Ingrid Alina Fotino (née Popa)

Born 31 May 1940, Bucharest. The interviewee comes from a family persecuted from the very beginning of the communist regime in Romania. Many of her close relatives were kept under surveillance, interrogated and imprisoned by the regime. Her father, a lawyer and the joint-owner, with his father, of a number of well-known firms in the textiles sector, was arrested in 1947 and imprisoned for many months at Jilava. The likely motive for the arrest was the fact that in 1946, as a consultant in the economic mission sent to Moscow to negotiate the strategies that were to be applied in the textiles industry, Ervin Popa was the only member of the delegation who refused to sign the final treaty, which he believed was to Romania’s disadvantage. Her mother’s sister, Lidia Gavrilescu, was imprisoned for more than four years in a series of women’s gaols, and her uncle, Constantin Niculescu, an officer in the navy, was imprisoned for five years at Aiud. As a result, in 1948, in an attempt to flee communism and the atmosphere of terror during the years immediately after the war, and following Ervin Popa’s arrest and imprisonment for a number of months in 1947, the Popa family (parents Ervin Popa and Ariana Popa, née Gavrilescu, and daughters Ingrid Alina and Alda) clandestinely crossed the border from Romania into Yugoslavia. They made the perilous journey across the Danube in a group consisting of twelve people: besides the Popa family, there was another family of two parents and three sons, and three men who helped with the launch and also who took advantage of the opportunity to flee the country. On reaching the other bank of the Danube, after a brief moment of jubilation, the Popa family was arrested by the Serbs and imprisoned in the camps at Kovačica and Zrenjanin. Conditions in the two camps proved to be very harsh, in terms of both food and hygiene and for both adults and children. After two years, they were taken to a camp in Bitola, (Macedonia), before being released in Greece. Regarding this camp, the interviewee mentions that the guards used to fake escapes as a means of disposing of prisoners. For example, on 30-31 January 1950, the Economu family, comprising husband and wife Narcis and Elena and two children, Liliana and Sandu, were part of a group of around twenty persons who were granted apparent leave to head to Greece. The release proved to be a ruse and all the members of the group were killed by the camp guards. It seems that the purpose of such tricks was to send a harsh message to Romanians thinking of fleeing from communism. The Popa family was released as part of a group of thirteen persons on 9 February 1950 and travelled to Greece, and then to Italy and finally Switzerland where they had acquaintances. They subsequently spent two years in France, where they began to rebuild their lives. They were familiar with French culture as Ervin Popa had taken his doctorate at the Sorbonne, and Ariana Popa, whose mother died when she was very young, had been raised by nuns at Notre Dame des Cieux and had learned French at an early age. The Popa family later moved to the United States of America, where Ariana Popa found a job at the French Lycée in New York and Ervin Popa in a textile company. Ingrid Fotino, (née Popa), lives in the United States of America. She is married and has two daughters.

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