I first entered a foster care center 10 years ago.
Since then, for about five years I was part of a small NGO working with institutionalized children, and I was always hearing from people around me: "at least it's better than before".
I very vaguely knew that "before" referred to the situation in the 90s, when Michael Jackson had helped some children in an orphanage in Bucharest. I didn't ask myself too many questions then, I was focused on how I could help the children I was working with.
Several times I also went to children with different types of disabilities, physical or psycho-social.
At that time, I was feeling pity and I felt like a guest. We came with gifts. The staff treated us well, hoping we would come the next time with our hands full.
I haven't stepped in a center since before the pandemic. In the meantime, I finished Anthropology and a research on women's menstrual experiences during the socialist period. The research was very much based on understanding the socio-political context and the effects of Decree 770 of 1966, through which the elective abortion became impossible. I then learned that one of the effects of pro-natalist policies was the population boom of 1967 and 1968, when the number of births doubled.
The same regime that promoted the family was, however, not prepared for the phenomenon of abandonment that followed the decree.
In the present, I am working in the archiving team at the Museum of Abandonment, an independent project that aims to bring to light the stories and invisible history of abandoned and institutionalized children during the communist period. A collaboration that was supposed to last 3 months turned into my daily job for the last 2 and a half years.
The first materials I have worked with were collected by the Museum's team from the former Sighetu Marmației Dorm-Hospital.
We archived coloring books received from international aid, drawings with children's fingerprints, reports for the supply of bread, candy, meat, but also textile material for straitjackets.
You may be wondering what is a dorm-hospital, whether there is any difference between an orphanage and a dorm-hospital, or between an orphanage and a cradle for children. A lot of the work of documenting the archives has been exactly that: setting straight the language of the old system.
For starters, orphanage is the popular term for institutions housing abandoned children. The term itself comes from orphan, a child who has lost one or both parents. During the communist period, the most common official names were cradle, children's home, dorm-hospital.
Let`s imagine that a child was abandoned in hospital at birth. From there he was taken to the nearest cradle, where he stayed until he was 3 years old.
Then, depending on his state of health and abilities, he would go to the Orphanage for pre-schoolers and then on to schoolers. And if he was considered 'unfit for recovery', from the age of 3, he went straight to a dorm-hospital, where he had no access to education. Practically, he was institutionalized for life.
Although they needed medical care and recuperation, most of the children in these homes spent their time in metal beds, sometimes tied up and immobilized. Many saw the daylight, trees and birds only through the window bars from that point on. They were fed milk or diluted soups. The mattresses were soaked with urine and feces. Flies swarmed around them. The bathrooms were clogged. The heating system was either overwhelmed or broken. They did not have any toys. Sometimes they didn`t even have clothes, some were not even used to wearing them. They were swinging, kicking, harming themselves due to the lack of affection.
They didn't know what a hug was.
According to a 1991 study, there were more than 700 childcare institutions in Romania, but a list of their names doesn’t exist. Cradles, children's homes, dorm-hospital homes - they were all overcrowded. We estimate that over 50 years, at least half a million children were abandoned, but the communist state didn't keep statistics on them either.
Many of the children who entered the system never got out.
When I was researching for the Abandonment Map, the first database mapping communist care institutions, I learned about the mass graves, where children who died were dumped.
Other homes had cemeteries nearby, or even in their courtyards, such as the Ungureni Dorm-Hospital for Minors with Unrecoverable Disabilities, in Bacău County, or the Cighid Dorm-Hospital, in Bihor - this is one of the few that also has a memorial cross commemorating those who died there.
At a certain point we found in the archive a photo of some little children sitting on a blanket, in the sun, at a funeral in the courtyard of an institution.
One of the counties for which we lack a lot of information is actually Brasov. While documenting the Children's Cradle No. 1 in Brasov, I met Alina Beteringhe, co-founder of the Museum of the Memories of Communism in your city.
I only knew that the cradle was on Apullum Street. Alina told me she lived just a few blocks away. She avoided passing by because there was always howling on the other side of the fence. She told me that on holidays, some neighbors took the children to their houses or baptized them in secret in a house that had become to function as a church.
And also in Brasov county, in Timișul de Sus, there was the Barza Mica Dorm-Hospital Home, established in 1979, with a capacity of 150 places. I found some information about it in the Free Youngsters newspaper in September 1990. I quote:
"By 1987, the radio "Free Europe" revealed to the whole world the systematic extermination of handicapped children hospitalized in the hospital for the irrecoverable in Timișul de Sus. The day after the broadcast was aired, the entire Brasov County Security Service, accompanied by the public prosecutor's office and party organs, began an investigation using the well-known means to find out through whom had "Free Europe" discovered these "state secrets".
Nothing could be found tho, but for stopping the leak of information a measure was ordered which, if it were not frightening, might seem ridiculous: the construction of a higher fence to prevent anyone from seeing what was going on inside
And about those who were in the dorms it was said:
"Most of those hospitalized at Timis are unwanted children, failed abortion attempts, or come from families of alcoholics. The most common diagnosis is encephalopathy, sometimes accompanied by tetraparesis, which means that these children have never spoken and probably never will, cannot walk, cannot eat with their own hands and cannot defecate by themselves.
All of them have been here since they were three years old, the age at which the children's cradle prepared their forms to send them into this endless tunnel from which they will only come out in a coffin." I end the quote here.
Most likely, there's at least one person in this room who has a connection to a former institution: you either know someone who was there, you either lived a few blocks from it, you had classmates at school who came from one, you have relatives who worked in the system or volunteered and so on.
Perhaps one of the most important lessons I've learned is to replace pity with empathy, active listening and understanding. Pity means power: you position yourself as being superior to the one in front of you, and that often reinforces stigma and discrimination.
I have gone through thousands of photos of children piled up in wards, filthy with vomit or feces, squeezed, but now I no longer feel pity. I feel a lot of injustice, for those who were in the system and those who remained in the system.
