Romania Journal -
Summer 1999 - Preparations
July 14, 1999
I'm going to Romania for the August 11 total eclipse, and boy am I ever getting excited! I want to turn
my page over to the trip for a while. Since it is dominating my life, it should dominate my page as well.
It will be my third eclipse. The first was Mexico, '91, 5 minutes and 50 seconds "in the shadow." Then Paraguay, '94,
3 minutes and 34 seconds. Here's how the NASA
web page describes the path of the Aug. 11 eclipse:
On Wednesday, 1999 August 11, a total eclipse of the Sun will be visible
from within a narrow corridor which traverses the Eastern Hemisphere. The path
of the Moon's umbral shadow begins in the Atlantic and crosses central Europe,
the Middle East, and India where it ends at sunset in the Bay of Bengal.
I CHOSE ROMANIA for a variety of reasons, and for no reason at all: Best projected
viewing conditions; longest duration of totality; my mother was born in a refuge camp
in what is now Moldova but in 1921 was part of Romania (see my aunt's memoir).
But it comes down to this: It's a big trip, anywhere along the path is somewhere I've
never been; England and France, not interesting enough; eastern Turkey and northern
Iraq, too interesting; Romania, just right!
July 17
Only three weeks before we go to Romania, and it's practically all I think about. I'm reading my third
Ceausescu-era memoir, THE RETURN by Petru Popescu. And a couple of days ago I spent a few hours with
UCLA Prof. Olga Lazin, who grew up in Ceausescu's Romania and spent a year in prison for trying to escape.
Actually, she did escape, crossing the Danube with two college associates, under fire, but they made
it to Yugoslavia. Only to be returned to Romania for a wagon load of salt and some other trade goods.
The Ceausescu era fascinates me. A few years ago, if you called my house and got my answering machine,
you would have heard my cute little message: "Thank you for calling the California Thought Police. If
you have been thinking and want to confess, please do so at the tone." I thought I was being cute. "Thought
police, hahahaha." In Romania, they had the thought police, Securitate. Big Brother WAS watching. And
listening. Having opinions was dangerous. One person in three or four was an informant. They did it for
money, revenge, self-protection or advancement.
And Nicolae Ceausescu was the worst kind of dictator, a petty, narrow man with delusions of grandeur
and unlimited power. He got worse and worse. In the end, he was building the largest palace in the world,
lit up by thousands and thousands of light bulbs, while the secret police and their informants were authorized
to enter any house to be sure that no more than the allowable maximum--one 40-watt bulb--was lit in any
house or apartment. He starved the people, and refused to supply heat even in the dead of winter. People
froze to death while he and his wife Elena lived in opulent luxury. Elena was Nicolae's perfect counterpart
and partner. She called the Romanian people "worms."
In 1989, there was a revolution, or the appearance of a revolution. It broke out in the western city
of Timisoara in what looked like and maybe was an heroic and spontaneous outbreak in defense of a dissident
priest. There were confrontations. Hundreds were killed. Popular demonstrations broke out in other cities.
This was a month after the Berlin Wall came down. Gorbachev was promoting glastnost. Eastern Europe was
changing. Even in Romania, probably the most oppressive country in the region, the most controlled, people
still heard Radio Free Europe (although if you got caught listening to it you could be in trouble), people
must have had a sense that change was imminent.
In Bucharest there were massive student demonstrations. Ceausescu addressed the crowd from the balcony;
instead of cheers he got booed. The royal couple fled, were caught and executed. "Students" took over
the tv station and broadcast the revolution. There was a bunch of fighting and more people were killed
than in the largely peaceful transitions in the other Warsaw Pact countries, but who was fighting whom?
Everyone I've read so far seems to think it was a stage play, with a bunch of civilian corpses as props.
When the dust cleared, the National Salvation Party emerged as the saviors of the revolution, but they
were largely the same party hacks that had served under Ceausescu. The dread Securitate was dissolved.
The same guys were in the same offices, but now they were called something else. And I guess they stopped
arresting people for having opinions.
Here are a couple of disturbing things I've read:
1. There was a team of reporters from TASS in Timisoara at the time of the outbreak. They'd been there
for twelve days.
2. At the big demo where Ceausescu was booed, the cries of "Remember Timisoara" came from Securitate
men in the crowd.
In other words, the whole thing was somehow staged. At this point, I can't say that I fully accept this
interpretation.
"Time had stood still in Romania. Until recently.
A revolution did take place in December (1989) and then in June. It was not the revolution
that we saw on television and that was most likely a play scripted by the KGB and
acted by the Army and Securitate with the innocent help of a cast of millions. It
was a revolution in people's souls when they suddenly felt no more fear. This revolution
is going on still. Whoever let the tiger out of its cage is in no position to put it back again."
--Andrei Codrescu, The Hole In
the Flag
July 19, 1999....Preparations and Expectations.
"I have traveled widely," Thoreau wrote. "In Concord." I love Thoreau, a great thinker and writer, a
great soul. Like Blake, he could "see the earth in a grain of sand, and the universe in a flower." For
lesser souls like me, actually getting out on the road, going someplace different, seeing the world not
in a grain of sand, but in all its wide-world mystery...that's the best. It takes my mind and spirit
where books, movies and the reports of others cannot.
In a way, it's best to travel without goals or expectations, just move from place to place by impulse
and see where you get and what you find along the way. But I'm going to far Romania for 10 days only,
and I want to make the most of it. So I've been reading, studying, making plans and contacts. This trip
will be well-planned, not spontaneous.
July 22
I think I know what I'll read on the plane over...I'm printing it out now. It's
probably the most important critique of "bourgeois capitalism" ever penned...the Communist Manifesto.
I never have read it. Written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in 1848, it starts: "A spectre is haunting
Europe -- the spectre of communism."
This should really be pretty good reading.
July 23
Olga Lazin and Nathan Shapira, two Romanian emigrees I met through the internet, came to dinner last
night. It was so fine. The food--barbecued roast, babaganoush, pasta salad, home grown tomatoes--went
practically unnoticed, eclipsed, as it were, by the conversation.
Nathan grew up in Romania. During WWII. He told me he's been to six universities, but his best education
was high school in Bucharest. It was with his fellow displaced and disenfranchised Jews, under the nazi
race laws. He said that they couldn't offer a diploma, a degree, or any hope for a good job on graduation.
But they could teach about life.
Nathan had a very tough time in the Holocaust, but he survived. So did 400,000 other Romanian Jews, who
generally fared much better than their lontsmen in other Nazi countries. After a terrible killing
spree in which more than 100,000 were killed, Romania refused to go along with the "final solution."
At one point last night, we were discussing the bombing of Serbia. Olga and I were pretty adamant about
what a mess it was. I'm particularly incensed that the US, which was built on the principles of ethnic
cleansing, should be bombing a country to teach them how to behave. The hypocrisy. The contradictions.
"I am very conflicted about this," Nathan said after a thoughtful pause. "Most people look at bombing
from above. I have seen it from below, in 1944, when we were bombed by the Allies. It looks very different.
I was on a forced-labor detail, and we would go out in Bucharest after the raids to clean up. It was
a very terrible and frightening thing to be bombed. But without it I might still be in a forced-labor
camp, or worse."
July 26
Spoke today Joana Sturdza, who defected in 1980. Joana told me she was in prison in the
'60s. I asked her why. "Everyone who wasn't an idiot was in prison," she said.
July 28
This morning, I spent an hour with Dr. Nicolae Constantinescu, Consul General of Romania, at his West
LA office. A gracious and dignified man, as pleasure to talk to. He is a surgeon and an academic, one
year into a four-year stint in the US.
Several times I said "I have read that..." and he replied with an emotive "You have read, but I lived
it!"
August 4
We leave tomorrow. Last minute things to tidy up before we go. Call airport shuttle. Pack.
I like to travel light, but not this time. A fair amount of camera and video equipment, a ton of film
and tapes, a care package for a friend's mother. Some gifts.
Thanks to the great contacts I made in cyberspace, we probably won't be schlepping a lot of stuff on
crowded trains. Calin and Alex will be our hosts and guides, and I think they both have cars. Have you
heard people complain that the Internet is sapping true personal contact from society? I say nothing
is further from the truth! The Internet opens channels between people. At least it has for me.
So I'm going with extra baggage, and not only cameras, baseball caps and peanuts. I've read a ton in
the past couple of months, so that a country I knew nothing about is now vivid for me. I know I will
see the beautiful Carpathian Mountains, old castles and monasteries, a rich peasant culture not yet absorbed
by the MTV/McDonalds global monolith. And I expect to have some interesting conversations with people
who, having emerged from a brutal police state only a decade ago, in the poorest corner of Europe, are
halfway around the world from me figuratively, experientially and physically.
Two issues, among others, intrigue me: communism and the cold war, and nationality.
About communism, I always felt that the cold war was bunk and was used to whip up an hysterical popular
support for an ongoing war-based economy. Yeah, there are bad commies, but look what we did in Vietnam
and El Salvador. There are bad commie regimes, but what about Pinochet's Chile or the Argentine junta
on the right? What about Indonesia? Aren't the right wing dictatorships just as bad? If you can at least
theoretically have a free-market society with a respect for human rights, can't you have it for a socialist
society?
The FBI followed my folks around because they thought they might be commies. Frankly, I've always been
more afraid of the reactionary right than of the left. The Romanians I've been meeting don't seem to
share that view. The big bad wolf of communism is dead. A few capitalist dogs pose only a minor threat.
Nationality. Nations. I don't believe in them. People on earth. Animals on earth. Life on earth. That's
what I believe. Nations are inventions of the kleptocracy to manipulate, dominate and exploit the mass
of people. Forget nations.
But I'm going to Romania with my lady and my daughter. No arrangements necessary. I'll waltz in like
I belong there. Calin will meet me at the airport. But if he wanted to visit me here in LA, it would
be an entirely different story. It would be very difficult for him to get a visa unless he had a bunch
of money in the bank and, I've heard it alleged, a tidy some to pay for the privilege. So, nations exist
after all.
What insights will my visit to Romania provide on these and other issues? Check back here to find out.
If possible, I'll try to post a report from Sighetu around Aug. 18. If not, I'll be updating this page
during the week of Aug. 22. Come back then and see me.
La revedere,
Peter
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