Growing up in Canada, I had a Romanian immigrant’s relentless pragmatism, having been raised to think that medicine and law were the only acceptable career options in life. Although I was a bookish teenager, I never thought I could study literature or history or philosophy.

At the University of Toronto I fell in love, against my better judgment, with English literature, and switched majors. But I couldn’t help but feel that the humanities were still somewhat superfluous. This opinion began to change the summer when I was 20 years old. In search of my roots, I went to Bucharest and worked at the Canadian embassy there. That job was the beginning of a practical education in the importance of the humanities.

I learned, for example, how much depends on a word. One of my tasks was to translate interviews with Romanians who wanted to marry Canadians. The immigration agent needed to know if the couple was in love or if the relationship was faked. It was essential that I be scrupulous, adding nothing and taking nothing away. Liars, I learned, often make up romantic stories about their betrothed, but cannot bring themselves to say “love.” One woman was allowed to emigrate because, pressed to explain why she wanted to marry her middle-aged, average-looking fiancé, she said merely that he was a good man and she loved him.

The more important lesson, though, I learned secondhand. One day, my co-worker told me the story of her in-laws’ marriage. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the communist government of Romania carried out a massive program of re-education and extermination of the country’s cultural elites. Artists, intellectuals, and priests were put in political prisons and work camps. In a notorious experiment at the Pitești prison, prisoners —many of them university students in the humanities — were “re-educated;”. Guards beat and subjected them to extreme cold and hunger. They were made to eat their own excrement and torture each other.

My colleague’s father-in-law, a literature student, was one such prisoner. To maintain his sanity, the young man turned to his education. He knew French, his cellmate knew English, so they taught one another their foreign languages. After his release, the student was forced to work in a factory, where he met a woman who had also studied literature and been imprisoned. Neither could marry people with clean records, so they married each other. Their apartment in Bucharest became a salon for artists and writers. This man, who had learned English in a jail cell, ultimately became a literary translator of English poetry.

When I heard this story, I understood that the stereotype of the useless liberal arts was a lie. If the study of literature or history were really that pointless, a government trying to control the minds of its subjects would not go to the trouble of putting humanities students and professors in jail. For educated prisoners, the love of language, art, and scholarship was a lifeline, sometimes the only thread tying them to their shredded sense of humanity. Nothing could be more practical.

Years later, when a new wave of cutbacks in higher education led to reports of another humanities “crisis,” I decided to find out how much of the oral history I heard at the embassy had been written down. I read a dozen Romanian prison memoirs, all of them published after the 1989 revolution. Each one testified to the power of the liberal arts to help individuals maintain sanity in conditions designed to destroy them.

The memoirs taught me how common it was for prisoners to teach each other languages. Dan Brătianu and his fellow prisoners were tormented by lice, for which they received DDT in glass bottles, so they covered the bottles in spit, rubbed them with soap, and sprinkled the DDT on top. They could scratch up to four hundred words on this makeshift writing surface, which they used to teach each other foreign vocabulary.

Many prisoners survived by recalling poetry they had learned in school or by writing their own. Prisoners formed study groups, recalling the plots of novels and teaching each other history from memory. Forced into a program of “re-education,” they created their own university instead.

The experiences of these political prisoners reveal what the attack on the humanities really is. It is an attack on the ability to think, criticize, and endure in crisis, and its virulence betrays how vital the liberal arts are. The political rhetoric against the humanities exposes what is most important in our education, even as it attempts to destroy it.

Irina Dumitrescu teaches medieval literature at the University of Bonn and writes about food, immigration, and dance. She is the editor of Rumba Under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi, a collection of essays and poems on the humanities in times of crisis.

This article was written for Zocalo Public Square.