Nikulina Moika felt the weight of history as she pushed open the rusted iron gates of Ziraba, the former communist prison where she was detained as a teenager.
According to the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes, Ziraba is a group of 44 prisons and 72 forced labor camps set up to hold more than 150,000 political prisoners under Romania's communist regime (1945-1989). This is one of them.
Some still function as prisons, but many buildings have been closed, demolished, or abandoned.
“It's a shame because (Jilaba) is a place that shows the truth about the communist era. The torture, food, cold conditions, and other deplorable conditions the prisoners were kept in,” said Moika, now 80 years old.
She has been fighting for years to turn Jiraba into a museum before it falls further into disrepair and risks disappearing into oblivion.
“You can go to any country and visit places like that. We destroyed them,” said Moica, president of the Romanian Association of Ex-Political Prisoners.
After years of drag, the Romanian government recently revived plans to list five former communist prisons as a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site.
Originally built as a defensive fortress around the capital Bucharest in the late 19th century, Jiraba was later converted into a prison and became one of the busiest prisons for political prisoners from 1948 to 1964.
Prisoners were kept in dark, damp cells 10 meters (33 feet) underground.
“It felt like walking into a hole,” Moika said, recalling the Christmas Eve she arrived in Jiraba in the rain when she was 16 years old. “I thought they were going to shoot me.”
Moika was convicted in 1959 for participating in an anti-communist organization and spent five years in prison, including several months in Jiraba, about 10 kilometers outside Bucharest.
So far, only two former communist prisons in Romania have been converted into museums with the help of private funds.
One of them is Pitesti, a two-hour drive from Bucharest and one of the five sites proposed for UNESCO's inscription.
Maria Axinte, 34, who launched the Pitesti Prison Monument project in 2014, says that once they become heritage sites, “no one can dispute the importance of these places.”
Hundreds of photographs are a lasting testament to more than 600 students at Pitesti. Some of them were later forced to become torturers themselves.
Since last year, Pitesti has been declared a historical monument and receives around 10,000 visitors each year.
Nostalgia for communism is growing in Romania as the cost of living crisis continues. A recent poll of 1,100 Romanians found that 48.1% said the communist regime was “good for the country,” an increase of 3 percentage points from 10 years ago.
Dozens of Romanians also continue to celebrate the birthday of late communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
Moika said that when she occasionally gives talks about communism at her local high school, students sometimes say to her, “You know what?
“Ask Grandpa,” Moika replied, telling him about Jiraba's “hideous cell” that he still searches for every time he visits.
She still feels the urge to take a shower after leaving her former prison.