[2] As depicted by memoirist Ion Ioanid, the three main adversities faced by prisoners were hunger, cold, and damp.
Barred from receiving food packages from their families, they were fed three weak soups per day, along with a piece of bread.
Prisoners, allotted thin sheets, found sleep a torture, trembling and nearly losing fingers and toes to hypothermia.
One of the wardens treated the prison as a personal thief, stealing significant amounts of food for the hogs on his farm.
Conditions relaxed slightly in the mid-1950s, during a period of De-Stalinization, but suddenly worsened during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, when there was a fear that the revolutionaries, if successful, would come and free the prisoners.
Other people incarcerated at Oradea included Sorin Bottez, Ovidiu Cotruș, Gheorghe Flondor, and Iuliu Hirțea.