Tag #127916 - Interview #89861 (Dan Mizrahy)

For several years the opinion that ‘nothing has changed’ could often be heard. It was fueled by people who weren’t necessarily ill willed, but whose horizons were rather limited. In my opinion, they were wrong. In the first year after the [Romanian] Revolution [of 1989] [16] there was a joke. What were the Romanians before the revolution? Penguins standing in the cold and applauding. What about after the revolution? Dalmatians: the more black spots they had, the louder they barked… If I am not mistaken, this is the only political joke that I heard after the revolution. Once the winter vacation was over schools were opened again and we began our classes. People returned to their daily routine. The pictures of the ‘genius of the Carpathians’ were taken down from the walls; the word ‘comrade’ disappeared from the vocabulary, together with other terms that we were happy to get rid of: ‘activist,’ ‘sectorist’ [police officer in charge of law enforcement and population registration in a certain district], ‘the collective work,’ ‘on duty’…