Yep! 😦
Is it possible for these orphans to find resilience? My 33-year old kid can’t. No acceptance whatsoever for what had been done to him. No forgiveness. What we witnessed about 30 years ago in orphanages can hardly be imagined. And the word which was used to talk about these kids was atrocious: “interned”.
Later on, in 1998, I entered a small orphanage in Maramures. The same sad eyes, dressed with rags, unclean ( filthy would be the exact word) but … they were in the summer open air at least! Came to me running and said ” mama”. I had already experienced that welcome you can’t get used to. Heartbreaking and revolting!
“By 1989, when the dictator was killed, up to 20,000 had died in Romania’s children’s homes. Now criminal cases may finally be brought
They were the pictures that, for many across the world, were the defining image of the aftermath of Romania’s 1989 revolution: emaciated children clothed in rags, looking into the camera with desperate eyes amid the squalid decay of the country’s orphanages.
Christmas Day will mark 30 years since Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania’s megalomaniac, isolationist dictator, was convicted in an impromptu trial and shot dead together with his wife. His execution ended more than two decades of rule that brought poverty and misery to the majority of the country’s population.
In the three decades since his fall, only a handful of people have faced legal punishment for their roles in Ceaușescu’s repressive regime, and there have been no criminal cases over the tens of thousands of children mistreated by the regime’s inhumane network of juvenile internment institutions. Soon, however, that could change.
Prosecutors are investigating dozens of people with direct or indirect responsibility for deaths in the system, after a long inquiry by investigators from the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes, a state body tasked with looking into abuses from the communist period. Florin Soare, an investigator for the institute who spent several years gathering testimony, estimates that between 1966 and 1989 there were between 15,000 and 20,000 unnecessary deaths of children in Romania’s grim network of children’s homes, with the vast majority taking place in those set aside for disabled children.
“When we started investigating, we knew there were abuses, but we never imagined the extent of the crimes that were committed,” he said in an interview at the institute’s modest headquarters in central Bucharest. The investigators handed over the results of their work to Romanian prosecutors in 2017. The prosecution service told the Observer they are continuing to gather evidence “due to the large number of cases”. Official charges could be filed next year.
The process of bringing the crimes of the communist period to light is moving slowly. The repression is skimmed over in school classes, said Ana Blandiana, a poet who has transformed a former communist-era prison in the town of Sighet, on Romania’s border with Ukraine, into the country’s only museum of communist crimes.
Few among Ceaușescu’s inner circle were tried in the aftermath of the revolution, and attempts to bring prosecutions for specific crimes have ended in failure in all but a handful of cases. The trial of Ion Iliescu, who took over from Ceaușescu and is now 89, finally began in Bucharest last month after years of delay. He is accused of crimes against humanity for his role in the violence that continued after Ceaușescu fled. In October, a Bucharest court acquitted two former officers of the communist-era secret police, the Securitate, of crimes against humanity over the death of dissident Gheorghe Ursu, who died in detention in 1985 after being tortured by his jailers.
“The point is not to put 90-year-olds in prison, the point is to change the atmosphere of the country, to speak the truth about the period and to tell the truth in order to close this chapter,” said Blandiana.
Bucharest has no museum of communism, and the city’s history museum ends its displays in 1918, with visitors enquiring where the 20th-century section is given an irritated shake of the head by the attendants.
Orphanages are a particularly sensitive point, with many Romanians feeling that the wide publicity for the footage, and subsequent massive global adoption campaign, is a stain on the country’s reputation that is best forgotten.
The country’s orphanages began to fill up from the late 1960s, when the state decided to battle a demographic crisis by banning abortion and removing contraception from sale. Many of those in the orphanages were not actually orphans, but those whose parents felt they could not cope financially with raising a child.
The most horrific abuse took place in homes for disabled children, who were taken away from their families and institutionalised. At the age of three, disabled children would be sorted by hospital commissions into three categories: so-called “curable”, “partially curable” and “incurable”. The children who were sorted into the third category, some of whom had minor or no disabilities, were subjected to particularly brutal conditions.
Across the country, there were 26 institutions catering to the “category three” disabled children. Investigators from the institute picked three of them to investigate, and found shocking mortality levels among the children. “They didn’t die from the disabilities they had: 70% of the registered deaths were for pneumonia. They were dying of external causes that were preventable and treatable,” said Soare.
As the investigators continued, they discovered ever more horrific details. There is testimony of children suffering from frostbite, and of children literally being eaten by rats, being kept in cages or being smeared in their own faeces, said Soare.
The investigators logged 771 deaths they believed could have been prevented in the three facilities in the late 1980s, suggesting that the number across all 26 institutions over a longer period is much higher. “There is no document that proves this, but it is clear that the ultimate goal of this was an extermination campaign,” said Soare. The list of those the institute believes should be prosecuted for the deaths is classified, but includes employees directly responsible for abuse, and functionaries in the communist system.
Some of those who spent their childhoods in the facilities have mixed feelings about whether court cases are a good idea, three decades later. Florin Catanescu, a 41-year-old who was taken from his mother at birth because she was receiving psychiatric treatment at the time, grew up in a series of orphanages.
He remembers cases of ill treatment, but believes in focusing on the future, not the past. “It’s better to concentrate on positivity moving forward, and to make sure these things can’t happen again,” he said. He now runs a halfway house in the city of Braşov, providing accommodation for today’s orphanage leavers and helping them to integrate into society”.
Some have managed to come to terms with that horror:
Francette's blog 