I grew up near a girls' children's home in Bucharest and for a long time I didn't understand why they all had short haircuts and why they were all walking in the morning to a school named “special”. Nor why in the afternoons I saw them on the curb of the Gemeni square, one on top of the other, swaying obsessively.
I had no idea that in those '90s over 100,000 children in Romania were growing up like that. Nor did I know that for the rest of the world the image of our country was closely linked to the tragedy of abandoned children, especially because of the 1966 pronatalist decree.
"Ceausescu's orphans" were on the lips of the West, and truckloads of aid and thousands of foreigners eager to help - or adopt - were crossing our borders. We didn't have cable TV at home, so I made no connection between the children's home next door and Romania's international image.
Today, I'm a journalist and I research the history of children's institutionalization for the independent project Museum of Abandonment. My memories take a completely different meaning and depth.
One winter in elementary school, my parents sent me to the non-stop that was right next to the children's home.
I had a blue wool hat from which I got itches. It was the same shade of blue as the girls' uniforms. When I was about to pay for the groceries, the cashier told me in a disgusted tone of voice to also give her the "debt". I whispered that I didn't know what she was talking about and I was also a very shy child. "Aren't you from the Lizuci dorm? Stop fooling me! You always do that!" she said. I started crying and ran straight home to the mirror. Did I look like the girls in the blue uniform? Did the cashier know that I too was rocking myself to sleep?!
Because we were neighbors, in middle school I got close to some of the girls. My mom would help them with money or food, and they would call me at the gate to give me some of the things they got from the "helpers". They'd talk about how they'd only have parties when the foreigners came with trucks, and then they'd start fighting to get to keep something from the packages. I was ashamed to take from those things, but they had fought for them. So I used to collect in a drawer little bags or teddy bears on which I would write big with the marker "Dincă", "Ionescu".
But the girls from Lizuca gave me something even more precious in those years: security. At that beginning of year 2000, at every step you were hearing gross remarks or you ended up being touched. I often sat with them on the curb at the market, so that people I feared would pass by. In this kind of day I asked Georgiana why her arms were marked. "Revenge," she replied. When she didn't know what to do with all the pain, she'd cut herself with a razor.
When we started our teenage years, the rocking at the curb became more and more intense, and the bags of aurolac - more and more present. Then syringes. Then babies that they conceived and carried down the street, and so began a new cycle of abandonment.
Years later, I met a few of them again in the area of the North Station canals. Today I don't know if they're still alive.
I wish I hadn't been embarrassed when the cashier thought I was a Lizuca. Not to be part of the huge archipelago of "protective" institutions we all grew up next to.
Now, as I try to reconstruct their history for a Map of Abandonment, I know that such institutions were in every city in the country. In Romania we had over 700 institutions in which lived, we estimate, because nobody knows, half a million of children in about 50 years.
At the Museum of Abandonment, we place on a digital map each of these swings, children's homes and hospital-homes. We link their addresses with press archives, photos from NGOs and volunteers, sometimes old phone books or testimonials we can collect.
Some of the children with disabilities died by the thousands in hospital-homes, which often had a cemetery nearby. Under communism they were called "unrecoverable", with no chance of ever leading an independent life, whether they were physically, intellectually or hearing impaired.
And yet, some of the unrecovered today live independently or in some NGO’s family-type housing. They have friends, hobbies and a dignified life. Some were adopted in the 1990s and have jobs, write books and make movies about their experience. Others were moved after their 18th birthday into adult institutions and never got out. Of those who died in the dormitories, many are in mass graves.
The Institute for the Investigation of Crimes of Communism has filed complaints with the prosecutor's office about the inhuman treatment and death of more than 400 children in the Plătărești children's home, more than 300 in Siret, and more than 700 in Cighid, Păstrăveni and Sighet.
So far, no one has been punished, but investigations are continuing and reveal what the Institute calls "protection through extermination".
The Museum of Abandonment’s archive is a merry-go-round that takes you from photos of harrowing suffering, to pint-sized straitjackets in a small size but also tiny remnants of the 90s pop culture.
One of the most fascinating artifacts I found was a pink paper that also contains a glimpse into the history of the Ecaterina Cradle, the one near the Arc de Triomphe that was also visited by Michael Jackson in 1992.
It was the largest cradle in Bucharest: it housed as many as 500 children between the ages of 0 and 3 and had been functioning since 1897.
The pink paper is a list of donations to the Romanian Angel Appeal organization, in dozens of different currencies, collected behind the scenes of the Dangerous world tour, from musicians, dancers, sound artists: $3,929, 889 lira, 460 lei, 28 marks, 27 forints, 21 Czech crowns.
Beyond pop culture, this pink flyer is proof that, not so long ago, the whole world had their eyes on Romania's abandoned children. As we reformed the protection system, we rushed to close this shameful chapter. But there are survivors and witnesses of those times who still carry the nightmares.
Remembrance is a form of restorative justice, but it cannot bring about healing unless the state officially takes responsibility for all these wrongs. And owning up would mean investigating the long-term consequences of that child protection system; it would mean official apologies and legislative measures to make life easier for those who experienced it.
In recent years, some survivors, as well as European initiatives, have been trying to push through the Romanian Parliament a legislative project that would officially recognize the suffering of all those who lived in an old-style protective institution.
Only then could we also have a public conversation about compensatory measures, such as psychological counseling, allowances, incentives for employers, free transportation, treatment for those who left the system with health problems.
Earlier this year, the Council of Europe called its member states to build mechanisms for public apologies, measures for restoring and memorializing the suffering of the victims.
Some countries, such as Switzerland, Ireland, Norway, Switzerland, the UK, have already done this and have even offered financial reparations to survivors of abuse in their religious and welfare institutions.
In our country, the Senate rejected the legislative proposal to grant rights to people who lived in children's homes. The initiative is now in the Chamber of Deputies and has been stalled since spring.
The road to recognition and restorative justice may be long and arduous from the state's perspective, but survivors are certainly waiting. One, for example, suggested that the question, "Did you grow up in a children's home?" be removed from employment psychological sheets.
Another wrote us that he would like a lifetime allowance for those who still carry the trauma of that past. I will quote him anonymously, with his permission: "It is just like the former political prisoners during the communist period, who were treated inhumanely. We were innocent children who did nothing wrong to society."
