La memoria como forma de justiciael memorial de las víctimas del comunismo y de la resistencia en Sighet, Rumanía

Abstract

This essay analyzes the way in which more than thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the former East European countries beyond the Iron curtain struggle to come to terms with the terrible legacy of communism. Founded by Ana Blandiana and Romulus Rusan, two writers, the Memorial to the Victims of Communism in Sighet, Romania is the first institution in the world which honors those who suffered under communist oppression. The essay reveals the story of its creation and reflects on its symbolic significance. The Memorial was born to break "the great loneliness in the destiny of the Romanian people and the unbearable silence that surrounds their fate. Built in a former prison, where the intellectual and political elites of the country were exterminated in the 1950s, the Memorial is a monument against oblivion transformed into a book that reveals the black holes of history and, with them, the hidden face of the crimes of communism. To its founders the Memorial was not a goal but a means to prevent first, that history may be repeated, and second, the destruction of memory which was the main goal of the communist regime, a necessary step for the creation of the new man, brainwashed and unable to remember either what happened, nor what he did during the communist period.