Siret, a small Romanian town that borders Ukraine, is no stranger to attention. Just after the 1989 revolution, foreign journalists flocked there to reveal its grim story to the world. Under the Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu’s brutal regime, which forbade birth control and exacted appalling privations on its people, thousands of children were abandoned in inhumane state orphanages.
The most vulnerable – those deemed by the system to have neuropsychological problems – were dumped, out of sight, in Siret, hundreds of miles from Romania’s capital, Bucharest. This border community was home to the country’s biggest orphanage; a four-storey former barracks that became a gulag for nearly 1,000 abandoned and disabled children.