PROFMEX OPENINGS TO THE EU AND RUSSIA:
My Escape from Transylvania to the World From the Romanian
Gulag to Modern Cultures and Globalization
INTRODUCTION
I was born in Transylvania, Northern Romania, in a town
named Satu M. I grew up like Alice in Wonderland: among
intellectual’s children, and also cute, lovely, and many Gypsy
children whom I taught the Romanian language, pretty early in
life, starting in 1st and second grade. We had a tough life, and
our parents were always working ‘til late hours at night. My
brother Alex, and I were reading late at night, waiting for mom,
Magdalena to turn off the lights, as she continued working at
home in accounting. She was compounding the lengths and width of
the wooden logs that were heading to Russia year by year. And
she let us play all day long to our heart’s content. So unique,
and we felt so free exploring nature in Sighet.
In 1973, at age 10 as a fifth grader in Transylvania’s
isolated town of Sighet, I had to make a fateful decision about
my choice of foreign-language study: Russian or English. The
pressure was on us to take up Russian, thus proving that we were
all students loyal to the dictator Socialist” Nicole Ceausescu’s
“Socialist Government” (read Romanian Communism allied with
Moscow), but consciously I detested that system.
Although I wanted to learn English, I did not then how fateful
that choice would be until 1991, when at almost 27 years of age,
I met Jim Wilkie who had been advised by his brother Richard to
include my town of Sighet in his journey to assess the how
Eastern Europe was faring after the fall of the “Berlin Wall,”
short for the long wall that kept the people of Communist
countries locked and unable to escape. But more later about how
Jim found me as he sought an English-speaking intellectual and
social guide to Eastern Europe.
In the meantime, growing up in Sighet with a population of
only 30,000 people, we were proud to recognize Elie Wiesel (born
1928) as our most prominent citizen long before he won the 1986
Nobel Peace Prize. He helped us get past the terrible history of
Sighet Communist Prison where “enemies of the state” were
confined until “death due to natural cause.”
Read More