A Luminous Future: Growing up in Transylvania in the Shadow of Communism

Summary

The story of the young Teodor unravels on the background of the drama that his family and his country lived in the terrible days of the 1950s in a Stalinist Romania. While the Western countries were engaged in post-war reconstruction, the communist regime, imposed on Romanians by the Soviet Union, was committed to depriving its citizens of the most elementary freedoms and reducing an entire people to starvation.

The regime threatens to eliminate the Flonta family, declaring Pavel, Teodor's father, an "enemy of the people." As a consequence, he is arrested, imprisoned and tortured. When the wave of persecution reaches its climax, Pavel is forced to live in hiding. A job Pavel learned in his youth saves him: the Russians, who extract uranium in the Carpathians for their atomic bomb, hire him. There, at the mine, the long arm of the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, cannot reach him.

As in communism children were made to suffer for the “sins” the secret police invented for their parents, Teodor goes through a lot of strife while growing up; he is expelled from high school and prevented to undertake studies at the faculty of his choice.

The fall of communism will find Teodor 'at the end of the world', in Tasmania, while his father will be involved in the recovery of the land that the totalitarian regime had confiscated from him decades earlier.