The tiny cubicle of reinforced concrete was divided into five spaces: bath, kitchen, living room, one-bedroom, small pantry, and one hallway. The entire place was about 650 square feet of space barely big enough for one person, about the size of an average hotel room today.
The bathroom was equipped with a small tub, a sink, a
commode with a pull chain from the ceiling water tank, and a tiny window with
exterior slats of concrete, and a lovely view of the world through prison-like bars.
They were so heavy that, when we had a strong earthquake in 1977, one of the concrete
bars broke and was dangling from the reinforced wires like a loose tooth. Last
time I visited in 2015, the bar was still there, dangling loose.
The police state we lived under charged the “classless”
society lower prices than the true cost to keep the proletariat happy and
especially the country folks whose farms and modest homes were confiscated by
the forced party cooperatives.
If some renters were behind their water, electric, rent, and
gas bills, the total was divided by the number of apartments and everyone paid
equal shares. The rest also paid for those who were behind. Eventually they
were made to pay it back from their paychecks. Nobody was on welfare. You had
to work if you wanted to eat. No matter how much electricity, gas, or water each
apartment consumed, the total was calculated and equally divided for each
apartment.
My mom and dad’s apartment was an improvement from living in
the same tiny apartment with another family of four who stole our food. Prior
to that, mom and dad rented a bedroom from an old lady who lived at the edge of
town, so far out that the party had not decided to demolish her little place
yet in their haste for modernization.
Dad hated the communists and was not shy about making his
feelings and thoughts known about all the parasitical propagandists employed in
each factory by the dozen. They also hated my dad with so much passion and
often hired goons to beat him up to silence him. One such beating caused him
massive health issues and he died paralyzed, helpless, and untreated in one of Ceausescu’s
horrible “free“ hospitals. He died on May 13, 1989, a few months short of seeing
the demise of his foe, Ceausescu, on Christmas 1989.
My Dad worked hard every day for 43 years in one refinery after
another since he was eighteen and left his home in the beautiful hills of Valea
Dulce (Sweet Valley), leaving behind eight brothers and sisters, who were raised
primarily by my grandmother, after my grandpa passed away at a young age. He
now rests on the hill overlooking the green valley below, gently swept by the changing
winds.
I spent many summers with my grandma and my cousins, playing
by the nearby river and valley when they tended their sheep. The village was too
hilly for co-operative farms to exist, so the communists left it alone. People
raised grapes and fruit trees on the slopes with rich soil.
As early as I can remember, dad cursed Ceausescu out loud
and hoped vociferously to see him dead someday.
Sadly, my dad died seven months before the dictator and his wife were executed
after a brief kangaroo trial.
I had hoped that the revolutionary front would give the
Ceausescu dictator and his wife a fair trial but, since his ousting was a coup,
not really a revolution as it was presented in the media, the coup organizers
were eager to get rid of him so that nobody would find out the truth about the
so-called “revolution.”
The young protesters present in huge crowds all over the
city were shot as collateral damage by the Securitate men and their mercenaries.
Curiously, the TASS agency, the Soviet news outlet, were present in the town of
Timisoara, two days before the so-called “revolution” began there.
Dad would have been so disgusted when, on the first free
election after 45 years of Ceausescu’s reign of communist terror, 83 percent of
the population voted again for a communist government ruled by Iliescu,
Ceausescu’s good friend and confidant who participated in the coup d’etat.
Three months of revolution and freedom was not enough to erase 45 years of
communist dependence.
Allegedly, more than 10,000 innocent civilians who came out
to protest Ceausescu’s regime were killed by Army and Securitate agents who,
although had been collaborating since 1984 to depose Ceausescu, opened fire on demonstrators
in Timisoara and Bucharest while claiming that the sharp shooters were foreign
mercenaries.
Thirty-six years since the “revolution,” the neo-communists
are still in power today with each new parliamentary government that comes and
goes. The children and grandchildren of the “revolutionaries” are communists
themselves, thanks to the socialist indoctrination in schools. And the old
people are nostalgic about the crumbs that Ceausescu gave them once a month to
keep them in line. Dad would have been so disappointed that people were so
easily indoctrinated and bought!
And then things got worse. It took only 36 years since the “fall”
of communism in Europe for the leftist activists to repackage communism as
globalism with money from the many NGOs funded by George Soros.
American leftists got busy immediately destroying the capitalism
that made them well-off economically and replacing it with socialism, the steppingstone
to communism. They gave it a new name, Globalism, and they called themselves
Democrat Socialists.
The march to global communism continues in the west with not
much opposition from people who love their countries. They think that it will never happen to them.
