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Posted: Jul. 21, 2017 7:00 am Updated: Jul. 21, 2017 10:37 am

PITESTI, Romania (AP) An art exhibition went on display Friday at a former Romanian prison where communists tortured and killed political prisoners in a gruesome re-education program.

The collection of 11 sculptures at the Pitesti Prison, southern Romania, aims to remind visitors about the horrors that took place there from 1949 to 1951.

The 3.5 meter-tall (11.5-feet) grey, polystyrene figures depict detainees who were tortured and humiliated to force them to become communists.

Several thousand prisoners who had fallen foul of the communist regime underwent what was known as "The Pitesti Experiment." Prisoners were forced to stare at lightbulbs, eat feces, given electric shocks and head butt each other. They were also encouraged to inform on each other and torture fellow inmates. About 100 died from mistreatment.

Alexandru Bogdanovici, who was imprisoned because he'd been a member of the fascist Iron Guard, was co-opted to re-educate fellow prisoners. But the prison commander later considered him disloyal and he was beaten, denied water and eventually died.

For the exhibit, artist Catalin Badarau sculpted contorted, anonymous figures which lie in hallways or in former prison cells. One figure stands awkwardly on his head, others have their hands tied behind their backs or are covering their faces.

Badarau says the oversized figures, of a mottled grey color which is similar to the prison walls and floors "show the fragility of human beings."

"They were strong people when they went into prison but they came out physical wrecks," he told The Associated Press. "But conversely, they became spiritual giants."

Among the detainees that survived Pitesti are Romanian Orthodox priest Gheorghe Calciu-Dumitreasa who spent 21 years as a political prisoner and Corneliu Coposu, an anti-communist politician and well-known dissident who died in 1995.

An estimated 500,000 people, members of the pre-communist intellectual and political elite, were locked up in political prisons until a general amnesty was declared in 1964.

Similar art exhibitions will be held this year in other cities that housed political prisons or had anti-communist revolts, sponsored by the Nasui Collection & Gallery and a government institute tasked with investigating crimes of the communist era.

Badarau said his sculptures challenge people to ask themselves: "What would I have done? Would I have become a victim or a torturer, or both?"

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Romania: Art exhibit at ex-prison show horrors of communism ... - Herald-Whig

WARSAW The Polish Parliaments move on Saturday to subvert judicial independence has opened a searing debate about whether a nation once held up as a paragon of post-communist democracy has slid back into a darker era.

The Senates 55-23 vote on the measure, which is widely expected to be signed into law by President Andrzej Duda, capped a 20-month procession by the right-wing ruling Law and Justice party to bring Polands independent institutions under its control.The swift offensive has left leaders who toppled communist rule in 1989 to question whether they succeeded in embedding democratic norms in a state that was under Soviet domination for decades.

Lech Walesa, a former Polish president and leader of Solidarity, the labor union that helped precipitate communisms fall across Europe, called Saturday for a mass effort to reengage citizens about the importance of the separation of powers.

Our generation managed, in the most improbable situation, to lead Poland to freedom, he told a crowd gathered in Gdansks Solidarity Square.You cannot let anyone interrupt this victory, especially you young people.

The erosion of the rule of law also raises difficult questions for the European Union, which once saw Polish democracy and prosperity as its biggest success after the 2004 expansion that encompassed much of Eastern Europe. Now, E.U. leaders are threatening to suspend Polands voting rights in decisions of the bloc, though they may be thwarted by the veto of Hungary's leader, Viktor Orban, another post-communist prime minister who has centralized power in defiance of democratic norms.

Polands disregard for the E.U.s warnings and the opposition of tens of thousands of protesters who have taken to the streets in recent days comes amid a global wave of nationalism that crested last year with Britain's decision to leave the E.U. and the election of Donald Trump. Saturdays vote, which unfolded soon after Trump visited Warsaw and praised its populist leaders, may be another measure of the transatlantic echoes of the American election.

The U.S. State Department sounded an alarm about the measure, which would cast out all current justices of the Supreme Court, except those handpicked by the governing partys justice minister. But Trumps visit was tacit support for Law and Justice leaders, said Michal Kobosko,director of the Atlantic Councils Warsaw Global Forum, andencouraged them to move forward with their offensive against the courts. Another measure would dissolve the independent body that selects judges. And the Constitutional Tribunal, the authority capable of invalidating the legislation, has been filled with government loyalists.

Behind the monument to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, the backdrop for Trumps speech, sits the Supreme Court. Its top judge,Malgorzata Gersdorf, said she will probably lose her job as a result of the changes. She is scheduled to meet Monday with Duda, the president and a former Law and Justice member of Parliament. He is a close ally ofJaroslaw Kaczynski, the architect of the effort to bring the courts to heel.

Gersdorf said the judiciary is the last independent institution protecting citizens from an authoritarian state whose aim, she said, is removing legal obstacles to interference in elections. The government has already clamped down on public media and restricted democratic assembly

The last barrier is the Supreme Court, she said in an interview.This change would undo our democratic system based on the independence of the courts. Each citizen has to know that a judge wont fall in front of political power.

According to Law and Justice, however, the courts are riddled with corruption, a product of lingering communist influence. The charge, said Jan Gross, a Polish-born professor of Eastern European history at Princeton University, is total nonsense. He called the proposed changesan indigenous assault on democracy and decency.

Law and Justice calls them democracy in action. A professional and honest system of justice is a dream of many Poles, said the ruling partys justice minister, Zbigniew Ziobro.Poles chose our program. This is democracy.

Polling suggests that a majority of the country wants Duda to veto the legislation. At the same time, there is strong support for Law and Justice, which leads its closest competitor, the center-right Civic Platform, by double digits.

Zygmunt Poziomka, a former coal miner who stood wrapped in a Polish flag outside the Senate building Friday, said Law and Justice was returning control of the courts to people ill-served by negotiations in 1989 over Polands post-communist future.

The communists are still there just the sons instead of their fathers, saidPoziomka, 58.Its been 72 years since World War II, and they still wont let Poland have a chance. Finally Trump let the world see that Warsaw had an uprising, that we fought and had a vision.

Kaczynski, the leader of Law and Justice, is the son of a veteran of the uprising, and his political vision is defined by national victimhood, not just in World War II but in the decades since, Gross said. The most powerful politician in Poland, Kaczynski continues to insist that a 2010 plane crash that killed his brother, Lech Kaczynski, then the nations president, was orchestrated by the Russians, with the help of Civic Platform and its leader at the time, Donald Tusk, who is now president of the European Council.

This is the underlying dispute that defines Polish politics right now, said the Atlantic Councils Kobosko.

Conspiracy theories, as well as the governments broadside against the courts, have found support among peopleleft out by the transition from communism, said Rafal Trzaskowski, a Civic Platform member of Parliament.These are people who dont travel or use the infrastructure that came with integration, and we failed to communicate with them.

Law and Justice, he said, uses that resentment to deny the legitimacy of negotiations in 1989 that brought a peaceful end to communism talks in which Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his brother played a minor role and later dismissed as the collusion of elites.

This is the beginning of the end of a democracy, Trzaskowski said, lamenting that opposition lawmakers could do little beyond joining the demonstrations.

One protester, Radomir Szumelda, a leader of the Committee for the Defense of Democracy, a civic group promoting liberal values, said the aim is to sustain public outcry until the government takes notice. In particular, he said, they are seeking to pressure the president to veto the legislation, which remains unlikely even though Duda expressed some concerns Saturday through a spokesman.

We will show that we refuse to live without freedom, said Szumelda, 45. Young people who didnt live under communism may not know what that was like, but they are also joining us, and together we are saying that we cant go back.

Protester Sasza Reznikow, a 31-year-old actor, immigrated to Poland from neighboring Belarus in 2006 to escape the dictatorship. Now, he said, he sees Poland lurching to the East.

Klaudia Kocimska and Magdalena Foremska in Warsaw and Michael Birnbaum in Brussels contributed to this report.

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It only took two years for a robust European democracy to fall apart

Trumps visit to Poland seen as a snub to the E.U. and Germany

Europe is starkly divided over whether democracy is working

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Poland's long march toward democracy is threatened by quick steps away from it - Washington Post

An art exhibition went on display Friday at a former Romanian prison where communists tortured and killed political prisoners in a gruesome re-education program.

The collection of 11 sculptures at the Pitesti Prison, southern Romania, aims to remind visitors about the horrors that took place there from 1949 to 1951.

The 3.5 meter-tall (11.5-feet) grey, polystyrene figures depict detainees who were tortured and humiliated to force them to become communists.

Several thousand prisoners who had fallen foul of the communist regime underwent what was known as "The Pitesti Experiment." Prisoners were forced to stare at lightbulbs, eat feces, given electric shocks and head butt each other. They were also encouraged to inform on each other and torture fellow inmates. About 100 died from mistreatment.

Alexandru Bogdanovici, who was imprisoned because he'd been a member of the fascist Iron Guard, was co-opted to re-educate fellow prisoners. But the prison commander later considered him disloyal and he was beaten, denied water and eventually died.

For the exhibit, artist Catalin Badarau sculpted contorted, anonymous figures which lie in hallways or in former prison cells. One figure stands awkwardly on his head, others have their hands tied behind their backs or are covering their faces.

Badarau says the oversized figures, of a mottled grey color which is similar to the prison walls and floors "show the fragility of human beings."

"They were strong people when they went into prison but they came out physical wrecks," he told The Associated Press. "But conversely, they became spiritual giants."

Among the detainees that survived Pitesti are Romanian Orthodox priest Gheorghe Calciu-Dumitreasa who spent 21 years as a political prisoner and Corneliu Coposu, an anti-communist politician and well-known dissident who died in 1995.

An estimated 500,000 people, members of the pre-communist intellectual and political elite, were locked up in political prisons until a general amnesty was declared in 1964.

Similar art exhibitions will be held this year in other cities that housed political prisons or had anti-communist revolts, sponsored by the Nasui Collection & Gallery and a government institute tasked with investigating crimes of the communist era.

Badarau said his sculptures challenge people to ask themselves: "What would I have done? Would I have become a victim or a torturer, or both?"

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Romania: Art exhibit at ex-prison show horrors of communism - ABC News

Power and insight Svetlana Alexievich. Photograph: Reuters

In conversations with Svetlana Alexievich, it quickly becomes apparent that she is more comfortable listening than she is talking. Thats hardly surprising: the Belarusian writer has spent decades in listening mode. Alexievich, now 69, put in thousands of hours with her tape recorder across the lands of the former Soviet Union, collecting and collating stories from ordinary people. She wove those tales into elegant books of such power and insight, that in 2015 she received the Nobel prize for literature.

In todays Russia, Alexievichs work is a Rorschach test for political beliefs: among the beleaguered, liberal opposition, she is frequently seen as the conscience of the nation, a uniquely incisive commentator on the disappointments and complexities of the post-Soviet condition. Mainstream opinion sees her as a turncoat whose books degrade Russia and Russians.

When I meet her in a cosy basement caf in her home city of Minsk, the entrance nestled in an amphitheatre of imposing, late-Soviet apartment blocks, she has just returned from a book tour of South Korea, and is about to embark on a trip to Moscow. Its tiring to have the attention on yourself; I want to closet myself away and start writing properly again, she says, looking visibly wearied by the travel and spotlight. Alexievich reluctantly agreed to deliver a talk about a book she wrote more than three decades ago, The Unwomanly Face of War, which has been republished in a new English translation this month. It was written in the early 1980s, and for many years she could not find a publisher, but during the soul-searching of the late-Soviet perestroika period, it tapped into the zeitgeist of reflection and critical thinking, and was published in a print run of 2m, briefly turning Alexievich into a household name. Later, the merciless flashlight Alexievich shone on to the Soviet war experience became less welcome in Russia. Since the Nobel win, her work has found a new international audience, giving her a second stint of fame 30 years after the first.

The original inspiration for the book was an article Alexievich read in the local Minsk press during the 1970s, about a retirement party for the accountant at a local car factory, a decorated sniper who had killed 75 Germans during the war. After that first interview, she began to seek out female war veterans across the Soviet Union. A million Soviet women served at the front, but they were absent from the official war narrative. Before this book, the only female character in our war literature was the nurse who improved the life of some heroic lieutenant, she says. But these women were steeped in the filth of war as deeply as the men.

It took a long time, Alexievich concedes, to get the women to stop speaking in rehearsed platitudes. Many were embarrassed about the reality of their war memories. They would say, OK, well tell you, but you have to write it differently, more heroically. After a frank interview with a woman who served as the medical assistant to a tank battalion, Alexievich recounts, she sent the transcript as promised and received a package through the post in response, full of newspaper clippings about wartime feats and most of the interview text crossed out in pen. More than once afterward I met with these two truths that live in the same human being, Alexievich writes. Ones own truth, driven underground, and the common one, filled with the spirit of the time.

The book touches on topics that were taboo during the Soviet period and have once again been excised from Putins Russia: the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, by which Stalin and Hitler carved up Europe, the executions of deserters and the psychological effects of war for years to come. Her subjects recall sweaty nightmares, grinding teeth, short tempers and an inability to see forests without thinking of twisted bodies in shallow graves.

In modern Russia, Putin has turned the war victory into a national building block of almost religious significance, and questioning the black-and-white history of glorious victory is considered heresy. This makes the testimony of the women in Alexievichs book, most of whom are now dead, feel all the more important today. There is no lack of heroism in the book; the feats and the bravery and the enormous burden that fell on the shoulders of these women shine from every page. But she does not erase the horror from the story, either. In the end, the book is a far more powerful testament to the extraordinary price paid by the Soviet people to defeat Nazi Germany than the sight of intercontinental missiles rolling across Red Square on 9 May, or the endless bombastic war films shown on Russian television.

After The Unwomanly Face of War, Alexievich wrote books that dealt with the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl and the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan, two tragedies that accompanied the death throes of the Soviet Union, both of them simultaneously causes and symptoms of its impending collapse.

More recently, she published the doorstop-sized Second-Hand Time, which reads as a requiem for the Soviet era. It chronicles the shock and the existential void that characterised the 1990s after the Soviet Union disintegrated, and helps explain the appeal of Putins promises to bring pride back to a wounded, post-imperial nation.

Nobody thought the Soviet Union would collapse, it was a shock for everyone, she says. Everyone had to adapt to a new and painful reality as the rules, behavioural codes and everyday language of the Soviet experience dissolved almost overnight. Taken together, Alexievichs books remain perhaps the single most impressive document of the late Soviet Union and its aftermath. Alexievich became a harsh critic of Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian president of newly independent Belarus. She left the country as a protest, and spent 11 years living in exile in various European countries, returning only a few years ago. When youre on the barricades, all you can see is a target, not a human, which is what a writer should see. From the point of view of art, the butcher and the victim are equal as people. You need to see the people.

Lukashenko has made it clear he is no fan of Alexievichs work, and while the Nobel prize has given her some security, her books have not been published in Belarus, and she is de facto banned from making public appearances. As a writer of Ukrainian and Belarusian heritage, but who writes essentially about the whole post-Soviet space, she is confused about modern Russia. She is unsure whether to say we or they when she speaks about Russians. Where she is more certain is in her opinions of Putin and the current political climate. We thought wed leave communism behind and everything would turn out fine. But it turns out you cant leave this and become free, because these people dont understand what freedom is.

She has repeatedly criticised the Russian annexation of Crimea and intervention in east Ukraine, which has led to a falling-out with many Russian friends, she says. She never quite knows how conversations will go when she visits Moscow. She recalls a recent visit when she entered the apartment of an old acquaintance: I had just walked in the door and taken my coat off, when she sits me down and says, Svetochka, so that everything is clear, let me just say that Crimea isnt ours. Its like a password! Thank God, I told her.

During her trip to Moscow, she gives a talk at Gogol Centre, an edgy theatre space known for its outspoken director and controversial productions. The lecture is rambling and in places barely coherent, but receives multiple rounds of applause from an audience eager to display their liberalism and disdain for Putins militarism. The questions are mainly gushing odes to her work.

Shortly after, she grants an interview to a Russian news agency. This time, the questions are rude and provocative, and a flustered Alexievich appears to suggest she understands the motivations of the murderers of a pro-Russian journalist in Kiev, and appears uneasy and unsure of herself. The Russian-language internet explodes with debates over the scandal.

She has two new projects she wants to finish: one about love, which will look at 100 relationships from the perspective of the man and the woman involved, and a second book about the process of ageing. It is something she has been thinking about, as she approaches her 70th birthday.

In youth, we dont think much about it and then suddenly all these questions arrive, she says. After a little more than an hour of discussion, her already quiet voice has become almost inaudible, and she seems tired and distracted. What was the point of life, why did all of that happen?

Not wanting to outstay my welcome any further, I turn off my recorder and thank her for the interview, assuming she will make a speedy beeline for the exit. Excellent, she says, immediately brightening. Shall we have some lunch? Surprised, I stay, and we talk for another hour. Now its mainly her asking the questions: about my views on Russia but also Donald Trump, the European far right and the Queen. Ever the listener, Alexievich is much more at ease asking the questions than answering them.

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Svetlana Alexievich: 'After communism we thought everything would ... - The Guardian

It might come as a shock to Susan Stamper Brown (Trumps Warsaw speech truly inspiring, Times-Standard, July 13, Page A4) that not only are liberals opposed to oppressive communism and the slaughter of Jews by the Nazis, but we are also opposed to jihad. We are also for freedom, our country and probably more in favor of family, because we view family to include LGBT parents and children as well as single parents and families extended through divorce and remarriage. When it comes to God I and many liberals do differ. The God in the constitution is a specific one, Natures God. For thousands of years all over the planet every nation, every tribe had different deities they worshipped. Susan thinks I and every American should believe that just one god is the real deity and although that deity created the whole universe, it only spoke to a handful of people in the Middle East long, long ago. And if we dont believe in her deity we must be deep into lunacy. Susan was very impressed with Trumps speech and for that she need not thank the president but rather his speechwriter. Now if someone could teach the Donald to read his speeches a little faster and a lot more convincingly, but there may not be enough time. Sad.

Larry DePuy, Eureka

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Liberals oppose Nazis, jihad, communism - Eureka Times Standard