The Sighet Summer School

The creation of the Sighet Memorial was not an end in itself, but rather a means: a means to counteract the brainwashing operation carried out in the past, whose first result was the destruction of memory, the bone structure of every society, without which the populace becomes a flaccid, disarticulated, easily manipulated monster. Now in its seventeenth year, the Sighet Memorial Summer School is the place where young people learn the memory that neither their own schools nor their parents have been able to pass down to them. The Summer School courses are aimed at fostering memory, and the pupils read documents, study visual materials, and listen to analyses and eyewitness accounts relating to the monstrous mechanisms whereby history functioned in the second half of the twentieth century, based on class hatred and the repression of fundamental human rights. The transcripted conferences and debates from the summer schools resulted in “The School of Memory”, annual collection published between 2002 and 2013, and in the “Adolescent” series, including four essays books. Thanks to the Summer School, the Memorial becomes a living museum, a school and institution of memory, passing down, from one generation of students to the next, truths in the absence of which progress would be impossible. Thanks to the Summer School, the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and the Resistance moves beyond the walls of the prison in Sighet and dwells in the minds of the thousands of young people who come here to understand history in order to gain an understanding of themselves.