CHAPTER 1

Initial Flames

In the midst of World War II, the fertile soil of Eastern Europeran red with the blood of millions. The fighting swept throughvillages, cities, and farms, shattering lives and filling mass graveswith the dead. Families were torn apart. Fathers, husbands, sons,brothers, and uncles were vaporized in artillery blasts, burnedalive in tanks and planes, or turned to raw meat under witheringmachine-gun fire. Mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, and auntsstarved or were disintegrated in carpet bombings. The very fabricof civilized society ripped to tatters as the years of war draggedon, and it seemed for a time that darkness would reign over all ofEurope, and possibly the world, for a thousand years.

Then, slowly, ever so slowly, the Eastern Front began to change.The Soviet Union stalled the German advance toward Moscow.The Russian people rose up. The munitions factories hummed. Thetroop trains rolled westward. The Russian Bear pushed on, drivingGermany back. Alliances shifted as the tide of war ebbed andflowed, favoring one side or another. Romania was no exception.Early in the war, it sided with Germany in September 1940 underthe rule of Premier Ion Antonescu, with the tacit approval of KingMichael. It was like that in Hungary and other nearby countries.You might say Romania received an offer it couldn't refuse: sign onthe dotted line or be slaughtered.

German soldiers poured into Bucharest, and the lovely capitalwould never again be the same. In 1941, Romanians rallied to fightthe Soviet Union along with their German masters when AdolfHitler saw fit to void the nonaggression pact he'd signed withJoseph Stalin in 1939. My father, a man I never knew, was amongthem, a proclaimed fighter for his king. He graduated from themilitary academy of the Romanian Royal Army in Timisoara asa lieutenant in the same year Hitler and Stalin made their emptypromises not to wage war against each other.

When my father went into action against the Soviets, hefought with distinction, earning an Iron Cross and a promotionto captain. On September 7, 1942, on the Kalmuk Steppe eighteenmiles southwest of Stalingrad, his company engaged the Soviets ina fierce firefight. He was on the field telephone in a foxhole when anartillery shell landed nearby, killing him and seriously woundingthe telephone technician. It was only ten days after the start of theBattle of Stalingrad, a bloody fight that lasted until the followingFebruary and that by some counts killed two million people. Mymother was twenty-eight, and five months pregnant with me, whenshe received word of my father's death.

I sometimes look at timeworn black-and-white snapshots ofmy father and mother when they were newlyweds just before thewar, back when our family owned an eleven-acre property with afine house and employed a married couple serving as housekeeperand caretaker. The future of my parents seemed bright when theygot married in 1939, but in retrospect their timing couldn't havebeen worse. The clouds of war in Europe had been gathering since1936, when Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland. Germany hadabsorbed Austria and seized Czechoslovakia, and in September1939 it invaded Poland, officially kicking off the start of WorldWar II in the European Theater.

I wonder what life would have been like for us all if someGermans hadn't gotten it into their sick heads that they couldconquer the whole planet. My parents, Gordana and Olimpiu, werea handsome couple, she with a tender smile and dark black hairand he with eyes reflecting a mischievous bent. Olimpiu lookedquite dashing with his well-trimmed moustache, shock of thick,wavy black hair that resembled mine in my younger years, and aRomanian military cadet's uniform that must have made Gordanaswoon. They'd met as he walked past her apartment on the way tothe military academy, and it was almost love at first sight for themboth. The war changed the lives of everyone on the globe. It killedmy father, like the millions of other fathers lost, and it set the stagefor a grim existence in Eastern Europe under Soviet rule. In manyways, the war charted my own life, even though I was only an infantwhen it happened.

As the tide of war changed in favor of the Allies, King Michaeloverthrew Antonescu and changed sides in 1944, standing withStalin instead of Hitler. I was living with my grief-strickenmother, my three-year-old sister, and my maternal grandparentsin the rectory in Timisoara's Christian Orthodox Church. Mygrandfather, Slobodan Kostic, was the vicar of the church in thecity with three other priests reporting to him. He was an importantman in many circles, and he was considered one of the elite amongthe Serbian community. The war was tragic, but Slobodan and mygrandmother, Paulina, were financially and spiritually secure. Theywere busy doing God's work, helping the needy and war ravagedand running the church for its large congregation, which was sobereft of hope in those terrifying times. I don't think my mother ormy grandparents had any idea of what was just around the cornerfor them. What could they have done if they had known? It's easyto look back and make judgments, but I ask myself now and then ifI would have done anything differently than they did. I don't havethe answers. I just don't know.

Suddenly, as a member of Allied forces, Romania was afriend of Soviet Russia, its former sworn nemesis. The Red Armymarched in and occupied the land, just as the Germans had done.The steady tramp of hobnailed boots on cobblestones and therumble of Soviet tanks on country roads filled the air but didnot drown out the guns of war. The Soviet occupation created anominous backdrop to the fighting that few people paid attentionto at the time. I can now understand why the Communist threatwent largely unidentified among the rich and poor of Romania,but as a young man living in utter fear of the securitate, Romania'ssecret police, I did not. I did not understand how a people couldfail to see what was plainly obvious to me then. It seemed...