The Cemetery of the Poor was originally built in the early 20th century as the last resting place for the area's poor but in the 1950s, it was used by Sighet Prison to buried their political prisoners of the Communist regime. The graves are all unmarked and often a common mass grave for many. Some inmates may have actually been buried at the old prison site in unmarked graves. These inmates may have died of a disease process or executed. The cemetery is an open meadow within a low hedge of fir trees in the shape of Romania. There is a huge white limestone Byzantine-style cross with an altar and a bell tower. Within the cemetery, there is a memorial area of over forty slate slabs, which have been inscribed with the names of deported Romanians, who died in the Soviet gulags and prisons. The cemetery is located 2.5 miles outside the city of Sighet. The Prison was built in 1897 to be used as a common jail, but with the Communist regime, students, laborers and peasants were imprisoned at the facility starting in August of 1948, and on the night between May 5 to 6, 1950, or the "Night of the Dignitaries," hundreds of dignitaries such as ministers, academics, economists, the military, historians, journalists, and politicians were imprisoned without trials for long and hard sentences. Many of these dignitaries were over the age of 60. Death certificates for the inmates were not issued between 1950 and 1955, and were incomplete for 1957, plus, the families of the dead were not notified. Prison documentation was poor; thus, nothing is known about many of the inmates except the person was sent there. Physically and psychologically, the inmates were punished by not having heat in freezing winters, unsanitary conditions for living, inadequate nutrition, deprived of adequate sleep, and being punished for even looking out a window to see daylight. By 1955, 200 prisoners had died. After the Geneva Convention in 1955 and Romania was admitted to the United Nations, conditions improved and some inmates were released, some to the local psychiatric hospital. After the prison closed in 1977, memorials at the prison and the cemetery were being built by 2000 to preserve the memory of victims, who fell during the regime of Communism in Romania.