December 21-22, 1989
Last night, going through my old, cherished boxes, haven for all my memories, I retrieved the orange notebook where I gathered all my thoughts in December 1989.
On that cold winter day of December (22) 1989, I was 13 years old and I was wearing my beloved short red skirt (intriguing memory exercise)… I remember coming back from a dentist appointment accompanied by my father and my siblings. As the armoured cars passed us on the street, we couldn’t help but be bewildered… A few days before, after the Timisoara events, there were rumblings of looming pandemonium. Conversely, as per my father’s advice, the members of my family were supposed to conceal the fact that we were aware of the rumours and pretend to be oblivious to the astonishing news (ergo, innocent of any rebellious thoughts or actions).
On that day, a strange feeling came over us: trepidation, anxiety, excitement… Interestingly enough, I don’t remember being frightened not even when, later, on the public square, we were facing the soldiers, the guns, and the armoured cars. I will never forget how my mother (under confinement in the building where she worked – her boss was guarding the door in order to stop his employees from joining the rebellious masses) was asking us to return home, to safety.
We did, eventually, return, and watched in complete disbelief the live television programming showing the people that, after taking over the national television station, were chanting: Victory! The sensation was of dream, scepticism and concern that we will all wake up soon and realize all this wasn’t real. Somehow, the images that invaded the television screen that day reminded us of a televised play. As the truth came out, later on, that the events, were, for the most part, staged, the parallel gained validity.
I explicitly remember walking around with my father in a city invaded by the kind of enthusiasm and frenzy that only come with occurrences beyond all hope or imagination. I remember people throwing documents out of the windows of official institutions. In a country in turmoil, the act of destroying the official documents was seen as a sort of exorcism (burning of all ties with the old regime and a deliverance). Or maybe it was just a deliberate act of destroying of evidence… Whatever the meaning, it seemed unnecessary and superficial even to my eyes, a 13-year-old at the time. As we arrived at my uncle’s house, we watched live on TV as the National Library in Bucharest was going up in flames and we could only feel sorrow and discontent versus yet another action that could have possibly been avoided. What a shame!
For days, we spent countless hours in front of the television set as our main source of information. Being deprived of extensive and reliable television programming for so long, we were thirsty for televised news: the Timisoara victims, the shootings on the night of December 21, the last speech of Nicolae Ceausescu, the capture of his youngest son (a character known and loathed by the public for his erratic behaviour), the revelation of the opulent living conditions of the Ceausescu family (the possessions, the bank accounts, the parties) and, then, on Christmas day, the trial and the hasty execution of the dictator and his wife.
Maybe it was because my immediate family didn’t have any real confrontations with the Securitate or maybe I am just very sensitive, but, for me, the trial and the execution were particularly difficult to watch. I was educated in the respect of human life and dignity and, I think, there was nothing legitimate or worthy about those “legal” proceedings. People that have suffered under the communist regime might disagree with me, but I think that even the Ceausescus deserved an impartial tribunal.
I am not going to pretend I am wizard at history or fake an interest in politics or claim I know what the challenges were in working or studying (at the university level, for example) under a communist regime. I am not and I don’t. I was too young to know. All I have is my memories of the young girl, in her short red skirt, wandering (eyes open wide with marvel) in an effervescent world that was about to change.
I remember my deep sympathy for the victims (more than 1000 people died during the “Revolution”) and, 20 years later, my sorrow deepens as the controversy is still alive on why and how these people perished. I will never forget the bodies taken out of the common grave in Timisoara (a mother and baby were among the victims) and the natural parallel with the Nazism victims. I believe many of those lives could have been spared.
As communism was dying everywhere in Eastern Europe, Ceausescu’s reign was coming to a natural end. Twenty years removed from the frenzy of those December days, the human sacrifice seems painfully futile, random and indefensible (or, worse, justified by pitifully selfish reasons). It pains me to think of all those mothers that, twenty years after the fact, are still wondering why and how their children were killed. They believed they were changing the course of history, but, instead, they became its victims.
Tags: Bucharest, Ceausescu, December 1989, Romanian Revolution
