Prior to the communist regime, the prison was for common criminals with life terms, forced to work in the nearby salt mine.
Although many of the guards were locals, they did not dare to discuss what happened inside the walls or about the cart carrying dead prisoners to the cemetery at night, to be buried in unmarked graves.
[2] The poet and writer Vasile Militaru [ro], a good friend of the composer George Enescu, arrived at Ocnele Mari at the age of 74, after receiving a 32-year sentence for conspiring against the social order and possession of prohibited publications; he died in July 1959, after 18 days of detention.
[4] Petre Pandrea, imprisoned there from December 1948 to March 1952, recalled the perennial problem of spoiled, insufficient food, augmented by overcrowding.
Solitary confinement was carried out inside the white tower at the entrance, in dirty, smelly, suffocating, mouse-infested cells.
[2] Prisoners would catch linden leaves blown into their cells by the wind, chewing one per day in an effort to ward off the very common ailments of scurvy, vitamin deficiency and tooth decay.
Medical visits were purely formal, prisoners were banned from receiving medicines from their families, and imprisoned doctors often had to operate with scissors or blades reddened in the fire.
Later, they received even less food; rations were constantly reduced until many of the inmates began to die from extreme anemia and chronic diseases.
According to Pandrea's recollection, the prisoners called the new arrivals “Makarenko teams”, showing they understood the Soviet origin of what was unfolding.
Petre Țuțea, Mihail Manoilescu, Virgil Solomon, and Ion Victor Vojen threatened to commit suicide en masse unless the torture.
The experiment was abandoned: total isolation could not be maintained like in Pitești, and fearing that the atrocities would be heard about, the Interior Ministry stopped the unmaskings.
[2] A series of significant figures of the Romanian intelligentsia and simple people, linked to the anti-communist struggle, were exterminated at Ocnele Mari and buried anonymously in the Bozeasca Cemetery.
The penitentiary remains as one of the harshest detention centers in the history of Romania, where the unbearable conditions contributed decisively to the mental and physical destruction of the prisoner.