Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 29, 1990 TAG: 9005290081
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SUSAN SACHS NEWSDAY
DATELINE: PLATARESTI, ROMANIA LENGTH: Long
"Only the completely ill children are here," said Paula Casacu, the matter-of-fact nurse in charge of this rural institution for severely handicapped children 25 miles south of the Romanian capital. "In Bucharest, they decide if they have any chance to recover. If not, they are sent here."
These are the children that the Romanian system calls "non-recoverables." That is the literal translation, although the true meaning doesn't sink in until the reality of the lives, and deaths, is seen firsthand.
"What it really means is lost forever," said Beatrice Stambull, a French psychiatrist with the relief organization Medecins du Monde, or Doctors of the World, who has been visiting such asylums for harrowing months. "Kafka is nothing compared to Romania."
Of all the revelations about life in Romania since December's revolution toppled the totalitarian regime and opened the country to foreign observers, none has been so shocking as its treatment of its weakest and youngest citizens.
Under the late dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, life was miserable for everyone. Over the past decade, as part of his plan to repay the country's huge foreign debt, food was scarce, electricity was rationed to two or three hours a day and foreign products, including medicine, were available only at great risk through the black market.
The children suffered as their parents did - and more. For example, a virtual epidemic of AIDS has been discovered among babies here, a phenomenon not seen anywhere else in the world. In an outmoded practice intended to strengthen the babies, doctors gave them total blood transfusions, unaware that the blood was AIDS-infected. Authorities under the old regime refused to acknowledge the problem for years, despite efforts by some doctors who saw the disease spreading.
Now Western relief workers are discovering a new horror as they visit homes for mentally retarded, physically handicapped and abandoned children. They have found children tied to beds, starving and filthy. Often the children have never been touched or held. No one has talked to them. They rock back and forth, staring blankly, or cower in the presence of strangers.
Only five months after the revolution, the system remains unchanged, although slightly more money has been allocated for food in orphanages and other institutions. No one knows how many children under the age of 18 are in Romania's institutions. Western diplomats have estimated that between 25,000 and 40,000 young people and infants are being kept in conditions ranging from spartan to hellish. In Plataresti, which is not considered the worst home, children ages from 3 to 17 years old are said to be mentally and physically handicapped, although many appear to suffer chiefly from isolation and neglect.
"You see, his eyes and nose and mouth are not normal," said Casacu, as she pointed out a soiled toddler standing, teetering, in his crib. The child's eyes followed visitors as they walked through the room. Nothing about his face looked abnormal. Another child lay quietly beside him in the same bed. "They will never walk, they can't move, so they are put together," the nurse said.
In another room, about 30 children ranging in age from 5 to 9 were crushed into a corner, knees drawn up to their chins. A heavy-set woman towered over them. "Do you ever touch them?" she was asked. "Of course," she responded, reaching out for a towheaded boy in gray pajamas with scabs on his face. He cowered and retreated.
Children arrive here at the age of 3, after doctors in local hospitals and orphanages sort out those who may one day be able to work and those who will never work. In Romania, it was against the law not to work. And under the odd logic of the old regime, children and invalids who cannot work fall under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Labor, which runs homes such as Plataresti but provides no therapy, training or rehabilitation.
"It is a place they go to die," said Floretina Dinca, the medical director of Bucharest Orphanage No. 5, one of the places where the selections are made. Here she received infants dumped by families unable or unwilling to care for them. Many of them have deformities caused by drugs their mothers took during pregnancy in disastrous attempts to abort them illegally.
But even in this happier place, where a few tattered dolls and toys brighten the crowded rooms, the rules are rigid. Every month each of the 160 children is tested to see if his motor, verbal and social skills match norms for his exact age, as written in a 1977 manual from Romanian health authorities. If not, the babies are candidates for selection as "non-recoverables."
Often, Dinca said, babies may have been born normal but arrive at the orphanage totally unresponsive, the result of never having been shown affection or touched. These she tries to help because she knows the fate that awaits them. Sometimes her staff altered babies' records in an effort to keep them beyond the age of 3.
Stambull fears that Dinca's orphanage may be the exception among Romanian institutions. She has seen so-called untreatable children who suffered only from harelips, who were only deaf or mute, who could play chess and discuss politics.
Earlier this year, she visited a children's home in Brasov where the youngsters were kept locked in one room and slept on the floor. At another home she was told by the director that 40 of the 100 children died last year.
"Of what?" Stambull said she demanded. The director shrugged and told her, "Of mental deficiency."
"As if they could die of being dumb!" said Stambull, still outraged. "Maybe they died of not being fed - and I don't mean just being underfed. Sometimes they put the food near the child, but not near enough for him to reach it. It has to do with extermination."
Many Romanians blame the problem of abandoned children on Ceausescu's obsession with increasing the Romanian population. He outlawed abortions, penalized single women and childless couples and forced women in factories to undergo quarterly gynecological examinations at work to monitor pregnancies. Under conditions of hardship, women abandoned both unwanted and abnormal babies.
But outsiders such as Stambull wonder if the Romanian treatment of children can be explained so easily. "It's not just that it was a Stalinist state and everybody had to work," she said. "Misery doesn't explain it. The lack of technical knowledge doesn't explain it."
"The question is," she added, "was it Ceausescu who made this, or was it this that made Ceausescu?"
by CNB