CHAPTER 1
Initial Flames
In the midst of World War II, the fertile soil of Eastern Europeran red with the blood of millions. The fighting swept throughvillages, cities, and farms, shattering lives and filling mass graveswith the dead. Families were torn apart. Fathers, husbands, sons,brothers, and uncles were vaporized in artillery blasts, burnedalive in tanks and planes, or turned to raw meat under witheringmachine-gun fire. Mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, and auntsstarved or were disintegrated in carpet bombings. The very fabricof civilized society ripped to tatters as the years of war draggedon, and it seemed for a time that darkness would reign over all ofEurope, and possibly the world, for a thousand years.
Then, slowly, ever so slowly, the Eastern Front began to change.The Soviet Union stalled the German advance toward Moscow.The Russian people rose up. The munitions factories hummed. Thetroop trains rolled westward. The Russian Bear pushed on, drivingGermany back. Alliances shifted as the tide of war ebbed andflowed, favoring one side or another. Romania was no exception.Early in the war, it sided with Germany in September 1940 underthe rule of Premier Ion Antonescu, with the tacit approval of KingMichael. It was like that in Hungary and other nearby countries.You might say Romania received an offer it couldn't refuse: sign onthe dotted line or be slaughtered.
German soldiers poured into Bucharest, and the lovely capitalwould never again be the same. In 1941, Romanians rallied to fightthe Soviet Union along with their German masters when AdolfHitler saw fit to void the nonaggression pact he'd signed withJoseph Stalin in 1939. My father, a man I never knew, was amongthem, a proclaimed fighter for his king. He graduated from themilitary academy of the Romanian Royal Army in Timisoara asa lieutenant in the same year Hitler and Stalin made their emptypromises not to wage war against each other.
When my father went into action against the Soviets, hefought with distinction, earning an Iron Cross and a promotionto captain. On September 7, 1942, on the Kalmuk Steppe eighteenmiles southwest of Stalingrad, his company engaged the Soviets ina fierce firefight. He was on the field telephone in a foxhole when anartillery shell landed nearby, killing him and seriously woundingthe telephone technician. It was only ten days after the start of theBattle of Stalingrad, a bloody fight that lasted until the followingFebruary and that by some counts killed two million people. Mymother was twenty-eight, and five months pregnant with me, whenshe received word of my father's death.
I sometimes look at timeworn black-and-white snapshots ofmy father and mother when they were newlyweds just before thewar, back when our family owned an eleven-acre property with afine house and employed a married couple serving as housekeeperand caretaker. The future of my parents seemed bright when theygot married in 1939, but in retrospect their timing couldn't havebeen worse. The clouds of war in Europe had been gathering since1936, when Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland. Germany hadabsorbed Austria and seized Czechoslovakia, and in September1939 it invaded Poland, officially kicking off the start of WorldWar II in the European Theater.
I wonder what life would have been like for us all if someGermans hadn't gotten it into their sick heads that they couldconquer the whole planet. My parents, Gordana and Olimpiu, werea handsome couple, she with a tender smile and dark black hairand he with eyes reflecting a mischievous bent. Olimpiu lookedquite dashing with his well-trimmed moustache, shock of thick,wavy black hair that resembled mine in my younger years, and aRomanian military cadet's uniform that must have made Gordanaswoon. They'd met as he walked past her apartment on the way tothe military academy, and it was almost love at first sight for themboth. The war changed the lives of everyone on the globe. It killedmy father, like the millions of other fathers lost, and it set the stagefor a grim existence in Eastern Europe under Soviet rule. In manyways, the war charted my own life, even though I was only an infantwhen it happened.
As the tide of war changed in favor of the Allies, King Michaeloverthrew Antonescu and changed sides in 1944, standing withStalin instead of Hitler. I was living with my grief-strickenmother, my three-year-old sister, and my maternal grandparentsin the rectory in Timisoara's Christian Orthodox Church. Mygrandfather, Slobodan Kostic, was the vicar of the church in thecity with three other priests reporting to him. He was an importantman in many circles, and he was considered one of the elite amongthe Serbian community. The war was tragic, but Slobodan and mygrandmother, Paulina, were financially and spiritually secure. Theywere busy doing God's work, helping the needy and war ravagedand running the church for its large congregation, which was sobereft of hope in those terrifying times. I don't think my mother ormy grandparents had any idea of what was just around the cornerfor them. What could they have done if they had known? It's easyto look back and make judgments, but I ask myself now and then ifI would have done anything differently than they did. I don't havethe answers. I just don't know.
Suddenly, as a member of Allied forces, Romania was afriend of Soviet Russia, its former sworn nemesis. The Red Armymarched in and occupied the land, just as the Germans had done.The steady tramp of hobnailed boots on cobblestones and therumble of Soviet tanks on country roads filled the air but didnot drown out the guns of war. The Soviet occupation created anominous backdrop to the fighting that few people paid attentionto at the time. I can now understand why the Communist threatwent largely unidentified among the rich and poor of Romania,but as a young man living in utter fear of the securitate, Romania'ssecret police, I did not. I did not understand how a people couldfail to see what was plainly obvious to me then. It seemed clear thatSoviet rule would be no picnic for the Romanian people and otherswithin what became the Eastern Bloc. When you are young, youthink you are wiser than you really are. I know that now. I knowthe situation in Romania was very complicated and that no easyanswers existed for my grandparents or my mother. It's harder torun away than you might think.
I was only two years old when the Big Three met at the swankyresort of Yalta in February 1945, ensconced in the incredible beautyof the Crimea on the shimmering Black Sea. Russia's Joseph Stalin,Britain's Winston Churchill, and America's Franklin D. Rooseveltdithered and jockeyed, and eventually a new map was agreed uponfor Europe. Stalin came away with much of what he wanted. DidYalta change my life more than the violence of World War II, withthe death and destruction that took my father? Did it send me onthe journey through darkness that would shroud my every wakingmoment for much of the first two decades of my existence underthe thumb of the Soviet-backed Romanian Communist Party?
Perhaps. I tend to think so now.
It does seem that big events do impact the lives of the so-calledlittle people. Events like war. Events like the loss of a father whowill always remain a painful blank place inside me, even now toa certain degree, especially on holidays when I'm with my familyand friends. Who can be sure, though? I know I still don't know. Iknow my destiny could have gone one way just as easily as it couldhave gone another.
We Romanians can be fatalists. We think whatever happenswill happen and that there is little we can do about it. WeRomanians are also known for our ancient culture and language,which dates back to the Roman Empire. Our country was knownas "land of the Romans," which accounts for its present name. Wethink that whatever happens will happen and that there is littlewe can do about it. However, we are also known for ignoring aseemingly obvious fate and pressing on to find our destinies inspite of impossible odds. That is what I did when I risked jail,gunfire, and death to escape from behind the Iron Curtain at theheight of the Cold War in 1966. That is why I risked everythingto come to America. I was too stubborn to accept the fate othershad relegated me to.
The birth of a dream, or the spark of a personal revolutionlike mine, can come from many things. I suppose it is different foreveryone. After all, we are unique as individuals, and yet we areoften much the same, like a crowd driven by some common cattleprod that moves us to stampede blindly forward.
After the war, the Russians stayed. They had no intention ofgiving up any territory they'd won with Soviet blood and treasure,and Yalta built in geopolitical guarantees that made it possible forthe Iron Curtain to close tight. The government of King Michaelwas weakened, and the Communist wolves were howling at thedoor. Yet I'm told that my family got on with life pretty much asusual. I guess my mother and grandparents had no other choice.In those years, the world just wanted to forget. It wanted peace. Itwanted to heal. My mother had lost the love of her life, and I thinkshe found solace in taking care of us, sharing the babysitting withPaulina. Slobodan continued running the Christian OrthodoxChurch in Timisoara, which also could correctly be called theGreek Orthodox Church. (In Romania, we don't call the churchGreek, but both are one and the same.) The five of us were happy.Obviously, because I was a toddler, the years just after the end ofWorld War II are blanks for me, voids in the cosmic space of mymind that nevertheless helped shape me as a person.
I dimly recall holidays with lots of family and friends in therectory, mere wisps of a time far removed from my present. Mymother's smiling face and warm touch I can remember more clearly.I remember the timbre of her gentle, soft voice. Superimposingknowledge of our family from later years on those earliest periods ofmy life, I know with assurance that there was good food and plentyof drink on Easter and Christmas. I know there was singing andlaughing. I know that on Christmas Eve my grandfather walkedfrom room to room in the residence, a grand space of more thanthree thousand square feet, and offered prayers of blessing. I amsure I followed my sister, Smaragda (we called her Ada for short),and got in the way as she spread clean hay on the floor behindSlobodan as he went. The hay was part of our ceremony, and itremained for two weeks, signifying the manger where Jesus sleptafter he was born.
Although I don't recall it, I am also sure that at the age of fourI sensed the tumult in the family when the Soviets orchestratedthe overthrow of King Michael in 1947 and installed a puppetCommunist government to rule the people of Romania. Fromthen on, Soviet officials pulled the strings, making the CommunistParty members in Romania's elite dance to whatever tune wasdesired. It seemed the central objective was to subjugate the people.Those who did not join the Communists were viewed as enemiesof the state. Just about anyone could end up in jail, and lots ofpeople did.
Slobodan was attacked almost immediately. As a prominentreligious leader, the Communists viewed him as a threat. Theyalso knew his son-in-law had spilled Soviet blood in the fight forStalingrad during the war, something that did little to endearhim to party officials. The authorities forced Slobodan out of thechurch, saying he was unfit to lead it in a way in keeping withdirectives from Bucharest. They forced us out of the rectory, givingSlobodan's job to a Communist sympathizer. Timisoara's ChristianOrthodox community set Grandfather up with a small pension,and, ironically enough, they arranged for him to have a rent-freethree-bedroom apartment on the first floor in the rundowntenement building adjacent to the church. He was banished infull sight of where he had preached for decades. The Communistsalso confiscated the property my father had owned in the country,giving it to a party member and his family.
Resigned to his reduced circumstances but defiant to the last,Slobodan directed men he'd hired to move the nice furniturehe had been allowed to keep into the dingy cold-water flat nextdoor to his former church. I don't know what he must have beenthinking as he walked with Paulina through the dank and darkrooms, black cast-iron woodstoves in each for heat, the plasterwalls water streaked in places and stained a dull gray from soot.The humiliation and the stripping of his very identity as a man anda spiritual leader must have been intense.
A trim man of medium height with reddish hair long sinceturned snowy with age, a thick white beard, and gentle eyes, hebegan walking with a stoop and was prone to long silences. Whenhe became a presence in my young mind, a fixture in my life asa boy, a substitute father and mentor, I remember him alwayswalking with a cane. His eyes occasionally twinkled when helaughed, but there was ever a pervasive look of sadness in them too.Later, much later, I learned that Slobodan had suffered a strokein 1947, not so very long after his exile into the apartment wherehe would eventually die. He called the place his dungeon, and inmany ways it was even worse than that.
CHAPTER 2
The Disappeared
When looking back in time, it's easy to get lost. Memoriesshift and change like the dunes on a beach, always presentand yet always changing under the influence of wind and wave.Who is to say what is accurate and what is not? Precision is notthe most basic element of history, both personal and global. Itis a messy thing, memory. It's a creation about as imprecise as itgets. The shadows part on occasion, though, and I can scan the farhorizons of my earliest memories and catch sight of a lighthousewith a beam that slices through the darkness to illuminate a timefrom my early life. It happens for just a split second, the incredibleflash that catches an event, smile, or a burst of laughter, fixing itfor me to see before the beam moves on and leaves me in the darkagain.
One of those times happened in 1949. My mother was workingthen. She eventually became a school nurse, but I don't know whatGordana was doing way back then. I do know she was gone duringthe day, and my grandfather, weakened from his stroke, remained inthe background, usually reading a book or staring out the windowat the people hurrying by on the street as they went about theirbusy lives and he went about doing nothing. Even though he wasbanned from the church he loved, he always dressed in his blackchurch garb, as if at any moment he would be called to preach asermon from the pulpit. He'd served as an army chaplain at thefront during World War I and had seen unspeakable horrors, and Ithink in those lost days of forced inertia, those bloody times visitedhim with undesirable frequency.
After school, my grandmother herded my sister, Ada, fouror five cousins, and me into the apartment living room to watchus until the parents came home from work. She was running ade facto daycare center, freeing up the parents, who had all losteverything after the Communists came into power, to scrape andscratch out a living doing whatever they could in their positions asundesirables. They were like the untouchables in India, the lowestof a caste system that supposedly didn't exist in the Soviet Unionor in Communist Romania. We the workers were all equals, or soit was said, but that was a lie, and almost everyone knew it.
I fondly remember those times I played with my cousinsafter school. I was a boy and still innocent. I did not know aboutCommunists, Stalin, or the expansion of the Eastern Bloc that hadswallowed once-free people and was slowly digesting them in thebelly of the Red Giant. I only knew that we were warm when theCarpathian winds blew in the depths of winter, with fires merrilycrackling in the woodstoves until the wood burned down late atnight and it got cold again even under the heavy wool blankets. Iknew we ate hard black bread and thin potato soup a lot and thathot dogs were a rare treat worthy of celebration when we couldafford them once a month. Sometimes the stores we were allowedto shop in had ground beef or chicken, but we usually couldn'tafford it even when there was any. I ate toast with lard for breakfastalmost every day.
