Sighet Memorial: Room 5 - The Maps Room

The Map Room serves as a reception area for visitors to the Memorial and provides a geographical overview of the Romanian gulag together with a chronology of the forty-five-year history of communist Romania. On the large map of the country, crosses mark the prisons, labour camps, areas for internal deportation, psychiatric hospitals used to hold political prisoners, sites of battles between partisans and the secret police, places of execution, and mass graves. Each of these categories is presented in greater detail in six smaller maps. Images of the main communist prisons are exhibited alongside these maps. During the communist period (1945-1989) there were more than 230 places of imprisonment in Romania, a figure that also includes interrogation and prisoner sorting centres, and forced labour and deportation camps. If we add to these the town, district, regional and county headquarters of the Securitate, where detainees were brought after their arrest in order to be interrogated, then the figures increase more than a hundredfold. No fewer than fifteen former psychiatric treatment (“re-education”) centres have been discovered in recent years, as well as more than ninety locations were partisans fought the Securitate or were executed, and mass graves.