PLIGHT OF ROMANIAN ORPHANS EXPOSED

Daily News of Los Angeles (CA)
July 18, 1991 
Edition: FINAL
Section: NEWS
Page: N3

Topics:
Index Terms:
TOUCH ROMANIA
CHILD
ORPHAN
KRON
TV
SAN FRANCISCO CALIFORNIA
MENTAL ILLNESS
SHOW
PLIGHT OF ROMANIAN ORPHANS EXPOSED
RELIEF WORKERS SAY IN TV NEWS SERIES THAT CENTERS OPERATE LIKE
DEATH CAMPS
Author: Christina Mungan Associated Press
Dateline: SAN FRANCISCO
Article Text:
Relief workers are hoping to reap new donations now that a local television station is airing a new series on the mental hospitals and orphanages of Romania.
Five KRON (Channel 4) news segments running Monday through Friday charge that the hospitals are virtually death camps designed to kill hundreds of thousands of unwanted children and physically or mentally handicapped adults.
Monday's 10-minute segment introduced central Transylvania's Rui Vadului, a 17th-century stable-turned-hospital with a mortality rate of 50 percent per year.
Children there froze to death and died of pneumonia, hepatitis and starvation without medicine or doctors, surrounded by blooming fruit trees and green lawns.
"It was planned, they had to die," Dutch relief worker Hans Hunink told KRON. "It was organized, by a lack of materials, a lack of care, a lack of food, a lack of medicine."
The camera switched from file clips of the Auschwitz death camp to a Romanian mass grave four football fields long less than a mile from the hospital.
The series may receive nationwide coverage, since KRON has licensed it to NBC, executive producer Anne Peterson said.
"I hope that it will give the people of California, maybe of the whole United States of America, the desire to give some money so we can follow up on our work," said Willem De Vries, director of a Dutch relief agency. "I can use a lot of help."
Terre Des Hommes needs at least $3 million to train Romanian nurses and replace sanitation, water, electrical, kitchen and laundry systems in seven mental asylums and 44 orphanages across Romania. The agency cares for 8,400 children, De Vries said.
San Francisco-based Touch Romania is working with Terre Des Hommes at three asylums. As money permits, Touch Romania will expand its efforts to educating children and their care-givers, as well as improving their living conditions, said founder Angela Mason.
It was Mason who encouraged KRON to follow the plight of Romanian children. The station had been covering Touch Romania locally for over a year before it sent reporter Mark Jones and photographer Tim Walton to Romania in mid-June along with a team from the San Francisco Chronicle. The newspaper recently has run two stories and a package of photographs.
"We had no idea when we went what we would find," Peterson said. ''There was much more there than just a heartwarming story about a Bay Area relief organization."
De Vries met the reporters on their first day in Bucharest and told them he believed the real purpose of the "hospitals" had been to weed out the ''racially impure," just as Hitler did during the Nazi Holocaust.
Children of Romanian Gypsies and Jews and the weak were sent to 170 isolated zones from which they never returned, De Vries charged.
Memo:
CALIFORNIA
Copyright (c) 1991 Daily News of Los Angeles
Record Number: 9102020609