Hungarian Prisoners in the Romanian Gateway to the Soviet Camp Empire. Additions to the History of Prison Camp No. 176 in Focșani in the Light of Archival and Oral History Sources

The prison camp No. 176, in Focșani was one of the largest Soviet camps in Eastern Europe, from 1944 to 1948. From the fall of 1944 until the summer of 1946 this camp functioned as a sorting and transit camp for Hungarian, German and even Romanian prisoners, both military and civilian, who were brought in freight trains from Romania and Hungary, occupied by Red Army troops, and after sorting were loaded into cattle railway cars and transported to labor camps in the USSR. In the period after the summer of 1946, the camp also functioned for the sorting and repatriation of prisoners returned from the USSR. In this study, using Romanian and Soviet archival sources, translated into Romanian and published in Romania, as well as interviews with survivors, the authors deal with some aspects related to this camp, such as the location of the camp, the approximate number of prisoners, in the order of hundreds of thousands, the conditions of accommodation, hygiene and food, the use of prisoners by the Soviet authorities for various labor, liberation and escape attempts of some prisoners, relations between the local Romanian and Soviet authorities, on the functioning of the camp. In this study, the authors present previously unknown details and publish, for the first time, a sketch of the camp.