Remembering Romania, 25 years later
In 1989, ending a year of global upheaval, a country gains freedom
WASHINGTON — If you lived it, 1989 is more than Taylor Swift’s new album. Viewed from the vantage of a quarter-century, it was a year of such faith and upheaval, such dissonance and disaster, that it feels as if it happened in ancient times, in cities of gleaming marble and many-armed gods.
If you came along later, you do not know about Tiananmen Square and the Berlin Wall and Solidarity, about the millions of ordinary people who whistled at dictators, stared down tanks, liberated dungeons, and made presidents of poets and shipwrights. Yet all of this occurred in 1989.
In a coffee house, now, in the soy-latte suburbs of Washington, are a man and a woman who, exactly 25 Christmases ago, were in Bucharest, the capital of Romania. This is a country that, if we outsiders ever think of it at all, we know as a fount of gymnasts and vampires. In December 1989, however, the citizens of this dark crypt of a nation deposed a preening murderer named Nicolae Ceausescu, and I was sent there by CBC-TV to report on their messy, mournful revolution.
“That Christmas, 25 years ago, who are you?” I ask my companion, a neighbour of ours here named Ioana Hance, née Dragoi. We are sharing our memories of what was, to her, the seminal event of her young life and what was, to me, a chilling story to cover at the end of a thrilling year.
“That Christmas, I am 16 years old, just a naive dreamer in shackles to the whole communist thing,” Ioana answers. “I am on break from studying math and physics at the best high school in Bucharest. What does a 16-year-old want? To go out with her friends. To have fun. But there is no heat in the apartment and no food on the table and nothing on TV but two hours of Ceausescu every night. We were drooling over anything that was western — the movies, the cars, the way people were civilized to each other.”
Then, suddenly — impossibly — the dictator is shouted down as he orates to the masses; he flees by helicopter but is captured in a provincial town; he is “tried” for his crimes and shot dead (with his wife) in his suit and tie on Christmas Day. I watch the execution with a platoon of stunned and elated Romanian infantrymen whose commander asks us if we might have brought a banana or an orange. (For the coal-blackened minions of Ceausescu’s Romania, fresh fruit was a Hope Diamond beyond hope. He also denied them contraception, a free press, exit visas, and the church.)
As this transpires, Ioana Dragoi is living with her grandfather, a judge in Ceausescu’s kangaroo courts who lowers the heavy wooden blinds and puts blankets over the telephone so the secret police cannot rat him out as he tunes to the U.S. government’s Radio Free Europe to find out what is going on in his own city.
“I want to join the demonstrations,” Ioana remembers. “But my grandfather says, ‘I’m locking the door. There is a lot of shooting but we don’t know who is shooting. Stay away from the windows. In communism, this kind of thing never ends well for anybody.’”
Anchoring those Romanian-language broadcasts on Radio Free Europe is a man named Mircea Carp who ends each bulletin with the words “sa auzim numai de bine” — “let’s hope for the best.” Completely by chance, as my crew and I make our way toward Bucharest, we meet broadcaster Carp’s college-age American son, Mihai, in a sandbagged hotel full of soldiers and offer to drive him to the capital if he will serve as our translator. (Mihai has come to Romania to visit his aunt and has been stranded by the turmoil.)
From then on, everywhere we go during that unforgettable week — the orphanage where Ceausescu’s malnourished wards are penned in rusting cages; the cemetery where weeping mothers are laying their sons to rest in frozen soil; Olympic darling Nadia Comaneci’s abandoned boudoir — Mihai Carp simply states his surname and people fall to their knees, weeping, “Your father kept us alive. He was our voice of truth.”
Ioana Dragoi endured the insurrection in her grandfather’s apartment — there still is a bullet hole in their balcony — and immigrated to the United States, joining her mother and sister, as soon as the door cracked open. She graduated from the University of Maryland and works for a manufacturer of medical supplies. But her health never has been the best.
“Had I stayed in Romania,” she tells me, “I would have been dead by the age of 25.”
Twenty-five years after he vacationed into a revolution, Mihai Carp is living in Brussels and working in crisis management for NATO.
“Some of us, only a year ago, thought the world was at everlasting peace,” Mihai tells me from Belgium, a placid seat in a Europe once again gone mad.
His father, Mircea, who will be 92 next month, answers the phone at his home in Munich, and I ask him if he thinks the Romanian revolution that he helped to inspire succeeded.
“First of all, there is a democracy,” he replies. “It’s not a perfect democracy, but it is a democracy. People can speak now, there is freedom of speech, freedom of getting together. On the other hand, there is so much big corruption, you cannot even imagine.”
Such is our flawed, human world. In 2014 as in 1989, in every country, the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate. But our private joys defy them.
Mihai Carp married a woman from Denmark and they have a nine-year-old daughter and two other children aged six and four. I have a nine-year-old daughter who plays tennis, Beethoven, and my heart. Ioana Dragoi Hance has her Sabrina, a scholar, dog rescuer, and basketball star, aged 10, named for one of those western movies — Bogart, Hepburn, Holden — that filled her mother’s teenage dreams in Bucharest.
“When you tell her about 1989, how does she react?” I ask her mom.
“Her jaw drops,” the Romanian says. “But I think she gets it now. She understands that the stories I tell her, it was real. This really happened.” Postmedia News