FOCUS
After the revolution, a former
Romanian journalist finds that
the nation's shrinking, aging
Jewish community is still
surviving. But there is fear for
the future. A first hand
account.
EVA PEEL
Special to The Jewish News
A
fter
spending most of December and January glued to
the television set and poring over newspaper ac-
counts of the Romanian revolution, that most
extraordinary uprising nobody believed could hap-
pen, I had to see the changes in my native land for
myself.
I packed 150 pounds of food and flew to Bucha-
rest. I landed at the International Airport of
Otopeni and was driven by a friend of a friend ("no
cabs," I had been warned) through downtown, to
my parents' house.
Most of this city of 2.5 million people was pitch
dark. The 25 kilometer (over 16 mile) trip, took less
than half-an-hour and gave me the odd feeling that
this was not the Bucharest I'd known and loved
growing up.
I could hardly recognize anything. Tanks and
soldiers were still guarding key points. There were
fresh flowers, burning candles and crowds of peo-
ple at memorial sites. There were bullet holes and
burnt buildings. Whatever wasn't shot down had
been torn down beforehand by the late dictator,
Nicolae Ceausescu.
He had ordered the demolition of almost the en-
tire Jewish part of town, the area I had grown up
in, and had relocated the inhabitants to the dread-
ed suburbs. Instead of small, one-family homes, he
ordered the construction of an almost two mile
stretch of apartment buildings leading to his
humongous new Palace.
Eva Peel is a former Romanian journalist now
writing from Santa Monica, Ca. Peel, 42, left
Romania in 1974.
44
The Victory of Socialism Boulevard, as this
street is called, is now an unending row of identical
buildings, which have facades but no back walls.
Unfinished and uninhabited, they look like a movie
set.
The Bucharest I found had no food, no medi-
cines, no light in the streets at night and almost
no public transportation. There weren't even post-
cards to send home.
It was a city after the revolution.
Of course, everyone assured me that this was a
major improvement. They also told me that, now
there's heat and light in homes. Then, somehow
they all seemed to run out of words.
"You cannot imagine what we've been through,
what we've survived," they said.
"I'll never forget old Mrs. Rosenberg's face that
day in the milk line," Gyuri, my 72-year-old father,
recalled. "It was 7 a.m. and it was cold, well below
zero. We had all been standing in line for more than
an hour silent, glad that there was milk for a
change."
Mrs. Rosenberg, who has Parkinson's disease,
was in front of my father and seemed to be shak-
ing worse than usual. Finally it was her turn to get
a container of milk in a soft plastic bag.
"But she couldn't quite hold on to it," Gyuri said.
"The milk was jumping wildly in her shaky hands.
Her efforts to hang on to it might have passed for
some novel juggling routine, except for the look of
absolute horror on her face, horror that she could
drop the irreplaceable milk."
"That happened to me too,"said Lida, my 68-year-
old step-mother.
On another very cold day, more than 400 people
were lined up at the corner store for chickens. Lida
and her friend, Raya, had been in line for about four
hours.
"The chickens were running low and people were
getting very crazy," Lida said. "By the time we got
up front, they were pushing and shoving so violent-
ly that, when Raya swung out of the line with two
birds and handed me one holding it by the legs...
probably because my hands were too numb, I drop-
ped it."
Lida made no attempt to fight for her purchase.
She said she watched the only meat she had seen
in two weeks get trampled by the mob.
"I didn't survive the Nazi concentration camps
to die over a scrawny chicken," she said. "It isn't
even the money. People aren't rich. But they would
be happy to pay. There just isn't any food. (But),
it's a bit better since the revolution."
I did a mental roll call and realized that all of my
old Jewish friends and former colleagues have been
long gone. Everybody I know seems to be in my
parents' age bracket.
They belong to that fairly large group of Ro-
The Victory
of Socialism
Boulevard.
Unfinished
and
uninhabited,
the buildings
look like a
huge movie
set.
g Back To
BUCHAREST
FRIDAY. APRIL 20. 1990