More accessible now than ever in the last century, the emigration of Romanians to the West preserves a disturbing history. Thousands of Romanians have ended in the past in the fear of leaving Romania, and others had to face the extreme challenges of harsh worlds, completely unknown to them.
The Danube in the area of the boilers, separates Romania from Serbia. Photo: Daniel Guță. TRUTH
Over five million Romanians live outside the borders, most established in Western Europe and North America.
If at present the departure from the country has become a relatively simple process, the history of Romanian migration to the West, stretched for more than a hundred years, remains marked by dramatic episodes and moments of profound transformation.
Throughout the last century, the emigration from Romania meant, for many, to take on huge risks in search of a better life, sometimes, even with the price of life.
In certain periods, the flight across the border was almost impossible, and the thousands of Romanians shot at the western borders or who ended up in the Danube waters are testified to tragically ended attempts.
The dramatic journey to the “realm of promise”
The first important wave of the Romanian migration to the west, in search of a better life, began in the last years of the 19th century, when many Romanians from Transylvania, Bucovina and Banat (regions then compared to the Austro-Hungarian Empire) took the path of North America.
Ship from Hamburg port in the 1900s. Fortepan.hu source
Until the outbreak of the First World War, over 150,000 Romanians had reached the American continent. For many, the trip was long, difficult and full of risks. Most began their journey from the Transylvanian villages, passing through Budapest and Vienna, then to the Hamburg or Rijeka ports, where they left with the ship to New York, after weeks spent at sea.
“The emigrant, along his path to America, leaves you the impression of a pack of merchandise thrown from the corner to the corner. The ignorance of the tongue, the lack of experience, the clums in the face of the habits of a huge industrial and commercial world make the poor Romanian peasant, left from the plow on an unknown road, to hit all the walls, as well as” as well. “wrote the priest Moise Balea from Cleveland in 1907.
The Pittsburgh Strip, where many Romanians worked. Wikipedia.
He added that the real misery began only after the Romanians arrived in America:
“Here he opens an unimaginable hole in front of him, which harms him and makes him curse his fate. If he is lucky and quickly finds work, the desire to win pushes him to neglect the needs of the body. He squeezes all his power for a dollar or two more a week and, finally, he gets tired,” the priest reported.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Romanian newspapers-both in the country and those that have appeared in the communities of the United States, were full of bitter testimonies of those who went across the ocean, according to the popular saying: either bad bread, better in my country.
“Of the emigrants, some call their families there, and others do not think about the people at home. The country of the Olt only remains with the rich, with the baboons, the mosquitoes, the poor who have no money and the girls who, in the end, start after the wills, to marry.” The priest Ioan Podea, parish in the American city of Farrel, in the volume Emigration to America (1914) reported.
Life full of weights in the USA 1900
Many Romanians came to work in me, steel or factories, under extremely difficult conditions. Life on the “realm of promise” was, at least in the first years, far from the dream.
“The worker is like a servant, followed by the guardian, and the continuous cry of” go ahead! ” (Come on before!) He sounds worse than the whip on the back of an animal ”, informed the Tribuna newspaper, in 1907.
From the desire to make savings, the Romanians were forced to live in dirty rooms, worse than the cattle, said the newspaper publicists. In many places, small huts housed 30 people.
Ship in Rijeka port. Source: fort.hu
“There are four or five beds in a room, with canvas that, once, maybe they were white. And in a bed night more than nights each other. I sleep to ten in a small room, whose windows do not open with the weeks. Their way of living is far more than at home.” the priest adds the priest Ioan Podea.
In the early 1920s, the United States drastically tightened the conditions for receiving immigrants. However, despite the new restrictions and discouraging propaganda, many Romanians continued to try their luck over the ocean, attracted by the high income they could get working for a few years in America.
Other important groups of Romanians went to Canada, where, in the interwar years, the authorities continued to encourage the colonization and development of the vast territories of the country.
At the same time, Mexico and Canada were, for many Romanians, transit countries in their attempt to illegally reach the US. More than half a million Romanians are currently living in North America, many followers of the first large migrant groups since the beginning of the 20th century.
The terror of the years of Stalinism, at the western borders of Romania
In the first years after the Second World War, the communist regime closed the borders of Romania, leaving little to escape the Romanians who wanted to reach the West.
Both the heavy living conditions in Romania, isolated and controlled by the Soviets, as well as the persecutions, the fear of arrest, the pursuits on the Stalinist model, gave many Romanians to try, despite the risks, to save themselves, passing fraudulently in Yugoslavia and Hungary, hoping to reach the west.
In order to prevent illegal departures, the communist authorities militated regions from the borders of Romania with Yugoslavia and Hungary. The borders were guarded by military units, with frequent observation stations, horse patrols and wolfs specially trained to stop them on the fugitives.
“The command of the regiment is located in the barracks on the main road, where there are also dogs. There are over 100 dogs, trained by a German, whose name is not known. The animals are very strong and well fed, they receive 800 grams of bread daily, next to the muffins. It showed a report from the 1950s on the border in Jimbolia, kept in the Radio Free Europe archives.
The deadly traps on the Danube bank
The borders on the Danube of Romania with Yugoslavia were as strictly supervised, and tens of thousands of inhabitants of the southwestern Romanian villages, near the border, were deported in the early 1950s, to reduce the risk of fraudulent crossings in the neighboring country and to prevent the locals from collaborating with a possible enemy.
About 60,000 people were raised and sent to Soviet Moldova or Bărăgan, with everything they could carry in a single bag, showed a report of the Central Intelligence Agency of 1954.
The Danube Șa Orșova. Photo: Daniel Guță
In the Orșova – Drobeta Turnu Severin area, the civilian population was not allowed to approach less than 30-40 meters from the river, and the hundreds of boats that could be seen before the war floating on the Danube disappeared. On the banks were installed me, and the border guards were trained to shoot the Romanians who were thrown into the water to swim in Yugoslavia.
“Those who were trying to run used dogs to detect mines, in the idea that animals would discover and activate the explosive before the master.”mentioned another 1952 CIA report.
The escape from the communist camp, led by the Ceausescu regime
In the last decades of communism, the emigration from Romania under the Ceausescu regime has been partially allowed for ethnic minorities, especially Jews and Germans, in exchange for political and economic benefits.
For most Romanians, the illegal departure from the country remained extremely risky, while emigration by legal ways was almost impossible.
Poverty, lack of freedoms and repression remained the reasons why many Romanians wanted to leave the country at any cost. Many “frontiers” have lost their lives in fearful trials, some kidnapped by bullets, others missing in the waters of the river.
Others were stopped at the borders, arrested, tortured and then persecuted by the communist security. Sometimes, the border guards were trained to consider those caught running out of the country as deserving traitors.
Trained border guards to be ruthless
Some of the soldiers mocked their shot victims, recalled John Pîrva, a Romanian who managed to escape from Romania in the 1980s, in his book “Memories of a border.”
“I was amazed by what this soldier told me, who practically confessed his necrophilia documents to impress me.” A few days ago-he says-I was caring four shot, who were from Bucharest, three men and I saw her in the mirror. That! John Pîrva reported, telling the dialogue with a border guide, in his book “Memories of a border”.
Border guards and an old border point. Photo: Border Police / John Pîrva, Facebook.
Other soldiers were waiting for the opportunity to escape themselves to Yugoslavia, and deserts in this way were frequent, showed some testimonies. The border authorities in Romania in the 1980s found a unique means of discouraging Romanians from running with cars in the country, forcing the barriers of the border road.
“At the PCTFs and the small traffic points on the border with Serbs, they thought of” building safe obstacles on the traffic arteries near the border barrier (at PCTF Jimbolia, post no. With four supports, acted by remote or electronic, at a button press you could instantly rise from the asphalt a grape with sharp metal corners or a concrete, wide and deep ditch for road vehicles ”,, Related in the Border Police Magazine, reserve officer Ionel Bostan, former military man in Jimbolia, in 1981.
