The Silent Escape: Three Thousand Days in Romanian Prisons / Edition 1

by Lena Constante, Franklin Philip, Gail Kligman

Overview

Winner, 1992 Association des Ecrivains de Langue Française Prix Européen

"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."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520082090
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	04/07/1995
Series:	Society and Culture in East-Central Europe , #9
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	257
Product dimensions:	(w) x (h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Lena Constante (1909-2005) was a Romanian artist, essayist, and memoirist. She won the Association des Ecrivains de Langue Française's 1992 Prix Européen for this book's French edition. Franklin Philip is a freelance translator living in Boston. Gail Kligman is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Editorial Reviews

"Constante has written a beautiful book about human endurance painfully learned; above all, it is a testament to the power of poetry to free the human spirit even when the physical body is suffering cold, hunger, and cruel degradation." 

Women's Review of Books

"Constante's story vividly captures the prisoner's desperate struggle to hang onto her sanity and humanity and the remarkable victory when she and other women prisoners learned to communicate through "the language of the walls." A moving contribution to the literature of political imprisonment."

Booklist

Romanian artist Constante and her companion, Harry Brauner, an ethnomusicologist, were caught in the dragnet for the show trial of Romanian Minister of Justice Lucretiu Patrascanu in 1954. Patrascanu was convicted of treason and executed; Constante was sentenced to 12 years' imprisonment-as was Brauner-with five years deducted for the period she was detained while awaiting trial. In this expressive, desolate memoir, she recreates the test to her spirit of the solitary confinement she endured for seven years: "For 576,000 minutes I was subjected to this assault... 288,000 times," she writes of the surveillance at the peephole of her cell. After her conviction, prison became marginally more endurable when she mastered the technique of "talking" to other prisoners-23 taps on the wall, for example, conveyed the letter w. At the end of this volume, Constante is moved into a communal cell-her experiences in which, she says, she will recount in another book. She also tells us that she was released in 1961 and exonerated in 1968.

Publishers Weekly - Cahners\\Publishers_Weekly

Romanian artist Constante and her companion, Harry Brauner, an ethnomusicologist, were caught in the dragnet for the show trial of Romanian Minister of Justice Lucretiu Patrascanu in 1954. Patrascanu was convicted of treason and executed; Constante was sentenced to l2 years' imprisonment-as was Brauner-with five years deducted for the period she was detained while awaiting trial. In this expressive, desolate memoir, she recreates the test to her spirit of the solitary confinement she endured for seven years: ``For 576,000 minutes I was subjected to this assault... 288,000 times,'' she writes of the surveillance at the peephole of her cell. After her conviction, prison became marginally more endurable when she mastered the technique of ``talking'' to other prisoners-23 taps on the wall, for example, conveyed the letter w. At the end of this volume, Constante is moved into a communal cell-her experiences in which, she says, she will recount in another book. She also tells us that she was released in 1961 and exonerated in 1968. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Constante, an artist convicted of espionage in 1954, endured 12 years in prison in Romania. The first eight years, which she spent in solitary confinement, are the subject of this powerful and terrifying book. Constante re-creates the rituals of everyday life in prison and the brutal interrogation methods, offering gripping descriptions of physical and psychological pain. During her confinement, Constante kept her mind active by memorizing artistic compositions and learning the "language of the walls" to communicate with other prisoners. She also became engaged in intense solidarity with the other women in prison, which bolstered her will to survive. This is an important contribution to the literature of the Stalinist period in Eastern Europe, to prison narratives (joining the works of Arthur Koestler, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Evgenia Ginzburg), and to the literature of the human spirit. Highly recommended for all libraries.-Thomas Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib., Lancaster, Pa.

Library Journal

In 1945 in Bucharest, Constante worked with the wife of Romania's minister of justice, Lucretiu Patrascanu, to set up a puppet theater; her ethnomusicologist companion (years later, her husband) Harry Brauner won support from Patrascanu for organizing a folklore institute in the Romanian capital. When the Stalinist show trials came, those activities qualified Constante and Brauner as conspirators: they received long prison sentences, and Minister Patrascanu himself was executed for "espionage." For the eight years (195057) recalled in this memoir, Constante lived in solitary confinement; she served an additional four years, returned to Bucharest in the mid-sixties, and was "rehabilitated" in 1968 by the Ceausescu government. The Silent Escape is a wrenching narrative of endless hours and days and weeks of physical and psychological abuse, of isolation and, somehow, endurance. Constante's story vividly captures the prisoner's desperate struggle to hang onto her sanity and humanity and the remarkable victory when she and other women prisoners learned to communicate through "the language of the walls." A moving contribution to the literature of political imprisonment; winner, in its French edition, of the 1992 Prix Europeen.

Mary Carroll