The Silent Escape: Three Thousand Days in Romanian Prisons: 9 (Society and Culture in East-Central Europe) - Hardcover

Constante, Lena

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520082095 ISBN 13: 9780520082090

Publisher: California University Press, 1995

Synopsis

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."

About this title

About the Author

Lena Constante, an artist and writer living in Bucharest, won the Association des Ecrivains de Langue Francaise's 1992 Prix Europeen 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.

From the Back Cover

"A heartbreaking, human document . . . that ranks comparably to Eugenia Ginzburg's In the Whirlwind and Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope."--Vladimir Tismaneanu, author of Reinventing Politics

"A superb book. Without ever lapsing into self-pity, it allows the reader to enter the nightmarishly vindictive Romanian political prison system."--Daniel Chirot, author of The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe

"A superb book. Without ever lapsing into self-pity, it allows the reader to enter the nightmarishly vindictive Romanian political prison system."--Daniel Chirot, author of The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe

Edition details

• Publisher: California University Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520082095
• ISBN 13: 9780520082090
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 257