On a trip in 1999 I went to Romania, and visited some of the orphanages there. I was prepared for something awful, but not what I saw.
We got the the orphanage in the morning as it was opening. It was winter in Romania and you can imagine, it's very cold. The orphanages are poorly funded and maintained. When we walked in the orphanage is essentially a few rooms, with one giant room housing all the babies. All of the babies are in cribs, painted white. The walls are grey, and there's nothing on them but stains, there are no windows. The cribs all have stained mattresses in them, and most of the kids don't have blankets. Just babies in cribs with bare mattresses. Many of the babies aren't dressed in anything more than a diaper. They're all facing the same direction. Many of them are just silently rocking back and forth. All of them have terrifyingly large, wide eyes that seem to bulge out of their skulls, but this is only because the hunger has sunken their cheeks.
The morning nurse has to perform one of her duties: rounding up all the dead bodies of the babies that have frozen to death during the night. All the babies are watching her, rocking silently. She has an old sheet, and has gathered all of the corners together to make a 'sack' for the frozen baby corpses. She's dragging this sheet on the floor behind her as she walks between the rows and rows of cribs. As she's walking, one of the baby corpses slips out of the sheet and kind of 'thuds' on the floor.
I am so horrified, my eyes are welling up with tears and I'm just trying to breathe. (I was told before coming to the orphanage that I'm not allowed to touch any of the children.)
When the corpse of the frozen baby slips out onto the floor, one of the babies starts to laugh. The laughter spreads throughout the whole room, with all these skinny, pale, wide eyed, alien children just laughing at the frozen body of a child who lived in the crib next to them. It seemed to echo through the whole room. The nurse turned around and picked up the dead baby again and just tossed him back in the sheet, and continued on.
The sound of those babies laughing was the most haunting noise I've ever heard.
+ dalsi na
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