A powerful testament to the uncanny resilience of the human spirit.
Constante relates in mesmerizing detail the eight years of solitary
confinement that she suffered in Romanian prisons after being
convicted in the Stalinist show trials of 1948. After more than
three years of "interrogations," she was tried, convicted of
treason, and sentenced to 12 years of hard labor. The hardships
that she encountered included nearly constant surveillance, extreme
cold in winter and heat during the summer, food deprivation,
beatings, the inability to meet her basic requirements for hygiene,
lack of basic medical and dental care, sleep deprivation, near
total sensory deprivation, and forced adherence to arbitrary rules
that controlled every aspect of her daily regimen ("It was
forbidden to cry...to shout...to laugh"). Despite the insanity of
her daily existence, Constante develops methods for implementing
her"silent escape" - an escape within. She fills her empty hours
with "work." She writes, in her mind, stories, poems, puppet shows,
and dramas, which she then memorizes. Her escape becomes most
tangible when she learns Morse code and is able to communicate with
those in the cells around her. Once she has learned to "listen to
the walls," she has indeed escaped from the solitude that is her
main torment, and she becomes a member of the prison community. The
facility with which Constante describes her imprisonment and her
intense awareness of the rhythms of prison life at times seem to
transport her narrative into the realm of poetry. Her images are as
strikingly clear as a painting by one of the Dutch masters, and her
words demand to be read out loud so that one can experience the
oppressive repetition created by their meter. It is rare for such
an important historical document to be rendered with such profound
artistic integrity. (Kirkus Reviews)
'I have lived, alone, in a cell, 157,852,800 seconds of solitude
and fear. Cause for screaming! They sentence me to live yet another
220,838,400 seconds! To live them or to die from them' - from "The
Silent Escape". Victim of Stalinist-era terror, Lena Constante was
arrested on trumped-up charges of 'espionage' and sentenced to
twelve years in Romanian prisons. "The Silent Escape" is the
extraordinary account of the first eight years of her incarceration
- years of solitary confinement during which she was tortured,
starved, and daily humiliated. The only woman to have endured
isolation so long in Romanian jails, Constante is also one of the
few women political prisoners to have written about her ordeal.
Unlike other more political prison diaries, this book draws us into
the practical and emotional experiences of everyday prison life.
Candidly, eloquently, Constante describes the physical and
psychological abuses that were the common lot of communist-state
political prisoners. She also recounts the particular humiliations
she suffered as a woman, including that of male guards watching her
in the bathroom. Constante survived by escaping into her mind - and
finally by discovering the 'language of the walls', which enabled
her to communicate with other female inmates. A powerful story of
totalitarianism and human endurance, this work makes an important
contribution to the literature of 'prison notebooks'.
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