What Flickers Through Your Head When You Know

There’s a kind of man history keeps producing—charismatic, paranoid, capable of bending an entire nation to the shape of his fear—and I’ve been unable to stop reading about them since I was old enough to find books unsettling. Hitler is the obvious one. A monstrous, abhorrent human being whose world I keep circling because I can’t fully hold the scale of it in my head. I don’t think anyone can. You approach the numbers and your mind deflects.

My real obsession is Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania’s communist dictator from 1965 until his execution in December 1989. I was a small child when I stayed up late one night and caught a documentary about him and his wife Elena on Arte. I sat on the sofa and didn’t move. Romania’s orphanages for children deemed "unrecoverable"—the disabled, the dying—were spectacular in their cruelty, and he toured them like a patron. His pro-natalist policies flooded those same institutions. Women who had illegal abortions were left to die from complications, hospitals forbidden from treating them. And the birth rate: he tried to drive it up by banning television. The state could just cancel your television. That detail terrified me more than anything else. Not the mass graves. The TV.

Then I saw the execution footage. Nicolae and Elena, hands bound, against a wall. First they were pleading, then in the next second they were dead. Two people. Gone. I was eight years old and I couldn’t stop asking myself what goes through someone’s mind in that moment—not in the abstract before, but in the precise instant between the last breath and the shot. I’m still asking. Goodbye, Ceaușescu. You did something awful to my imagination and it never quite healed.