From Wikipedia
A little more about kids under communism.
The worst conditions for the orphans of Romania were found in those institutions designed for disabled children. In one institution, a psychiatric hospital, it lacked basic medicines and washing facilities, increasing again the pain and suffering. At the same time, in many institutions physical and sexual abuse was rampant, compounding problems for the hapless children. In some institutions for disabled children, they were often tied to their own beds, or dangerously restrained in their own clothing.
Shockingly, because sometimes staff in the institutions failed to put clothes on the children, they were left all day sitting in their own feces and urine. The nurses were not properly trained and even frequently abused them. They used dirty water to bathe the children and sometimes threw 3 children into a bath at one time to save time and water. Just as happened in Canadian Indian Residential Schools, because of abuses of children by staff, older children learned that they should be abusing the younger children as well. As it did in Canada, this might bring intergenerational trauma. Naturally, many of the children had delayed cognitive development as a result of the conditions in which they lived. Many did not even learn how to bathe or feed themselves.
Staff at times used inappropriate drugs to control behaviour. Since many of the children did not have even their most basic needs met in the institutions, many children died of minor illness or injuries that healthy children could have coped with easily. Many actually starved to death. The development of many children was impaired by the condition of the children. For example, sometimes fractures did not heal properly resulting in seriously deformed limbs.
Because of the common practice of using unsterilized instruments in the institutions, some of the institutions became infected with HIV/AIDS As a result of the orphanages being infected with HIV/ because of all of this, more than 17,000 Romania teenagers died. And you can guess what happened to the rest?
Some children suffered from multiple transfers to other institutions often without warnings or explanations. The harshest treatments were reserved for children who were considered “irrecuperable” or “unproductive.” Former staff reported that corporal punished was encouraged by officials as appropriate punishment and those who were loath to impose such were considered weak.
Unfortunately, the true number of children who lived or died in orphanages during the communist era is not known with clarity, but according to one report in 2015, “Half a million kids survived Romania’s ‘slaughterhouse of souls.”.
In. summary, the best comparison would be to the horrors of the treatment of Canadian children in Canada’s Residential School system for indigenous children.
After the fall of communism in 1989 pictures were released around the world that showed images of emaciated children clothed in rags, looking into the cameras with desperate eyes amid the squalor of Romania’s orphanages. It wasnot a pleasant sight.
Shaun Walker for The Guardian reported 30 years later that Florian Soare, an investigator as part of investigations that followed estimated that “between 1966 and 1989 there were between 15,000 and 20,000 unnecessary deaths of children in Romania’s grim network of children’s homes, with the vast majority taking place in those set aside for disabled children.”
Across the country, there were 26 institutions catering to the “category three” disabled children (“incurable”). Walker reported how the investigators found shocking mortality levels among the children. Soare said, “They didn’t die from the disabilities they had: 70% of the registered deaths were for pneumonia. They were dying of external causes that were preventable and treatable,” said Soare. In other words, there was negligence or malfeasance or both.
Walker also remarked that,
“The process of bringing the crimes of the communist period to light is moving slowly. The repression is skimmed over in school classes, said Ana Blandiana, a poet who has transformed a former communist-era prison in the town of Sighet, on Romania’s border with Ukraine, into the country’s only museum of communist crimes.”
Many people in Romania don’t like it when such history is brought up because they feel it is a stain on their reputation.
When the investigators dug deeper they found some horrifying secrets. Some children testified that some children died of frostbite, or were literally chewed to death by rats. Some were kept in cages smeared with their own feces. Soare actually believes it was part of a campaign of extermination. No wonder Romanians don’t want those stories out there. Frankly, I can’t believe that. I have heard of no evidence that showed deliberate systematic murder. Some cases of deliberate murder, but a campaign?
Izidor Ruckel who spent 11 years at one of the facilities for supposedly “incurable” children because he had contracted polio, said there were “a number of genuine sadists on the staff of his institution” and recalled that “you could feel her in her veins that she loved abusing children.”[1] He himself had been subjected to gruesome beatings and other forms of abuse yet amazingly concluded “it was for God alone to judge.”
After the fall of the communist regime, and people learned what happened in those institutions, international adoption was seen as the answer to the problem of what to do with the orphans. Get rid of the children and at the same time have westerners pay for them. As a result, large numbers of children were adopted by foreigners in the 1990s and early 2000s. However, there were many irregularities encouraged by loose government regulations. In 2004 the government banned international adoptions except to grandparents. The EU supported a ban so that abuses could be curtailed.
Improving the situation of orphans was made a condition of Romanian entry into the European Union but a BBC investigation in 2009 showed that many problems remained.
All in all, it was a terrible mess. Similar things happened in Bulgaria.
As a result, a shocking number of children were abandoned and cared for by largely well-meaning, but overwhelmed government employees. The children often did not experience the loving care and attention of a mother or father. This led to children with severe mental health problems that plagued the country and even the families in the west that adopted these children. It was a catastrophe.
But thank goodness there is some better news. In September 2005, the European Parliament’s rapporteur for Romania made this very hopeful statement: “Romania has profoundly reformed [from top to bottom] its child protection system and has evolved from one of the worst systems in Europe to one of the best.”
The history is miserable; the future is better.
[1] Shaun Walker, Thirty years on, will the guilty pay for horror of Ceaușescu orphanages?” The Guardian Dec. 15, 2019