Museum of Abandonment on Emptiness: Confronting the Dark History of Child Abandonment in Romania

by Anca Niță, Digitalisation Coordinator, 2024

 

„The theme of abandoned children is like an empty space, which the collective mind refuses to populate with information, but especially with emotion.”

 (Team of the Museum of Abandonment)

 

The premise of this article is to understand the relation between abandonment and emptiness. Moreover, the exploratory research is starting from the question: Is emptiness a way of dealing and managing the abandonment phenomena in Romania? This question came after almost three years since the Museum of Abandonment project was launched, in 2021.

 

The Historical Emptiness: Institutionalised Abandonment in Communism

Firstly, the Museum of Abandonment is a participatory and digital museum that since the beginning assumed its mission to map the history of abandonment in Romania. More precisely, the abandonment of children in child protection institutions during the communist period, when the rate of abandonment increased since 1966. On the 1st day of October, 1966, the Communist Party passed Decree 770 restricting free choice abortion and banning any contraceptive methods. The purpose of this Decree was to increase the natality rate, meaning the increasement of future work and production force in the state. The Decree was available until 26th of December 1989, having multiple negative social effects. The body of the woman has become a biopolitical instrument in the great narrative of the Communist Party, many women tried to combat their lack of autonomy on their own bodies by trying dangerous methods to stop the unwanted pregnancies, sometimes threatening their own lives. If the reproductive policies from the communist had more attention in the last 30 years when it comes to research, there are still remaining parts that the general public is not aware of, such as the abandonment of children and their lives in the protection care institutions during this period of time. 

The first images of the cruelty that was happening in the communist orphanages appeared in the ‘90s when international journalists came to Romania and showed the entire world what was happening behind the walls of the institutions. Until that moment, people were not aware that most of the institutionalised children, especially the ones living with a disability, had been the victims of emotional, physical and sometimes even sexual abuse, of famine or of hipermedicalisation. 

One of the most iconic places is the Home-Hospital for Unrecoverable Children from Sighetu Marmației, Maramureș, from where the ABC TV team showed to the world in what inhuman conditions were living the children of Ceaușescu. In 2021, after 31 years since that footage and 18 years since the institution was closed, the team of Museum of Abandonment went on the field to document what remained behind in that building. This was the first field work of the team and also the first step taken in creating the first exclusive digital museum from Romania. The Museum of Abandonment is a space where we try to bring to light a part of history kept in the darkness for too long. A part of our history, that even though it may seem to be a considerable distance from some of us, is more present than we acknowledge. 

During these three years, from the first field trip to Sighetu Marmației, we created and launched Sighet. Home-Hospital exhibition – the immersive exhibition is available online anytime on our website muzeulabandonului.ro and the VR English version is available for download here. We organised three physical exhibit points, the last one from August 2023 was opened to the public for a month, we created and launched the Map of Abandonment, trying to fulfil the need of having a public database with all the child care protection institutions from communism and we are working on the second digital exhibition regarding The House of Girls from Zau de Câmpie, Tg. Mureș, which presents a different and more joyful story of the abandonment and institutionalisation during communism. 

Looking back at all the documentation and the motivations that drove us to continue this bold project, we realised that most of the time the museum is trying to fulfil the emptiness existing on so many ramifications of the abandonment. This part of our recent history is not learnt in schools and yet not recognised by the state as a horrific past event that affected multiple generations of children, now adults. In the case of the home-hospital from Sighet, people nearby did not know what was happening there or they were closing their eyes as a consequence of the shame and impossibility of doing anything for the children. The scenery from Sighet is different from what we found at Zau de Câmpie, a nostalgic community grieving the old House for Girls which functioned at the Ugron Castle. Nonetheless, the lack of the documentation and missing archives from the institutions all over the country that were closed due to child protection reform, whose histories remain unknown. These are some examples of how the emptiness seems to be a consequence of the abandonment in our society that I will continue to present, explain and debate in the next paragraphs, together with my team members (the italic written passages down below represents citations of our team). We are a multidisciplinary team: journalists, PR & Communication Specialists, anthropologists and historians. Talking with my colleagues, there are two themes that have occurred: the abandoned buildings that used to be child protection institutions and the images with the children from our archives. Nonetheless, they defined emptiness as loss, or a gap, as lacking something, but the most interesting definition that I believe is also strongly connected with our museum, is that emptiness represents a state of numbness and uncertainty, which represents a period of time that is not temporally defined, between past, present and an uncertain future.

 

The Physical Emptiness: The Material Remains of Abandoned Institutions

‘Ruination, the material remains or artefacts of destruction and violation, but also the subjectivities and residual effects that linger, like a hangover, in the aftermath of war or violence. (…) By ruination I therefore refer to an intimate involvement with the objected material.’ (Yael Navaro-Yashin, 2009). Yael Navaro-Yashin explores the conflict between Greeks and Turks in an after-war Cyprus, where the Turkish Cypriots had been moved to the north part of the island, where the Greeks used to live. Maybe one of the first encounters of the team with the emptiness and the ruination was in 2021, at Sighetu Marmației when they entered the abandoned building of Home-Hospital for Unrecoverable Children Sighetu Marmației. A time capsule, where everything was left and felt untouched in the 18 years since the institution was officially closed. The laundry was left behind with a floor full of clothes, some ripped, some never worn, some from the international aids, another painted or sewed with initials and the number of the salon where the children were staying all day. Beside all the clothes, left documents, lists with acquisitions for the institution, medical instruments, beds, toys received after 1989 from the international aids, one of the hardest and powerful objects: a straitjacket. Through these objects, which simultaneously express a sense of abandonment and waiting, it is as if the neatly stacked clothes and a toy are expecting the children’s return at any moment. Here, the emptiness is almost physical; you can feel it on the surface of the walls where someone has deeply scratched, like a fresh wound: GET OUT.

A part of the objects found at Home-Hospital for Unrecoverable Children from Sighetu Marmației

Yael Navaro-Yashin (2009) talks with the Turks, using the object as an intermediant, exploring through them people’s stories regarding the conflict between Greeks and Turks. The objects left behind by the Greeks are perceived as being dirty, stained symbolically, even though in reality were clean, functional and ready to use. The objects in Yashin’s research are the ones that still remind the existence of another, the enemy in this case. The objects collected during our visit in 2021 are one of the last memorial remains of a hidden part of our recent history. In this case, the objects from Sighet opened to us multiple narratives regarding the life in the institution, together with archive photographs from Thomas Szalay and Hope and Homes for Children Foundation.

„Abandoned houses, where people’s life and warmth once resounded, are now just cold carcasses, witnesses of the past. Likewise, the abandoned orphanages, with the walls still having the children’s drawings of the past, the broken windows, the clothes and toys left behind, emanate an overwhelming sense of emptiness. In their heartbreaking silence, you can still hear the echo of the children who used to live there, but who are now gone. In each of these manifestations of emptiness, you see how the past and the possibility of a future presence can be present. Emptiness is not only an absence of something, but also a presence of what was or what could be.”

„At the Abandonment Museum, we also noticed the presence of emptiness by exploring the Sighet home-hospital building, which was abandoned two decades ago. A physical void, in a real space, that remained as a testimony to the disturbing history of the children who lived there in appalling conditions.”

 „One way to translate the presence of absence is the very experience of Sighet, where I stepped into an empty building, full of despair. Sighet is like a hole, like a black hole, a complete lack of meaning in what happened there, a lack of humanity among the people. I can imagine the eyes of the children who lived there.”

„In order for this void to exist, it is necessary for someone to leave the space, the relationship that they filled at a given moment. It also makes me think of forgetting and how forgetting changes spaces and people: by depopulating something and letting time pass over that space/relationship, you change its present.”

Responses from the team of Museum of Abandonment

 

The Affective Emptiness: The Interpretation of Abandoned Objects and Spaces

If we look at emptiness as a sign of absence, but also a (possible) present, correlated with how ruination exists and the abandonment in this case, we have to talk about being the other. The term has a long history in anthropology coming from colonial times, redefined more recently in gender and race studies.

In Yael Navaro-Yashin’s article (2009), the concept of other is connected with the abject, a way of dealing with something unpleasant, a boundary, a way of distancing from something hard to comprehend and accept. Looking back in our recent history, especially at the home-hospital for children with disabilities, they were the others in a system where the full functional body was desired, where work and economic growth of the nation were one of the most important social values. They were hidden from society, not having access to education and social activities, they were hospitalised, poorly fed and neglected. The Institute of Communist Crime Investigation and the Memory of Exile in Romania’s (Institutul de Investigare a Crimelor Comunismului și Memoria Exilului Românesc) conclusion after the last investigation at a different Home-Hospital from Plătărești, Călărași is that these types of institutions were designed for extermination by the state. The fact that in 2021, the team found in Sighet objects that speaks themselves on how daily life could have been in the institution, abandoned, can be also interpreted as a sign of abjection. Clothes and toys that could easily have been reorganised and taken to the new homes where the children were deinstitutionalized, remained in the old building for almost 20 years. They are the sign of ruination, nobody wanted to take with them the traumatic events imprinted in them, therefore they were left behind and abandoned in turn.

„If by abandonment we are talking about the lack of a parental figure, for example, in someone’s life, emptiness is rather the result of abandonment. Abandonment is the phenomenon from which the concept of emptiness is born.”

„It seems that the spaces that hosted the abandonment were also condemned to abandonment (emptiness). Not only the spaces researched by us (Sighet, Zau de Câmpie) but also many other institutions where Romania’s abandoned children grew up had this fate. Many times there are rehabilitation projects that, for one reason or another, are no longer carried out. Perhaps when a space has been inhabited by abandonment, these traces cannot be erased and the place of abandonment cannot be taken by something else. In fact, in the haunted space of Sighet I don’t know what could naturally sit as an activity for that building, maybe just a place of commemoration. Like the Nazi camps, these places keep within their walls a pain that cannot be erased with a fresh coat of paint.”

Responses from the team of Museum of Abandonment

From our perspective emptiness represents a timeless non-space that remains a witness of the past and in its pending moments is ruining piece by piece mostly physically. The remains of a past existence are creating an affect of space and memory. Past functions are no longer in use, but the space encapsulated the past events, creating the feeling of emptiness. Wright (2015) documents the abandoned buildings, and the two processes specific to them. The first one is the abandonment, an immediate action of letting go of a space and its object. After that, ruining comes, when nature and degradation are taking over in time. Analysing the field work and the documentation done by our team, I would also add the emptiness as a consequence of abandonment and ruining. Emptiness as a consequence of abandonment represents the past events and an unknown factor of what will happen with the spaces and objects abandoned. The space is impregnated with emptiness – understood as a powerful and overwhelming affect. 

 

The Documentary Emptiness: The Lack of Archives and Official Recognition

Beside the digital exhibition, for almost two years we documented the history of so-called child protection institutions during communist in a long-run project: The Map of Abandonment. At the beginning of the 90’s, there were 700 hundred institutions according to UNICEF, but there is no national database of them. Currently we are working on documenting a list of 400 of them from 1997, for the rest of 300, where children lived, we have no information, a huge gap in the history of institutionalisation of not knowing at least their names. Searching for information for the institutions is a very hard and complicated process, for some of them there is very little information online or in the press archive. The Map of Abandonment is linked with the archive of the museum, an incredible effort of digitalisation of analogue photos donated to the museum by two important NGOs actors in the 90s: Romanian Angel Appeal Foundation and SERA Foundation. In the last two years, we scanned almost 20.000 images, owing to the 50 volunteers that worked together with our team. The three archivist archival funds (Romanian Angel Appeal, SERA and Hope and Homes of Children) offer us a sneak peak on how the life conditions in different child care protection institutions were in the first decade after communism collapsed in our country. While I was talking with my colleagues about emptiness, I was intrigued that some of them associated the feeling of emptiness with the images from our archive, mostly with the gazes of the children. Due to security and protection reasons we do not show these photos publicly, even though they tell a powerful story about hope and resilience.

 

„The emptiness is most of the time present in the eyes of the children from the photos in our archive.”

„Regarding the experience of working at the museum, you can find this void primarily in the photographs of abandoned children, their gazes are always empty, the image of a child from Sighet still haunts me. His gaze seems not only to be uninhabited at the moment of photographic importation, but it also seems not possible, that there is no space left inside him to be inhabited by anything other than emptiness.”

„I found it most often in the photos that capture degraded living spaces and in the foreground beneficiaries who convey through their gaze the personal, emotional emptiness in a space devoid of life, care and love.”

„I sometimes see the emptiness in the eyes of the children in the hospital dormitories and in the ruins of the spaces where they grew up.”

Responses from the team of Museum of Abandonment

 

Photo from the Unboxing The Museum of Abandonment- LIVE MUSEUM exhibition in Amzei, Bucharest, 2023. One part of the exhibition focused on the Map of Abandonment (right photo), where visitors were invited to participate with stories and information regarding former child protection institutions.

 

The Fulfilment from Zau as the Opposite of Emptiness

The description of emptiness mentioned before we saw in our recent research that is applying also on a community level at Zau de Câmpie, Târgu Mureș County. While the community around the old building from Sighets feels like not being aware of what was happening behind the grey fence, the community from Zau de Câmpie is nostalgic of the times when House of Girls in the commune was opened. Contemporary with the atrocities happening at Sighet Marmației, in an institution for girls in Tg. Mureș county was a whole different universe, for the beneficiaries, but also for the community. A place of pride that was thriving in hard times during communism. Pamfil Moldoveanu, the former director of the institution made everything possible for the girls institutionalised there to have access to education and a proper medium to develop their personality, identity, and learning skills useful in life. Currently we are working on the second virtual exhibition, presenting a different type of institution and a positive example that happened in a system crowded where children were neglected and the funds limited. 

Last summer, in 2023, the team went to Zau de Câmpie and discovered that 11 years later after the institution was closed the people were missing it. In this case, the house for girls was the heart of the community, leaving a hole in the life of the commune after its closing. From the interviews taken last year, it appears that the emptiness as a sign of the past and uncertain future is present for the ones that still live here. In a community where the child protection institution was a source of joy and there was a strong connection with the local people, even there the space ended up being abandoned – we refer to the Ugron Castle from Zau de Câmpie. Even there, the space has been vandalised, forgotten, emptied of meaning and utility. The local people, former employees, refuse to visit the former orphanage, not out of shame for how the children were treated, but out of shame that their work and the history of the children have fallen into ruins, that they were not able, as individuals and a community, to fight for this place that was important to them. During communism, the Ugron Castle, where the girls were living, was a place where the children from Zau wanted to be, instead of living with their families. The objects and archive found here tells a different story compared with Sighet Home-Hospital. It was a place full of joy where the institutionalised were seen as individuals, having different needs and passions. In the castle was a library, a tailoring room, and around the castles were gardens, stables, tennis courts, surrounded by nature.

Photos from the field trip of the team at Ugron Castle, Zau de Câmpie, the former House of Girls.

 

The Social Emptiness: The Stigmatization and Shame Associated with Abandonment

It is important to understand the difference between these types of institutions during communism. A home for children, or in some cases segregated by gender, a house for girls/boys, were the institutions for the typical abandoned children. Typical children means that at age of 3, in case they were abandoned at birth or shortly after, if the child was not living with any form of disability was sent to a home for children. They were staying in the system until 18 years old, in the meantime having theoretically the same educational journey as every child should have. However, if the child at 3 was living with a disability or had a medical diagnostic that was jeopardising his/her development was sent to a home-hospital, receiving an unchangeable tag: unrecoverable. Nonetheless, shame and the discrimination were key factors in how these children were treated in the ableist socialist society. Stigma is a “a set of personal constructs and social; a set of social relationships and interactions; a form of social reality” (Coleman, 1986, p.211), that according to Goffman appears when the individual poses characteristics different from what is in general socially accepted. From the Goffmanian perspective, the institutionalised children with disabilities were stigmatised because their bodies did not fit in the body standards implied by a greater force, the communist state. Beside the body perspective of the stigma, the socio-historical context in Romania is important.

Our work is focusing mostly on the communist period, after the Decree 770 and the first years of institutionalised abandonment after 1989. In the autumn of 2022, the launch of the VR exhibition Sighet. Cămin-Spital took place at Leagănul Sfânta Ecaterina din București — the oldest caring facility for infants (0-3 years old) — when we organised a physical exhibition regarding the history of facility between 1935 and 1948 after documenting the only 4-5 registers remained in the archive. We discovered a vast use of terms for children abandoned and born in non-traditional married couples. Historically we have proofs on how your birth could represent a source of stigmatisation. During communism new layers of shame were added. In some cases the children with disabilities could have experienced shame from the others because they were not useful for the society, being the others in the gaze of the society.

The shame is a powerful social feeling that, as we observed, is associated with abandonment. Shame to the women that abandoned children, because the state was more willing to blame them than men, shame to the children institutionalised and hidden by the state in crowded closed institutions and shame to us, as a nation because we are too ashamed to admit that we let to happen so many atrocities to the most vulnerable individuals in our society. The stigmatisation experienced by institutionalised children in the past or in recent years is a sign that we do not know how to act and respond with empathy to others different from the majority.

Lately, the most telling gap is in society’s response to our effort to bring this painful subject to light – a gap of reaction. The feeling of emptiness is fueled by the lack of empathy and support from those around, the lack of social and financial validation and support.

We, as a museum, did not intend to point out to the public the guilty ones because we are documenting and processing using museal instruments a transgenerational trauma due to systemic issues regarding reproductive laws and child care protection. We see the emptiness in the history, as the lack of databases and the missing archives, just the same as by not having an assumed recognition of the state, to acknowledge the abuses experienced by the institutionalised children. Putting most of the efforts of deinstitutionalization on the NGOs, looking with mercy at the victims, labelling them as being the others and the absence of a structured, informed historical discourse in the present, shows us how the emptiness is a process happening for more than 30 years in Romania, caused by the internalisation of abandonment phenomena in society.

 

Bibliography

Coleman, L.M., 1986. Stigma: An enigma demystified. The dilemma of difference: A multidisciplinary view of stigma, pp.211-232.

Navaro‐Yashin, Y., 2009. Affective spaces, melancholic objects: ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15(1), pp.1-18.

Wright, N.E., 2015. Museums of the present day: Contemporary abandoned spaces. University of Delaware.

 

---

TEAM OF THE MUSEUM OF ABANDONMENT 

Oana Drăgulinescu, founder of the museum

Ioana Călinescu, co-founder of the museum

Simina Bădică, co-founder of the museum

Iulia Țurcanu, PR & Communication Specialist

Iris Șerban, Archive Coordinator  

Ana-Maria Ciobanu, Documentation Coordinator

Anca Niță, Digitalisation Coordinator

Ina Alecxă, Archive Assistant 

Mirela Petrică, Archive Assistant