22 Years

The 22nd of December and now 22 years since the Romanian Revolution. I was 11 months old when it happened.

I lived in the same ground floor flat - in the most communist block of flats you’ll ever see - since I was born untill I moved to London (my parents still live there now), and we used to have only these big windows, but no balcony at the time (my dad had to build one since then).
My dad was obviously called in to work and he was gone from the end of December to the end of January.
Years later, some other Christmas, my dad starts telling us about the Revolution.
When it all kicked off and someone knocked on our door, all ready for war, looking for my dad, he was outside, cleaning the carpets with snow. (because it was right before Christmas and that’s some kind of ritual my mother used to keep when we actually had snow in December) He knew he wouldn’t have time to go all around the block to get in through the front door so he just jumped in through the window. The minute he said that I went “ah, I remember that!” and everyone turned and looked at me. Was quite funny and I know it's hard to believe, but I really do remember that. (Just as well as I remember jumping out that same window when I was 5 and woke up all alone in the house. Scary. I fell asleep with my mother next to me and woke up by myself. It marked me for life. Even now, if I fall asleep next to someone, and I wake up by myself, I panic. I don’t jump out of anything tho….)

Hmmm… I got distracted again.

A few years back I read something that moved me and changed something in me.
We killed our leader 22 years ago and we never loved any one of the ones who followed or any of the ones before Ceausescu. We had kings long before that and we didn’t love them till they were long gone and we were going through hell – see Pitesti Prison.

"...what has not yet become universal knowledge is the fact that in the Romanian Gulag Archipelago there was an island of absolute horror, such as existed nowhere else in the entire geography of the communist penitentiary system: Pitesti Prison."

Virgil Ierunca, The Pitesti Phenomenon.

Now you’re free to speak your mind and to believe in whatever you want to believe. And everytime my gran and her friends start to tell me how good it was THEN, I get angry. I think it’s OUT OF ORDER how people forget that one of the most terrible brainwashing experiments was carried out in OUR OWN country.

Just realised how I jumped from one thing to another and managed to give myself a headache.