Civic Academy Foundation - Sighet Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Anticommunist Resistance

The Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Anticommunist Resistance was established in 1993 when the well-known Romanian writers Ana Blandiana and Romulus Rusan presented the project of such a Memorial to the Council of Europe who decided to take it under its aegis. A non-governmental organisation, the Civic Academy Foundation, founded in 1994 by personalities of the Romanian public life, assumed the development of the project. The Memorial is made up of the Museum - located in the former Stalinist political prison of Sighet - and the International Center for Studies about Communism - based in Bucharest. The Civic Academy Foundation is the legal entity, which organises and administrates the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Anticommunist Resistance. Among its goals are civic education, youth education, a good knowledge of Romania’s past, and, to this end, the restoration of the contemporary Romanian history that was falsified during the period of the communist dictatorship. For that purpose, one of the most important projects of our institution is the Sighet Summer School. Since 1998, the Civic Academy Foundation in collaboration with Konrad Adenauer Foundation, organizes each year, at the Museum of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Anticommunist Resistance the Sighet Summer School, attended by high-school students, with ages between 14 and 18 years, and, starting with 2008, by history teachers. The lecturers had been until now specialists in the history of communism from France, Germany, England, United States of America, Poland, Czech Republic, Russia, Hungary, Moldavian Republic and Romania and also dissidents and fighters against the communism from all Eastern Europe.