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Niculina Moica felt the weight of history as she pushed open the rusty iron gate to the former communist prison of Jilava, where she was detained as a teenager.
Jilava is one of 44 prisons and 72 forced labour camps set up under Romania’s communist regime (1945-1989) to jail more than 150,000 political prisoners, according to the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes.
While some still function as prisons, many of the buildings have been closed and demolished or left derelict.
“It’s a pity, because (Jilava) is a place where you can show the truth about the communist period. The way prisoners were tortured, kept in such wretched conditions, the food, the cold,” said Moica, now 80.
For years she has been fighting to have Jilava turned into a museum before the site further deteriorates, at risk of fading into oblivion.
“In every country you go to, such places can be visited. We let them fall apart,” said Moica, who heads the Romanian Association of Former Political Prisoners.
After years of dragging its feet, the Romanian government has recently revived plans to have five former communist prisons listed as World Heritage sites by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Originally built as a defence fortress around the capital Bucharest in the late 19th century, Jilava was later transformed into a prison and became one of the most notoriously crowded jails for political prisoners between 1948 and 1964.
Inmates were kept in dark and damp cells as deep as 10m (33 feet) underground.
“It felt like entering a hole,” Moica said, recalling the Christmas Eve when, aged 16, she arrived at Jilava in the rain. “I thought those guys were going to shoot me.”
Convicted in 1959 for joining an anti-communist organisation, Moica spent five years behind bars, including several months at Jilava, about 10km (six miles) outside Bucharest.
So far only two former communist prisons in Romania have been converted into museums with the help of private funds.
One of them is Pitesti, a two-hour drive from Bucharest and among the five proposed UNESCO sites.
If they become heritage sites then “no one can dispute the importance of these places”, said Maria Axinte, 34, who initiated the project for the Pitesti Prison Memorial in 2014.
Hundreds of photographs are an enduring testament to the torture of more than 600 students at Pitesti. Some of them were later forced to become torturers themselves.
Since last year, Pitesti has been designated an historic monument and receives about 10,000 visitors every year.
Nostalgia for communism has been rising in Romania amid a persistent cost-of-living crisis. In a recent poll of 1,100 Romanians, 48.1 percent answered that the communist regime was “good for the country”, an increase of three percentage points from 10 years ago.
Dozens of Romanians also continue to celebrate the birthday of the late communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
During her occasional talks on communism at local high schools, Moica says, students sometimes tell her: “Mum used to say that life was better under communism.”
“Go ask your grandpa,” Moica replies, telling them about the “damned cell” in Jilava she still looks for during every visit.
To this day she feels the urge to shower after leaving the former prison.
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