Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsAffecting, well researched
Reviewed in the United States on August 27, 2023
In 1992, I left Romania and never turned back. By then, as a young student, I had lived through essentially all the events in the book, and tried to rise in a happier aftermath. Not only has the author done her homework and researched the facts, she has also reached deeply into the deep well of despair that living through those years brought. The glimmers of a happier, richer past stomped by the grey reality of life without hope. It's not that the regime managed to convince people that communism was better. Nobody believed that. But the state of constant guard, learned when you were a small child, meant people lived in a constant fear mixed with anger and shame. This is what the book explores, unflinchingly, un-romantically, uncolored. After the revolution, while I was trying to figure out what my future would bring, I realized that the collective trauma would not leave us. I left, not because I wanted a better, richer life, or because I held a deeply seated distaste for Romania. I left because I could not heal among my people. In leaving, I left behind too much of my own being, my family's long past, a sense of belonging. I am now in my 50s, reading this book selected for my son's HS English, and confront memories and despairs from a long time ago. The book builds slowly, carefully building the years of dread and awfulness we all lived through, over about 2/3 of the content. The Revolution laid in stark view the violence of the regime, their disconnect from the people. Again, the book explodes through those pages in ways that are precisely rooted in the reality of those days. As someone who lived through it, I could pin every event to a real place and real people from the time. I hope readers will be able to use their imagination and spend the time to look through testimonies and youtube videos of the time. It was a tragic lesson on the consequences of a corrupt dictatorship.
Also, to the author: the night of 12/21/1998, while the army and police were using armored vehicles to break the masses of protesters in small groups that could be rounded up, beaten to a pulp and thrown, sometimes unconscious, in the van, Vytautas Landsbergis, not yet president, but already a leader, in a still-sovietic Lithuania, gave an interview on Radio Free Europe, cheering on the uprising in Bucharest. Here I am, 30+ years later, still remembering his speech that night, the respect I had for his courage, and the way it allowed me to think that maybe the revolution might achieve something. This book, written by a Lithuanian author, confirms my steady gratitude towards the country that saw us in times of deep trouble. Thank you for this book!