The Romanian Cultural Institute and the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes in Romania with the support of the National Council for Studying the Securitate Archives, the Embassy of the Polish Republic in Romania, the Italian Cultural Institute and the Romanian Ministry of Culture and Religious Affairs are organizing during the 9 October 2007 – 19 January 2008 the itinerant exposition Reading between the lines: Echoes of the 1956 events in Romania.
Under a concept signed by historian Andrea Varga, the exposition aims to anchor the importance of the 1956 events in Romania into the collective memory considering their magnitude, the brutal repression that followed and the punishments given by the political authorities, these events follow the line of the important anticommunist movements that shook the socialist camp, together with moments such as Budapest 1956, Prague 1968 or Gdansk 1980. 24 executions, 1000 expelled students, a total of 14,000 years of convictions, a permanent change in the living of thousands of people – this is the result of the persecutions suffered by those who dared to join the Hungarian Revolution. Documents selected from different archives, photographs, movies, audio records, all integrated into an original concept, illustrate the amplitude of the persecutions enforced by the Securitate against the regime’s contestants. Beyond its educational purpose, the exposition is also a manifest for the annulment of political sentences and the rehabilitation of those who stood against the communist regime. From a legal point of view, these persons that is, former ex political convicts or people committed into psychiatric facilities are still criminals, only for having had the courage to speak and act freely. That is why this project is also an appeal to acknowledgment and action.
