The Girl They Left Behind, by Roxanne Veletzos

The style of Roxanne Veletzos’s 2018 novel feels artless, but nevertheless it draws the reader into the heartbreaking story it tells.  The story opens on a January night in 1941, in a Romania allied with Germany and increasingly hostile to Jews.  A small Jewish girl, Natalia, has been found on her own freezing in front of a block of flats.  She is put in an orphanage and is eventually adopted by a well-to-do couple, Despina and her charismatic husband Anton, who are unable to have children.

Anton started with nothing and by his hard work has built a successful chain of stationery shops.  The couple provide a warm loving environment and Natalia thrives.  Unfortunately their happiness does not last long.  The family has to survive a series of misfortunes: the uncertainties of war, Natalia’s desperate bout of fever in which Despina is ironically assisted by a German officer as she seeks medical help, the country’s defeat and occupation by the Red Army, and then the hardships of the communist period, where hostility for being bourgeois replaces persecution for being Jewish.

Through the changing political situation we follow Natalia as she grows and becomes a young woman, facing a dark future in an authoritarian country where she and her family are despised for being affluent.  The Russian occupiers are nothing more than looters and rapists, and the Romanian bureaucrats expropriate the family’s possessions and finally their flat, moving them to a grim communal apartment while denying Anton the opportunity to work.  Having lost his business and their home, he becomes a shell of the vibrant man he had been, while Natalia is deprived of her beloved piano.  She has trouble finding work, and after a stint in the fields outside Bucharest gets a slightly more congenial occupation packing fruit.

By chance she comes across papers relating to her birth parents and adoption in a drawer, but when she tries to find out about her origins she discovers the orphanage has closed and been turned into a military headquarters.  Eventually she learns that her birth parents, Zora and Iosef, had had to flee to Switzerland to escape the Holocaust, and they eventually settled in New York.  Had they tried to take her with them, they would probably all have perished; giving her up was a selfless act of love.  They initially thought they would be able to return for her, but once the Iron Curtain fell this was no longer possible, though they never gave up hope and made efforts to secure her freedom, engaging an American lawyer and saving what little money they could to pay the necessary bribes to facilitate her emigration.

Salvation for Natalia comes from an unlikely source.  When she was small her father had befriended a young man, Victor, who had been on the verge of starvation, becoming almost a surrogate father to him.  Now Victor is a senior figure in the Securitate.  When she is in her early 20s he and Natalia meet by chance after not having seen each other for a decade, and they become lovers.  But there can be no future for them as he is in a marriage of convenience with the daughter of a senior Russian official.

However, he is able to expedite Natalia leaving the country using money sent by Zora and Iosef, and in 1960 she joins her birth parents in the United States, but at the cost of being wrenched from Anton and Despina.  The ending is truly moving, as Natalia is reunited with her birth parents but separated from her adoptive ones and from Victor, who all in their own ways have helped her.  She realises she is much loved, and the book ends with her happy, thinking of Anton, Despina and Victor, and dreaming of a time when they might all be reunited (while the reader wonders whether leaving Anton and Despina was a selfish act reversing their selflessness).

The story is apparently inspired by Veletzos’ own mother, Alexandra, though one wonders how much, as Veletzos was born in Bucharest, not the United States, and moved to California in her early teens.  No matter, the story of Zora, Iosef, Anton and Despina sounds authentically harrowing even when one quibbles with details (would Iosef and Zora really have left a small ill-clad child on an icy street where she might have frozen to death before being rescued?).  One black mark against Simon and Schuster: the cataloguing keywords refer to Hungary and Budapest; presumably someone in the marketing department mistook Bucharest for Budapest, which is very sloppy and guaranteed to annoy a Romanian.

Crossing Continents: Romania’s Killer Roads

  

Tessa Dunlop reports for BBC Radio 4’s Crossing Continents programme, first broadcast on 22 August 2019, about road conditions in Romania.  Having visited and worked there since the early 1990s (and with Romanian relatives) she has become increasingly aware of how dangerous the roads are.  She focuses on the state of the road network in north-eastern Romania, though she says the situation is replicated across the country.

Roads have not improved since the 1989 revolution, while the amount of traffic has increased.  There is not a safe driving culture: people ignore the speed limits and the rules of the road; alcohol and drugs are contributory factors to the high accident rate, while slow-moving horse and carts add to the problem.  Railway crossings without barriers are accident hot-spots claiming an alarming number of lives each year.

Stefan Mandachi, a successful and charismatic businessman, is leading the ‘Romania vrea autostrazi’ (Romania wants highways) campaign to build motorways in the region.  Spurred into action by his inability to reach his dying mother in hospital because of the lack of decent roads, his efforts include a video, billboards and the hashtag #sieu (count me in).  He constructed a symbolic metre of motorway which has become a tourist attraction.

Mandachi says 60,000 people have died on Romanian roads since 1989.  Two thousand die each year, the highest rate per capita in the EU, twice the EU average and 3-4 times the figure for the UK.  Mandachi says that new roads, including motorways, are required, following which bad behaviour should be punished, in order to reduce the number of fatalities and serious injuries.  In March 2019 he called on the country to stop work for fifteen minutes in a bid to persuade the authorities to build motorways

Judging by Dunlop’s interviews with politicians, they seem to be in denial about the problem and refuse to take responsibility, passing the buck for the lack of action.  There is also the issue of the loss of expertise due to migration, including engineers.  Before EU accession there wasn’t the money.  Now there is, but a shortage of skills necessary to develop the country’s infrastructure. 

Commentators agree there is money to address the situation, but feel that governments have not considered it a priority.  Fortunately, the Romanian diaspora is becoming increasingly vocal about corruption and mismanagement at home so perhaps, Dunlop concludes, there is hope for the future.

The programme is available (at the time of writing) on the BBC website:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0007rl2