You could not find any seafood except perhaps, once in a while, some frozen variety from China or somewhere far. This happened while Romania has both a sea (the Black Sea) and a great river (the Danube.) Sometimes you were lucky enough to find a great product that you could actually buy. Not surprisingly, it bore a strange label, written in English or other foreign language. But down below you could read “Made in Romania”. What happened is that sometimes a lot of products were refused by the foreign importers as being substandard. Then it was sold to the Romanians. For us it was perfect.
More and more deli items became totally unappetizing. It became known that the producers were adding by-products and soy additives. But again, you couldn’t complain because everything was state run and the state would not prosecute itself. Later on, a few special stores also state run, opened. They carried luxury food items (they would be regular in the western world) but for us, they were spectacular. Although they were extremely expensive, there would be long lines there as well. After a few years of operation, these stores ran out of things to sell and became just like the other ordinary stores that were mostly empty.
There was also the phenomenon of the hard currency store. They displayed wonderful merchandise like shearing coats, fine leather shoes and boots, luxury cosmetics, as well as various folk costumes and sundries. Only foreigners with dollars, sterling, franks, etc. could buy from these stores. Romanians were not allowed to carry foreign currency. We used to gaze at the windows and wish that we could have access to all that.
Foreign travel, like I said, was very hard to do. When I was about 11-12, my mother managed to save enough to purchase some tickets for an organized trip to Eastern Germany. This was a communist country, of course, but too close to its western counterpart. As such, my mother was allowed to go but not me. I had to be kept behind as a guarantee that my mother would not try to flee into Western Germany. Even a one-day trip to a town in Bulgaria just across the border from Romania, when I was about 10, proved to be difficult. We were going by bus and the bus was stopped for hours at the border to determine whether I should be allowed to go.
On every trip there would be a few security police infiltrators who would watch what everybody was saying and doing. There were rumors that security police were everywhere, in lines at stores, in government building, everywhere. However, people would still tell political jokes in which they would make fun of the whole situation. Romanians like to joke, even when faced with misery and deprivation.
Romanians are not too quick to act against authority. They are more laid back and expect that somehow, somewhere somebody will do something and things will miraculously improve. “Let others do it”, “Don’t get involved”, “It might be too risky”, are all mottoes of Romanians.
There were a few courageous souls that spoke their mind openly or distributed anti-Communist manifestos and they ended up in unknown jails, psychiatric hospitals or working 16-18 hour days on the Canal (a grandiose plan Ceausescu had). They were usually intellectuals, students that were idealistic and thought they could change the system.
How I Decided to Leave
The situation, both political, economic, and cultural became worse and worse. People were grumbling. You heard of more and more people that somehow had managed to flee the country. Sometimes, people would find an opportunity to be sent on business trips. People that were allowed on business trips were deemed sure not to flee, but sometimes they did. Sportspeople, artists that had to go to other countries for competitions, sometimes decided to defect. Some brave ones swam over the Danube into Yugoslavia and from then on into Greece, Italy, Austria, etc. Usually, it was one member of the family that managed to leave and after a while, the rest of the family would be brought over. Usually, the person abroad had to pay some heavy money either officially or as bribes to have his family released from Romania.
Quite early I realized that I could not change the system single-handedly or even as part of a small group. I was no martyr either. The country was not ready for change. I had heard that through sheer persistence you sometimes succeeded in obtaining a visa to leave the country. I was not afraid and was willing to take the chance.
My mother and I (my father was deceased) decided to leave in 1980. Before doing anything else, we went to the American Embassy to make it known that we wanted to leave for the U.S.A. That proved to be a very smart move because one of my co-workers, who decided to leave the country as well, did not start by going to the American Embassy first and went to the Romanian authorities first. This cost him more than a year delay in leaving Romania. Although he had started the immigration proceedings before we did (my mother and I), he only managed to leave much later (and then, maybe out of too much stress or happiness, he died in transit at the age of 39 before getting to America).
(to be continued)
