Bucharest Romania Quotes

Bucharest is a faded old gal in a raggedy coat. Once called the “Little Paris of the East,” she has long lost her finery. A few parks and buildings dream of past grandeur, but the picture is spoiled by the concrete and steel mementoes of Communism on every side.

there's a long history of resistance movements igniting in the soccer stadium. In the Red Star Revolution, Draza, Krle, and the other Belgrade soccer hooligans helped topple Slobodan Milosevic. Celebrations for Romania's 1990 WOrld Cup qualification carried over into the Bucharest squares, culminating in a firing squad that trained its rifles on the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife. The movement that toppled the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner had the same sportive ground zero.

When I read, I get so lost in the story, I forget where I am. Bucharest just melts away and I’m transported someplace else. I forget the time of day, sometimes even the year or the century. This may sound crazy, but I get myself all mixed up with the characters, like the story is actually happening to me.

Communist Romania almost everything was owned by the state. Democratic Romania quickly privatised its assets, selling them at bargain prices to the ex-communists, who alone grasped what was happening and collaborated to feather each other’s nests. Government companies that controlled national infrastructure and natural resources were sold to former communist officials at end-of-season prices while the party’s foot soldiers bought houses and apartments for pennies. Ion Iliescu was elected president of Romania, while his colleagues became ministers, parliament members, bank directors and multimillionaires. The new Romanian elite that controls the country to this day is composed mostly of former communists and their families. The masses who risked their necks in Timişoara and Bucharest settled for scraps, because they did not know how to cooperate and how to create an efficient organisation to look after their own interests.21

Communist Romania crumbled when 80,000 people in the Bucharest central square realised they were much stronger than the old man in the fur hat on the balcony. What is truly astounding, however, is not the moment the system collapsed, but the fact that it managed to survive for decades. Why are revolutions so rare? Why do the masses sometimes clap and cheer for centuries on end, doing everything the man on the balcony commands them, even though they could in theory charge forward at any moment and tear him to pieces?

The communists didn’t release their grip until the late 1980s. Effective organisation kept them in power for eight long decades, and they eventually fell due to defective organisation. On 21 December 1989 Nicolae Ceaus¸escu, the communist dictator of Romania, organised a mass demonstration of support in the centre of Bucharest. Over the previous months the Soviet Union had withdrawn its support from the eastern European communist regimes, the Berlin Wall had fallen, and revolutions had swept Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. Ceaus¸escu, who had ruled Romania since 1965, believed he could withstand the tsunami, even though riots against his rule had erupted in the Romanian city of Timis¸oara on 17 December. As one of his counter-measures, Ceaus¸escu arranged a massive rally in Bucharest to prove to Romanians and the rest of the world that the majority of the populace still loved him – or at least feared him. The creaking party apparatus mobilised 80,000 people to fill the city’s central square, and citizens throughout Romania were instructed to stop all their activities and tune in on their radios and televisions. To the cheering of the seemingly enthusiastic crowd, Ceauşescu mounted the balcony overlooking the square, as he had done scores of times in previous decades. Flanked by his wife, Elena, leading party officials and a bevy of bodyguards, Ceaus¸escu began delivering one of his trademark dreary speeches. For eight minutes he praised the glories of Romanian socialism, looking very pleased with himself as the crowd clapped mechanically. And then something went wrong. You can see it for yourself on YouTube. Just search for ‘Ceauşescu’s last speech’, and watch history in action.20 The YouTube clip shows Ceaus¸escu starting another long sentence, saying, ‘I want to thank the initiators and organisers of this great event in Bucharest, considering it as a—’, and then he falls silent, his eyes open wide, and he freezes in disbelief. He never finished the sentence. You can see in that split second how an entire world collapses. Somebody in the audience booed. People

Bickel's hair was not fair. His eyes were not blue. He spoke with an accent, and his family connections consisted, principally, of being the son of Solomon and Yetta Bickel of Bucharest, Romania,

         Preparations for another dislocation proved, this time, more complicated than, let's say, leaving Bucharest. While in Romania it was unclear whether any last moment hitch might not retain me, leaving America was easy from a legal point of view. However, there was a large family, whom I barely managed to acquaint myself with, sisters and brothers and a very large, extended family. There were lovely nieces and nephews, a generation of sweet youngsters and I was about to leave them all.

We lived in three lousy rooms, on the third floor, with windows like little portholes, under the roof. It became unbearably hot in the summer, Bucharest was dry and intensely hot. When Mother's health improved, we started to concentrate on plans to leave Romania.

When Leiser returned from the labor camp, he received the notebook with the poems. Since he was forced to return to the camp, he was not in a position to take along anything besides his clothes; again he left the poems in the hands of their common friend Else. Yuda and his cousin Leiser spent months in the same location, during compulsory work: digging trenches. Leiser never found out about Selma's death. In 1944, when the Russians approached Romania, while the German armies were retreating westward, toward their final defeat, Leiser escaped from camp and reached Bucharest.

There were just so many cafés now—bearing conceited names such as Charme, Rembrandt, La Muse—with their chairs and tables made of wicker, zinc, velvet, blond wood, and black metal, each establishment desperately trying to evoke Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Stockholm, or New York. Even the ashtrays bore edgy designer patterns evocative of Art Deco and the Belle Époque. And yet it has to be said that these new cafés of Bucharest lack the enfolding and layered elegance—and especially the intimacy—of cafés in Central Europe. I was still south of the Carpathians, in the former Byzantine and Turkish world. There was simply

Take the architectural legacy of Bucharest: Byzantine, Brâncoveanu, Ottoman, Renaissance, Venetian Classical, French Baroque, Austrian Secession, Art Deco, and Modernist, all writhing and struggling to break free of a dirty gray sea of pillbox Stalinism, like Michelangelo’s Unfinished Slaves struggling to break free of their marble blocks.

In 1900, George and Clara Morris and their four children, Samuel, Selma, Marcella, and Malvina, left Bucharest, Romania, and boarded a ship for New York City. When they arrived in the United States, they stayed in New York City for a few weeks and then decided to move to Los Angeles, where George wanted to become a director in the movie business. Along the way, in St. Louis, Clara had another baby and died in childbirth. George put the children in an orphanage there before heading on to Los Angeles, where he promised to send for them. The children stayed in the orphanage until the oldest child, Marcella, was able to make enough money to get them all out. She moved them back to New York City, where she became the first Jewish female to hold a seat on the Wall Street stock exchange, where she made millions of dollars that she later gave to Brandeis University. She lived with her sisters in an apartment on Charles Street in Greenwich Village and had a house in Southampton, New York, and somewhere along the way had an affair with J. P. Morgan. Interesting? You bet. But don’t worry about remembering any of this, because it’s 90 percent wrong, which I didn’t find out until years later.

The first thing I remember about Bucharest is how very dark it was.

In Romania, there is only one reason to own a pig: Christmas meat. In June, small pink loaves nuzzle up to nurse from fat sows. In August, the piglets frisk about on green grass, root for hidden treasures, and bask their plump sides in the sun. In October, they lumber up to feed troughs, grunting and shoving, their cuteness mostly a memory. In December, they die.

By the time the parents were settled in that shelter and cooking was done on a kerosene lamp, in a corner of the room, I got ready to go to Bucharest. Some people had relatives in Romania, usually in Bucharest. They wrote letters and expected to be able to settle with relatives, for the time being. We had no family in the Old Kingdom. All our relatives in Europe used to live in Poland and they had all been taken care of by Hitler.

joined a number of people in a freight train, headed toward Bucharest. A journey that should have taken normally about six hours stretched into two days and a night. We arrived at the North Railroad Station on the first of May, in the evening. Romania, being already partially occupied by the Soviet troops, celebrated May Day with loud music on the loudspeakers. I had no idea how to get to the people, whose address I had. Thus I and many others sat through the night in the R.R. station.

Throngs congregated in Pia ta Victoria (Victory Square) people hugged and kissed and whistled and danced, with abandon. The only military around were Russians and they kept to themselves. Life was supposed to return to normal, but it never did for Romania any more. In over a year, the Communists took over and life there was steadily deteriorating. I had housing trouble all along, all through the over two years of my life in Bucharest. I changed addresses about six times. Inflation ate up the value of the currency to an extent that, as soon as I rented a room and agreed on a rent, that sum was almost worthless next month. Since the landlady could not raise your rent every month, she just chased you out under one pretext or another. Bucharest had been bombed several times during the war and therefore housing was in very short supply. Many refugees converged on the capital and it turned into a nightmare.

left by train on a Friday morning to arrive at six in the evening in Bucharest. My friend awaited me at the railroad station. As I got off the train, on that snowy late afternoon, I heard newspaper boys hawking an extra newspaper edition: Extra, extra, the new government of Goga, Cuza. Death to the Jews. That was my bone chilling, frightening reception on my first pleasure trip. King Carol II had called on Octavian Goga, a well-know poet and politician and rabid anti-semite and on Alexandru Cuza, a historian, professor at the University of Iassi, infamous for his incitement to pogroms on Jews in that town, to form a new government. Actually, it was a maneuver on the part of the king of Romania, who felt threatened by Ionel Codreanu, the leader of the "Iron Guard," known Fascists and antisemites, who were taking their orders from Hitler.

         On September 10, 1947, I left Bucharest by train, headed for Prague. The Hias sent about ten people on that same train - eight oldsters, myself and a young woman, my age, who was supposed to go to the U.S. to marry a cousin, whom she had never met. The two of us were supposed to keep an eye on the entire group, answer any questions about documents at the borders or whatever else may occur. Mary, the other young woman, came from a small town in Transylvania; she spoke Romanian and Hungarian; for the rest I had to step in. It took about 36 hours to arrive in Prague. None of us had any foreign currency - we had no money in any currency, since it was against the law in Romania to take money out of the country. Somebody from Hias was supposed to await us at the Wilson Railroad Station in Prague. We had left on Friday and arrived early on Sunday morning.