Danube-Black Sea Canal labor camps

The Danube–Black Sea Canal (Romanian: Canalul Dunăre – Marea Neagră) is a canal in Romania, which runs from Cernavodă, on the Danube, to Constanța (southern arm, as main branch), and to Năvodari (northern arm), on the Black Sea.

The Canal was notorious as the site of labor camps in 1950s Communist Romania, when, at any given time, several tens of thousands political prisoners worked on its excavation. The total number of people used as a workforce for the entire period is unknown, as is the number of people who died in the construction.

Creation of the camps
The decision to build the Danube – Black Sea Canal was taken on May 25, 1949 by the Politburo of the Romanian Workers' Party and the Petru Groza executive. The document specified: "in accordance with art[icle] 72 of the Constitution of the People's Republic of Romania, the Council of Ministers decides: art[icle] – preparatory work on the Danube – Black Sea Canal to begin."

A version of events, supported on one occasion by the Romanian leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and made popular through the literary works of Marin Preda, credited Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin with the idea for the Canal – a project which was supposedly based on the Gulag (Communist leader Ana Pauker, who, like her collaborator Vasile Luca, opposed the project, told her family that Stalin personally "proposed" the Canal in late 1948). The legal framework for unfree labor was set up in 1950, when a decree passed by the Great National Assembly introduced it as a measure for the "reeducation of hostile elements", and when the new Labor Code allowed the executive to requisition workforce for various political purposes. In its original form, the project was meant to result in the third-largest canal ever built (after the Panama and the Suez Canals).

In October 1949, the authorities established a General Directorate to oversee both the works and the penal facilities, answering directly to the national leadership. Its first head was the engineer Gheorghe Hossu, replaced in 1951 by Meyer Grünberg, in turn replaced by Vasile Posteucă (who held the position in 1952–1953). According to historian Adrian Cioroianu, all three were insufficiently trained for the task they were required to accomplish. By 1952, the Directorate came under the direct supervision of the Internal Affairs Ministry, and the Securitate was allowed direct intervention on the construction site.

Forced labor and repression
Prison camps sprang up all along the projected canal route in the summer of 1949 and were quickly filled with political prisoners brought from jails from throughout the country. These first arrivals were soon joined by newly arrested people who were sent to the canal in ever increasing numbers. By 1950 the forced labor camps set up along the length of the planned canal were filled to capacity; that year alone, 40,000 prisoners were held in those camps. By 1953, the number of prisoners had swelled to 60,000 (other sources indicate 100,000 or 40,000 for the entire period). British historian and New York University professor Tony Judt claims in his book, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, as recorded in a 2005 review: "At the time, an estimated 1 million Romanians were imprisoned in dire conditions or engaged in often deadly slave labor, digging out the Danube – Black Sea Canal."

The construction effort surpassed the resources available to the Romanian economy in the 1950s. The canal was assigned inferior machinery, part of which had already been used on the Soviet Volga-Don Canal, and building had to rely on primitive techniques (most work appears to have been carried out using shovels and pickaxes, which was especially hard in the rocky terrain of Northern Dobruja). Detainees were allocated to brigades, usually run by common criminals – encouraged to use violence against their subordinates. In parallel, the region's industrialization, destined to assist in the building effort, was never accomplished.

Sums allocated for prisoner health, hygiene and nutrition declined dramatically over the years. Food rations were kept to a minimum, and prisoners would often resort to hunting mice and other small animals, or even consuming grass in an attempt to supplement their diet.

The prisoners comprised dispossessed farmers who had attempted to resist collectivization, former activists of the National Peasants' Party, the National Liberal Party, the Romanian Social Democratic Party, and the fascist Iron Guard, Zionist Jews, as well as Orthodox and Catholic priests. The canal was referred to as the "graveyard of the Romanian bourgeoisie" by the Communist authorities, and the physical elimination of undesirable social classes was one of its most significant goals.

One estimate places at over 200,000 the number of people who died as a result of exposure, unsafe equipment, malnutrition, accidents, tuberculosis and other diseases, over-work, etc., of those working on the project between 1949 to 1953. More conservative estimates place the number at "considerably in excess of 10,000". As such, the project became known as The Death Canal (Canalul Morții). It has also been called "a cloaca of immense human suffering and mortality".

In parallel, authorities left aside sectors of employment for skilled workers – kept in strict isolation from all others, they were attracted to the site with exceptional salaries (over 5,000 lei per month), as well as for young people drafted in the Romanian Army and whose files indicated "unhealthy origins" (a middle-class family background). Their numbers fluctuated greatly (regular employees went from 13,200 in 1950 to 15,000 in 1951, to as little as 7,000 in early 1952, and again to 12,500 later in that year). At the same time, facilities meant to accommodate the projected influx of labor (including homes available on credit) were never actually completed. This was overlooked by the propaganda machine, which instead furnished Stakhanovite stories, according to which work quotas were surpassed by as much as 170%. Authorities also made the claim that the construction site was offering training to previously unskilled workers (as many as 10,000 in one official communiqué).

On July 18, 1953, the project came to a discreet halt, all work being suspended for another 23 years  (according to some sources, the closure had been ordered by Stalin himself, as early as 1952). The canal camps remained in existence for another year, and their prisoners progressively relocated, to similar conditions at other work sites in Northern Dobruja. Penal facilities on the canal site were shut down in mid-1954.

Inmates of the labor camps

 * Arsenie Boca
 * Matei Boilă
 * Barbu Brezianu
 * George Matei Cantacuzino
 * Ion Caraion
 * Ion Cârja
 * Andrei Ciurunga
 * Corneliu Coposu
 * Gheorghe Cristescu
 * Constantin Galeriu
 * Șerban Ghica
 * Pyotr Leshchenko
 * Ovidiu Papadima
 * Aurel Popa
 * Pavel Popa
 * Ștefan Radof
 * Toma Spătaru
 * Richard Wurmbrand
 * Sabina Wurmbrand