Istoria din memorie. Încercări de istorie orală

The cohabitation with the other political prisoners as an extended family opened new horizons in his motivation to explore the forms of repression, violent at the beginning, then later more refined, such as the "peaceful" methods of blackmail and threat, or maintaining a climate of fear and psychological terror."2 Oral history is considered to be "a branch of the historiography discourse" that has been exploited in the last decades based on a certain methodology and that has a series of autonomous research subjects (the history of industrialisation and its consequences in the evolution of the lives and health of workers, the study of the marginalised individual in industrialised societies, emigration and emigrants, social invalidity, the history of orphan children, the way in which the individual relates to the re-institution of democracy, the study of the Holocaust, the reconstruction of the post-apartheid life, natural disasters, the economical crises and the great tragedies, the relation between biography and history, the landscape and the environment, focused on the relation between place - memory - identity)."3 Doru Radosav cites and explains multiple causes, that may be: connected to cultural identity ("memory entails particularity and diversity" in the context in which the hegemonic historiography cultural discourse is overridden and the cultural "centre" and "peripheries" are both asserted as equal cultural fields), ethical (drawing on memory in order to reconstruct the great tragedies of the 20th century - fascism, Nazism, the Holocaust, the Gulag, or understood as a "veteran" memory - the memory of the years on the front), epistemological (the use of testimonies in historiography leads to an expansion of historical knowledge, as well as a rediscovery of humanity, individual sensibility given by the uniqueness of each life, a practice that ensures the reproduction of family, traditional, cultural and identity values), ideological (after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, "memory was discharged," a phenomenon which, in the context of a European unification, was associated with a memory transfer manifested as "a combustion of the national feeling" projected by sports competitions and commemorations) and pragmatic (the technology acquisitions, the audio and video recordings created a new type of memory that is "fixed, conserved with maximum accuracy... and it can provide a generous accessibility."5 The history of communism in Romania is approac