In December last year 20 years since the Romanian "Revolution" were celebrated on many TV channels world wide. A French friend on my Facebook list asked me to tell him how living in a communist society was like. I started writing everything that was passing through my head, in a memory dance that was going faster and faster and so I ended up writing a lot. I split that in two parts. I'll post here the first part, since another friend of mine had suggested I did...It's my personal perception based on my personal experience, which I am sure is very similar to many...Here it goes...
I haven’t been writing much about the communist times and the Revolution on my blogs because it seemed so vast and so hard to describe things to people so they can understand, or at least so they can get a vague impression of how things were…I’ve read many books of people who got the chance to write about their experiences in the communist prisons, and I think that should be a mandatory reading for everyone on this Earth. My grandfather was imprisoned in a communist jail. Fortunately only for two years… He was innocent of any crime of course, as most people killed or imprisoned by the communists who destroyed intellectuals and rich people, the most “dangerous” to their political regime. And to think that everything was decided by three people after World War II, slices of Europe being divided between them…people waiting for the Americans to come and free us, building a Resistance in the mountains…how ironic, a Romania who was pro-West and wanted to be democratic became communist and an Italy who wanted to become communist became a Christian-democratic country…
But I should stop with the historical background that you already know, I’m sure, and which can be found in any history book…
“1984” by George Orwell? That was so close to what we had here in the ‘80s…of course he exaggerated things a bit to gain full impact on people, but that was pretty much how everything worked….”Animal farm?” Right to the point! "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others." People should also read books by Alexander Soljenitin (“one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich” is one title, thin book as number of pages), Nicolae Steihardt – “Journal of Happiness” (that he wrote after his experience in the communist prisons) and so so many others…
Anyway, I’ve heard many stories of what happened before I was born but I’ll talk about my personal experience. I was born October 1st 1972 and only when I was in the fifth grade I was told my maternal grandmother was Italian. I haven’t known that before even though it felt strange to hear her talk Italian and listen to Italian music and everything, passing it on to me…Because it was so dangerously “bourgeois”…for this kind of thing, or for being related to former rich people got many youngsters to be rejected from attending Universities in the ‘50s and ‘60s…and you definitely couldn’t leave the country with such a “breed”.
My parents received permission to visit Italy in 1979 October, I had just started 1st grade and they left me with an aunt for one month. It was not allowed for entire families to leave, generally children had to be left behind so they can have a card against you if you chose to defect. Generally people used to recover their kids after one or two years, and even though my dad’s Italian uncle offered to help him if he had chosen to stay in Italy, my parents refused because of me. Now I think they should have chosen otherwise, even though I still can remember how hard it was without them for a month…By the way, my Italian grandmother was not allowed to visit Italy until 1965, after World War II.
In the 80s life became hard. Food was rationalized: for a family of three (which was us) we were allowed to have:
- 2 liters of milk/week
- 1+1/2 liters of sunflower seeds/month
- 150g butter/month (which was really watery)
- half of loaf of bread/person per day (which was sour, so sometimes we made bread if we could find flour)
and some other things I can’t remember. They used to “bring” other “goodies” like meat, chicken, cheese, oil, flour, candies, oranges (around Christmas – btw, they had made that tradition communist too, since religion was forbidden and changed Santa’s name in “The Old Frost”) and when that happened there were huge queues, and even then they were forced to rationalize it per person so more people can get some…that’s why you could often see grown ups (neighbours) offering kids in my block some money so they can go queue so they can buy more goodies…
That’s why black market was flourishing…you had to know someone working at the dairy factory etc…they use to steal and sell products…You even had to know someone working in a books store or a stationary store…or in a pharmacy…sometimes you couldn’t even find toothpaste or toilet paper…not to mention tampons by the way…cotton wool was just fine (that’s a sordid detail, but you have to be fully aware of things)….You could always find cans with salted fish, olives and lemon juice, bad chocolate (which I swear I’d love to eat now, as Proust’s Madeleine)….Clothes…whew…horrible, so then you needed to know someone who used to sail for a living because they used to sell coffee, jeans and all kind of other “rotten” western goodies…
Electricity cuts…oh yeah…the whole night (from midnight to 5am) and two hours every day, one day from 4pm to 6pm, and one day from 5pm to 7pm, or more…so I used to write homework at oil lamp or candle light…I used to study in the afternoon (too many kids, the little ones – primary school- used to study in the morning, the others in the afternoon from 1pm to 4/5/6pm…at high-school even 7pm – actually this is still how it’s still done here) so during power cuts in winter we had to have torch lights…and usually we used to write with gloves on many times in winter because the heating was absent…Heating was also absent from our apartments…have you seen people so desperate that their kid is freezing in the house in the dark (that was me) that they lit a fire in some pot in the middle of the living-room so that the kid can warm her hands?
I was a happy kid though, we all were…we used to read so much since there were 2hTV a day (the latest years 3hours), from 8pm to 10pm, and then from 7pm to 10pm – of which one hour was represented by the news about our dear president and our country’s accomplishments in agriculture…All kids used to watch the news because after the news there were 10 minutes of cartoons. 10 minutes!:) And on Sunday we used to have an afternoon TV programme, but the feast was at New Year’s Eve, TV programmes all night long…They used to broadcast movies too…yeah…like Korean, or Russian or Romanian (propaganda)…sometimes we were lucky to get an American music hall or even a western movie (from the wild wild west! Wooooow! In the cinemas the offer was wider…American comedies, Indian movies too, Japanese (the 7 samurai – gosh, I must have watched it so many times!), Elvis Presley’s movies…Thank God for living in a harbour city and thank God for video players…We used to go watch movies in people’s houses who had one…sometimes in strangers’ houses paying a fee like at the cinema…
OK,. I only want to write about one more thing…school and working as an agricultural worker every year for 3 weeks…and then about where I was at the revolution and what I felt…hopefully that will be shorter….Now I need to go get that bath because they might take away hot water at midnight or earlier…yeah…I live in a neighbourhood where that happens on regular basis because of the still old structure…But I am thankful, in communist times we had hot water a few times a week…for a few hours…
Tell me if this is boring, I'll continue writing after my bath...
