Romanian Family Settled in Sweden Retrieve the History Communism Stole from Them

Part I: “Our history was deleted”

Around 40 students attend the class on Typeface Evolution taught by Arina Stoenescu, 54, at the Stockholm University. The young people examine specimens of typeface dating from 1400 to 1800, debate and ask questions, with the bibliography opened on their tablets and laptops.

Arina has been teaching Graphics and Typography in Sweden for 20 years and is currently hired by the Södertörn and Stockholm universities. Since 2015, she has been working on her doctorate on typography and politics in Communist Romania: “I am interested in the impact of politics on the graphical and typographical medium in Romania and in how political interests used typography to legitimise the Communist regime.”

Arina was born in 1969 in Bucharest and, like most children in her generation, grew up taking care of herself while her parents were working, wearing the house key on a string around her neck in school. She grew up in the working-class Balta Albă neighbourhood of Bucharest, built on its outskirts during the Communist regime and surrounded, in the 1970s, by fields and reeds. The children in the four-storey blocks – the so-called “decree-born”, conceived after 1966, when Ceaușescu prohibited all abortions – were free to explore the surroundings: the lake, wheat fields, poppy patches, cherry and walnut orchards.

Her parents worked in the Buftea Film Studios – her father was an acoustics technician, her mother was in charge of the male costumes section – and were away from six a.m. to six p.m. When she was little, they used to leave her with a neighbour in the same block, then they signed her up to a kindergarten with dormitories, where she stayed Monday to Saturday. Arina remembers the large dorms, the educators who thought she had headaches and gave her Pyramidon when she used to cry because she missed her parents, and the summers with kindergarten summer trips to the seaside, when they would get rubbed with oil and made to lie in the sun first on one side, then the other, “like frying fish”.

After she turned 5, her parents signed her up to a kindergarten with regular hours, then to School 149 in their neighbourhood. She warmed up her lunch when she came back from school – her father had bought her a small electric stove with a single ring, because the girl was afraid to turn on the gas stove.

Arina’s school was a “protocol school”, with diligent pupils, prepared for appearing in propaganda materials, receiving Party visits and delegations from Cuba, North Korea, Finland and Russia. Arina “modelled” for the new kindergarten uniforms and was photographed wearing them.

Arina’s great-grandfather on her father’s side, protopope Inocențiu Ștefănescu, was a military priest by the Romanian royal court, and the cross he used during religious ceremonies, now kept in Arina’s apartment in Stockholm, bears the inscription: “This Holy Cross was worshipped by Three Kings: Ferdinand I, Michael I and H.H. Carol II”.

Her great-grandfather’s photo albums are carefully preserved in Ariana’s bookshelf – one piece of inheritance the Communist regime failed to confiscate. In 1987, when they fled Romania, Arina and her mother couldn’t take them along, but later paid an HGV driver to get them out of the country; the man brought them to Sweden before 1989.

Arina lives in the southern part of Stockholm, in a three-room apartment where she has archived or exhibited family photos, objects brought from Romania over the years, countless books she has read or created the graphic design for, letters sent by her father after he fled to Israel, school notebooks, neckties and badges from the Communist school uniform, documents, papers and diplomas from her grandfather and great-grandfather.

The family legend says Arina’s great-grandfather was present when King Michael I of Romania was forced by the Communists to abdicate in December 1947. Months later, protopope Inocențiu Ștefănescu died suddenly, shortly followed by his wife, though neither was ill – irradiated by the Communists, according to the family legend.

In 1949, their son-in-law, Arina’s grandfather, an engineer who had studied in Bonn, was sentenced to detention at the Danube-Black Sea canal – a Communist labour camp survived by few. Their daughter died of tuberculosis in 1950, without seeing her husband again. Nini, Arina’s father, was 14 when he had to organise his mother’s funeral alone. He was left penniless, the family’s entire fortune confiscated: the coal mine in Voineasa, the vineyard in Urlați, the Ford, the nine apartments and the house in Bucharest. He and his younger brother were raised by family in Ploiești.

Nini dropped out of school after the Communists closed down the religious German-language school where he studied in Bucharest. “Father remembered how the Communists threw out the bruders, who hurriedly woke up the children: ‘Aufstehen! Aufstehen!’ It was rather violent, at least from a child’s perspective.” A few years later, her father started going to the Film Vocational School and became an acoustics technician.

When Arina was little, Nini used to tell her about how rich her grandparents used to be. “Just how rich?” the girl asked. “So rich your children’s children wouldn’t have had to work,” replied her father. The man never stopped thinking of the life the Communists cut short and of a parallel world in which he would have continued his studies.

Arina’s father, Inocențiu Stoenescu (Nini), was born in 1936 and named after his grandfather, the military priest of the royal court. After his father, engineer Nicolae Stoenescu, was released from the Canal labour camp in 1953, having served four years and three months, he remarried a camp guard’s daughter, Lucia Sabetay, a Jew he had fallen in love with during detention. Forever prohibited from working as an engineer (though he made a point of having everyone call him “Comrade engineer”), he began to design labels and badges for restaurants.

For a few years, Nini lived with his younger brother, his father and his stepmother in an apartment on Calea Moșilor, but it was too cramped for four people, so he couldn’t wait to leave home.

Arina’s mother, Florica Stoenescu (Rica), was born in 1943 in Drăgoești village, Ialomița County, in a wealthy peasant family, as the only girl of five children. The Communist regime confiscated their lands, their vineyard and their farming equipment, so they moved to Bucharest, left without any way to make a living. There they lived in a house on an island on Colentina Lake, and her father became a police agent. “Dad joined the Police because he didn’t like work,” Rica jokes.

In the post-war years after the instatement of Communism, families lived in poverty and all food was rationed on coupons. Rica remembers snippets of that period, but her most vivid memory is related to Stalin’s death in 1953. She was in third grade, and the headmistress brought all the primary school children out in the schoolyard to tell them. She started to cry and the children burst out crying as well, though they were too young to understand.

Rica was a good pupil, so in fifth grade she got a scholarship. She was accepted at Mihai Viteazul Highschool in Bucharest, where she stayed until 10th grade, when she contracted tuberculosis. There was an epidemic of it in the Popular Republic of Romania, and TB patients in Bucharest were admitted to the Lebăda sanatorium in her neighbourhood.

“I was poorly dressed, I didn’t have a winter coat,” Rica remembers. “There were five of us children and the only money in the family came from my father, so we couldn’t afford clothes. It happened to be a nasty winter, too: I got back home and leaned against the wood stove to warm up.”

Rica and Nini met in 1959, as patients of the TB sanatorium – she was 16, he was 23. “I was the youngest in that hospital,” Rica remembers. “When I went outside, I carried a stick so boys wouldn’t pick on me. He liked me, small as I was, and we fell in love.”

After recovering from TB, they continued to meet, and in 1950, just before she turned 18, Rica ran away from home and moved with Nini to a rented room near Romană Square. Her father hadn’t let her go to a New Year’s party with Nini, so the young man made her choose: “Either you follow me or your father.”

A month later they married and moved back into Rica’s family home, with her parents and four siblings, until Nini was assigned housing by the production studio in Buftea. They shared a three-room apartment with a driver from the studios and another acoustics technician. They shared the bathroom and kitchen, but they didn’t mind – neither had led a comfortable life before.

“My youth was after the war, when things were bad anyway,” said Rica. “We, at least, took life as it was.”

After their daughter Arina was born, they moved into a three-room flat of their own, in a nearby neighbourhood. Their greatest discomfort came not from the cold and the food shortages, but from the Communist system, based on acquaintances and favours, in which they were discriminated because they were not Party members. Nini, Arina’s father, had a reputation for having “loose lips” and “speaking freely [against the system]”. Though he was good at his job and the regime tolerated him, he never received bonuses.

His younger brother, a graphic designer at the Buftea Studios, was a Party member – even a Party secretary – but in 1981 he fled to Switzerland, which put the family in a bad light.

Arina was used to the contradictory reality of her life. Her family had two attitudes towards the Communist regime: that of her maternal grandfather – a police agent, part of the system – and that of her paternal grandfather, former political prisoner in the Canal labour camp.

Arina’s maternal grandfather had only finished four years of school and he was the local constable of the island on Colentina Lake, where he lived with her grandmother and where Arina’s mother had grown up. He used to ask his 10-year-old granddaughter to read him stories, because she could read better than him, and help him write his “reports”.

Arina spent hours home alone, watching the Party congress broadcasts on TV. “The brainwashing was working,” she says. With no other role models, the little girl had taken to writing in a notebook: “Nicolae Ceaușescu, the People’s most beloved son, was born on the 26th of January 1918 in Scornicești, Olt County, in a peasant family with 10 children…”

In 1983, when she was in eighth grade, Arina met Nicolae Ceaușescu and presented him with a scale model of the Cultural Centre for Pioneers (as Communist schoolchildren were called). Her background was checked and found to be “healthy” thanks to her policeman grandfather and her grandmother’s peasant family; she had to provide a medical letter stating she had no contagious diseases. Before Ceaușescu’s visit, on a warm summer day, the teachers noticed the bushes around the school were rather dusty, so they armed the children with rags and sent them to do some wiping.

“I remember I met Ceaușescu and he kissed me on the cheek, but I can’t recall what I said, I was so nervous,” Arina remembers. “But I do remember going home and my dad looking at me and saying ‘Off to the bathroom! Wash before I give you a kiss.’ I find that most descriptive of their attitude towards what I did as a Pioneer.”

Part II: “Dad is happy! The three of us are free!”

In 1983, her father Nini was planning to leave the Socialist Republic of Romania. Because of his brother’s flight to Switzerland, he would never have received a visa for the West, but his stepmother, who was Jewish, had settled in Israel after her father’s death in 1981, and Nini requested permission to visit her.

He had to go alone, leaving his wife and daughter in the country as guarantee. Once he got political refugee status in a Western country, he could bring his family over. But first he had to reach Israel, at a time when Communist Romania was selling Jews – through a convention signed in 1983, Israel paid it 3,300 US dollars for each Jew leaving the country. As a non-Jew, he would never have been granted political asylum.

It took a year and a half for Nini to get his tourist visa – the bureaucracy was a nightmare, his wife remembers. Rica worried for his health, but their problems were only just beginning. Nothing certain awaited him in Israel; his only plan was to knock on embassy doors for asylum.

In September 1985, when her father left the country, Arina was in 10th grade at the Nicolae Tonitza Art Highschool in Bucharest. No one knew of his departure, not even the rest of the family, so only his wife and daughter saw him off at the airport. He had a suitcase with a few changes of clothes – nothing to make anyone suspect he never intended to return. He was going to live with his stepmother in Haifa, where they could also write to him.

Two months later, Arina wrote her father: “Mum and I hope to see you as soon as possible, but not in a photo.” The then-teenager didn’t know it would be almost two years until they next saw each other.

Nini requested political asylum from the embassies of the US, Canada, and Switzerland, but was turned down. He took a flight to Greece, but he was denied entry, so he returned to Israel. He was desperate. He fell ill around that time – Arina never knew the details, he didn’t like talking about it. She doesn’t know how he made do, how he got the money or his visa extension.

Back in the country, a month after her husband’s departure, Rica was called to a Secret Police office for interrogation. The agents tried to get her to divorce him, saying Nini was not a good father for her daughter. They failed to convince her, so they confiscated half of her apartment, considered to have been Nini’s property.

Nini stayed in Israel for almost a year, until the summer of 1986. He was 49. Help came to him in the guise of Richard Wurmbrand, a Romanian Evangelical pastor of Jewish origin, who had been tortured and imprisoned for 14 years under Communism.

In 1965, after a Norwegian religious mission paid the Romanian state 10,000 dollars to allow him to leave, Richard Wurmbrand reached the US, where he created a mission named Jesus to the Communist World, supporting people persecuted for their faith.

Wurmbrand put Nini in contact with a Swedish organisation helping refugees from Communist countries. At the time, Sweden’s refugee policy was more generous than that in the US.

“Sweden is fantastic!” wrote Nini on the first postcard sent from his new country, as a political refugee. “I couldn’t have found better people to get along with.” But the year in Israel, the stress and the waiting had exhausted him. And it was not over: he would only see his wife and daughter a year later.

After Nini was granted political asylum in Sweden, the state gave Arina and her mother the right to permanent residency – but leaving Communist Romania would not be so easy. “Small forms, big forms,” Arina remembers the bureaucratic labyrinth. “If you got past the small forms, you had to sell all you had, to be free of all debt towards the State. My mother was so stressed, she felt anyone could harm us. They could have found three shirts missing from the storeroom where she worked and said ‘Where are they? This is theft from the People.’”

“I felt horrible, I couldn’t wait to leave,” says Rica. “Every Sunday they’d call me from the Secret Police: ‘Is your man home yet?’ At work, they held a meeting to pillory me: ‘Where are you leaving? Why are you leaving?’ My mother didn’t know what I was preparing to do; when I told her, she started crying: ‘Where are you going? Why are you going?’ It was such a relief, getting to Sweden.”

Arina was excluded from the Communist Youth Union, automatically joined by most young people over 14, and told off before her class for running to the West. Her colleagues secretly envied her, but only told her that a few years later.

They were only allowed to take along a 100-kilo wooden crate – a few photo albums, an art album from the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, their letters, some clothes, the kúkta (pressure cooker), a modern-design stainless-steel bread basket, Arina’s table set featuring Pif, the animated dog, a Communist cartoon magazine, and the notebooks with Arina’s sketches, for which she got a paper guaranteeing they were not part of the national cultural heritage. “The customs evaluation room had dim lights and long concrete tables, you couldn’t see properly. You felt like anything you did could turn against you, that they could just say ‘No, we’re not letting you out.’”

“I was running out of patience,” remembers Arina. “Everything in Romania looked so grey and black, I thought I would never set foot there again. I found it hard to imagine things would change: [Communism] seemed eternal.”

They left Romania in July 1987. After the Communist state had confiscated her great-grandparents’ belongings, her grandfather’s freedom and her father’s future through his right to education, now it was confiscating the last thing Arina (and her mother) had left: their Romanian citizenship. They were officially stateless, with special blue passports.

“When we got to Sölvesborg, everything looked like it was on steroids: gigantic rosehip bushes, obese cats ambling down the street, bumblebees twice the size I knew,” remembers Arina. “I froze when I first entered a grocery store.”

They lived in a three-room apartment provided by the Swedish state, in a community of a few hundred Romanian refugees in Sölvesborg. At first they relied on social aid, then Rica found work at the library and Arina got a scholarship.

What the Swedish authorities had not foreseen was that they all came from the Socialist Republic of Romania, where over half a million citizens were informers for the Secret Police. “When I started to speak the language, I was very open with the Swedes, but I wouldn’t breathe a word to Romanians,” remembers Arina. “We were very wary, something the Swedish hadn’t thought of when they put us all together.”

One day, Nini got a visit from the Swedish Security Service (SÄPO): its agents had intercepted a Romanian priest in their community who was a Secret Police informer. Arina’s father’s name was on his list – he was probably being watched.

Meeting Nini again was emotional and awkward. They hadn’t seen each other in almost two years, and their experiences had transformed them: Rica weighed 43 kilos when she reached Sweden. “She was a wisp of a human,” remembers Arina. “My father was a mental wreck. In Sölvesborg, if we sat around the table and I dropped a fork, he would explode. You could tell he had been through rough times.”

“DAD is HAPPY!!! The three of us are FREE!!!” wrote her father on the back of a photo taken on the 29th of September 1987, the day Arina turned 18. Rica and Nini lived free in Sweden, going on the trips they had always dreamed of before escaping Romania. Life started to follow a normal course. In 1993 they visited Arina in Germany, where she was studying on an Erasmus scholarship – their last trip together before learning that Nini had cancer.

“The worst was the talk with his doctor when I acted as translator. My dad said ‘I only wish I could see my grandchildren.’ And the doctor answered ‘I’m afraid that would mean you, young lady, would have to be very, very quick about it.’” Nini died the year he was diagnosed, without getting a chance to return to Romania. He is buried in Stockholm, where Arina’s mother moved in 1994 to be closer to her daughter.

Arina learned Swedish quickly, and in the autumn of 1987 she started going to highschool in Kristianstad, 30 kilometres from Sölvesborg. She was part of a special immigrants class, with pupils from Poland, Ecuador and Chile. Her Chilian classmates, who had fled Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship, came from families of Communists persecuted for their convictions and couldn’t understand why Arina had fled a Communist country, which they thought to be Heaven on earth.

She quickly made friends, both immigrant and Swedish; the hardest thing for her to get used to was an educational system which encouraged critical thinking. “I was disoriented. You adapt to a system, you do things almost mechanically, and when you’re told ‘Think for yourself,’ you suddenly find yourself in a vacuum. Independent thinking takes more effort – it’s easier to do as you’re told.”

In university, Arina started to live out her Swedish life and give less and less thought to Romania, Communism and the history that left its mark on her family. She was busy with her studies, she was in love, she worked as a graphic designer and illustrator for Sweden’s biggest dailies – Expressen and Dagens Nyheter.

She got her MA in Arts from Konstfack University in Stockholm in 1996, and four years later started to work for Ordfront Magasin, one of Sweden’s most important cultural and social publications. Since 2003, she has been teaching a class on graphics and typefont in several universities in Sweden.

She regained her interest for the political situation in Romania in the late ’90s, when she began work on The Archive of Pain, a book on former political prisoners on which she collaborated with several artists, including a childhood friend – film director Cristi Puiu, who grew up on the same street. The book appeared in 2000 at micro-publishing company pionier press, founded by Arina in 1991.

“I have a fascination for lives stolen by Communism – it’s not necessarily interest for Communism itself, but rather concern for mechanisms that could be repeated in different contexts,” she says. “Threats to democracy can appear anywhere, Sweden included – the signs are there. Discourses change tack, normality shifts. There we had Communism, here we have racism and the far right, the us and you. Only the categories are different – Swedish and Muslim, in this case.”

The books graphically designed, edited, written, translated, and published by Arina through pionier press in the following 23 years were children’s books, but also objects of art and experimental typography. She collaborated with many writers and artists – Romanian, Korean, Swedish, Kurd, Icelander, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Roma – and published bilingual children’s books, most of them Romanian-Swedish, Swedish-Romanian, Romanian-English and Romanian-Romani.

Part III: “Our citizenship was confiscated. The Romanian State threw us out”

Arina’s daughter, born in 2001, was named Ninni, after her grandfather and great-grandfather, but bears her Swedish father’s family name – Nylén. Arina and her partner separated when Ninni was one year old, but they continued to have a good relationship and raised her together.

In 2003, Arina bought an apartment in the Stuvsta neighbourhood in Huddinge, a suburb in southern Stockholm, right across from the building where her mother Rica now lives. After her husband’s death, Rica spent 16 years working at an afterschool, where she had one part-time job as a janitor and another as an educator.

Ninni received an Eastern Orthodox christening in 2002, at the Curtea Veche Church in the old centre of Bucharest. Her father, who is part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Sweden but is an atheist, agreed for his daughter to be baptised in Romania and came to the ceremony with his Swedish family. For Arina, the significance of her daughter’s christening was cultural more than religious.

To Arina, it was important for Ninni to learn Romanian. “I was so determined that I found myself speaking Romanian with other small children. Ninni could understand it, but she answered in Swedish, because she had no way to acquire an active vocabulary. I started to take her to Romania each summer, so she could understand why we spoke Romanian: she could understand the people there and was allowed to watch all the children’s shows dubbed into Romanian.”

When Ninni was in third grade, they spent a month in Bucharest, and she went to a local school. “She liked it, but she also noticed some things. She felt embarrassed when the teacher praised her by belittling others: ‘See, Ninni comes from Sweden and she knows the answer.’ One day the teacher told me ‘Mrs Stoenescu, today Ninni had an argument with the other children because she told them you are not married and they couldn’t understand how she could exist if her parents are not married. Ninni said ‘Well, I exist and my parents aren’t married.’ Eventually I had to step in and tell them ‘Oh, Ninni’s case is like those celebrities, you know.’”

Arina did not try to sugarcoat Romania for Ninni nor avoid discussing problematic situations with her. “For example, she saw parents hitting their children. ‘Love, there is violence here. That is not good. But the parents are probably very stressed and act that way because it’s all they know, all they understand.’ I’ve always tried to explain things to her and thus understand myself why society is as it is. I found it a good form of vaccination against the things she has in Sweden. There are pros and cons to both cultures, but in order to discuss them you must have some experience of them, something to compare them against.”

Ninni Nylén, 21, is a third-year student at the Academy of Art and Design within the University of Gothenburg. We have a coffee at the city library’s outdoor café, where we agreed to meet over Facebook Messenger.

I noticed Ninni’s writing in Romanian is faultless, with the dashes and diacritics in all the right places. In the almost five years we have been documenting Romanian migrants, we have met many young people born or raised abroad who find it difficult to write in Romanian. Ninni studied Romanian in school until her second year of highschool, as the state provides mother tongue classes for children of immigrant families.

We discuss the Romanian citizenship her mother and grandmother have not yet tried to retrieve. Ninni says that would involve “more rigmarole than you can shake a stick at”, and we are bemused by her use of the expression.

“My language was shaped by my mum and grandma – I speak more like them than like a young woman,” Ninni says. She noticed that when she visited Bucharest during her last year of highschool to film a documentary at the Nicolae Tonitza Art Highschool where her mother studied. There she interviewed five young people and noticed the differences between her way of speaking and theirs – Ninni was not familiar with teenage idioms.

Until 2020, when the pandemic started, Ninni visited Romania every year – with her mother as a child, then alone or with friends. Her relationship with Romania is not marked by trauma, like that of her mother and grandmother; Ninni relates to it with a certain tenderness. “I visited more towns in Romania than in Sweden,” she says.

The Romanian half of her identity has always been a cause for pride, not shame, as it is the case – she has noticed – among some Romanians settled in Sweden.

Since she was little, Ninni used to stop with her mother Arina to talk with the Romanians begging outside Swedish supermarkets, which she continued to do as a grown-up. “When you’re in a country where no one understands you and everyone gives you the side eye, it means a lot for someone to come over and speak to you in your language. Other Romanians who saw me said ‘Don’t talk to them, it gives us a bad reputation.’ It only gave me a poor image of them. I find it odd that, at the time, I was a teenager and they were adults. I assume that’s why they felt the need to say it – ‘Look, there’s a child we have to teach how to behave.’”

Her Romanian roots are a subject she wants to exploit in her art, which is why she went to Lithuania to study glass painting. “My mother sometimes paints glass icons and she taught me too, so I occasionally do it as well. Of course, the ones there were not icons – those are rather specific to Romania – but I wanted to learn more about glass painting and stained glass, and for my project I worked with family photos from back in Romania.”

This year she is writing her dissertation, on the relationship between contemporary art and the Romanian Eastern Orthodox Church. Since childhood, Ninni has been interested in the differences between the Romanian Orthodox Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Sweden. “I’m drawn to the cultural and historical perspective,” she says. “I like the Church of Sweden a lot, it’s extremely open, welcoming, doing a lot for young people and seniors. Also, it takes a totally different view of women’s freedom and LGBTQ.”

While the Romanian Eastern Orthodox Church opposes same-sex marriage, the Church of Sweden has been marrying same-sex couples since 2009, and a 2021 letter to its believers, signed by 1,000 priests, deacons and members, declares its support of transgender people’s rights.

That is not the only difference Ninni has noticed between the two cultures. When she visits Romania, she realises she is more vigilant, as a woman, and bothered by the societal misogyny. “Being raised in Sweden as a woman or girl, you learn to claim more space, be confident, talk to people more,” she says.

In her Swedish family, her cousins from his father’s four siblings are half-Serbian, -Korean, and -Argentinian. Of them all, she has the strongest bond to the non-Swedish half of her identity.

Nini’s studio in Gothenburg is in a block with residences for students in an immigrant neighbourhood. Nearby she has one Romanian, one Polish, and one Indian grocery store; one Bosnian, one Turkish, one Vietnamese, one Thai, and one Ethiopian restaurant; a Serbian bakery; a Protestant church and a mosque. She missed this multiculturalism while she lived in Lithuania: she found it odd for everyone to have the same skin colour.

“It’s more interesting walking on streets with such a mix of people, meeting and trying things from other cultures,” she says. “In Sweden, because so many people are from other countries or have parents from other countries, there is a sort of community created by this common experience.”