The Lost Children

No love, no human contact, languishing and forgotten in the home: Under the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceau?escu, babies who did not fit the norm were mercilessly sorted out. Whats become of you?

Izidor spent the first three years of his life in the hospital.

The dark-eyed, dark-haired boy, born June 20, 1980, was abandoned when he was a few weeks old. The reason for this was obvious to all who looked: His right leg was twisted. After an illness (probably polio) he had been thrown into the sea of ??abandoned infants in the Socialist Republic of Romania.

In films from the period that capture the care of orphans, nurses are seen like assembly line workers wrapping newborns from a seemingly endless supply; with muscular arms and careless indifference, they toss the children onto a square cloth, expertly knot it into a neat bundle, and place it at the end of a line of silent, worried-looking babies. The women do not speak softly to them or sing to them. You can see the little faces trying to understand what is happening as their heads roll back and forth during the winding manoeuvre.

At his hospital in Sighetu Marma?iei, a mountain town in northern Romania, Izidor was probably fed with a bottle placed in his mouth and propped against the bars of his cot. Well past the age when children in the outer world begin to taste solid foods and then eat for themselves, he and his peers remained on their backs, sucking from bottles whose openings had been widened to allow watery gruel to flow through. Without proper care or physical therapy, the baby's leg muscles atrophied. At the age of three he was found "deficient" and transferred to the other side of town to a C?min Spital Pentru Copii Deficien?i , a home for unsavable children.

No noise of children playing came from this concrete fortress, although at times up to 500 of them lived in it. She stood sadly away from the cobblestone streets and glittering river in the city.

On the third floor of Izidor's ward, the windows were barred. As a child, he often stood there looking down at an empty dirt-floored yard surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. In winter, through the bare branches, Izidor could see another hospital shielding its building from the street. Real children, children in shoes and coats, children holding their parents' hands, came and went from this hospital. No one from Izidor's C?min Hospital was ever taken there, no matter how sick they were, even when they were dying.

When the dictator left, there was also a network of "children's gulags"

Like all the boys and girls who lived in the hospital for the "lost", Izidor ate almost inedible, watery food at long tables, naked children sat on benches and banged the tables with their tin bowls. He grew up in crowded spaces where the other orphans endlessly swayed or slapped their own faces or screeched. Out of control children were given adult sedatives, with non-sterile needles; many who fell ill were transfused with blood that had not been tested. Hepatitis B and HIV/AIDS ravaged the Romanian orphanages.

Izidor was doomed to spend the rest of his childhood in this building, not leaving the gate until he was eighteen. And then, if he were completely incapacitated, he would be transferred to an old men's home. If he functioned minimally, he would be thrown out to make his way on the street. But it was very likely that he wouldn't survive that long, that this boy with the shriveled leg would die as an infant, malnourished, trembling, unloved.

Christmas Day marked the 31st anniversary of the public execution by firing squad of Romania's last communist dictator, Nicolae Ceau?escu, who had ruled for 24 years. In 1990 the outside world discovered his network of "child gulags" in which an estimated 170,000 abandoned infants, children and young people were being raised. Believing that a larger population would strengthen Romania's economy, Ceau?escu had restricted access to contraception and abortion, imposed punitive taxes on those without children, and celebrated women who gave birth to ten or more children as "hero mothers." Parents who couldn't handle another baby sometimes called their new baby "Ceau?escu's kid," meaning, "Let him raise it."

To accommodate a generation of unwanted, economically unsustainable children, Ceausescu ordered the construction or conversion of hundreds of buildings across the country. Signs read: The state can take better care of your child than you.

At the age of three, abandoned children were sorted.

Future workers received clothes, shoes, food and a little education in the case de copii , the "children's homes" - while "deficit" children in the C?mine hospitals received practically nothing. The science of defectology, developed in the Soviet Union, saw disabilities in young children as intrinsic and incurable. Even children with treatable problems—perhaps they were squinting, anemic, or had a cleft lip—were classified as “unsalvageable.”

In a freezing building they sneak around like goblins, tiny, dirty

After the Romanian revolution, children in horrible condition - skeletal, lying on the ground in urine, covered in excrement - were discovered and filmed by foreign news channels, including US network ABC, which aired "Shame of a Nation" in 1990 . Much like the liberators of Auschwitz 45 years earlier, the first visitors to these institutions were haunted by what they saw throughout their lives. "We flew over the snow to Siret in a helicopter, landed after midnight, it was below zero, we were accompanied by Romanian bodyguards with Uzis," says Jane Aronson.

She is a Manhattan-based pediatrician and adoption specialist and was part of one of the first pediatric teams brought to Romania by the new government. “We walk into a pitch-dark, freezing building and realize there are children slinking around there – tiny but older, weird, like goblins, dirty, smelly. They sing monotonously, gibberish. We open a door and find a group of 'cretins' - today it is known as congenital iodine deficiency syndrome: an untreated underactive thyroid gland inhibits growth and brain development. I don't know how old they were, they were a meter tall, could have been twenty years old. In other rooms we see youths as tall as six or seven years old, with no secondary sex characteristics. Children with deep-seated genetic diseases lay in cages. You almost start to crawl inside."

Classified as «unsalvageable»: children in the home in Sighetu Marma?iei, Romania (September 1992). Thomas Szalay

"I walked into an institution in Bucharest one afternoon and there was a little boy sobbing," recalls Charles A. Nelson III, professor of pediatrics and neuroscience at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital. “He was heartbroken and had wet his pants. I asked, 'What's the matter with this kid?' One worker said, 'Oh, his mother left him this morning and he's been like that all day.' That was all. Nobody comforted the little boy or picked him up. That was my introduction."

The Romanian orphans were not the first terribly neglected children psychologists had seen in the 20th century. Jaded orphans after World War II and children who had long been isolated in hospitals had the luminaries of child development like René A. Spitz and John Bowlbyheavily troubled in mid-century. In an age dedicated to fighting malnutrition, injury, and infection, the idea that well-fed and medically stable children were stunted because they missed their parents was hard to grasp. Research in the field of psychology led to the bold view of the time, most notably Bowlby, that the mere absence of an "attachment figure"—a parent or caregiver—can be devastating to mental and physical health.

Female neuroscientists have tended to view "attachment theory" as suggestive and thought-provoking work within the "soft science" of psychology. It was largely based on case studies, correlational evidence, or animal research. In psychologist Harry Harlow's infamous "loss of mother" experiments , this little rhesus monkey locked himself in a cage alone and gave them only maternal replicas made of wire and wood or foam and terry cloth.

Izidor was also in one of these homes, he was lucky, now he lives in the USA

In 1998, at a small scientific meeting, the juxtaposition of animal research and images from Romanian orphanages changed the study of attachment forever. First, Dana Johnson, a University of Minnesota neonatal specialist, showed photos and videos he took in Romania of rooms full of children exhibiting "stereotyped motor disorders": rocking, head banging, squealing. This was followed by a speaker showing videos of her work with orphan primate infants like Harlow's—swaying, rolling, self-harming. Audiences were shocked at the parallels. "We were all in tears," said neuroscientist Nelson.

In the decade after the fall of dictator Ceau?escu, the new Romanian government invited Western child development experts to help and study the tens of thousands of children still in state care. The researchers hoped to answer some long-standing questions: Is there a sensitive period in neural development after which a neglected child's brain becomes less able to cope with the mental, emotional, and physical stimulation it later receives? Can the effects of the "loss of the mother" or the "lack of a caregiver" be visualized with modern brain scans? And finally: Can a child who is transferred from an institution to a family environment gain skills that you haven't developed by then? The haunting question was implied: Can a person who was not loved in childhood learn to love?

Townhouse developments fan out around Denver Airport like playing cards on a table. The area here has been razed to waste, to wind and dirt and junk on the shoulder of the highway, to chain pharmacies and fast food joints and auto parts stores. I drive slowly through the semicircles and dead ends of Izidor's district in a rental car until I see him stepping out of the shadow of a large, pompous house and waving half-heartedly. He rented a room here, as did many others, including some families - a commune close to town in a single-family estate built for Goliaths. Izidor is 39, an elegant, wiry man with sad eyes. His demeanor is alert and hesitant.

"Welcome to Romania," he announces, opening his bedroom door. It's a gateway to another time, another place. From every visit to his homeland, Izidor has brought back folk art and souvenirs – hand-painted glazed plates and teacups, embroidered tea towels, Romanian flags, shot glasses, wooden figurines, carved bottles of plum brandy and CDs of Romanian folk music, many with fiddle tunes. He could outfit a gift shop. Izidor has wine colored rugs, throws and wall hangings. The room light is reddish brown, the curtains shut out the sunlight at high altitude. Izidor lives ten miles southwest of Denver Airport in a cheap copy of a Romanian cottage.

Suspended for Life: That's the (translated) title of Izidor Ruckel's autobiography (near his home near Denver, Colorado). Benjamin Rasmussen

"Everyone in Maramure? lives like this," he says, referring to the cultural region in northern Romania where he was born.

I think: are they really doing this?

"A lot of people there have things like that at home," he says.

That sounds more convincing. People like knick-knacks. "Do you sound like a Romanian when you go there?" I ask.

"No," he says. "When I start speaking, they ask: 'Where are you from?' I answer: 'From Maramure?!'" Nobody believes him because of his accent, so he has to explain: "Actually, if you take it seriously, I am Romanian, but I've lived in America for more than twenty years."

"When you meet new people, do you talk about your story?"

'No, I try not to do that. I try to experience Romania as a normal person. I don't want to be known as 'the orphan' anywhere."

A caregiver offered the child a great opportunity. It left them unused, beatings followed

His precise English makes even casual sentences sound formal. In his room, Izidor has captured Romanian folklore, but something else stirs beneath the surface. I remember the book he self-edited at the age of 22 called Abandoned for Life .

It's a bleak story, but once, when he was about eight, Izidor had a happy day.

A kind caregiver had just started working at the hospital. "Onisa was a young woman, a bit plump, with long black hair and round, rosy cheeks," Izidor writes in his memoirs. "She loved to sing and often taught us her songs." One day, Onisa intervened when another caretaker hit Izidor with a broomstick. Like others before her, Onisa had noticed his intelligence. On a ward with half-ambulatory (some crawling or crawling), only partially speaking (some just making noises) children, Izidor was the child to turn to when an adult had questions, such as what that child's name was or when that child had died. The director sometimes stopped by and asked Izidor if he and the other children were being beaten.

To cheer him up that day after his spanking, Onisa promised that one day she would take him home for an overnight visit. Izidor was skeptical that such an extraordinary event would ever happen. But he thanked her for the nice idea.

A few weeks later, on a snowy winter day, Onisa Izidor put on warm clothes and shoes that she brought from home, took him by the hand and led him out the front door and through the gate of the orphanage. She walked slowly down the street, past the public hospital, and into town with the little boy, who was swaying on unequal legs and limping badly. Cold, fresh air brushed his cheeks, the snow crunched under his shoes, the wind cracked the branches, a bird sat on a chimney. "It was the first time I ever went out into the world," Izidor tells me now. He looked at the cars and houses and shops in amazement. He tried to soak it all up and remember it so he could later tell the kids on his ward.

"When I entered Onisa's apartment," he writes, "I couldn't believe how beautiful it was. Dark tapestries hung on the walls, and on one was a picture of the Last Supper. The carpets on the floor were red." The neighborhood children knocked on Onisa's door to see if the strange boy from the orphanage wanted to come outside to play. He wanted.

Onisa's children came home from school, and Izidor learned that it was the start of their Christmas vacation. He feasted with Onisa's family at friends' table that evening, sampling Romanian specialties for the first time, including sarmale (stuffed savoy cabbage), potato goulash with thick noodles and sweet yellow sponge cake with cream filling. He remembers every bite. After dinner, the child of the Izidor house let play with his toys in the living room. Izidor followed the boy's example and pushed small strokes across the carpet. Back at Onisa's, he slept in a soft, clean bed for the first time.

The next morning, Onisa asked Izidor if he wanted to go to work with her or stay with her children. Here he made a mistake so horrific that 31 years later he still remembers it with sorrow.

He shouted, "I want to go to work with you!"

He was lost in the fantasy that Onisa was his mother and did not want to part with her. "I got dressed as quickly as I could and we walked out the door," he recalls. "When we got close to where she worked, I realized her job was at the hospital, my hospital, and I started crying... it had only been 24 hours, but somehow I felt like from now on I'd be a part would be from Onisa's family. It didn't occur to me that her job was at the hospital until we got back to the gate. I was so shocked when we turned into the yard, as if I had forgotten that I came from there."

Izidor tried to turn back, but was denied. He had found the most wonderful place in the world - Onisa's apartment - and through his own stupidity lost it again. He sobbed like a newcomer to the home until the other caregivers threatened to slap him.

Today Izidor lives 9500 kilometers away from Romania. He leads a lonely life. But in his bedroom on the paved prairie, he recreated the setting of the happiest night of his childhood.

"That night at Onisa's," I ask, "do you think you sensed there were family connections and feelings that you had never seen or felt before?"

"No, I was too young to see that."

"But you noticed the beautiful furnishings?"

"Yes! See that?” says Izidor, lifting a tapestry woven with burgundy roses on a dark background of leaves. "It's practically identical to Onisa's. That's exactly why I bought it in Romania!"

"All these things...?" I point to it.

"Yes."

"But not because they mean 'family' to you?"

"No, but they mean 'peace' to me. It was the first time I slept in a real home. For many years I thought: why can't I have a home like this?"

Now he has it. But he knows that no matter how many shot glasses he still collects, parts are missing.

The grievances in Romania became known in the west, and Marlys and Danny set off

In the early 1990s, Danny and Marlys Ruckel lived in a San Diego condo with their three young daughters. They thought it would be nice if a boy came along. John Upton, a local independent filmmaker, organized the adoptions of Romanian orphans. Marlys called him and said they would like to adopt a little boy. "There are thousands of children there," Upton replied. "It'll be easy."

Marlys laughs. "Not much of it was true," she says. We are sitting in the living room of a white stucco house in Temecula, Southern California, between Los Angeles and San Diego, surrounded by grapevines. Children and dogs rumble in and out on the sweltering day (the Ruckels have adopted five foster children in recent years). Marlys, who now works as a mentor for adults with disabilities, appears shy behind large glasses and a curtain of long hair. But sometimes she has bold outbursts. Danny, a programmer, is a laid back guy. Marlys describes herself as a domestic person, but there was a time when she moved to Romania for two months to try and adopt a boy she saw in a video.

Shocked by the documentary «Shame of a Nation», filmmaker Upton flew to Romania four days after the broadcast and drove to the worst place in the show, the home for lost children in Sighetu Marma?iei. He returned there several times, in 2013 Upton was killed in a neighborhood dispute .

On one of his visits to Romania, Upton gathered a few children in an empty room to film them for possible adoptive parents. His video did not show the children crammed together naked "like small reptiles in an aquarium", as he had described, but as people, with clothes and language.

In the meantime, donations in kind had been received from aid organizations around the world. Little went down with the children because the staff picked the best stuff, but that day the caregivers had dressed the children in donated sweaters out of respect for the American who was visiting. Though the kids seemed excited to be the center of attention, Upton and his Romanian assistant found it all tedious. Some children did not speak at all, and others could not stand up or keep still. When the filmmakers asked the children's names, the caregivers shrugged.

At one end of a wooden bench sat a boy the size of a six-year-old - at the age of ten Izidor weighed about 25 kilos. Upton was the first American he had ever seen. Izidor knew Americans from the television show "Dallas". One day a donated TV had arrived, and he had campaigned to keep at least that one item in the hospital. The director agreed. On Sunday evenings at 8 p.m., the children who could walk, the caregivers and workers from other floors gathered to watch "Dallas" together. That day, when rumors spread up the stairs that an American had arrived, the reaction in the orphanage was, My God, someone from the land of giant houses!

Izidor knew things that the carers didn't know. He relates: "John Upton asked a child, 'How old are you?' › He asked another kid: ‹What is his last name?› and I cried out: ‹Dumka!›»

"Izidor knows the children here better than the employees," Upton scolds in one of the videos. Before closing the meeting, he lifts Izidor onto his lap and asks him if he wants to go to America. Izidor says he will.

Back in San Diego, Upton told the Ruckels about what he said was an intelligent boy of about seven who was hoping to come to the United States. "We wanted to adopt a baby," says Marlys. "Then we saw John's video and fell in love with Izidor."

In May 1991, Marlys flew to Romania to meet the boy and try to bring him home. Shortly before the trip, she found out that Izidor was almost eleven, but she wasn't put off by that. She was traveling with a new friend, Debbie Principe, for whom Upton had also found a child. In the home director's office, Marlys was waiting to meet Izidor and Debbie was waiting to meet a little blond hottie named Ciprian.

"When Izidor came in," says Marlys, "I only saw him, everything else was a blur. He was as beautiful as I imagined him to be. Our translator asked him which of the visitors to the office should be his new mother, and he pointed to me!"

Izidor had a question for the translator: «Where will I live? Is it like Dallas?"

'Well . . . no,' Marlys replied, 'we live in a block of flats. But you will have three sisters. You will love her."

Izidor didn't seem particularly enthusiastic about this deal. Dryly he replied to the translator: "We'll see."

That evening Marlys rejoiced at what an angel Izidor was.

"Then I want her as my mother": Izidor meets Marlys Ruckel for the first time (left, with a nurse from the home). Marly's jerk

Debbie laughed. "He struck me as more of a cool, shrewd fellow, a smart politician guy," she told Marlys. "He was a lot more in control than Chippy." Ciprian had spent the time in the office wildly rummaging through everything, including desk drawers and everyone's trouser pockets.

'No, he's an innocent man. He's adorable,' said Marlys. "Did you see how he chose me to be his mother?"

Years later, in his memoirs, Izidor recounted this moment:

Marlys was the big American and Debbie was the little American... "Roxana, who will be my new mother?" I (the translator) asked.

"Which one would you like for your mother?"

"Which is my mother?" I asked again.

"The great American," she replied.

"Then I want her as my mother," I said.

When I pointed to Marlys, she started crying, overjoyed that I had chosen her.

Pediatrician and neuroscientist Charles A. Nelson is known for being sociable and friendly, with wavy grey-blonde hair and a mustache. In the fall of 2000, he launched the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP) with colleagues Nathan A. Fox, Professor of Human Development at the University of Maryland, and Charles H. Zeanah, Professor of Child Psychiatry at Tulane University School of Medicine. They were allowed to work with 136 children between six months and two and a half years old from six leagãne, baby institutions, in Bucharest. None of these was a home for lost children like Izidor's; they were a bit better equipped, also in terms of staff.

It was planned that 68 of the children would continue to receive "usual care," while the other 68 would go to foster families recruited and trained by the BEIP. (Romania had no tradition of foster care; political officials felt that orphanages were safer for children.) Local children, whose parents volunteered, formed a third group. The BEIP study became the first randomized controlled trial to assess the impact of early institutionalization on brain and behavioral development - and to investigate quality foster care as an alternative.

To begin with, the researchers applied the classic “strange situation test” developed by developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworthto assess the quality of attachment between children and their caregivers or parents. In a typical setting, a baby between nine and eighteen months enters an unfamiliar playroom with his "attachment figure" and experiences some increasingly disturbing events. Such as the arrival of a stranger and the departure of its adult caregiver, while the researchers assess the baby's behavior behind a one-way mirror. "Our assessors, who were unaware of the child's background, saw 100 percent of the children living in the community as fully developed bonds with their mothers," Zeanah said. "For the children from the homes, it was just 3 percent."

Nearly two-thirds of the children were classified as "disorganized," meaning they exhibited inconsistent, incoherent behavior, such as freezing or suddenly changing direction after approaching the adult. This pattern bears the clearest relation to later psychopathology. Even more disturbing, Zeanah said, was that 13 percent were considered "unclassified," meaning they showed no attachment behavior at all. "Ainsworth and Bowlby believed that infants bond with adults even when the person is abusive," Zeanah said. "They had n't even considered the possibility of toddlers without attachment."

Until the Bucharest project, child psychiatry professor Zeanah said he didn't realize that seeking solace in distress is a learned behavior. "These kids had no idea that an adult could make them feel better," he said. "Imagine what it must feel like - being unhappy and not even knowing that someone else can help."

When Izidor is strapped into the car, sheer panic breaks out

In October 1991, Izidor and Ciprian, with Romanian escorts, flew to San Diego, California. The boys' new families were waiting at the airport to greet them, along with Upton and previously adopted Romanian children - a small group with balloons and signs, cheering and waving. Izidor looked around the terminal with satisfaction. "Where's my room?" he asked. When Marlys told him they were in an airport and not his new home, Izidor was surprised. Although she had explained to him that the Ruckels didn't live in Dallas like the Ewings, he hadn't believed her. He had mistaken the arrivals hall for his new living room.

Smile for the family album: Izidor photographs Marlys at San Diego Airport. Thomas Szalay

A seventeen-year-old from the orphanage, Izabela, was part of the reception committee at the airport. She was born with hydrocephalus and could not walk because she had been in a cot all her life. She was in a wheelchair, nicely dressed and pretty to look at. Upton had rescued her on a previous trip, she had been able to enter the United States on humanitarian medical grounds and was living with the Ruckels as a foster child.

Izidor was surprised to see Izabela. "Who is your mother?"

"My mother is your mother, Izidor."

"I didn't like that," he recalls. To make sure he got it right, he asked again, "Who is your mother here in America?"

"Izidor, you and I have the same mother," she said, pointing to Marlys.

So now he had to get used to four sisters.

In the car, when Danny tried to fasten the seat belt around Izidor's waist, he bucked and screamed; he feared being tied down.

Marlys homeschooled the girls, but Izidor insisted on starting in fourth grade at the local school. He quickly learned English. His ability to sense the atmosphere of a room served him well with teachers, but at home he seemed constantly irritable. Again and again he was suddenly offended, stormed into his room and took everything apart. "He tore up books, posters, family photos," says Marlys, "and then he stood on the balcony and let the pieces trickle into the garden. If I had to go away for an hour, when I came back everyone would be over the moon: 'He did this, he did that.' He didn't like the girls."

Marlys and Danny had hoped adding another child would bring even more joy and happiness to the family. But the newest member of the family almost never laughed. He didn't like being touched. He was alert, hurt, proud. "At the age of about fourteen he was angry at everything," says Marlys. "He decided to be President of America when he grew up. When he found out that that wasn't possible because he was born in another country, he said: 'Okay, then I'll go back to Romania.' That was when it all started – his plan to return to Romania. We thought it would be good for him to have a plan, a goal, so we said, sure, get a job, save your money, and when you're eighteen you can move back to Romania." Izidor now worked every day after school in a fast food restaurant.

“Those were difficult years. I walked like crazy, trying not to upset him. The girls were completely exhausted. They were mad at me. Not because I brought Izidor into the family, but because I was so... so under his slipper. They said, 'Mom, you're just trying to heal him!' I was so focused on helping him settle in that I lost sight of the fact that the other kids were making do with a fraction of my time."

She and husband Danny tried to send him to therapy, but he refused to go back. He told them he didn't need therapy, "you need therapy. Why don't you go? So that's what we did. He said, 'I'm fine when there's nobody in the house.' We said, 'But Izidor, it's our house.'»

Neglected children can be saved. But the timing is crucial

As early as 2003, it was clear to the scientists at the BEIP and their Romanian research partners that the children in foster families were making progress. The data highlighted a critical 24-month period in which a child would form a bond with a caregiver, Zeanah said. Children removed from an orphanage before their second birthday benefited far more from living with families than those who stayed longer. "When you're doing a study and the early signs are that the intervention is working, you have to ask, are we going to stop now and make the drug available to everyone?" says Zeanah. "For us, the 'effective drug' was foster care, but we couldn't build a national system of foster families." Instead, the researchers announced their findings publicly, and the following year the Romanian government banned the institutionalization of children under the age of two. Since then, it has raised the minimum age to seven and government-sponsored foster care has been greatly expanded.

Meanwhile, the study continued. When the children were reassessed in a playroom with the "strange situation test" at age three and a half, the proportion of foster children showing secure attachment rose from 3 percent at the start to almost 50 percent, but to just 18 percent among children who remained in institutions—and again, children who entered foster care before their second birthday fared best. "The timing is crucial," the researchers wrote. Neuronal plasticity is not "unlimited," they warned. "Earlier is better."

The benefits to the children who had established secure attachments increased over time. At age four and a half, they had significantly lower rates of depression and anxiety and fewer "non-emotional characteristics" (limited empathy, lack of guilt, low emotion) than their institutionalized peers. About 40 percent of the teenagers who took part in the study and who had lived in orphanages were eventually diagnosed with a serious psychiatric illness. They were stunted, and their motor skills and language development were delayed. MRI studies showed that the brain capacity of the children who were still institutionalized was below that of the children who were never institutionalized,

"If you think of the brain as a lightbulb," said pediatrician and neuroscientist Charles Nelson, "it's like there was a dimmer that reduced a 100-watt bulb to 30 watts."

According to developmental theory, a baby only attaches to a small number of adults because it's the most efficient way to get help. "If there were a lot of attachment figures and there was danger, the toddler wouldn't know who to send the signal to," explains Martha Pott , associate professor of child development at Tufts University. Unattached children see threats everywhere, a thesis that emerged from brain studies. Flooded with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, the amygdala — the part of the brain that primarily processes fear and emotions — seemed to do extra work in the still-institutionalized children.

Comparing data from orphanages around the world shows the profound impact that institutionalization has, even at its best, on socio-emotional development. 'In England's children's homes in the 1960s there were a reasonable number of caregivers and the children were well taken care of materially. Their IQs, although lower than those of children in families, were in the normal range, around 90," says Zeanah. “Recently, the caregiver-child ratio in Greek orphanages was not so good, and they were not so well-endowed materially either. Those children had an IQ that was in the lower normal range. And then, in Romania, we have our children with really huge deficits. But here's the remarkable thing:

All the affection of the parents, the sisters, and he can't do anything with it

When the children in the Bucharest study were eight years old, the researchers arranged play meetings. They wanted to find out how early attachment impairments block a child's later ability to interact with their peers. In a video of this, two boys who don't know each other walk into a playroom. Everything gets out of hand within seconds. A boy in a white turtleneck eagerly takes the other boy's hand and chews on it. This boy, in a striped sweater, yanks his hand away and sees if there are teeth marks on it. The scientist offers a toy, but the boy in white is busy holding the other child's hand or grabbing his wrists or hugging him like he's trying to carry a giant teddy bear. He tries to tip the table over. The other boy makes a half-hearted attempt to save the table and then drops it. You can almost hear him thinking: This is weird, can I go home now?

The boy in the white turtleneck lived in an asylum, the boy in the striped sweater was a neighborhood kid.

Neuroscientist Nelson appeases that the door doesn't "slam shut" for children who are still living in an institution at 24 months. "But the longer you wait to place the children in a family," he says, "the more difficult it becomes to get them back on a balanced level."

"Every time we fought again," Izidor recalls, "I wanted one of them to say, 'Izidor, we wish we had never adopted you and we're going to send you back to the hospital.' But they said it not."

The freedom that Izidor praises on the t-shirt was also associated with rules and boundaries: With Danny Ruckel on the way home from the airport. Thomas Szalay

He was unable to process his family's affection and just wanted to know where he was. It had been easier in the orphanage, where you either got beaten or you didn't. "I coped better with being beaten up," Izidor tells me. "In America they had 'rules' and 'consequences'. so much talk I hated the expression 'let's talk about it'. As a child I had never heard sentences like 'You are special' or 'You are our child'. Later, when your adoptive parents tell you something like that, you think: Okay, whatever, thanks. I don't even know what you're talking about. I don't know what you want from me or what you want me to do for you." If he was sent to his room for being naughty or swearing or being mean to the girls, Izidor stomped up the stairs and played loud Romanian music; or he would bang his fists or a shoe on his door from the inside.

Marlys blamed herself. "He said he wanted to go back to his first mother, a woman who didn't even want him, a woman he didn't remember. When I took him to the bank to open his savings account, the clerk filling out the form asked what his mother's maiden name was. I opened my mouth to answer, but he immediately said 'Maria'. That's his biological mother's name. I know it's probably stupid that it hurt me."

One night, when Izidor was sixteen, an outburst from him scared Marlys and Danny so much that they called the police. "I'll kill you!" he screamed. After escorting Izidor to the police car, a police officer insisted his parents were "abusing" him.

"For heaven's sake!" Danny said when the policeman came back and told him what Izidor had said.

"Great," said Marlys. "Did he mention how we mistreat him?"

The officer went to the car and asked, "How do your parents abuse you?"

"I go to work and they take all my money," Izidor roared. Inside the house, the officer searched Izidor's room and found his savings book. "We can't take him with us," the policeman told the Ruckels. "He's angry, but everything's fine here. I suggest you lock your bedroom door tonight."

And again the thought came to them: But it is our house.

And again and again the urgent desire to go back to Romania

The next morning, Marlys and Danny offered Izidor a ride to school. Instead, they drove him straight to a psychiatric hospital. "We couldn't afford it, but we went on a tour and it frightened him," says Marlys. "He said, 'Don't leave me here! I will follow your rules. Don't send me here!' Back in the car we said: 'Listen, Izidor, you don't have to love us, but you have to be safe and we have to be safe. You can live at home, work and go to school until you are eighteen. We love you.'" Then Marlys adds: "But you know, the sentimental stuff didn't work for him."

Living by the rules didn't work for long. One night, Izidor stayed out until two in the morning to find the house locked. He banged on the door. Marlys opened them a crack. "Your things are in the garage," she said.

Izidor never lived at home after that night. He moved in with some guys he knew; her indifference suited him. "He got drunk and called us in the middle of the night and his friends were talking on the phone and saying vulgar things about our daughters," says Marlys. "It was admittedly finally peaceful in our house - but I was worried about him."

On Izidor's eighteenth birthday, Marlys baked a cake and wrapped his present, a photo album documenting their life together: his first day in America, his first dentist appointment, his first job, his first shave. She brought the gifts to the house where she had heard her son lived. The person who came to the door promised to give it to Izidor when he came back. 'In the middle of the night,' says Marlys, 'we heard a car squeak through the cul-de-sac, then a thump on the front door, and the car drove away. I went downstairs and opened the door. It was the photo album."

At twenty, in 2001, Izidor felt an urgent need to return to Romania. Lacking money, he wrote letters to TV stations promoting the exclusive story of a Romanian orphan boy making his first trip back to his homeland. The program “20/20” addressed this – the same show that did “Shame of a Nation” at the time. On March 25, 2001, a film crew met him at Los Angeles Airport. Whoever came were the Ruckels.

"I thought: That's it, I'll never see him again," says Marlys. "I hugged and kissed him whether he wanted to or not. I said to him: You will always be our son and we will always love you."

They persevered: Marlys and Danny Ruckel at their home in Temecula, California. Ryan Pfluger

Izidor showed the Ruckels his wallet, in which he had put two family photos. He said: "If I decide to stay there, I will have something to remember you with." Although he meant well, Marlys shuddered at the ease with which Izidor seemed to leave her life.

In Romania, the "20/20" producers took Izidor to his old orphanage, where he was celebrated like a returned prince. Then they revealed in front of the cameras that they had found his family of origin outside of a farming village three hours away. They drove through a snowy landscape and stopped in a field. A one-room shack stood on a treeless patch of mud. In a white shirt, suit pants and tie, Izidor limped across the sodden, uneven ground. He was shaking. A thin-faced man came out of the hut and ran towards him across the field. Strangely, they passed each other like two strangers on a sidewalk. "Ce mai faci?" mumbled the man as he passed, how are you?

"Bun," Izidor murmured. Good.

It was Izidor's father, the man after whom he was named. Two young women rushed out of the hut and greeted Izidor with kisses on each cheek; they were his sisters. Finally, a small, black-haired woman, not yet fifty, identified herself as Maria - his mother - and went to hug him. Suddenly Izidor got angry, he dodged. How can I greet someone I barely know? That's what he thought, he says in memory. She crossed her hands on her chest and began to wail: "Fiul meu! Fiul meu!» My son! My son!

Then came the exhaustion, he had to leave these people as soon as possible

The house had a dirt floor and an oil lamp cast a dim light. There was no electricity, no running water. The family offered Izidor the best seat in the house, a stool. "Why did I even come to the hospital then?" he asked.

"You were six weeks old when you got sick," Maria said. 'We took you to the doctor to see what was wrong. Your grandparents checked on you a few weeks later but something was wrong with your right leg. We asked the doctor to straighten your leg, but no one helped us. So we took you to the hospital in Sighetu Marma?iei and left you there."

"Why hasn't anyone visited me for eleven years? I was stuck there and nobody told me I had parents."

'Your father didn't have a job. I took care of the other children. We couldn't afford to see you."

"Do you know that living in C?min Hospital was hell on earth?"

"My heart," Maria cried. "You have to understand that we are poor people, we moved from one place to another."

Agitated, barely able to breathe, Izidor got up and walked out. His Romanian family invited him to look at some pictures of his older siblings, who had already undressed, and he showed them his photo album: here a sunlit, grinning Izidor by the pool, with medals from a swimming competition. Here the jerky on the beach in Oceanside, California. Here at a picnic table in a green park. The Romanians turned the glossy pages without a word. When the cameras were switched off, Izidor tells me, I asked Maria if the jerks had hurt him or had made him beg. He assured her that neither was the case.

"You look thin," Maria continued. 'Move in with us. I'll take care of you." Then she squeezed him for details about his job and wages in America and asked if he wanted to build the family a new house. After three hours, Izidor was exhausted and desperately wanted to leave. "He called me from Bucharest," says Marlys, "and he said: 'I have to go home. Get me out of here. These people are terrible.'"

"My family of origin scared me, especially Maria," says Izidor. "I had the feeling that I could fall into a trap there."

A few weeks later he was back in Temecula working at a fast food restaurant. But suddenly he longed for Romania again. It became a pattern, restlessly moving around in search of a place that felt like home.

Friends told him there were jobs in Denver, so he decided to move to Colorado. Danny and Marlys visit him there and accompany him on trips to Romania. Marlys says it's harder for him to get home to California. 'Thanksgiving, Christmas - that's too much for him. Even when he lived alone nearby, he had a hard time dealing with holidays. He always had an excuse like 'I have to make the pizza dough'. When our whole family is here and someone asks if Izidor is coming, someone always says: 'No, he makes the pizza dough.'"

Neuropsychologist Ron Federici is another first-wave child development expert to visit the asylums for the "unrescuable." Today he is one of the world's leading specialists caring for children who were institutionalized and adopted in the West. "In the early years, everyone was idealistic," says Federici. “They thought loving, caring families could heal these children. I warned them: These children will push you to the breaking point. Learn to work with children with special needs. Furnishes her rooms spartanly and simply. Instead of saying 'I love you', just tell them 'You're safe.'"

But most new or prospective parents couldn't bear to listen to Federici, and the adoption agencies that had sprung up overnight in Romania didn't convey such grim messages. "I got a lot of threatening letters," says Federici. «You are cold! The children need love! You need a hug!" But the former marine, who was once accused by many of being overly pessimistic about the children's future, is now credited with foresight.

Federici and his wife adopted eight children of their own from brutal institutions: three from Russia and five from Romania, including three brothers aged eight, ten and twelve. The oldest two weighed 30 pounds each and were dying of untreated hemophilia and hepatitis C when he carried them out the front door of their orphanage. It took the couple two years to locate the boys' younger brother in another home. Since then, Federici has treated 9,000 young people, almost a third of them from Romania, at his practice in northern Virginia. He has followed his patients over the decades and has found that 25 percent of them need 24/7 care, 55 percent have "significant" disabilities that can be managed with adult support,

The most successful parents, he believes, could have focused on teaching basic life skills and appropriate behavior. "The Ruckels are a good example - they've persevered and he's coping. But I just had a family today. I've known the girl from Romania for ages, first seeing her when she was a little girl with all aspects of post-traumatic stress: anxiety, anxiety, insecurity, depression. She's twenty-two now. The parents said, 'We're done. She's on drugs, alcohol, hurting herself. She's on the street.' I said, 'We're going to put you back into the family program.' They said, 'No, we're exhausted, we can't afford treatment anymore - it is Time to focus on our other children.'"

Within his own family, Federici and his wife are the permanent legal guardians of four of his Romanian children, all of whom are now adults. Two of them work, under supervision, for a foundation he set up in Bucharest. The other two live with their parents in Virginia. (The Fifth is a shining example of the lucky 20 percent — he's an emergency medical technician in Wisconsin.)

His two adult sons, who still live at home, are cognitively impaired, but they have jobs and, according to Federici, are easy to get along with. "They are happy," he says, adding questions and answers himself: "Are they one hundred percent committed to us? Not at all. Are you happy with the family? Yes. Can they function in the world with other people? Absolutely."

Then Federici says: «They found a way - not to overcome what happened to them, you can't really overcome that. But you can live with it without taking other people hostage."

When a baby was born into the family nine years ago - the only biological child in the family - Federici saw new behaviors in his older children: "For them, the little one is a rock star. The big brothers at home are so protective of him. In public, in restaurants, for God's sake, no one can hurt him." It's an interesting dynamic: no one protected her when she was a child, but they made themselves his bodyguards. "He's her little brother," says Federici. «He was with them in Romania. Is that love? It's anything. They are more attached to him than to us, which is perfectly fine."

And then there was this heavy wooden door that had to be opened

Izidor - who lives independently - is in every way a success story among the survivors of Ceau?escu's asylums. "Can you imagine ever having a family?" I ask him. We're in his room in the huge house outside of Denver. 'You mean one of your own? No. I knew since I was fifteen that I wouldn't have a family. When I saw all my friends in stupid relationships with jealousy and control and depression, I thought, Really? All this for a relationship? No. As I see myself, there will never be a human being who wants to be close to me. You could say that's wrong, but that's how I see myself. If someone tries to approach, I run away. I'm used to it. It's called a celibate life."

He says he doesn't miss what he's never known, what he doesn't even notice. Maybe it's like color blindness. Do people with color blindness miss green? He focuses on the tasks in front of him and tries to behave in a way that humans expect other humans to behave.

«You can be the smartest orphan in the hospital. But you miss things,” says Izidor. “I am not a person who can have an intimate relationship. It's hard for parents because they show you love and you can't give it back."

Although Izidor says he wants to live a "normal" life, he still regularly takes on the role of the former orphan to speak publicly in the US and Romania about what this institutionalization is doing to young children.

He's working with a screenwriter on a miniseries about his life. He hopes that when people can understand what it's like to live behind fences, in cages, they will stop sending children there. He is well aware that as many as eight million children live in such institutions around the world, including those on the southern border of the United States.

Izidor's dream is to buy a house in Romania and set up a residential group for his former ward mates - those who have been transferred to old people's homes or thrown onto the streets. A group home for the other adults formerly institutionalized with him is as close to his idea of ??a family as he can get.

In the brain of a baby showered with loving attention, neural pathways thrive. The pathways multiply, intersect, and weave through distant regions of the brain like a highway network under construction. But in the brain of a neglected baby — a baby who lies alone and unwanted week after week, year after year — fewer of those connections are made. The baby's wet diaper is not changed. The baby's smile is not answered. The baby becomes silent. The door closes, but a streak of light shines through the door frame.

People sometimes paid attention to the baby with the twisted leg. Caregivers found him likeable and intellectually active. The director spoke to him. One glorious winter afternoon, Onisa took him from the orphanage and he walked down a street.

Sometimes Izidor has feelings.

Two years after the Ruckels threw him out, Izidor had his hair cut by a hairdresser the family knew. "Did you hear what happened to your family?" she asked. «Your mother and your sisters were in a terrible car accident yesterday. You're in the hospital."

Izidor ran out, took the day off, bought three dozen red roses and showed up at the hospital.

“We were in the truck coming from the grocery store,” Marlys recalls, “and a guy hit us really hard – it was a five-car accident. After a few hours in the hospital, we were released. I didn't call Izidor to tell him. We didn't speak to each other. But he found out, and I suppose at the hospital he said, 'I'm here to see the Ruckel family.' And they said, 'They're not here anymore,' which to him meant, 'They're dead .›»

Izidor raced from the hospital to the Ruckels' house - the house he boycotted, to the family he hated.

Danny Ruckel wouldn't let him in without a trial. "What are you up to?" he asked. "Do you promise to be decent to us?" Izidor promised. Danny let Izidor into the living room where he faced everyone, arms full of flowers and tears in his eyes. Before he left that day, Izidor put the flowers in his mother's arms and said, with the greatest sincerity they had ever heard: 'These are all for you. I love you."

It should be a turning point. From that day on something in him was softer when it came to the Ruckel family.

But first Izidor had to go to the heavy wooden door; the door against which he had thrown the photo album Marlys had made for him for his birthday; the door he had slammed behind him hundreds of times; the door he'd pounded and kicked when locked out. He knocked and stood on the front steps, head hanging, heart pounding, unsure if he would be let in. I left her, I neglected her, I made her suffer hell, he thought.

The spiky stems of the burgundy roses, with dark leaves and plastic around them, pricked his arms.

And then the door opened.

.