Reply #202: BBC: Half-naked children leapt from every direction, clawing at my clothes... [View All]

[Shallah Kali]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4630855.stm


Last Updated: Tuesday, 12 July 2005, 08:27 GMT 09:27 UK


Life in Ceausescu's institutions
By Kate McGeown
BBC News

It is now more than 15 years since the world found out about the thousands of children locked away in Romania's state institutions. In the second of a series on these children, former volunteer Kate McGeown looks at the dreadful conditions they faced.


Kate McGeown at the institution in Siret in 1996
Kate McGeown worked as a volunteer at an institution in Siret

In pictures: Siret institution

When I first walked into the large grey building at the heart of the Romanian town of Siret, my immediate instinct was to walk straight back out again.

Half-naked children leapt from every direction, clawing at my clothes, and there was an overpowering smell of urine and sweat that made me want to retch.

I first visited Siret's Spitalul de Copii Neuropsihici (children's psychiatric hospital) in 1996, to work as a volunteer.

But the situation was much worse when British schoolteacher Monica McDaid saw it for the first time in 1990 - just a few months after Ceausescu's downfall.

"What I saw was beyond belief," she said. "It was horrendous."

More: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4630855.stm

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Children of the Decree
Dax Experiment 770: Gebahren Auf Gefehl (Documentary -- Germany - Romania)
http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117929013.html?categoryid=31&cs=1

Present-day interviews with a TV personality and a fashion model, accompanied by kinescopes from their glitzy heydays, reveal the pain and paranoia they experienced because of their back-alley abortions, a practice which claimed tens of thousands of lives. The irony, never lost on filmmaker Iepan, is that during this period Romania was celebrated as the most liberal of the Warsaw Pact nations, hailed by the U.N. as a model of population growth and considered by the West as a friendly, potential break-away ally.

Only women over 40 and those who already spawned four offspring (and, unofficially, Gypsies, whose propagation was actively discouraged) were exempt from having children. In the years following the decree's passage in 1966, the birth rate doubled. Although a huge propaganda machine touted the beauty of motherhood, existing cultural biases encouraged men to disavow all post-coital responsibility, leaving the women to "take care of it" as best they could.

In the '80s, as the worsening economy made feeding extra mouths impossible, the undeclared war between women and the state escalated. Women suspected of interrupting their pregnancies were tortured or left untreated until they revealed who helped them. All gynecological procedures were spied on by prosecutors and by the militia, and girls in factories were frequently subject to spot exams. A wealth of black-and-white footage eloquently testifies to the relentless surveillance.

snip

In speeches, poems and musical extravaganzas featuring hundreds of twirling umbrellas, beaming, fresh-faced young pioneers declared their love for Ceaucescu. Hidden in the country, however, were special orphanages for the less-than-perfect, where disabled youths died of cold and starvation or were eaten by rats. Iepan shows excerpts of the horrific footage taken by a German film crew that first exposed the infamy.