VALENTIN CRISTEA , an 83-year-old engineer living in the tiny Romanian town of Comarnic, will never forget a day more than 55 years ago. On February 8th 1956, he was arrested by the Securitate, Romania’s notorious secret police, because he was accused of links with an anti-Communist resistance group. He was sentenced to five years in prison for disclosure of state secrets and jailed at the Râmnicu Sărat prison. After the Communists came to power in 1945 some of the country’s most prominent politicians, intellectuals and other members of the elite were tortured, beaten and isolated at Râmnicu Sărat. Some of them, such as Ion Mihalache, the leader of the Peasant Party, who was denied medical care and was frequently beaten, died in prison. Others, such as Ion Diaconescu and Corneliu Coposu, lived in horrific conditions and isolation. The prison’s terror methods included giving prisoners rotten food or forcing them to eat excrements.

Mr Cristea was once punished with isolation because he knocked on the wall, trying to use the Morse code, to communicate with other prisoners. “They took the mattress and the pillow out and I was left alone in the cell only with a metal bed, which I wasn’t allowed to touch during the day anyway”, he recalled in an interview conducted this year by a Romanian committee investigating crimes committed by the Communist establishment. “In the first two days I was only given a bowl of warm water and a piece of bread. I was given food again only on the third day”, he added.

Alexandru Vişinescu (pictured), who ran Râmnicu Sărat from 1956 to 1963, is one of the gulag commanders recently exposed by The Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile. The committee investigating his actions asked Romania’s general prosecutor to bring charges of aggravated murder against Mr Vişinescu related to the death of six political prisoners. Investigators plan to hand prosecutors 35 files with similar cases in the following months.

Speaking to the media near his home in central Bucharest, Mr Vişinescu, who is today 87, rejected the claims, arguing that “he only did his job”. He even cursed the journalists and tried to hit a cameraman before entering the building.

Despite the public pressure, Mr Vişinescu’s chances to face a trial and be convicted are very small. Andrei Muraru, who runs the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile, doesn’t have too much hope that Mr Vişinescu will be brought to justice. “The general prosecutor does not show any willingness to cooperate. They never asked us anything,” said Mr Muraru. “We don’t know what is going on there. Everything is like a locked door. Can we open it or not?”, he wondered, referring to the way in which the general prosecutor handled similar cases filed in the past.

Ion Vasilache, the head of the military prosecutor's offices department, the institution subordinated to the general prosecutor in charge of handling the Institute’s request, told our correspondent that nobody asked him about such cases since 2009. He said the institution he runs declined them in the past because it was no longer competent to solve them, due to a change of legislation in the recent years.

“Regarding Mr Vişinescu’s case, it is necessary to check first if the period of prescription for the accusations he faces has expired in the meantime. If he is accused of something he committed in 1956, the period of prescription probably expired 15 years after that”, he added. However, according to the document the Institute has given to the prosecutors, obtained by our correspondent, the prescription period for the crimes Mr Vişinescu is accused of has not yet expired, which means that he could still be prosecuted.

Mr Vişinescu could be Romania’s first gulag commander convicted for his acts. However, some doubt Mr Vasilache’s willingness to solve cases related to the Communist regime. One of them is Teodor Mărieş, the head of the “21 December” Association representing the people who fought during the 1989 Revolution. He publicly accused Mr Vasilache of being one of those responsible for hushing up the cases related to the 1989 Revolution. The European Court of Human Rights condemned Romania in 2011 for the way it handled the investigations into the army's repression in 1989.

Mr Vasilache is not the only controversial figure to hold a central position in the judicial system. After the 1989 Revolution, many other members of the old guard have remained in power and put pressure on the judicial institutions to prevent the investigation into cases related to the Communist regime. Traian Băsescu, the president, condemned he Communist dictatorship that ruled the country for more than four decades for the first time in 2006 describing it as “illegitimate and criminal”.

Romania had more than a half a million political prisoners during the Communists’ rule. More than 100,000 died in prison. Many of those responsible for these crimes died as free men or are still alive, carrying the shame of an entire nation on their shoulders.