A story about monsters. The ones inside us.

The other day in Tirana, in one of the city's old bunkers, I visited a museum dedicated to the cruelty of communism: an absolutely necessary initiative of post-communist recovery, which should be a must for every former communist country and visited by as many people as possible.

One surprise I had there was to find in one of the rooms a work by my colleague from Design Thinkers Academy Albania, Rajmonda Zajmi . The installation is called "Monster of Dictatorship" and it might be as well about the monstrosity of any dictatorship (communist, fascist, Putinist…). Because it's really about the monsters that grow inside us when we are indoctrinated, manipulated, deprived of freedom and moral values.?

The plaque describing the story of Rajmonda's monster describes her childhood experience, similar to the experiences of many of us who grew up in Eastern Europe during the years of communism. Those times we were surrounded by slogans we didn't understand back then, but which tried to create the false impression of the "greatness of socialism” which we supposedly built “together” using the pickaxe and rifle (in the case of the Albanians), or the sickle and hammer (in our case, as Romanians).

It's a story about the fear and suspicion that grew within us during those years, and about how powerfully these crippled our ability to distinguish right from wrong or to reason with our own minds (unfortunately, we can still see the effects of this today).

This work brought to my mind one of the most powerful memories from my childhood, which marked me and it is known only by people close to me. So I thought I'd recount it, bringing to light another of that monster’s heads.?

In our household there has always been a very strong anti-communist feeling (and generally a staunch opposition to dictatorship of any form). In a way, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. My grandparents on my father's side were deported to Soviet forced labour camps and lost their lives because of it. My grandfather on my mother's side was a supporter of the interwar National Peasants' Party and a monarchist (the opponents of the communists, when they came to power). During the 1946 elections, he ran into the woods carrying the ballot box on his back to “save it" from the communists, and, after he retired, I remember him with his ear glued to the radio every day, listening to Radio Free Europe and “waiting for the Americans to come and liberate us” ??

But whatever talk there was of the regime in our house, it was always mentioned in a whisper. We knew we were always being watched (because my father is ethnically German, belonging to the German minority from Romania, and secret police informants had an obsession about the possibility that we would try to flee the country), so my parents tried to protect me. In the fourth grade, I had written an essay at school mentioning how 'the communists confiscated our land', and the teacher, a friend of my parents, reached out to them in panic and told them to be careful what they talk about at home, so we don't get in trouble. So a silence fell, though I kept hearing them whispering behind closed doors. Until one day in 1987...

My mother is a Romanian language teacher. She has lived her life in the classroom, among children. Always the same lessons, the same stories, and somehow the same expectations of the children's reactions every year. Until the day I want to tell you about, when she taught a class of 5th graders. The reading for that class was D.R. Popescu's "Senin de august” (“Clear August sky”), a quite known novel for those times.?

I remember that story perfectly, even though I was only about 10 when I first read it in class. It's the story of a little boy, during World War II, who goes from one village to another to bring his grandmother food. In his basket, among other things, he has a fat goose named Lila, with whom he converses in a very innocent and lively way. The boy had covered the goose in the basket with grass, to protect it from being stolen by the soldiers, should he meet any along the way. Which is exactly what happens, because, at some point, the boy has to cross a bridge, and there he stumbles upon some soldiers trying to dynamite the bridge. The soldiers start talking to the boy and ask him what he has in his basket. ‘Grass’, he answers. They laugh and ask him ‘Does grass have a beak?'. In the meantime, the soldiers receive their signal to leave, so they tell the child to cross the bridge as fast as he can (without telling him why) and give him a piece of chocolate, disappearing in a hurry. The child starts walking over the bridge, but does so far too slowly, conversing with Lila in the meantime. The bridge blows up, killing the child.?

Even though it's been almost 40 years since I read this story, I can remember it perfectly, because of the strong emotion I felt then.?

So my mother taught this lesson that day, as she does every year, and at the end she asked the children the same question (from the list of questions at the end of the reading) that she had already asked dozens or hundreds of times: 'What scene strikes you the most in this story?'. Year after year, generations of students gave the same answer: “the death of the boy”. What else could strike you more? But that day, almost in unison, the children shouted: 'the soldiers gave the child chocolate'.

My mother was speechless. She couldn't comprehend what was happening and broke in tears. She wanted to cry out, 'No, a piece of chocolate cannot be more important than a human life, even though some of you may have never seen chocolate in your lives and would want it so badly!' She wanted to shout, 'If something doesn't happen to this regime, we will dehumanise ourselves completely’. But you could not do that in communist Romania. With tears in her eyes, she ran out of the classroom. I think it was the only time in her teaching career that she left the class before the bell rang.

I remember her coming home. She was angry, upset, and told me she really wanted to talk to me. I wondered what I had done, because she seemed to want to scold me. In fact, she just wanted to talk about things that had been hidden from me for too long (or at least that's what she thought at the time; I was already in the 7th grade and understood quite a lot, though everything was hidden under a layer of ambiguity).?

She told me how monstrous the regime was, how they were trying to brainwash us, and how, if something didn't happen soon, we would all become monsters. How our values have been completely turned upside down, how life was becoming less important than a forbidden (or almost impossible to find) object or food. How many sell out their friends or even their families for a small favour, and that she wants me to know all of this, because she is so afraid that this regime will dehumanise me. She wanted to make sure I do not become one of the children for whom chocolate is more important than life. She talked a lot, while I listened in a state of astonishment mixed with dread. I didn't know what I was supposed to do, but somehow in those moments I understood that the situation was very dire, and that I would have to act.?

That must have been the moment when I decided that I would have to leave Romania in order to survive. Since I was a child, I have had a hunger for freedom and justice that neither communism nor many other people or things have been able to quench over the years. So somehow, I felt that if I stayed put, I would end up badly. And since I am the type of person who needs to devise a plan for everything, in the days that followed I came up with a plan. ??

I knew that you are normally not allowed to leave Romania, so after a couple of days I told my parents that I was going to become a diplomat so we could move abroad. They smiled bitterly and told me that was impossible for people like us. To become a diplomat, you had to be one of ‘them’, which we were not and would never be.?

I didn’t feel discouraged. I quickly moved on to building Plan B. Still naive (and believing that there were still at least some positions awarded on merit), I decided I would learn a language that no one here really knows and choose a very small country where no one in the nomenklatura would want to go. I studied the atlas for a few days and finally decided: I was going to study Dutch and become the Romanian Ambassador to the Netherlands Antilles ???

You will smile at this point, I know. But for the next few years, I really was convinced of this and started to carve my plan in my mind, and even imagined my life there in this role.?

In the meantime, the 1989 Revolution came and I didn't need to become the Ambassador to the Antilles to leave the country. In fact, I ended up never leaving at all (except to study or to visit). I chose to stay and, for several years after the Revolution, I fought against the regime that apparently had left, but in reality did not want to leave. Because I wished very much that no child in Romania would ever again think that a piece of chocolate was more important than a human life.

But life goes in circles and many things in life are connected. So when I was a University student, one day I saw a poster at my school (in Timi?oara) for an optional Dutch language course. I remembered my childhood dream, so I signed up. It was an optional course for students from Languages programmes, and I remember perfectly the moment when I opened the classroom door and asked the teacher if I could also enrol (I was an Economics student). Slightly astonished and amused, he replied: ‘Sure, learning is for everyone!'. I also realise now that he is one of the inspiring teachers I have had over the years whom I never got to thank. So I’ll take this chance to do so now: Sorin Ciutacu, thank you for inspiring so many generations of students!?

But I digress, my story is not about good people. It's about monsters. About those who grow inside us if we give them the chance to. About those fed by dictatorships, by misinformation, by indoctrination. About those monsters who use nationality, doctrine or empty slogans to make us believe that some people are better than others. About those who are, unfortunately, so present around us even today. About those monsters that we could tame, or even root out from within ourselves if only we opened our eyes. And about those we could keep our children away from if only we opened theirs.