ABSTRACT
The chapter examines the conflicting accounts concerning the reeducation through torture program (the “Piteşti experiment”), which targeted the members and sympathizers of the pre-World War II Christian nationalist, fascist, and anti-Semitic Iron Guard movement. Given the extreme nature of the experiment, this category of political prisoners was placed in an unusual and ambiguous position of playing the roles of both victims and victimizers. After 1989, they became a subject of controversy, but many were also admired for their proclaimed salvation through exemplary Christian lives. The anti-communist democratic opposition utilized the memory of this painful past to describe the generalized experience of communism as a genocidal regime. More recently, conservative groups, some Christian intellectuals, and segments of the Greek-Orthodox clergy have become engaged in a controversial movement that seeks the canonization of some of the survivors of Piteşti. Through pilgrimages, religious ceremonies, and rumors involving the curative powers of relics ascribed to political detainees, the “prison saints movement” has gained some considerable popular support. At the same time, it provoked a strong backlash from victims and descendants of the Jewish Holocaust. This has resulted in the passage of memory laws that criminalize the dissemination of Iron Guard symbols and ideology.
