A Toddler's Memories of Grandpa's Life Under Communism

My daughter Eileen remembers to this day sharp details of her visit to a communist country when she was four and half years old. She wanted to meet her grandpa and her great-grandma, and both were excited to see her for the first time.

Bewildered after 23-hour long flights from Atlanta to New York, to London and to Bucharest, she arrived frazzled, tired, hungry, and thirsty in the Otopeni Airport of 1985 at the height of the brutal communist regime.

She remembers the heavily armed security police at the airport, the long passport lines and the family gathering waiting for us outside of arrivals where the doors were guarded by city police with weapons drawn shouting at everybody to stay in line and at her for barely stepping out of the waiting line while holding my hand.

My daddy was overwhelmed and cried tears of happiness while my daughter was scared and hid from everybody. After an almost one-hour ride to my hometown, we all arrived at daddy’s tiny Soviet era apartment which filled quickly with relatives. There was no food prepared so we had to ride in my cousin’s ratty Dacia car that had seen better days to Maita’s village where all the aunts and cousins had prepared food for all of us. Everything looked foreign to Eileen, but she remembers the fried chicken and French fries floating in an inch of grease. She liked it. Who can refuse delicious fried chicken? Nobody had paper towels to drain the excess oil. 

To deal with her fear of the unknown, Eileen listened to Michael Jackson’s cassette tape on her Walkman until the batteries died. Grandpa could not stand seeing his granddaughter weep, so he left with one cousin, and they searched all day until they found Romanian batteries on the black market. They lasted two hours of play and the acid leaked into the Walkman and ruined it. Eileen was so upset and still remembers the incident as music was her passion. She loved Michael Jackson and his album Bad.

To take her mind off her ruined Walkman, grandpa and cousin M. took us to Lake Snagov where Eileen swam with grandpa in a wooden box swimming pool built on top of the lily pad root system. It was built so because the lake was so choked with roots and other vegetation, some swimmers had become tangled in them and drowned.

The next day, we took a bus downtown and sat by the water fountain in front of the City Hall. It was late spring, hot, and the water was inviting. Eileen jumped into the fountain fully dressed to cool off just like children do in the U.S. It was a mistake that I quickly rectified but it was too late. A group of men dressed in dark suits appeared out of nowhere threatening to arrest us all if I did not control my child. They even threatened her with arrest! The sad part was that she spoke Romanian fluently, but she had no idea what those mean men were talking about. Puscarie (jail) was not a word we taught her at all.

Going to meet my mamaia at the farm was fun for my daughter because she met her great-grandma and played at the water pump in the yard with all the animals underfoot and the clucking hens. Like mother, like daughter, we both love animals.

I took her to the creek in the middle of the village where I used to play as a child and catch fish, frogs, and leeches. She walked right in, fully dressed and started to play in the water. It was not deep but still teeming with life.

That creek is no longer there today - it has been diverted around the village because the local Communist Party decided that it was too expensive to build a solid bridge over the creek to eventually asphalt the road crossing it.

Eileen remembers the daily drive for six weeks to the Communist Party resort, passing by village after village, with homes close to the highway, thirty miles away where, as a U.S. citizen, I could buy food for three adults and one child in U.S. dollars. I did not want daddy to spend all his time daily for six weeks standing in line just to provide us with food instead of visiting and enjoying each other’s company.

We took Eileen to the church where her dad and I got married seven years before and the marriage house where we received official marriage licenses from the Communist Party. They did not sanction just the church wedding; we had to do an official bureaucratic ceremony as well. She played in the beautiful yard and picked a few wildflowers. Decades after communism fell, that beautiful building was in terrible need of restoration, surrounded by a garden full of weeds. St. John’s Orthodox Cathedral, on the other hand, has been restored to its original splendor.

It amazes me to this day, four decades later, how many details my daughter still remembers from our trip to the communist Romania.