Revolution Orphan, USA Scholar

Vinerian Badoi was among the first that shouted "Down with Ceausescu!". The first that woke up, the first that got killed. People say Vinerian Badoi was the first victim of the Revolution in Bucharest. He got out on the streets just to fulfill his dream of getting to America and live a better life. This year, his daughter has fulfilled her father’s dream. She got on the other side of the Ocean.

After finding out about the horrors in Timisoara, a 30 year old man wondered: "Why did all the people able to do something just stayed and did nothing? They were probably scared. Lord, how can one shoot people, women or children?" These were the last words written by Vinerian Badoi in his diary on the 20th of December. He died the next day.

THE LAST LOOK. I met the wife of the martyr hero at the grave of Vinerian Badoi. She calmly remembers those days in 1989. Each sequence of the 20th of December 1989 has its certain spot in the memory of Maria Badoi. These are the last memories with her husband. We left together to work, like in any other day. We were also taking Olivia to kindergarten. I remember our daughter was wearing the uniform and that it had lost her national flag on that day. Vinerian got back to look for it. This was the last time when Olivia got to see her father alive."

Olivia remembers very well the Christmas celebration at the kindergarten, which had taken place a few days earlier. Because she had to work that day, Maria sent Olivia together with Valerian to the kindergarten. "She was very happy because few children had come with their fathers. One could see that the little girl had been dressed up by her father", the woman says while looking at a picture from that time.

SLICES OF LIFE. The family had to listen to several stories in order to find out what happened with Vinerian Badoi during that day. The colleagues from work told Maria that the first thing he had told when he had arrived was: "Who is coming with me?". Nobody stepped forward. One colleague told he had heard Vinerian shouting on the Onesti street: "Down with communism, down with Ceausescu, we want freedom!". "His brother had looked for him in the entire city that day, because we weren’t able to find him. After that, we started looking for him in the hospitals", the wife emotionally continues the story.

NUMBER 2. On the 22nd of December 1989, the Badois have found Vinerian at the Emergency Hospital. He was dead. "There were a lot of dead people in a huge room, and they were all mangled. Bullets were coming from everywhere so we had to walk by the walls. We recognized him after his sweater. The medical papers were saying he had been stepped over by a tank. However, he had strokes al over the body", the wife says.

They heard people saying he had punched a soldier when the army started watering the people. "I think this is when he got killed. The first one in Bucharest. He had a small hole and a big hole in his temporal, like he had been shot from close range", Maria Badoi precisely remembers. The body had a sticker on the arm. It read 2. They hardly managed to take him away from there. They buried him on the Christmas day. It was the only funeral on that day.

IN THE NAME OF THE DAUGHTER. Olivia has rather sensorial memories from the day her father died. "I remember the image of my father lying on the hospital table, the road to the cemetery, my mother crying and a powerful smell of musk, which still causes me strong reactions. My mother told that my father used to say that if he were to die he would have done it for his child, for me to live a better life", the daughter of the hero remembers.

LATE. Maria Badoi doesn’t care about the initiatives for finding the guilty people. "This won’t bring any change. There is nothing in the world to make me feel better. I would like to forget it all. Time will heal me, but he is irreplaceable. I will always miss him."

ABSENCE. Vinerian didn’t live to see his daughter getting good grades, getting admitted at the Foreign Languages Faculty nor when she fulfilled her father’s dream of getting in the United States on a scholarship. "I used to think Olivia was too young at that time to be touched by the events. However, even if she was 4, she understood it all", Maria Badoi noticed. Olivia says she is proud to be the daughter of a martyr, but there have been a lot of times in her life when she would have wanted to say "daddy". He knows that only a special person could do the things her father did. "I would have liked to have my father close to me and protect me from the bad people, to wait for me in front of the high school to find out the grades of my graduation, to be happy for my scholarship in the USA".