Cighid was a children's home in
Romania
Romania ( ; ro, România ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Moldova to the east, and ...
where many orphans and disabled youths were held in inhumane conditions. The extent of the abuse was exposed in March 1990, shortly after the
fall
Autumn, also known as fall in American English and Canadian English, is one of the four temperate seasons on Earth. Outside the tropics, autumn marks the transition from summer to winter, in September (Northern Hemisphere) or March ( Southe ...
of
Nicolae Ceaușescu
Nicolae Ceaușescu ( , ; – 25 December 1989) was a Romanian communist politician and dictator. He was the general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and the second and last Communist leader of Romania. He ...
's regime.
Background information
In 1966, the
regime
In politics, a regime (also "régime") is the form of government or the set of rules, cultural or social norms, etc. that regulate the operation of a government or institution and its interactions with society. According to Yale professor Juan Jo ...
of Nicolae Ceaușescu
decreed a ban on contraception and abortion with the aim of increasing
Romania's population. At the age of three years the children were medically examined. Disabled and orphaned children were in huge numbers brought into homes like Cighid or psychiatric hospitals, where they lived under inhumane conditions. Many children, especially those with disabilities, died within weeks of their arrival due to starvation, exposure or infections caused by lack of hygiene. At the time, this was labelled "dying without being killed". The local graveyard has 137 graves of victims.
The children's home Cighid, located in
Ghiorac near the
Hungarian border, was discovered in spring 1990 by western reporters. The pictures of sick and malnourished children were published in many newspapers and were shown on many TV stations around the world. Observers described the sight of Cighid with terms like "Child
Gulag
The Gulag, an acronym for , , "chief administration of the camps". The original name given to the system of camps controlled by the GPU was the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps (, )., name=, group= was the government agency in ...
s" or "the Romanian
Euthanasia Program". One example was the so-called "isolator": a shed with its windows nailed shut, where 17 toddlers were kept. In the darkness, they were using their sense of smell to know food from vomit or excrements.
After the discovery, employees blamed the conditions on orders from above.
Charities from
America and
Western Europe
Western Europe is the western region of Europe. The region's countries and territories vary depending on context.
The concept of "the West" appeared in Europe in juxtaposition to "the East" and originally applied to the ancient Mediterranean ...
contributed massively to an aid programme which saw Cighid improved. Many of the children being held at Cighid were adopted by Western European families. Others stayed in newly established homes for disabled adults, to avoid sending them to psychiatric hospitals for life.
See also
*
Duplessis Orphans
The Duplessis Orphans (french: link=no, les Orphelins de Duplessis) were a population of Canadian children wrongly certified as mentally ill by the provincial government of Quebec and confined to psychiatric institutions in the 1940s and 1950s ...
References
External links
Life in Ceausescu's institutions(BBC news)
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Socialist Republic of Romania
Orphanages in Romania