Site of witness and memory

If you've been to Belarus or followed the events of 2020 there, you've probably heard about Okrestina Detention Centre. So this is his prototype.
It's a tough place to be. Because it's not just a museum, it's a prison. More precisely, it's a DC, a place where prisoners were held before the trial. Earlier there was a Catholic theological seminary, but the building was confiscated by the Communists and re-equipped for their own needs, and those needs were simple - to imprison everyone, especially potential opponents of the regime.

At the entrance to the museum you will be struck by bright scarlet arches and gray walls.
Nothing intimidating yet...

The wall is a canvas of photographs of people who were killed or disappeared, persecuted for political reasons. These are not just photographs, because each of them is the grief of an entire family, the pain of their relatives and friends, the tragedy of an entire country.

Personal belongings and letters of the prisoners are expected artifacts in the exhibition room.

And then you see a booth.
A terrifying list of 20 points is written on it.
1.Beatings with a wooden club until wounds are open and flesh begins to fall out
2.The whip and wood stick
3.Piercing the flesh with burning wires
4.Use of electrical current in the ears until the loss of coscience
5.Putting salt in the open wounds
6.Immersion of naked body in freezing water
7.Food privation to death
8.Food privation for days
9.Leaving prisoners naked in cold temperatures
10.The "Vest " - a hugely painful restrictive gilet tying limbs and body
11.Dynamite to the genitals
12.Grasping breasts with pliers
13.Pushing excrements in the mouth and pushing it down with a stick 14.Hanging upside down
15.Tying to or hanging from the tree day and night
16.Long period of exposure to hot sun.
17.Tomcat inside the baggy trousers, especially to women
18.Digging one's own grave
19.Barrel of gun in the mouth
20. Attempts to rape prisoner's daughter
Here is a whole list

This is a list of the torture that was used on prisoners under the Communist regime under Enver Hoxha in this and other prisons in Albania.

This is how the necessary testimony (necessary does not mean true) was beaten out of the detainees. "Confess yourself, rat out your friends or die" - unfortunately that is all about the methods of such agencies all over the world.
Next is a long narrow corridor with numbered cells.
Some of this solitary confinement get sunlight through a small barred window, and some are just a deaf concrete box two steps long and one wide.
There is nothing else.
Only concrete.
Dampness and mold on the walls.
Sleeping on the bare floor, food - a piece of black bread and a few sips of water.
The toilet is at the end of the corridor. Prisoners took turns going to it, two minutes per person.

There were also endless interrogations.
We enter the interrogation room, i.e. the torture room.
There is a wooden pole with barbed wire in the corner for seting the pace of the conversation.
An electric generator to give the interrogator a charge of energy and determination.
A typewriter, a tape recorder to record indisputable evidence of guilt.
Maria Tuti died at age 22.
Maria worked as a school teacher and was detained among a group of 300 people for the murder of a Communist Party member. She was young and attractive, and the head of the Shkoder police department crashed on her.
He showed his sympathy in a primitive way - he tried to rape her. Maria did not let him. They put her in a sack, threw a wild cat in there, tied the sack up and beat the animal with sticks so that it became furious and pounced on the girl. The cat had done its job. Maria was taken to the hospital in a critical condition, where even her close relatives could not identify her, because the animal had tortured her so badly. She uttered her rapist's name and said she was dying free. She passed away in the hospital.
We go back to the cells. They are mostly all faceless, but some tell terrifying stories about the people held there.
It's hard to be here for a long time. I look from one corridor to the other and see a glowing "EXIT" sign.
A lifesaving exit.
We still have it.
Сreepiness and horror
send shivers
down your
spine
They didn't have it, lots of them stayed in those cells forever.
The gray walls and ceilings of the corridor are riddled with splits through which the sunlight penetrates this gloomy place.
Bright, brave people have been imprisoned here. And this light cannot be hidden in the cellars of prisons.
As I walk through the circles of red arches, I suddenly notice that they are not illuminated. They are simply painted red, and the natural sunlight falls on them and makes them so bright.
These are pools of blood of Albanians murdered by the bloodthirsty Hoxha regime, as an eternally vivid reminder that this must never happen again!
When you leave the museum, you realize that you have fulfilled the instruction hanging at the entrance: Let us respect this historic place, witness of people's suffering, by visiting it in silence.

The dead silence is louder than any words.