People congratulate him on his successes, so impressive because they are so unlikely: At age 11 he was plucked out of the orphanage by an American family in California and now lives in Denver, where he supports himself with two low-wage jobs.

“Give it one year and that child’s hopes and dreams and future have been taken away from him.” “A healthy child placed in one of these orphanages?” he says, his voice catching. The back of his head is lashed with scars. “If you did anything that even slightly annoyed them, they would either drug you, beat you or put you in a straitjacket - anything to keep you quiet,” he says. By then, Americans had adopted about 8,000 children from Romania and tens of thousands more from Russia, Kazakhstan and other former East Bloc countries. families were trafficking children and selling their organs. Americans continued to adopt there until early 2004, when Romania banned most international adoptions amid charges of corruption and rumors that U.S. The following year, the number shot up to 2,594. In 1990, 121 Romanian children received American adoption visas. “People just sort of figured generally that love would conquer all.” “People didn’t know that they should prepare themselves to raise a child who may have special needs,” Pertman said. Many of the children had become emotionally marooned, unable to process or return affection. Many adoptive parents knew nothing of the effects that sensory deprivation and neglect had wrought. In the post-revolution chaos, there was almost none of the regulation and oversight usually required for adoptions. Thousands of Americans flew to Romania to rescue children. “It set off a wildfire,” said Adam Pertman, executive director of the New York-based Evan B.

News organizations across the world presented Romania’s orphanages as a symbol of a decayed empire. “American couples, all of whom had the saddest stories of trying to adopt, specifically wanting to adopt a particular child they had seen in our report.” “My phone was ringing literally nonstop,” said Tomlin, who later adopted two infant girls there herself. The journalists produced a multi-part exposé that shocked American viewers and helped trigger an unprecedented surge in international adoptions in Romania and throughout the Eastern Bloc. There was Marin, a dark-haired Roma boy with an infectious smile Ana, who was blind and bedridden but sang with plaintive, perfect pitch and Izidor, a bright-eyed boy with a limp. The children wrapped their arms around the visitors’ legs. Countless children were institutionalized, sometimes because of disabilities but often simply because their parents couldn’t afford them. Under Ceausescu, birth control and abortion had been banned, and women were pressured to bear at least five children to provide workers and fighters for the nation. As an adult, he has become an activist for the tens of thousands of children who still languish in Romanian institutions.ĭetermined that they should not have to relive the nightmares he endured, he wants to help them in the same way he was once helped: by taking their story public. As a newly adopted adolescent, he fought for his orphanage friends to come to America, too. He is the reason everyone is here today.Īs a child, his fierce determination to get out of the orphanage propelled him into the arms of an American family. Izidor Ruckel, 32, is still small, with haunted brown eyes and close-cropped hair. The boy is 10, but he is the size of a much younger child, stunted by malnutrition. “That’s Izidor, in the red sweater,” someone interjects as a little boy with a big smile appears on the screen. Now in their teens and early 20s, these adoptees are too young to remember much of their home country. Some of those Americans are sitting here on an October afternoon in 2012, at the Homewood Suites hotel in Davidson, N.C., along with the Romanian children they adopted.

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