More than thirty years after the end of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s communist regime in Romania, members of civil society in Bucharest are coming together to shed light on the tragedy of Romanian society: the abandonment of hundreds of thousands of children. The Museum of Abandonment, Romania’s first virtual museum, is narrated by Iris Serban, head of the Collections & Archives department at the museum.
At the fall of the regime in 1989, American journalists discovered these macabre establishments: the orphanages actually hid a real prison system, with inhumane conditions.
They filmed these places: the images went viral and made the rounds of the world. Children were discovered sleeping on one or two mattresses, crowded into small spaces, sometimes in their own excrement, and subjected to screams and violence. Their swaying back and forth allowed them to fill their own emotional void. One assistant was in charge of 60 children, and these orphanages had about 200 to 700 children in different sections, written on their clothing. The only goal of these establishments was to keep the children alive.
Non-governmental organizations and humanitarian associations from around the world rushed to offer help, care, and materials to rescue these children.
It was only in 2003, fourteen years after the end of the regime, that these establishments ceased to exist.
The Museum of Abandonment, created in 2021, is a participatory forum museum, and Romania’s first virtual museum. It allows the sharing of the history of one of these concentration camps, located in Sighet (northern Romania), through a truly immersive experience: the building has been fully created and digitized in 3D, allowing visitors to discover the atrocious story of these children from home. The Museum of Abandonment offers a new way to access culture.
Read more in this article by Emilie Gully.