It’s December 1989 and a young woman is sitting in a Bucharest theatre, watching a sold-out performance of Hamlet. The air is laden with danger. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” Marcellus is about to say. Nearly 35 years later that woman, my mum, still remembers how electric the atmosphere inside the theatre was.
Everyone knew exactly what the line meant, but no one uttered a peep. It was common knowledge that secret police agents were watching. Any hint of support for Marcellus’s words guaranteed arrest. On that day in early December, my mum couldn’t have imagined that within weeks, the Ceaușescu dictatorship would be over. That we’d always have enough food in the fridge, freedom of speech, freedom of choice over our bodies, agency. That support for a line of Shakespeare wouldn’t mean arrest. That we’d be free. That I’d be sitting here, writing this, to you.
It’s December 1990 and my mum, our five suitcases, my pink potty and I have arrived in Luxembourg: straight into the heart of one of the EU’s founding member states. We were part of that first wave of eastern European migrants, bursting out of communist straitjackets, full of hope for the future. Full of ambition for the future. Full of future.
I got lucky. I think about the generations of women who’ve come before me: my great-grandmother, orphaned during the first world war, whose farm was expropriated by the communists after the second world war, and who died never having tasted freedom.
My grandmother, denied university entry based on her parents being “enemies of the people”, spent her entire youth and adulthood under a totalitarian regime, and was an elderly woman by the time it fell. Her generation was forced to learn Russian. And she did, refusing to learn the meaning of the words, memorising entire military marches phonetically. In her later years, she could still recite them and we’d all sing along in gibberish-Russian. A futile, but ridiculously delightful middle finger at the past. My mum, still a young woman when it all came crashing down. And then me. A toddler.
It’s December 2008 and I’m an acting student at Drama Centre London, doing a scene from Hamlet. Neither my great gran, nor my gran nor my mum would have ever thought I’d be able to cross all of those borders – no guards, no barbed wire – to train in the UK. It wasn’t a given. During the 1944 Moscow conference, Churchill and Stalin divided up Europe, and Romania fell to the Soviets. After the second world war many Romanians, including my family, were still praying for the US army to free them from the Soviets. A pipe dream. And yet, decades later, here I was. From Bucharest to Luxembourg to London.
A demonstration against Ceauseșcu’s rule during the Romanian revolution in Bucharest, 21 December 1989. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
With the EU elections under way, I can’t help but think of rising anti-EU sentiment. I’m certainly not dismissing criticism of the EU, but something about it feels off. While all of us, here in western Europe, have the freedom to debate the EU’s validity, others are risking their lives for a chance to be part of it. They know all too well what it means to live in Russia’s so-called sphere of influence.
As Russia was packing troops on the border with Ukraine, preparing the full-scale invasion, politicians from Poland and the Baltic states were raising the alarm with their western European colleagues. Their concerns were dismissed. Luxembourgish politician Charles Goerens later candidly admitted: “We thought at the time they were paranoid, but that’s not the case at all. They’d analysed the situation accurately and I think we’ve all, collectively, failed.”
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So on Sunday 9 June, as Luxembourg votes, I’ll be thinking of those fighting in Ukraine, of those protesting in Georgia, putting themselves on the line to one day have what we now often seem to take for granted. I’ll be thinking of the millions behind the iron curtain who never got to experience freedom, and all those who know its fragility so very intimately. I’ll be thinking of 1945, when eastern Europe fell to the Soviets to the resounding sound of silence from the other Allies. When the Soviets came into Romania, my great-grandma managed to fight off one of their soldiers who’d broken into her home. Others, who weren’t as lucky, faced the worst. A common crime, unpunished to this day. The Soviets were, after all, Allies. They’d come to liberate the locals. I sometimes fear we’re stuck in a loop.
The glossing over of crimes against humanity perpetrated in the eastern bloc has always been particularly vicious and, I’d argue, unhelpful in fostering true understanding between east and west. When I was 17, I went on a school trip to Berlin. I remember the utter disbelief on seeing street vendors on every corner peddling Soviet nostalgia wares. Brooches and fur hats with the hammer and sickle, flags and numerous other little trinkets for happy customers to wear or give others. Harmless relics of the past. In the late 90s, there was a fashion of CCCP-marked T-shirts, a mere brief decade after the atrocities perpetrated by that regime. Today one can buy a cookbook titled L’Archipel du Goulache, recently featured on French national radio, its title a pun on another relic of the past, Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. How ironic, considering the famines in the eastern bloc.
These days, it seems to me that we’ve forgotten the meaning of words. “Dictatorship” gets thrown around a fair bit. Have we forgotten the meaning of democracy and what was needed to get here? I wonder if we’re reaching for the top shelf, because we’ve forgotten that democracy doesn’t mean we each get our way all of the time and that the freedoms we’re currently enjoying need continuous maintenance work. On 9 June, I’ll be thinking of a Europe acquainted with its past, offering a visionary future. That’s why this European dreamer will remember the empty fridge when casting her vote, the taste of freedom and the unfathomable journey her pink potty made in December 1990. The rest will, hopefully, not be silence.
Source link : https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/07/born-behind-iron-curtain-voting-european-elections
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Publish date : 2024-06-07 07:00:00
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