Every summer our Marxist teachers, prompted by the Communist Party’s Ministry of Education, sent us home with a reading list of classical literature titles as well as the dear leader’s latest propaganda and “enlightened” writings and speeches by the infamous Marxist “revolutionaries” such as Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.
One of the items missing from the dear
leader’s list was accurate information about their real biographies, not the
lies about their “amazing” ideologies and bloody struggles.
These Marxists left in their social activist
wake, in their effort to bring about communism to the masses, a false and
miserable equality that killed people’s spirit, their freedom, their pride,
their humanity, robbed them of their wealth, and put so many in gulags and mass
graves while the “revolutionaries” prospered with confiscated wealth from the
millions they killed.
There was no way to research through communist
archives and few people were given access to any documents that might reveal embarrassing
histories about their Marxist “heroes” and bloody psychopathic social activists.
I did not bother reading the dear
leader’s latest propaganda, but I certainly enjoyed the classics. Many books
were banned and forbidden reading, and could not be found in the local library I
visited but other red-bound tomes that promoted the “class struggle” and other
communist propaganda were on the shelves in multiple copies.
The local librarian was a dull and ignorant
communist apparatchik who fashioned herself as a learned person. She attended
night school because her days were busy with propaganda and snitching on her
fellow citizens, friends, and family. Her decaying and yellowed teeth from excessive
cheap Carpați
cigarette smoking made her look much older than she was. She wore an ugly grey
suit with permanent food stains and a lapel bejeweled with a communist red star
insignia.
Dry cleaners were hardly accessible or
affordable to the oppressed masses and even to government informers like her. She
pretended to be my friend to get information on innocent people that she could
then turn in for extra cash or other rewards. But I had her number while
pretending to be naïve.
I borrowed so many books, four at a
time, from my summer list and read insatiably. I wanted to know as much as I
could about the real world outside of our heavily guarded borders with menacing
soldiers told to shoot anybody on site if they tried to cross without authority
or in the dead of night. Our communist world was a prison that kept us locked in.
I found a cool place to read, away
from noise and interference with my daydreaming. That place was under a lone small
apple tree at the edge of a wheat field, not far from our concrete apartment
complex. I could stop reading for a moment, raise my eyes to the clear blue sky
and imagine my journey to a fascinating place, an impossibility over time,
space, or tightly guarded and latched borders. Freedom existed only in my
imagination which could carry me anywhere if I read the right kind of book, the
magical carpet to amazing places.
At Maita’s house in the mountainous
village, in the green grass in her orchard, under the plum or quince trees, I
could lose myself in the pages of amazing books and fly away on imaginary trips
to faraway places. At lunchtime her voice and the smell of cooking from the outdoor
summer wood-burning stove brought me back to reality.
Surrounded by buzzing bees, the
occasional chirping birds, the gentle breeze, sunshine, and the blue and green
mountains, I was in my own garden of Eden. And I learned that freedom existed
outside of our heavily guarded borders and people were happy, and the “evil” and
“dangerous” capitalism allowed people to live much better lives than we did
under the socialist boot of the Communist Party who filled our heads with daily
propaganda and lies. I knew then that I had to escape.
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I would love to hear about your journey. It looks like reading was the catalyst.
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DeleteWe are fortunate to have you as an eye witness to what our America is in danger from. Prayers aren't helping and soon I expect the bodies will stack up here in America as anything remaining will be pillaged. - Carmel
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately America is not in danger from, it is already on its way to a totalitarian regime.
DeletePlease do excuse me, dear Ileana, for stealing your precious time again – but, being an ardent bookworm, I just couldn’t leave your reading impressions without an example of my own ones (I’ve got it at our recent cancer-charity event at the Lions club here)
ReplyDeleteYou see, among many wonderful reading discoveries I’ve brought home from this sale in Lions, there was an old (Nov. 1938 – that is, BEFORE Stalin devoured Bucovina and Moldavia) issue of “The National Geographic Magazine” with an article “An American Girl Cycles Across Romania”.
My, what a feast of happy impressions! And what a great contrast with your later description of the same country under Communists! My deep bow both to the Geographic’s author and to you for being so truthful – and, believe me, I’m so ashamed to bother you…
With every good wish from Tasmania - Rostislav.