By Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh Tuesday, November 19, 2013
I watched recently the video of a speech given by the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu to an adoring crowd of communist useful idiots a few days before the dictator was arrested in December 1989. Ceausescu, a megalomaniac who appointed himself the Father of the Country, was touting the slave wages he had ordered raised for his unlucky proletariat from 700 lei per month to 800 lei.
At the time, the pegged exchange rate was 12 lei to a dollar, making the proletariat’s wage of $58 per month go up to $67. What could we buy with this money? Sixty-seven dollars per month bought us subsidized, teacup-sized concrete block apartments, occasional heat, some electricity, daily scheduled hot or cold water, subsidized weekly bus fares, one pair of shoes per year, one outfit, and enough food to keep us from starving to death. Most of us were underweight and malnourished, in dire need of vitamins which were impossible to find on the empty pharmacy shelves.
“To each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” said Karl Marx’s popular slogan, “Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen. “ Ceausescu and his wife and the communist party elites had been the deciders of our needs since March 22, 1965 until December 25, 1989.
The year 1989 was a painful, bittersweet period in my life and in the history of my people. It was a year filled with death, life, grief, anguish, freedom, physical pain, and the struggle for power.
My father passed away on May 12 in excruciating pain, denied drugs, IV nourishment, and any kind of medical treatment, a 60-pound shadow of his former self. My Dad was a sturdy and healthy 200 pound man full of life and joie de vivre.
An outspoken critic of the president, Dad was always detained at his place of employment for his views, his lack of membership in the communist party, and his not-so-secret desire to have another president replace Ceausescu in his lifetime.
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Tue Nov 19, 2013 11:27 am
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