The oral history department of the Sighet Memorial was the initial nucleus of this institution, preceding and at the same time underpinning the creation of the museum collection. It began to function as early as 1993, under the coordination of Romulus Rusan and with the support of Georgeta Pop, within one of the most important civic-political organisations in Romania, the Civic Alliance. It was around this department that the International Centre for the Study of Communism was constructed and consolidated under the administration of the Civic Academy Foundation, one of the most prestigious institutions of public utility in Romania, under whose umbrella the Sighet Memorial, awarded the European Heritage Label in 2018, also functions.
Launched in 1993, the process of gathering recent history testimonies with the aim of building up the Sighet Memorial developed organically until it had created the most complex and most precious collection of oral history in Romania. Starting from 1993, the testimonies of survivors of traumatic experiences have been recorded year after year, at first on audio cassettes, then on CDs in more secure formats from a technical point of view, until the present day, when digital format is the standard for the Sighet Memorial’s oral history collection. “The first years, which we can also call the romantic period of this project, were, in terms of the number of testimonies gathered, also the most prolific for our archive of oral history,” says Ioana Boca, today executive director of the Civic Academy Foundation, but for a long time custodian of this archive and one of the closest collaborators of Romulus Rusan, the initiator of the collection. Ioana Boca offers further details regarding the priorities in the first years of activity of this department: “At the end of 1993, the first interviews were beginning to gather. The rate at which they came into the archive was high, because in the operation of recording the testimonies people in Bucharest were involved as well as people from the local branches of the Civic Academy. At first, detailed recordings were made with those who had been through prison; as many of these as possible. The Civic Academy members knew that there were a lot of people who had been under arrest, and they also knew that these were elderly people, who didn’t have much longer to live. Consequently we went to them as a priority.”
The testimonies that were collected followed a protocol that had been discussed beforehand with Robert Perks, a British specialist in the method of oral history from the National Sound Archive in London. As a result of cultural isolation, oral history as a research method had been practically unknown in academic circles in communist Romania. It had appeared in the 1980s only in an informal way, thanks to a few professionals who used it semi-clandestinely, outside their official academic work. For this reason, the creation of this collection necessitated the importation of professional expertise and a transnational dissemination of methodology. The British historian helped Romulus Rusan and his colleagues in the Civic Academy to put together a model questionnaire for the conservation of testimonies. The structure of these questionnaires can be seen in the file records, on which are entered the history and summary of the testimonies, including details about the interviewee, such as name, date of birth, profession, parents’ names, the story of the oppression that they suffered under communism, and if appropriate other relevant details connected to their life story.
The creation of an oral history archive also necessitated the establishment of an institutional umbrella. The foundation of the Civic Academy Foundation in 1994, basically meant that a formal framework was created for the administration of the oral history archive and implicitly of a department of oral history within the functional structures of the same foundation. The next step was the recruitment and training of local specialists able to carry out interviews respecting the method of oral history. “In 1995, Mr Romulus Rusan came to the Faculty of History and explained to us what this oral history project that he had already launched at the Civic Academy consisted in. He immediately convinced us. The next step was that, within a very short time, ten to twelve young students, including myself, began to gather testimonies,” says Ioana Boca, recalling the moment in which she joined the Civic Academy’s oral history team. And according to the official description of the oral history department of the Sighet Memorial, professional training was not only the first step after the foundation of this institutional entity, but a fundamental one if the traumatic memory of Romanian communism was to be preserved according to fully professional standards: “The functioning of the department of oral history made possible the attraction into research of young historians who were then still at university or even high school. For this purpose recruitment visits to universities were organised, together with oral history workshops (in Vaslui in March 1996, in Mangalia in September 1998, and in Sighet in July 2002, July 2004, July 2005, July 2006, and July 2007). The most significant intake of historians came from the Faculty of History in Bucharest, whose graduates (of 1997) still collaborate with the Centre today.” (http://www.memorialsighet.ro/departamentul-de-istorie-orala/)
Moreover it was in those first years that the greatest number of testimonies entered this collection of oral history. Ioana Boca explains that approximately 50–55% of the total number of testimonies arrived in the archive between 1994 and 2000. In each of these years several hundred testimonies were added, corresponding to several hundred hours of recording. “Those first years, in which our activities were voluntary, were very precious in the economy of this project, because, on the one hand, there were a great many witnesses still alive, willing to talk about communism and what they suffered during communism. We gathered, and thus saved, a lot of memory back then. On the other hand, there is another important thing about those years: because we were the first to gather these testimonies systematically, the memory of the speakers was not distorted by other testimonies, documents, or alternative accounts,” says Ioana Boca. In the first years, the great majority of the testimonies gathered in the oral history archive were recorded from prisoners and deportees. “The testimonies in our archive are essential. It is important to say that, especially at the beginning of this project, the testimonies of those who were directly involved, as victims, came to fill an information void. Almost no one knew what had gone on in the prisons. When the archives were opened, these testimonies reinforced and humanised the stories in the official documents. They are extremely precious testimonies about Romanian communism. This archive is an essential source. There is information here that will never be found in the archives of official documents. It is also a way of doing justice to those who suffered so much because of communism. ‘A sort of justice,’ as Mrs Ana Blandiana put it in an inspired way,” she continues. Later, after 2000, the types of testimonies recorded became diversified. “We began to develop projects that included the testimonies of people who hadn’t been arrested on political grounds during communism, but who had suffered because of communism—either in the demolitions, or because they worked in the institutions that put into practice actions aimed at the destruction of social life. More recently, we have also gathered a lot of testimonies from what we call another circle of suffering—namely the (moving) testimonies of the children of those who were imprisoned.” According to the website of the Sighet Memorial, the research themes that can now be covered on the basis of the interviews in the Memorial’s collection are the following: the Romanian gulag, the Piteşti phenomenon, the collectivisation of agriculture, the demolitions during the Ceauşescu regime, dissidents and opponents of the Ceauşescu regime, the Romanian exile community, the family under communism, student movements, and the anticommunist resistance in the mountains. The first two of these, dealing with the prison experience, are considered fundamental by the oral history department, while the others are listed alphabetically in the Romanian text, not according to the significance attributed to them or the length of the interviews gathered.
The rate at which testimonies entered the oral history collection of the Sighet Memorial naturally declined after the 2000s, given that the witnesses to communism were fewer and fewer in number. Nevertheless dozens of testimonies continued to enter the archive each year, and, albeit at a lower rate, they still do. Initially, the working team engaged in this project was made up of ten to twelve volunteers, coordinated by Romulus Rusan and Georgeta Pop. In the first five or six years of the project, the collectors of testimonies met weekly with the coordinators of the project, with the aim of systematising and archiving the oral history documents that had been created; later the coordination meetings took place every few weeks, and at present they are monthly. In total some fifty people have worked on the construction and consolidation of this oral history archive over its twenty-five years of activity. The young researchers who were selected from the History Faculty in Bucharest brought to the archive on average over a hundred testimonies each. Aurora Sasu managed to gather over a hundred testimonies about Greek Catholic priests. Daniel Popa, who gathered the testimonies of those who suffered as a result of collectivisation, brought into the archive over three hundred testimonies. At present the department has three external collaborators, and three or four researchers from within the Civic Academy Foundation are involved in its ongoing activities. The current head of the department of oral history is Andreea Cârstea. The archive is open for research, and every year between five and ten researchers request access to this huge and very important database for scholarly purposes. At the beginning of the 2000s an extensive process of digitisation was begun for documents that had hitherto been archived on more fragile supports—especially audio cassettes. By 2004, the entire archive was digitised. In 2002, as a result of a partnership with the Hoover Institute, duplicates of approximately a quarter of the testimonies in the oral history archive, amounting to some 1,500 hours of recordings, together with reference file entries on the interviews and their subject matter, were transferred to that institution.
(http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt8489r7s4/)
