PT Jan-67 - Herbert W. Armstrong Library and Archives

14 The PLAIN TRUTH
Romania - Land of Contrasts!
Downtown BucureJti, right top, lit up on rainy night. Cars are few and old .
Romania has just completed financial deal to have French build auto plant to
begin to supply Romanian urban consumer market. Below, village scene and
rural home. Wagon load of hay is pulled by water buffalo.
PhotOJ: Romania. Ambouodor College
mans, then Jews and Gypsies. Then
come the Slavic-speaking peoples -
Ukrainians; Serbs, Croats and Slovenes;
Russians; and Czechs and Slovaks. And
as if that were not enough, there are
thousands of Tartars, Turks, Bulgarians,
Greeks, Albanians and Armenians!
With this diversity of population,
the Romanian Communist party would
be forced to whip up Romanian nationalism
even if there had been no
strife with the USSR.
Romania's Lost Territory
Romanians have little love for the
Russians. At the end of World War II
the Soviet Union seized Bessarabia from
Romania. Tens of thousands of Romanians
were forced to become Soviet
citizens. The Romanian Communist
Party has never forgotten it.
Roman ia was the first satellite behind
the Iron Curtain to drop the compulsory
study of the Russian language.
In 1964 Romanian scholars, tipped
off by a Polish student, uncovered
some long-forgotten articles written by
Karl Marx, founder of Communism. In
the last century, it seems, Marx condemned
Czarist Russia for seizure of
Bessarabia. The Rom an ian s reacquired
it in 1918 - only to lose it again.
Romanians, in and out of the Communist
Party, are incensed, embittered
over the lost territory of Bessarabia.
Inside Party Headquarters
In Bucur~~ti, Romania's capital, we
inquired at the Government Tourist
Office for photographs. We were generously
given all we might use. Later,
we asked one of the secretaries for information
about a private photo agency.
She did not know its exact whereabouts,
but gave us an address. It turned out to
be that of the Romanian Communist
Party Headquarters. Two of our staff
went in, talked to an official, but were
told to return next day at noon. Our
schedule called for our departure before
noon next day.
So next morning we all returned,
walked past the guards with our cameras,
headed straight for the office of
the official whom we met the day before.
The door was locked. Just then a
Party worker walked by us, and opened
the door to an adjoining room. Before
he cou ld close it, we stepped in, introduced
ourselves in German and asked
to see the photographic files. We explained
our purpose, that we were an
educational institution, publish a magazine
and wanted the latest pictures on
the big changes taking place In Romania.
At length we were asked to step
down the hall into another office. All
the doors were soundproofed with
thick leather padding. Keys were hanging
from the locks. While we looked
over the photos in the files, the woman
in charge kept asking how we knew
about the files. We explained that we
had found an address of a photographic
agency in a commercial publication in
West Germany, but that apparently the
address had been changed and we had
been directed here.
"We do not advertise," she responded.
"We have no photographs
for sale. You cou ld not have known
of us."
We expIaineq it again to her, as we
kept looking over the photographs.
When we at last mentioned the name
of the agency we were looking for, she
burst out laughing. "You are in the -