romanian Studies

“Memorialul Durerii”, a political TV Documentary series had been researched and produced for the Romanian TV by Lucia Hossu-Loghin. This is an epic story of Romania’s most notorious political prisons under Communism. Miss Hossu-Loghin had interviewed the survivors, or the families of those jailed, visited the sites where the crimes were perpetrated and even interviewed some of the surviving warders and torturers. Bringing to the world’s consciiousness this graphic evidence reminds one of those documentaries on the WWII nazi camps. But unlike some of the Germans who would have said that they did not know that such camps existed, the Romanians knew, through whispers and the publicised political trials that such terrible things had happenned, but could not fathom out the enormity of the Holocaust (q.v. Pitesti Phenomenon, Sighet).

It is perhaps not altogether surprising that Lucia’s TV research into such dark period of Romania’s recent history to have troubled enough the authorities in Bucharest to do the unthinkable and axe, in February 2003, both the producer’s serial as well as the producer herself: all this in defiance of all promises for a greater democracy and transparency in the media prior to EU accession membership.

Read more about Lucia Hossu-Longin in:

Blouse Roumaine – The Unsung Voices of Romanian Women

(Centre for Romanian Studies, London, 2009)

(1,100 pages, 160 Biographies, 600 quotations)

http://www.blouseroumaine.com/freeexcerpt_download.html