Trip to Communism in 1985

When my oldest daughter was four and a half years old, we flew to communist Romania to visit my dad. The commies would not give him a passport or a visa to visit us, hence my trip with a small child, on a twenty-four hour flight.

So many things happened on that trip in 1985! I never thought that Mimi would remember much. Yet she remembers in great detail certain things that I never thought she would have even noticed. They had made such an impact on my little girl. She never traveled back again as an adult. Relatives from generations prior to mine are long gone except one maternal aunt.

Aside from the long flight, throwing up from motion sickness, missing the connecting flight in New York, doing without our luggage which flew ahead of us, and being threatened with jail time if she did not stop rattling a metal fence that irritated a Kalashnikov-carrying guard at the airport, the communist “adventures” kept stacking up.

A very musical child early on, my daughter was in love with Michael Jackson’s latest album, Thriller. She played his music every night on her Sony Walkman until the batteries drained. Disaster was looming.

Batteries were hard to find just like everything else in the communist economy, but my dad and cousin Mircea went on a day-long hunt on the black market at Obor, where people sold second-hand clothing and things obtained beyond the vigilant eyes of the economic police.

Nobody in the poor and starving proletariat was allowed to have more food or personal possessions than everyone else had, hence the strict laws in place against black market purchases. People did it anyway and bribed the local police to stay away.

My cousin Mircea and dad were remarkably close, they played chess together for hours on end and would do errands to expedite transportation. Mircea was the only person in the entire family on dad’s side of the family who owned a used and beat up Dacia car which he had to frequently repair himself.

The duo returned six hours later victorious with two Romanian production batteries which lasted about two hours of play before the acid leeched inside the Walkman and ruined it. My child’s tears could have drowned the entire neighborhood.

Every day we went on a driving hunt with Cousin Mircea to find a place that would feed us because dad had no food in his pantry at all; everyone in families on both sides struggled to feed their own children and spouses, did not have enough food to feed me and my daughter.

In 1985, the dear leader had passed more laws and decrees, specifically outlining how many calories each person was allowed to consume daily, and they had issued rationing cards to reflect the purchase of just enough food to keep that person alive in his/her category of calories permitted. The socialist man had to sacrifice for the good of the collective while the elites in the Communist Party were fat, happy, obscenely rich, and wasteful. The caloric decisions were made for everyone based on the type of job a person had.

The one place we found that could feed us daily for a high price, of course, was a restaurant at Lake Snagov. The cozy open terrace by the lake had good fresh food and Pepsi Cola, my dad’s favorite. The place also had an outdoor pool encircled with wooden walls and a wood bottom. I found the choice of materials curious at first but glad of its existence.

The lake was saturated with waterlilies’ roots which had drowned many would-be swimmers by entangling their legs into the vines and dragging them under the water.

Mimi remembers with fondness swimming with her grandfather in that wooden pool, a rare treat for people like my proletarian dad who would have never been allowed in the area had we not been carrying American passports.

Close to the restaurant was the club built for Ceausescu’s family and cronies with a Versailles-like Garden with a myriad of paths adorned with marble statues and iron benches near manicured bushes and beautiful flower beds, artificial lakes, artesian fountains, and intricate gazebos. It was a dream world that the proletariat was never allowed to enter.

Behind hedges and trees were buildings with a cinema, a bowling alley with its own café in a glass conservatory filled with palm trees and tropical plants. There was a banquet hall, a ball room, bars, and comfortable chairs for the elite communists who visited their opulent club daily, a short, chauffeured drive from Bucharest. Unseen guards appeared out of nowhere if anybody tried to get too close to the dear leader’s and his henchmen’s playgrounds.

Mimi remembers wading her feet in the large fountain downtown Ploiesti on the hottest day of our trip and the scary policeman who appeared from the tunnels under the building across, threatening us with jail if she did not get out immediately. Who would put a four-year old little girl in jail for having fun like millions of other kids around the world when they find a fountain, a puddle, a creek, or a pond? The answer is simple, a heartless, evil communist.

As American citizens, there were places where we were not allowed to enter. It drove my husband mad on previous trips because he could not go inside certain buildings. But we could shop in the very rare luxury stores set up for foreigners and for the communist elites where goods were priced in dollars, not lei. First of all, it was illegal for the masses to hold foreign currency, it was punishable by hard prison time. Secondly, the poor proletariat had to shop in their stores with empty shelves; they stood in endless lines, large wads of cash in their pockets, in hope that some food would be delivered eventually.

Mimi remembers her maternal great-grandmother, Elena Ilie, pumping water out of the ground in the yard, to cook our lunch; having no tub to take a bath in the country: going to the outhouse in the back of the farmhouse; and not having running water. So many things that people take for granted today were missing under the communist rule. As a child, Mimi thought it was fun to pump cold artesian water out of the ground and get wet and muddy while doing it.

Mimi remembers her grandfather frying chicken in a pan in heavy rapeseed oil which was an unpleasant looking dark yellow; the chicken was swimming in the heavy grease which it had absorbed. Dad did not have paper towels, nor napkins to soak the excess oil, it was a luxury only found in the homes of the party elites. As a southern girl through and through, Mimi loved fried chicken, but she barely nibbled on dad’s cooking and his French fries.

Mircea drove us to the Black Sea in his Dacia that had seen better days, a treat for my dad who went on vacation twice in his life. Unfortunately, due to the restrictive communist laws, even though we were close relatives, because my daughter and I held American passports, we were not allowed to stay in the same hotel as my dad and my cousin. My daughter and I had better rooms in a special hotel reserved for foreigners, for double the price, while dad and Mircea stayed in accommodations reserved for Romanian citizens. It was so upsetting for Mimi and for us that we were not allowed to stay together! We had come a long way to spend six weeks with him and the long arm of communist control was still keeping us apart.

We did not know at the time, but this was the first and the last time my dad was going to see his oldest granddaughter and the last time we would see him.

For seven years we had tried to get a passport and a visa for dad to come to the U.S. to visit or stay with us, but he was always declined. Four years later, in 1989, dad passed away after another severe beating he received at work from the evil goons on the Communist Party payroll. He was 61 years old and in good health – he never took any pills. He should have been left in peace to live happily in his retirement. But his distaste and hatred for communism ended his life.