Ana’s Voice

The year 1989 was filled with joy and turmoil.  It was the year our daughter Ana was born.  She came into a world of turmoil and pain on March 8, 1989.  Although her birth parents lived about 15 kilometers to the north, they were visiting friends in the gypsy section of Arad known as Kekecs.  There they were in eastern Europe, in a poverty-stricken neighborhood in Arad, Romania.   A tiny one-room house with a dirt floor and no water, in the city of Arad, western Romania, became her birthplace. 

Ana Sue Jessen started her life as the ninth child born to a poor gypsy family on the outskirts of town.  Ana and Ovidiu Cionca brought her into a world that was about to turn upside down. 

Nicolae Ceausescu had been the communist dictator of Romania since 1965.  By the mid-1980s, the economy had been drained by Ceausescu’s demented desire to build grand monuments to identify himself as a world-class leader.  While people were standing in line for hours to feed their families, he was selling off the resources of the country to build a huge palace in downtown Bucharest.  His Bucharest palace was still under construction at the time of his death.   While people were starving, he had nearly 700 architects designing his 900-room palace on Unirii Boulevard.  The ostentatious splendor of Ceausescu’s demented design was only rumored until the people discovered his excesses after the revolution of December 1989.  The “Palace of Parliament,” as it is now known, is the second-largest building in the world.  It is second only to the Pentagon in Washington, DC. 

Ceausescu destroyed the spirit of the people through his waste of national resources and his single-minded destruction of the economy to satisfy his need for recognition.  He infiltrated the entire social structure with his private secret police and controlled every move of every person, from the aristocrats to the peasant farmers. 

For years, Ceausescu had been one of the most paranoid Communist leaders.  He was frightened that someone would poison him or try to overthrow him.  The former head of Romanian Intelligence reported that Ceausescu had warehouses of new clothing placed all around the country.  His fear of being poisoned forced him to demand a completely new set of clothing for each new day.  Every pair of shoes, every suit, and every pair of socks were marked for destruction after he wore them once.  Even so, in 1989 he seemed oblivious to the political upheaval that surrounded his country. 

The 12-foot tall, 103-mile-long Berlin wall started to come down on November 9, 1989.  It stood for 28 years as a symbol of oppression and the division between east and west.  At the same time, the former Soviet Union was being crushed under the weight of a failed communist economy.  One communist leader after another began to fall.  But Ceausescu’s mind was focused on meeting his own lavish needs.  He was not able to learn from the political upheaval that surrounded him.  It proved to be a fatal error.  1989