Category: Romania

On the train trip there, it began to rain.  

 Anya and I were on our way to a town in the west of Romania where we had booked accommodation in a local house for a week and where we planned to do some walking.

 But the weather didn’t look promising.

 On the horizon, enshrouded in mist, were the silhouettes of mountains.

 In the past, on the plains between those mountains, the armies of Austria, Hungary, and Russia had invaded Romania and for centuries it had remained the property of others. In the bad weather, such thoughts loomed large.

As our train approached the station, we passed abandoned factories surrounded by weeds and dilapidated apartment blocks, chipped and cracked. At the station, we were met by dour faced people, resigned to living nowhere.

 For 45 years Romania had been a part of the Russian communist empire, like the other nations of Eastern Europe and this town, once thriving and a major source of employment, had been left behind by the relentless march of history, like a discarded wrapper thrown to the wayside. 

Long ago, in this end-of-the-world town, people had found hope in a  maelstrom of suffering and chaos.  And so it was with a woman named Elena (pronounced ‘A-lay-na’). It was 6 years ago that we heard about her and whilst I had filed the memory away in one of my diaries, it was only with recent events in The Ukraine that I was reminded of her………

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Elena: like so many Europeans of her generation who had endured the Nazi occupation, she had experienced horrors which after the war, she had put behind her, determined never to inflict her sufferings upon her children. But during the last days of her life, she had told her great granddaughter Andrea, her and her alone, about what she and her husband had endured.

 It was story from another time, another world, and Andrea, very much at odds with her country, suddenly realized how fortunate she was. The terrible events which Elena’s generation had experienced seemed to put everything into another perspective.

 In 2016 Andrea thought, along with everyone else, that the past was a scene from another era. That Elena’s story, kept secret for so long, was destined to die with her passing.  

 But what if the past could be reincarnated like a mythical figure out of an ancient Greek tragedy?

Could come back from the nether world and haunt the living?

 Elena’s story begins in Bucharest in the 1930’s, almost a century ago. It begins with an innocuous scene: two teenage women and a young man in love.

 But soon enough, Love will be in very short supply and vastly overwhelmed by the beast called Hate…..

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