Painful Memories of Escaping Communism Legally

To escape communism, its dire poverty, and the total lack of opportunity for a good life for my present and future family, I left behind everything I have ever known and all the people I loved who loved me back. I embarked on a journey to freedom that has given me, my mom, and my children a life that I had never dreamed of having.

For four long years, before I was given permission to emigrate, to depart the lovely communist country I was born and raised in, I was interviewed and interrogated at the most inconvenient times, sometimes in the middle of the night, had to file hundreds of sheets of various forms, affidavits, all notarized, translated, and quite expensive to obtain; I had to pay for my “free” government education I received as part of being a Romanian citizen, schooling which suddenly became valuable because I was going to live with the capitalist enemies and my education was too important to the communist police state and it cost an x number of dollars which I had to pay in cash. Not having such cash at all, I had to rely on my American husband.

At that time, I did not know that I would spend four more years in America being interrogated by the INS and filling out paperwork, notarizing them, paying expensive fees with money I did not have, before I could become a naturalized American citizen. Today all that process has become an expensive joke as illegals waltz across the border greeted by a welcoming committee of NGOs who give them money, clothes, phones, apartments, plane tickets, bus tickets, voter registration cards, and free reign of America, no questions asked.

Knowing what I know now, would I do it again? I am not sure since communism has followed me to America in my golden years. I had thirty years of what made America great, and it was wonderful. But it is waning fast and becoming communist.

Communism did not really die, as the west proclaimed assuredly in 1989, it went underground, it regrouped, and re-emerged stronger and more insidious than ever on the shores of the most powerful nation on earth that had fought communism. McCarthy was right. Not only do we have communism now, but it has also spread globally.

One of the many reason for my journey was that I was born to impoverished parents who were not Communist Party members, were part of the proletariat, did not have college degrees, were ordinary people who worked hard in the communist factories for a paltry salary and a rental apartment in a small, grey, reinforced concrete high rise complex which the communists built in a hurry to house urbanites and villagers alike whom communists dispossessed of their land, homes, and family valuables. We had no hope of building a more prosperous life and nothing to look forward to in such an oppressive regime. I had to escape and, even though I was an only child, my parents agreed that it was the only way.

Did I want to leave behind my parents, my friends, my relatives, my books, my grandparents, and all memorable places attached to my growing up? Most certainly not, but I had no choice. The communists made it difficult for people like us to succeed, all venues were closed to us and were reserved for communist party members, their children, and even their extended families. The dear leader’s armies also had special privileges not reserved for the likes of us, simple people spied upon by an army of informants to make sure that we took our place in the daily drudgery, cogs in the communist well-armed machine.

When I moved to America legally, the locals called people like me derisively Eurotrash. To my face, they were welcoming, unsure where exactly my country was on the map as geography was not their strong suit or any suit for that matter. I was the stranger who left her family to come here – who does that, they said, and they were right unless they knew where I came from. Nobody in her/his right mind would move halfway around the globe for a better life, with no family at all, no friends, and fighting new prejudices and rejections from the locals. The rejection was so obvious, you could have cut it with a knife.

If I had money for an air fare back then, and they were quite expensive, I would have returned to my birth home, but I was too stubborn to admit that I was wrong, and that America and my new family did not exactly welcome me with open arms.

I endured the pain and eventually became comfortable with my new life and family, becoming a naturalized American. My roots still live inside me but I am an American citizen. The apartment that I grew up in, our “home,” is still standing today, but I found it more foreign with each visit to my homeland. The expression, you can’t go home again, rings true because you can never find again what you are looking for.

Is there any place left in the world to escape to from the global communism that is infecting the planet and our country?

You Can't Go Home Again

Photo: Ileana Johnson, August 23, 2018

Untold numbers of people and families have escaped totalitarian and oppressive regimes with just the clothes on their backs. Some swam across treacherous rivers; some cut through barbed wire; some hid on the floorboard of a car, some fit into the carved out car seats; some walked across the desert, through dense forests, climbed mountainous terrain, or hiked into steep valleys.

Once they escaped dangerous territories, the surviving defectors trekked to the west, to freedom, to America, the shining city on the hill that held the promise of freedom and the opportunity to succeed, if they were willing to work hard and integrate into society peacefully and productively.

Things have changed in the last twenty years, borders are being erased by the liberal elites, countries are succumbing to multiculturalism and the invasion of the third world interested solely in redistribution of wealth or as the leftist PC police have told us repeatedly, social justice – code word for communist taking from the productive and redistribution to the unproductive as reparations for perceived grievances and injustices of the past.

The latest leftist euphemism, agrarian or land reform, hides the true goal of confiscation of land from white farmers in South Africa who must agree to a ten percent purchase price or else. Black South Africans have already been encouraged by their president to “cut the throat of whiteness.”

And so the white farmers must leave everything they’ve ever known behind, their homes and the rich farm land their families have turned productive from wilderness areas, and must flee to escape with their lives.

How long will it be before the productive farm land will become a wasteland and the formerly agricultural rich South Africa will turn to the World Bank for food handouts and imports like the former Rhodesia did when it became the bankrupt Zimbabwe?

Millions have escaped from communist regimes; sadly, many did not make it, shot at the border during their attempted escapes. Those who fled made it to the free west and were eventually able to return to their homelands for brief visits or even come back for good after the fall of communism in 1989.

A successful family now living and thriving in California, brother, sister, and mother had escaped from Iran. As defectors, they could no longer visit the country of their birth, the place where their dad had been buried. The closest they could get on a recent trip was the border between Turkey and Iran.

After a long drive and a difficult trek on rocky cliffs, the shining sun over the valleys miles away brought into view their former homeland where a religious Ayatollah rules with an iron fist and harsh prisons, where religion oppression and the threat of overt nuclear holocaust defines every facet of Iranian life. A once thriving civilization, Iran has fallen back into oppression in 1979 and religious domination by a few well-armed zealots.

The family trio were overcome with grief and emotion, so close to the country of their birth calling them back for a visit, yet so far away, kept at the border by an intolerant regime who dominates the entire population with one book.

Spreading like snow angels on the ground, their hands touched dirt and rocks, in an effort to melt back into the ancestral lands. By being there, the brother and sister felt that huge rocks had been lifted off their chests. It was only fitting that each carried home a small stone from the land bordering Iran.

Like millions of humans before them, they finally came to the realization that they could not go home again, literally and figuratively, no matter how badly they wished to go.

But if they could return, if their house they left long ago was still there, if they were allowed to retrace their steps from childhood or youth, they would not find what they were looking for because it is no longer there. People and life have moved on.

They would find out that they were just strangers in their own land, looking for the essence of their being, of their existence, that Je ne sais quoi, something intangible which resides only in a person’s soul and in his/her fleeting memories.

Exodus from Tyranny

If you are trying to escape from your country and they shoot you in the back, that’s not a nation, it’s a prison. Nobody would risk it all if life was good and happy. No Cuban would get into a rickety boat or try to swim in shark-infested waters to the U.S. shores if life was so great in Cuba. People attempt to escape oppressive, tyrannical governments that keep their bodies and minds imprisoned in conditions that most Americans cannot fathom.

People escaped the communist Iron Curtain in many ingenious ways since the Bolsheviks closed borders to the West. They were not allowed to see how much better people lived under free market governments. Some would be defectors made it and some did not. They escaped by boat, U-Boat, hot air balloons, chair lifts, cars, small planes, crop dusters, swimming, crawling, hiding in the car engine compartment, hiding inside passenger seats, evading their guards at sports competitions abroad, digging tunnels under the border, and traveling with fake passports. The human ingenuity to escape oppression and to seek freedom is boundless.

Checkpoint Charlie Museum documents many escapes and fails, including the death of Peter Fechter who bled to death in front of the white border line and before the eyes of the entire world on August 17, 1962. He became the symbol of what is wrong with socialism and communism – the communist party government keeps people fenced in like a prison and, if they try to escape, they will meet a swift death. The Checkpoint Charlie Museum claims that 1,303 people were killed until 1989, trying to escape from the German Democratic Republic, a communist stronghold, to the Federal Republic of Germany.

Few stories of successful escapes are as complicated as Albani’s. I wrote the two-part account of his 1969 escape from communism and the return a year later to help his wife defect as well. Albani became a successful engineer who worked for years in New York. http://canadafreepress.com/article/albanis-escape-from-communism-and-his-free-life-in-america1 http://canadafreepress.com/article/albanis-escape-from-communism-and-his-free-life-in-america

I never understood why young liberals yearn for socialism with such passion when none of their activist “role models,” Hollywood types and political figures, is in a hurry to move to the paradise they advocate for the rest of the millennials who are gullible enough to believe them.

I did not see Bernie Sanders move to the socialist paradise he promoted during his campaign and still does. On the contrary, he is happy in Vermont, with his expensive cars and homes.

I never saw a Hollywood star or a public person, activist, community organizer, or politician seek medical treatment and surgery in Cuba, Venezuela, or North Korea. Michael Moore told us they had the best medical care in the world and it is free.  What a deal!

Never mind that their hospital wards are decaying in a pathetic state of disrepair, neglected, dirty, with urine, feces, and caked on blood stains. Never mind that Venezuela, once a prosperous nation, after 18 years of Chavez’s and Maduro’s socialism, cannot even produce enough food, toilet paper, medicines, and gasoline for its people, even though it has one of the largest oil reserves in the world.

Venezuelan millennials demonstrate against the regime weekly, to no avail. Their parents believed the socialist lies and voted in the rapacious socialists who stole the country’s wealth and became billionaires at the expense of the hapless poor to whom they threw a few freebies now and then as pacifying bones. As the regime keeps printing money without the backing of goods and services, the inflation rate in Venezuela has already skyrocketed to 720 percent after so many years of socialist “paradise.”

Community organizers, agitators, and socialist apparatchiks are not very good at planning centralized economies successfully. They have failed everywhere they tried on their way to communism. They have the gift of gab, policing, theft, and oppression.

Who knew that standing in endless lines in hot or cold weather for food, medicine, toilet paper, and other essentials spoiled American leftists take for granted, makes us better humans and enrich our lives?

I am still waiting to see western citizens crossing the border illegally into North Korea or Cuba because socialism is so great and desirable. The few Americans who were dumb enough to visit North Korea and ask for political asylum are imprisoned there.

According to Petrisor Peiu, shortly after the communist regime took power in Romania, 1945-1960, the country lost, by historians’ account, most of the intellectual elites. Those who remained and/or survived were reintegrated (indoctrinated) into society with many restrictions to their freedoms. Communism destroyed the fabric of society to such an extent that recovery has been very slow. It is hard to erase decades of fear, indoctrination, and welfare dependency mentality.

After 2000, according to United Nations’ estimates, 3.5 million Romanians, 17 percent of the population, left for greener economic pastures. Since the integration into the EU in 2007, 14,000 doctors and 30,000 registered nurses left, leaving behind only 57,000 doctors. In the massive brain drain, 300,000 engineers and other technical personnel sought residence and employment in other countries as well.

If socialism and communism are so great, why are so many people leaving? And once they get wherever their destination is, why are they trying to install through voting the very socialist or communist society they’ve fled? My educated guess is that the deep socialist and communist indoctrination from schools and colleges, coupled with youthful idealism, are hard to overcome.

If Fabian socialism of Western Europe is so enviable and desirable, why are they such a basket case of failed multiculturalism, drug culture, Muslim rapes, and bankrupt governments who tax their citizens to death?

Smart and cautious Venezuelans, who have seen the writing on the wall for a long time, are fleeing to neighboring countries in expectation of worse to come. Nobody wants to leave their loved ones and friends behind but have no choice. I should know, I left everything behind in 1978 and seldom do I regret that decision. But the freedom from communism exacted a heavy toll nevertheless.

 

 

Albani's Escape from Communism and His Free Life in America (Part II)

“A year later I went back to the country and stole my wife. Nobody knew I was coming.”

Albani had no idea what happened to the unassembled submarine he had abandoned when he escaped to France and never returned. He had sent drawings to each factory to manufacture the parts. The authorities had no idea what he was going to make with all these separate sections; some of them were conical, like a piece of pipe, with flanges and bolts; they looked like something designed by an idiot who did not know how to do a flange because his flanges were inside instead of outside.

Once he escaped, Albani hatched a plan to bring his wife to Paris. “I made a trick car because I wanted to steal more people, not just my wife. But my best friend escaped too and my plan now focused solely on her. I modified the car in such a way as to fit her in.”

How did he get away with stealing her without papers and hiding her in a car across so many borders? Albani answered with pride and aplomb: “I’m an engineer.”

There is a modified Volkswagen in the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., in which people have been hidden and taken across Checkpoint Charlie between East and West Berlin. The two sides were separated by the heavily guarded Berlin Wall of Shame built by East German communists who wanted to keep their oppressed subjects inside the “socially just and egalitarian communist paradise” they built for their citizens. It was such a miserable “paradise” that people were willing to chance being shot and possibly die in order to escape it.

From August 13, 1961 until November 9, 1989 the Berlin Wall was a stark reminder of the division between the free west and the communist-enslaved east. Before the Berlin Wall was erected, 3.5 million East Germans managed to cross the border between East and West Berlin. After 1961, there were few successful attempts to cross by low flying aircraft, running through the barbed wire, hidden in cars, and other unconventional means.  But many were shot and died trying to escape. The Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam gives the official figure of those who died trying to flee to freedom at 138, from an infant to an 80-year old woman, but researchers at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum estimate the death toll to be significantly higher.

Albani hid his wife inside the modified rear bench. He created a slight space; the floor went down two inches in the Citroen DS by cutting the springs much shorter, taking the cover and reversing it. The space was far from comfortable; it was a fetal position inside the bench. He sized the space by using his friend who knew what he was going to do.

To throw off the sniffing dogs at the border, he used a spray repellant for animals. “Maybe it was Tiger Balm,” he joked.

While in Paris, Albani toyed with the idea of a phony passport for himself and his wife but it was very difficult to alter a French passport. The pictures had small rivets on which Republique française was written in very small font, and you needed a microscope to see them. Counterfeiting such a passport was impossible. A very good friend, a Moroccan Jew with a lot of dark and curly hair like him offered his passport. “But I don’t look like you. But I don’t look like myself either.” He showed Albani his passport. This man was 22 years old and Albani was 28. The saving grace was that the passport had been issued when he was 14 and he did not look like himself either. 

“You don’t have to change the picture! Look at all the countries I went through with this passport.” Indeed, there were 45 visas, from Iran, to Nepal, to France, Sweden, to Germany. “Nobody stopped me; I went all over the world.” And he did, he had lots of entry stamps.  The French passport was good for 16 years, until the age of 30. Albani took his passport.

After posting an ad on a college campus that he was going to Romania with his best friend, a really good driver, and had two seats available in the car, three guys called and asked how Romania was, they wanted to go. It was fashionable to hitchhike. “I chose my married friend who had a week old baby. He risked his life to come with me to get my wife. The other three guys had no idea what we were going to do.”

To make the trip even more dangerous, Albani foolishly bought a BB gun, a high speed, high precision target practice gun as a gift for his sister and put it in his luggage.

It was still dark when they left at 4 a.m. in a completely modified Citroen DS. Their intended route was through Germany, Austria, Hungary, and then Romania. They were driving through Paris, in a roundabout, had just entered it, when two gendarmes, very tough guys, on motorcycles with machine guns on their backs, cut them off, almost hitting a wall. The other cop drove and stopped by the driver’s side and put a gun to his head, literally touching it. They spread eagle the rest of us on the car and on the nearby wall. More gendarmes arrived for backup. They checked the luggage and I.D.

Apologizing for inconveniencing them, the gendarmes explained that four hippie looking guys had broken into a bank 20 minutes earlier and killed the guard. They were looking for those culprits who were armed with machine guns.

“They let us go, very apologetic, you can make a complaint, but someone was killed, and they were driving the same red Citroen DS like you. When they stopped us, I almost peed in my pants.  The whole time, I was thinking about my sister’s BB gun, my modified car, and I just knew we would wind up in jail. My French friend did not know I had the BB gun, I told him later, he said I was crazy. It looked like a real gun.”

Getting closer to the German border, with his friend driving like a maniac, 100 mph, rotating lights appeared in the rear view mirror and they had to stop. But the poor cop on the motorcycle did not see the blocked isle for a bus stop and he hit the concrete side and spun wildly all over the road but recovered. Visibly shaken, he asked for IDs.

The passengers were scared that he was going to arrest them for driving so fast. But he told them to slow down and let them go very graciously without a ticket.

The German border guards pored over Albani’s French passport but let him go. The stop at the Austrian border was short. But then they got to Hungary, a strict communist country. There was barbed wire everywhere, control towers, guns, lights; it was frightening, dozens and dozens of cops armed to their teeth.

In no time their luggage was spread in the grass, and everything was taken out of the car; they were looking for contraband, cassette recorders, western goods, Kent cigarettes, cosmetics, foreign currency. But they found nothing.

“We got to the Romanian border, guards were lazy, moving around very slowly, but checked the papers very carefully. We spoke only French. I was in the car, inching our way in line. A cop, military guy, with a gun from 1916, probably our age or younger, was looking at our smart car, never saw a Citroen before.  He checked the car out; I opened the hood, the trunk, etc. He tested the seats, but the springs in the rear benches were much shorter which made the bench quite stiff. Why is the back bench so hard, he asked?”

He pulled the bench; they were in such a rush to leave, Albani forgot to bolt the bench back in place. He pulled the bench and saw the cover, some dirt, glue, straw, a penny; all set up to look like a bench would look. He could have pulled the cover easily and revealed the hidden space, but, once again, they got lucky, he never did.

On the way to Cluj, they stopped in a village to eat Romanian meat balls called “mititei.” It was Sunday, everyone was out drinking, the smell of grilling meat was overpowering; a guy came by and, in his drunken stupor, called them bastard capitalists and threw a rock through the rear door window and shattered it.

The local policeman was horrified and forced him to pay for the window. The cop was very apologetic to the foreign visitors. The poor drunk looked like he could hardly afford to pay for his booze much less replace the broken window.  They declined and left in a hurry.

They replaced the window with a piece of plastic which took a really long time to find in the miserable “socialist paradise,” where it was hard to even find a piece of plastic on the black market at ten times the price.

The trio found two girls infatuated with “foreigners” and they offered them free overnight accommodations in their homes; if caught, this generous offer would have landed them all in jail. They visited the old city and churches in Cluj and then went to Feleac. They had to cross a ditch, Albani asked the driver to raise the hydraulic suspension of the Citroen in order to avoid being stuck but he declined. He was sure the Citroen could handle it. Once in the ditch, the cap of the low-hanging gas tank sheared off and the gas drained everywhere.

The girls helped push the car onto the highway, but the gas tank was now empty. “We could not fix it, what do you do, go to a garage and say, hey, I have a modified compartment with a gas tank hanging too low, would you fix our sheared gas cap? You have a gas tank under the driver’s seat? Boom.”

 

They went into the city, knowing that copper pipe was impossible to find. At that time, nothing could be found in Romania unless it was bought on the black market. But Albani bought two plastic tanks in a warehouse by bribing one worker willing to sell it to him.

“I had to become Romanian again because you could not wheel and deal in a warehouse as a foreigner.” To appear Romanian, he had to cut his hippie hair into a “fashionable” crew cut and ditch the western clothes because they were too easily identifiable, the quality was “too good.”

It was illegal in Romania at the time to have long hair. If the police caught you, they shaved your head. An actor was trapped once in a daily occurring raid in Bucharest; he was playing a hippie role in a movie and needed long hair for the duration of filming. Cops shaved his head and he had to finish the movie with a wig.  

Accidentally pulling out foreign money out of his pocket instead of Romanian lei, Albani explained to the barber that he had just returned from Germany and that’s why he had French francs. For owning foreign currency, Albani could have gotten a year in jail, it was the minimum punishment. Again, luck was on his side. Barbers and hairdressers were information collectors for the secret police, they were compensated informants and everyone knew that. He paid quickly and disappeared.

“I had a capped canister of 10 gallons of fuel in the car and that is how we drove all the way to Paris. I found a small tank of two quarts to put it in the engine compartment when crossing the border. It was red, so I had to find black paint. Black paint was not available but I did find some tar for roofs and made the small tank black. We left, it was raining heavily and we had a broken window in the back. Nearing Bucharest, a green secret police jeep followed us, passed us, looked inside, we had French plates, we were driving by the book, we found them two miles later stopped on the right. It happened three times. Later we realized they were picking up hitchhikers from various villages and dropping them off to make extra money and to get a bag of potatoes, onions, or a live chicken.” It was still cheaper to travel this way instead of taking the rickety state bus.

They made it to Bucharest too early in the day and could not find his wife. They drove twice around Bucharest to kill some time and then stopped in a coffee shop. Seated next to them was a former colleague from IPROMET with a good memory of faces. “Albani, I thought you defected to France a year ago.” He pretended to be the Frenchmen he impersonated while his heart was beating hard and beads of sweat were forming on his brow.

Finally, it was dark enough and drove to Marin’s apartment who was to bring his wife to him. Instead of Marin opening the door, an older acquaintance, a full bird colonel in the Secret Police invited them in. Albani froze.

“Come in, have a drink, what are you doing here, why did you come back? He knew everything. I went to college; I came back because I did not like France. I gave him a snow job. I thought momentarily, when survival instinct kicked in, about hitting him on the head with a heavy seltzer bottle nearby.”

When Marin returned, Albani found out that this colonel had been kicked out of his apartment by his estranged wife. He was a very good rugby player from a team that was sponsored by the Secret Police. The biggest rivalry at the time was between the railroad workers union, the secret police, and the military. Each sponsored a team and conferred high ranks on the best players.  “As it turned out, he was not a squealer, he was one of us. He never talked. One year later he died in a car accident. It was pretty sad.”

Marin left to pick up Albani’s wife. She was living in a building that was adjacent to the Secret Police headquarters that was guarding the president. You cannot make this stuff up. The villa had all the communication equipment and, in summer time when the windows were open, you could hear all the radio police chatter.

Fate intervened again – his wife was not home. She knew Albani was coming but was in Brasov with her sick mother.  He had sent her a note on thin paper placed inside a pen with General De Gaulle’s picture on it. He had called and emphasized the word “general” several times.  She eventually understood and read the note inside the pen. Henri, his French driver friend, and Marin went to Brasov and told her to take a few things, and, when the car stopped at the curb, to jump in. They drove back to Bucharest and left for Paris.

Choosing the Yugoslavia, Italy, and France route, they stopped at the border with Yugoslavia and had to cross a ditch filled with a chemical to prevent mad cow disease. Luckily, the ditch was only 2-3 inches deep and did not plug up the breathing hole of the compartment where his wife was hiding. But the chemical fumes were terrible. Maybe Albani’s animal spray deterrent worked or the dogs smelled the chemical in the ditch, they did not react when sniffing the Citroen’s back bench.

At border crossings, there were only two passengers in the car, Henri and Albani. The third Frenchman stayed in Romania for more sightseeing. Driving through each country, Albani’s wife would come out of her hiding.

“I went inside to have the passports stamped and some guy told me in Romanian, even though I had French documents and was dressed in western clothes, driving a Citroen DS, didn’t you pass by one year ago, which was true. I did not react. He said again, looking sideways, you passed by here a year ago. Again, I did not react. He stamped the passport and we left.”

Between Romania and Yugoslavia, there was no sign telling them how far they were from the border and at some point, the border suddenly appeared, two blocks away.  And his wife was sitting in the car, no passport, no nothing.  So they pulled into a field of corn, put her in and crossed the border.

The road eventually ended into a Yugoslavian checkpoint in the mountains, they could not even turn around. They stopped in the small parking lot to put his wife in again. They opened both back doors and acted like he was cleaning the car of trash. Henri went in to buy some candy. There was no time to be scared.  As they inched toward the border, the car started sputtering and died.

It was the crossing point down to Trieste. The guards were nice, pulled back the car and promised to fix it. “Don’t worry, you don’t have parts here. The road is going down.  It’s a spark plug. They pushed the car onto the Italian side, into the parking lot in Italy, and checked our papers. I took my wife out of the hiding spot later. Apparently, I had forgotten to reconnect the two tanks, the fake and the real one.”

She almost died in the Mont Blanc tunnel; they did not know how long it was and that they had to drive through it for 40 minutes.

“It was night time, the ventilation was not good, the border was right before the tunnel and I could not stop and take her out, so she stayed in for the entire Mont Blanc tunnel. When she came out, she was coughing and choking.”

In France they were all in the car, Henri was driving like a maniac, the car was not insured, as if it mattered at this point. They had insured the car by phone for two days only and were not sure if it was still valid. Stopped for speeding, they had to explain why his wife had a Romanian I.D. card.

Sent to the Paris prefecture to declare her, the police took them to the Secret Police and they just knew that they would be arrested and fined. Instead, the policemen laughed heartily. “We just knew our border guards were stupid, anybody can come through, and they have no idea what they are doing. They can’t catch anybody even if they import a tank.” Asked if she was persecuted in Romania, and after answering yes, the secret police issued her papers to stay in France.

So she made it to Paris and to the free world with a lot of luck and God’s providence. But, they did not live happily ever after - they were married “ten years minus three hours,” as Albani likes to say. They immigrated across the ocean to the land of the free where they both still reside today.

Copyright: ILEANA JOHNSON 2016

 

 

 

 

 

Albani's Escape from Communism and His Free Life in America (Part I)

Young Americans today do not really understand politics, history, and economics. What little history they did learn in school has been sifted through the revisionist historical perspective of Howard Zinn whose textbook has been the adopted textbook for decades in most high schools in America.  With socialist teachers and professors who push and advocate Common Core, global collectivism, and Islam, it is no wonder that they yearn for invented “social justice” and “equality” that never existed in the first place and will never exist in the real world.

Stories like Albani’s sound like a fascinating movie script and fly by the ears of intolerant young Americans who have never experienced want or exploitation but were pliable drones in the hands of their teachers and college professors who indoctrinated them into socialism, bogus “white privilege” and other non-existent advantages that inadequate students who cannot make the grade in college keep inventing in order to excuse their inadequacy and lack of achievement. Similar stories told by people who escaped communism are repeated around the country but only older Americans are listening.

Have the young and misinformed ever asked why countless people from around the world have died to escape communism and third world oppression but nobody has even attempted to flee from capitalism unless they were criminals and traitors wanted by the law.

It’s true, progressive Hollywood types threaten to leave this country and move elsewhere if rational and conservative politicians are elected, but liberals never move to a communist “paradise” of their invented dreams.

Nobody in Hollywood, academia, or the rich and spoiled billionaires who praise the medical care in socialist Europe actually go seek treatment there, they look for the best American doctors and hospitals, with the exception of perhaps plastic surgery when they seek anonymity and pampering while nobody recognizes or discovers them during recovery.

I met Albani, his wife, and his 97-year old mother-in-law on the Orthodox Palm Sunday this year in a mutual friend’s home in New Jersey.  His remarkable and beautiful mother-in-law was gracious, poised, speaking perfect English in a sweet and youthful voice. She had taught herself English by going to the New York library every day for months on end in order to prepare herself for the citizenship exam.

In addition to having an American sponsor and the means for support, no welfare given,  a resident alien had to learn English; nobody gave them translators, bureaucratic forms in their own language, and education in their native tongue. And nobody was publicly “offended” by the term “resident alien,” it was written at the top of every green card.

Not long ago, even in the 1980s, legal immigration meant something wonderful, a chance to succeed, to become part of the American fabric, and an opportunity to have a good and happy life. Immigrants came to America to become Americans, to assimilate into its society and make it better.

Now all the dregs of third world society flood our borders unimpeded, not to become Americans and make it better for all, but to receive welfare and to change it into a banana republic like the one they’ve escaped, with rampant poverty, disease, illiteracy, and violence.

Albani started talking about politics and he brought up Donald Trump’s name with admiration, to the exasperation of one gentleman, an avid supporter of the Marxists candidates. He had fled communism to move to America and made a successful life here for his family but was now willing to bring communist oppression on American shores.

Albani, an engineer by trade, had worked for Donald Trump in the Trump Tower and had a lot of respect for the billionaire’s business ethic and the empire he had built with less than one million dollars he had inherited from his dad. He reminisced about specific times and stories when Trump was not afraid to fire incompetent and dishonest contractors and employees.

But the conversation switched to the story of how Albani had escaped Romania in 1969, barely five years after the installation of the tyrant Ceausescu as the second totalitarian president of the newly emerged communist dictatorship of Romania.

He grew up in Constanta, one of the large port towns in Romania where everyone wanted to escape from and very few did because people squealed on each other to the dreaded Securitate.  He was an engineer at IPROMET in Bucharest. His job allowed him to go to different locations in the field where he could issue work orders for parts from the metallurgical industry in order to fix broken industrial machinery.

He decided to design and build a submarine that would accommodate six people. To this day, Albani is a humanitarian who helps many legal immigrants assimilate into our society. Albani placed work orders in various locations of the country to manufacture the submarine in seven to eight different sections and bought an engine.

The plan was to escape from Constanta, load everything on a giant earth-moving truck used in mining, put the parts together in the 40-ton truck, back it off into the Black Sea, assemble the small submarine overnight, and then abandon the earth moving truck nearby. Once the truck was discovered, nobody could trace all the parts and why this piece of equipment was at this location, particularly since such vehicles would often carry large concrete blocks and huge rocks which were dumped into the sea in order to reduce water erosion of the shore.

Each part had several bolts, about eighty total; it was going to take at least a couple of assembly hours if everything went smoothly.  “We did not want the makeshift submarine to go down too much, so we would not get detected by radar. Our final destination was on the shores of Turkey, about 200 miles away.”  

Before the assembly was to be completed, Albani applied for passport and visas to go to various places but was turned down. At some point, he petitioned to go to a cousin’s wedding in the former Yugoslavia, Romania’s neighbor to the south-west, and, to his surprise, they approved the request, and gave him a passport. It was at this point that Albani abandoned the submarine assembly operation.

“I tried to go to Greece in my father’s car. Very few people owned a car but my father had a car. He was a doctor and made six times more money than the average person in ‘tips’ [bribes] that supplemented his meager salary set by the state.”  

Once in Yugoslavia, his plan was to go to Greece and, along the way he picked up three hitchhikers, two Brits and a German. At that time, it was safe and customary to hitchhike across Europe without any worry and mostly free of charge.  The Yugoslavs let them through even though Albani did not have a visa for Greece like the other three hitchhikers.

But, when he got to Greece, his luck ran out. The Greeks said, “The hitchhikers could pass but you, the Romanian without a visa, you go back.”  “I can’t go back; I am asking for political asylum, they will arrest me if I go back. B.S., go back to Yugoslavia then.”

Once there, dejected but undeterred, Albani managed to get a visa from the Germans with the help of a friend’s invitation and a financial guarantee even though he only had $120 in his pocket, mostly for gas. He ate bread and drank milk most of the time because that is all he could afford.

Albani slept in his car wherever he happened to arrive at night and even got arrested in Skopje because he was not supposed to sleep in a car. His luck took a turn for the better when the Italian border police let him pass through without a visa and the French did too.

He stayed in Germany a while but he hated the place so he went back to France.  He remembered, while in Stuttgart, by 8 p.m., the city was empty, everyone was home with the shades drawn, and it was like a ghost town. “Unbelievable, I was there three days.”

Once in Paris, the authorities gave him the right to work almost overnight. He requested political asylum and, in one morning he got a place to live and the right to work.  In the next two days he had a job, a kind of quality assurance engineer.

Because he spoke French fluently, his new job paid him the same amount as the French engineer who had been working there a while. He could stay in France, but he wanted something better. Soon visas arrived from the Canadians, South Africans, the Swiss, Australia, and the last one was from the United States.

“I requested political asylum and they asked why, were you persecuted?  I knew I would get the visa anyway, but I explained that I was forced to do voluntary work for the government which was not a stretch, it was actually true.”  But that was far from the reason why Albani defected. The communists had totalitarian control over the entire country, confiscated everything, and were strangling freedom and the humanity from their captive Romanian citizens.

After one year in Paris, Albani returned to Romania to get his wife. The Romanians never questioned where he was even though he was a defector. The tight security police and population control was not in full force by 1970. He went back to steal his wife out of Romania. She came all the way to Paris from Bucharest, with no papers. She was hidden when they crossed borders, then she would come out and ride in the car normally. Exactly where she was hidden is quite an ingenious way that almost got her killed twice.

TO BE CONTINUED

Copyright:  ILEANA JOHNSON 2016