Only over a month and it will be 20 years since the execution of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife. The couple had begun to sing the "Internationale" but when they were at the fourth word the firing squad had already stopped their voices. Against the Romanian dictator, there were allegations of crimes against the state, genocide and "undermining the national economy." But today, young people born in Romania in those months, know very little of their national history.
It is not only a Romanian problem, is a problem of recent history culture in a world where we end up knowing much better what happened 60 years ago that 20 or 10. A survey of 2006 conducted by the historical Mirela Murgescu among high school students, has highlighted two important data: young people have vague and fragmentary knowledge of what happened in '89 and the primary source of information is not school, but the stories heard by families.
The regime of Nicolae Ceausescu began to fall in the city of Timisoara, where the authorities wanted to deport the Reformed pastor Laszlo Tokes, because in his sermons he did not avoid criticizing the regime. But in Timisoara a group of faithful gathered outside the house of the pastor and in 24 hours they became hundreds. The police began to attack and kill regardless of the strike of workers in factories that began on December 19. Then the 20 of December, after the refusal of the Romanian Prime Minister to listen what the protesters were asking, the army retreated and Timisoara was declared a free city.
The country began to realize that something was changing only by word of mouth, because the national media didn't say anything. The people, thus, managed to gather in the squares on December 21 and shouted against Ceausescu, who had not expected such a reaction at all. This was the moment of final collapse of communism in Eastern Europe.
On 25 December 1989 the Ceausescu couple were sentenced to death and execution of the sentence occurred several minutes after the pronouncement of sentence. But today there are still many who believe that revolution was only a coup d'etat organized by years and put into practice when the people seemed strong enough to decide to demonstrate.
Romania, which emerged from the dictatorship, however, was a country in disarray: the debt was paid in full in the summer of 1989 but to do that Romanian citizens had been subjected to a life of renunciation and, later, to heal the country from disaster they found a debt three times higher. Over one fifth of the city of Bucharest was demolished by the dictator: he wanted to rebuild it in Ceausescu style. And even then, there was the Rom issue. Nicolae Ceausescu could not bear to cross the road between Bucharest and Sibiu, where the Gypsy communities were living. He found no better solution than organizing a deportation of Roms in the reserve of Valea Lui Stan. Confined there, the fate of Romanies has not changed even after the end of the dictatorial regime and today they still live in the reserve, barely tolerated by the Romanians.
There are many stories of those years under the regime and of those days that gave again hope to an entire country: there was someone like Petre Roman (post-communist prime minister) who was teaching at the Polytechnic but he did not hesitate a moment to join with workers and students never seen before, panting in erecting a barrier that could block the arrival of the Securitate (that later killed 39 persons); there was someone who, employed in a factory, found himself suddenly to compile a list of demands of the revolutionaries to Prime Minister; there were those, like the Nobel laureate novelist Herta Muller, who was forced to live all this exiled in other countries because of Securitate persecution.
It's been 20 years, recently came out in Italian cinemas a Romanian film, "Tales of the golden age", that between farce and tragedy tells the time that has brought only misery and hunger in the country. Today, however, the young Romanians know little about what happened. "What I know I have certainly learned not from school but by my parents," someone says. These days in Bucharest in the art gallery Andreiana Mihail there is an exhibition with photos of those years. Photos that surprise young people, that divide the society and the generations. Today the Romanian society has set aside and removed most of the questions related to the chaotic days of December 1989. The country has not come to any interpretation truly shared, and remain polarized and distant views on those events.
Young people born in '89 does not give great importance to that date because the communist Romania is part of a world far away, almost grotesque. They do not know exactly what young people were asking twenty years ago, protesting against the dictatorship. Young people, today, look to the future, which looks very good. They like Coca Cola and McDonald's because they are Americans and they perceive the global environment as a place from which, culturally, economically and socially there is more to gain than to lose.
So the time was not used to try to understand those years but only to forget them and try to become "like the others." The dreams of the teens of 1989 were almost forgotten.
In just over a month there will be the celebration of the 20 years since the fall of the regime, but for young people with new dreams so different from the older teens will be a ceremony as many others.
Marianna Lepore
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Comments
i giovani rumeni di oggi non conoscono i fatti di 20 anni fa...va bene...lo posso accettare! comunque se a loro chiedi chi e' stato ceausescu lo sanno sicuramente..chedete ai giovani italiani chi è il presidente della Repubblica; io l'ho fatto e non potete capire le risposte che ho ricevuto!
comunque quello che voglio dire è questo: curatevi di più del vostro proprio giardino e poi criticate quello del vicino!