Ceausescu’s children

Ana – Maria Ciobanu of Decat of Revista wrote about life in a Romanian orphanage from the communism era, during dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s rule, and how the system changed after the fall of communism. This text was published in Romanian in the Decat o Revista magazine. A long building with a single floor shines in the October sun across a disaffected train line. It smells clean on the inside, like paint and new furniture, and a few men are making the last checks before opening the first Centre for Professional Reconversion in Comăneşti, Bacău County. Tall fir trees overshadow the yard and the grass seems even greener next to the exterior walls’ cheerful yellow colour. Nothing here reminds of the grey Preschool that ran in this place at the beginning of the new millennium. Where there were once beds and shelves in the bedrooms, there are now offices for adults. All of the restrooms have doors, unlike the ones in the ‘80s, when only the staff restroom could be locked. The cement on which children were placed in a row, all naked, waiting to be washed with a water hose, was replaced by tiles in which you could see your reflection. A few blocks away, the grey building that used to be the School Children’s Orphanage now embeds the offices of educators and councilors who work in the area’s family-type houses. There is no trace of the caretakers who obliged undisciplined children to walk with both their hands and their feet tighten up together 500 metres all the way to the cafeteria. Imagine how your life would have looked like if you were one of the children growing up here before 1989 and you misbehaved. You would sit at the table all bound up together with your colleagues, waiting for food to be placed in front of you, staring at the metallic bowls until the others finished their food, and you would then return hungry to your bedroom. The humiliation was not always sufficient. What came next were the strikes that marked your back and would sometimes make you run all the way to the train station. You would stretch your hand out for some money, carried things for the local stores and during the night you would snuggle in the waiting room. When you got too cold or became too afraid, you would then return to the centre, where they punished you for running away. You were one of more than 100,000 children of Ceauşescu, or the way caretakers named you. They showed him to you in the paintings hanging on the walls and they told you that he was your father, the one you needed to thank for being alive. The caretakers learned all of this nonsense from the propaganda offered by Anton Makarenko, Lenin’s educational councilor (“Children found in institutions are the children of the state. Their father is the state and their mother is the entire society of peasants and workers”). You were called “Ceauşescu’s children” by foreign journalists who shared the somber image of the Romanian social protection system to the entire world once they discovered it in 1990. Since then, however, Romania went a long way: from a country in which international organisations would do humanitarian work in a desperate race to save these children, to one considered a successful model in shutting down the old regime’s institutions. 25 years later, the anniversary should be a happy one. *