The last one hundred meters/Communism in a child's eyes

The last one hundred meters

It is about the last years of the Communist period and the memories of a person that was born in the early eighties in the Eastern Europe, namely in Romania. How do one survive the Communist era without remember anything? It is impossible if we only think at the stories told by our parents, the fragments of the past that we do remember and all that coagulated in our mind and gathered with the memories of stories read and analyzed by people that lived through all the period and even before and after it. The main issue here is to open a new chapter about what the eighties sons and daughters remember of the Communist period and how is the Communist period seen by the eyes "of an angel", the eyes of children that were born only to see the last glimpse of a totalitarian regime, one who was very rough for most of the people but very soft for others in comparison with other totalitarian regimes. We will humbly look on the perspectives of such a remembrance without touching the untouchable, the memories of the others.

One the nicest teachers that I can remember from college who became one of my greatest friends, or maybe my greatest friend due to our common path that has been lasting for so long, Ioan Stanomir , my Constitutional Law teacher, has pointed out, in a collective book about the memories of the Communist past called " A world which disappeared", some very important aspects of that era, beginning with the memories of the boy that he was then and the memories who faded for me about the school and the rules , back then, the hidden information and the way that the conversations back at home had nothing to do with the common discourse in the "real Romanian world". His memories are better penciled because of the fact that he spent a decade more than I in the Communism. But what we have in common are things that most of the children born in the Communist era have in common: memories about family, about how simple was a child's life in comparison with nowadays. The struggle with the words and the different discourses has been erased of my past because I did not have to deal with the real political world besides my first grade when I had at 7 am to be in front of the school singing the National Anthem. And all of our books had on the first page the photograph great leader Nicolae Ceausescu, as also every class had the portrait of him on one of its walls.

What I can remember of that period is more about the innocence of my childhood and the parallel with what children have today, the diversity of activities and freedom, not only from the financial point of view but also freedom of choice, which we did not have back then.