Well, indeed, the temptation to go to the windows was pretty high as there were crowds chanting outside of our building and strange cracking sounds like nothing I had heard before could be heard in the distance. The songs were not Christmas carols, nor were the cracking sounds the kind that most people in Western countries qualify as ‘fun sounds’ around the time of the holidays. Rather, the songs were songs of freedom and the chanting was of the sort that you would only hear when a most dreaded dictator is booted out of power after decades of starving and terrorizing his own population. They were exhilarating and it was not long before I started singing them around the house, without really having a clue what I was saying (and to the great amusement of all around me, not even pronouncing the new words in the songs exactly right).
It was the 23rd of December 1989, and my beloved country, Romania, was experiencing an unnecessarily violent, and unforgivably deadly revolution against a communist dictatorship that exhibited elements of a personality-cult driven totalitarian regime. As the regime initially turned its tanks and weapons on the population, resulting in more than 1000 deaths across the country and many times more severely injured civilians, buildings and windows were being targeted. And yet, the Christmas gifts coming early trick worked well: me and my brother were now busily toiling away at building a train station and connecting railways from pieces that looked like lego (but were not). I remember the calm, collected, focus on the game, while the streets were noisy and the TV was sounding like a thriller movie was playing, except of course it was worse than that and it was real. But to us, as children, the games we had just received seemed somehow to be the only reality.
Later, when studying the comparative history of all Central and East European countries during my Masters in European integration in Poland, I was really shocked to discover that my country was the only one where the transition out of communism took a violent route. Somehow, I had grown up thinking this must have been the only way, that a government would not peacefully negotiate its transition or yield the way for a new system to come to power. Studying with one of the very architects of the ‘roundtable’ managed transition methodology that Poland and other countries in the region started to emerge out of communism as early as 1988, a professor who had been a member of Solidarnośc (the trade union movement that eventually liberated Poland from communism in 1988), I remember feeling a lot of pain hearing this and even anger asking myself: “Why could the peaceful managed roundtable transition not have been the way for my country too? Why did people younger than myself had to die for me to become a European citizen..? Could it not have been different?” That pain and anger will never leave me and sometimes I wonder if being Romanian doesn’t actually also come down to this too, pain and anger over this tragic moment in our collective history.
Back to that early Christmas day: My parents were delighted because they could watch TV, which for once was actually interesting, showing more than just the platitudes controlled by the regime. They could see bits of what was going on around the country, where the revolutions had already started few days before but as the media entirely state owned there was not really place to get information from, but now the TV was finally showing footage of the dictator being booed by the crowd (this would have been unthinkable a year back) and eventually escaping in a military helicopter. At that point in time, with the military seemingly on the side of the dictator and victims including people of all ages, from very young to very old killed in Bucharest the night before, it became quite clear to my parents that anything was possible so they started planning an escape for us.
As the night drew in and we happened to live in the city center where by all likelihood this is where the biggest violence was expected, they simply dressed me and my brother in basically what was our ski suits and we left the house in the middle of the night to relocate to my grandparents house. Although they lived in the city too, their house was on a small, quiet street by the sea, which was secluded from the city center. I still remember walking in the cold winter night in a pretty surreal world. There were people on the streets but always walking fast, running, we seemed to be the only ones ‘walking’.
My dad was sort of walking ahead of us and I was walking holding on to my brother’s hand who was holding my mom’s. At some point, a gentleman started walking alongside my dad and the two were talking as if they knew each other. I could tell my mom was getting uneasy until she eventually quite literally told him to go away and leave us alone.
In a strange twist of things, the man was one of our neighbours who had been up to that day enrolled in the secret police. While my parents used to have to be polite to such people, it soon became pretty obvious that on that night he was not trying to spy on us, he was instead using a family with children as his own alibi to escape from fear of the revolutionaries thinking he was safer walking alongside us than on his own as he was not very loved in the city. When my parents realised this was happening and that we were at a huge risk walking alongside our neighbour, they had to choose to be impolite to him, for once, and shooed him away. I remember these details as I made a mental note at the time that something was odd in their behavior.
Recently, in the past few years, I was asked to write the English foreword for a book by a Romanian historian who studied the archives of the communist party in the 80s, in my city, Constanta, in order to publish the book. I was shocked by the stories of intimidation and the direct threats he received over the years on the topic of publishing his research. I also could not tell from his stories if there were recent threats or from before 1989. The lines are becoming more blurred I suppose in most people’s memories and the time passing only makes the ‘before’ and ‘after’ seem like two sides of the same coin – and / but are they?
Our little ‘escape’ or walk in the night between the 23rd of December to the 24th 1989 going to my grandparents home ended fine, we were happy to find them there (they did not know we were coming to visit and stay there for the holidays). I seem to remember whispering inside the house and the lights staying off that night. My cousins and their mom joined us shortly, with my uncle being stuck in Bucharest on those days, ending up nearly in the way of the tanks.
The following morning, my mom had to go to work (there were no days off on Christmas eve or on Christmas, the communist regime was severely limiting religious freedom to the point of criminalising it). She took a bus and went to her University to teach classes. She was a professor at the time at the military navy academy and she was quite scared to approach a military building. Once there, the school no longer wanted to let them leave the premises of the school but by the end of the day she could rejoin us. On the following day, which was Christmas day 1989, she decided to not to go to work, nearly nobody did anymore. The country witnessed the first live TV show which involved the shooting of the dictator and his wife, shown on screens which people watched from every home across the country.
It was my first Christmas as a child (i had previous ones but as a baby), and I was the happiest I had been, building train stations, learning new songs, night time walks across the city, staying with my grandparents, all these amounted to me having a pretty interesting time. Little did I know back then, that on that Christmas I had received the greatest gift: the seed of freedom to what was going to once be my European citizenship. And yet, it should have never come with the death of innocent civilians. Perhaps this is why I cherish it so much and I think we should grow it further. If previous generations did so much for us, I ask myself what are we doing now for future generations? Is this why I am advocating for growing EU citizenship to incorporate more rights, including political rights. I was told it is old fashioned somehow to talk about political rights in the 2020s. As if democracy, freedom, and political participation can ever go out of fashion… and if they do, then this Christmas tale should remind us all why they should instead be the only permanent fashionables.
To end on a bit of a lighter note, this episode impacted on much of my life now : I only recently realised I am uneasy when I receive gifts unannounced. I don’t know what to say and although in principle of course I like surprises, this aspect of gifts arriving out of the blue spooks me out. I’m also someone always in favour of building new train railways, having spent this past year 2024 as a candidate for a pan-European political party who advocated for building more train infrastructure to connect the EU. This always comes as a big YES for me, since December 1989 I never stopped seeing the link between building new train stations and railways and democracy 🙂
Wishing everyone a peaceful Christmas time 🙂
