Belene, Bulgaria - Gone now are the barracks, the sadistic guards and the barbed wire. Just one remaining watchtower and a plaque show that this marshy nature reserve on a river island in Bulgaria was once a place of misery.
But now, Belene's few remaining survivors want to create a museum to remind people of the suffering of the thousands of inmates inside communist-era Bulgaria's most notorious forced labour camp.
"The idea is to set up a museum like in Buchenwald or the other Nazi camps (in Germany)," said Vladimir Gerasimov, a member of a committee organising annual visits with former inmates as guides.
"The barracks must be reconstructed and we are currently gathering objects that belonged to the detainees, their letters or written memoirs," he told AFP.
Between 1944 and 1962 some 23,500 people including 2,100 women were incarcerated in Bulgaria's 45 labour camps, built to "re-educate" the "enemies of the people" as in Russia's Gulag system.
Like in the Soviet Union or other countries behind the Iron Curtain, an unknown number died in back-breaking manual work, malnourished and living like sardines in horrendous conditions.
Many were ordinary people, arrested by the secret police or denounced by their neighbours and friends for their "bourgeois" upbringings or speaking out of turn.
Belene, situated on an island on the River Danube, was Bulgaria's most infamous, its very name striking fear into people's hearts. Survivors say hundreds died here, if not thousands.
Around 3,000 men were crammed into the flimsy barracks, roasting and teaming with mosquitoes in the humid summer, draughty, leaky and freezing in the winter.
"Hunger, torture and labour -- that's what life here looked like," says Vande Vandev, 80, held prisoner in this "work education centre" as the communist regime called it.
As the son of the head of a banned party, Vandev was brought here in a cattle wagon in 1959 aged 24. He is one of a dwindling group of only 50 survivors, all now in their 80s or 90s.
"When we arrived on the island, they pushed us in the swamps and beat us," he recalls. "The guards called us 'skunks'."
"The guards had fun shooting at us at every occasion. The 're-education' consisted of regular beatings with batons or whips. The wounds festered. People hanged themselves with despair."
AFP
