The Sighet Memorial is not dedicated solely to Sighet Prison or solely to resistance and repression in communist Romania. It also commemorates the suffering of the other seven satellite countries in the so-called “communist bloc”. Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Yugoslavia, Poland and Hungary, which together with Romania made up the European communist bloc, are presented
in outline, through chronologies, montages, photographs, and key moments: the establishment of the communist system, the Stalinist terror, the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in 1956, Berlin 1953, Budapest 1956, Prague 1968, Warsaw 1970, and Gdansk 1980. The communist system could be maintained only through terror, and its history and break-up is traced step by step, from its inception, continuing with the history of the various movements for official emancipation (Yugoslavia, 1948, and Romania, 1964), and finally its collapse in 1989.
Over the course of the Museum’s evolution, to this room have been added rooms dedicated to the anti-communist resistance movements in East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and, of course, Romania.
