The harsh climate, gargantuan labor, lack of hygiene and mechanical technology rendered these camps extermination facilities.
[3] Other abuses included killing by shooting and burial alive, keeping detainees undressed and forcing them to enter waist-deep water in order to cut reeds in winter, chasing them on horseback and trampling them underfoot, forcing them to work naked and stand in freezing water for hours, binding and exposing them to mosquitoes.
Warden Ion Ficior (1960–1963) was remembered for his particular cruelty; he would keep detainees at the limit of starvation and order savage beatings for those who ate plants they harvested or missed their quotas.
[5] Initially a section of Ostrov camp, Salcia penal colony was located in Dăeni, on the left bank of the Danube.
Founded in April 1952, the detainees were forced to work in several areas: building a dike that would protect farmland from Danube flooding, crop and livestock farming, reed gathering and, most difficult, building yet another dike; the soil was shoveled out carted away by wheelbarrow, becoming increasingly difficult as they went deeper.
In one case, a dead man was placed in solitary confinement; his corpse, partially eaten by rats, was retrieved the following morning.
[6] Subsequently, the abusive methods did not stop: work sometimes lasting 12–14 hours a day, insufficient food, lack of any medical care and violent beatings increased the death rate.
In March 1956, flooding on the Danube threatened the dike, which prisoners protected for two weeks with their own bodies, in snowy, freezing weather.
German Shepherds were used as guard dogs: living in better rooms than the detainees, daily brushed, walked and fed a kilogram of meat, they were trained to knock down and maul prisoners.
This was done in order to provide workers for building dikes, cutting reeds and rushes in the Delta and growing crops.
Three subordinate sections were established at Tătaru (1956), Stână (1959) and Paradina (1963): detainees there harvested corn and wheat, cut reeds and rushes and cleared land.
Many of them were sick, over age 60, forced to work 10 hours a day in water, mud and cold, collecting 44 piles each, punished and deprived of food for not meeting the quota.
An internal investigation found that, aside from his abusive behavior (tacitly approved from higher up), he stole and sold the detainees’ food.
Another investigation carried out in August 1959 found that beatings with truncheons, wet ropes and wire-reinforced belts went on for hours on end, causing dozens of detainees to lose control of their bodily functions.
Hunger led some to eat snakes, rush bulbs, weeping willow leaves, alfalfa, and corn; many died of dysentery.
Sometimes, hungry detainees were forced to ingest 6 kilograms each of bean stew and mămăligă, leading to severe illness or death from intestinal occlusion.
In the winter of 1959–1960, with roads blocked by mud and the Danube frozen, food deliveries stopped, leading to days on end without rations; prisoners were still forced to work.
Among the more abusive wardens were Iova (1960), arrested for food theft the following year; and Petrescu (1961), who personally whipped detainees as they returned from the workday and beat and chained Adventists, who refused to work on Saturdays.
They were wakened at three in the morning, an hour later marched five to ten kilometers to their worksites, took a one-hour break at noon and left off for the day at five or six in the afternoon.
[10][11] Detainees were forced to work with crops and livestock, build dikes, homes for agricultural laborers and the Giurgeni–Vadu Oii Bridge, harvest reeds.
For the next two years, they were its only residents: Iron Guard members and men convicted of offenses such as propaganda, anti-regime agitation, illegal border crossing, calumny against the social order.
Sergeant Scarlat, a Securitate officer, was notorious for patrolling at the water's edge, armed with a two-meter bat, unhesitatingly beating slower detainees until they fainted.
Other prisoners were sent to the rice fields, where the swampy soil, cold temperatures and water parasites made conditions especially difficult.