Former Romanian Orphan Advocates For Change

“When Romanian orphan turned adoptee Izidor Ruckel recently visited Utah, he took a train from his home in Colorado — because he’d never seen the sweep of the Rocky Mountains before.

Ruckel, 35, came to Utah to help Ogden photographer Tom Szalay work on a book of images and stories from Szalay’s time in Romania. The two returned to Romania together this spring, and Ruckel was able to retrace steps and memories from his past as a child growing up in a Sighetu Marmatiei orphanage.

A free man

As an infant, Ruckel contracted polio. His parents took a seven-hour bus ride to figure out what was wrong with him, but the doctors weren’t sure what he had — they simply knew he was disabled, and told his parents he would need to stay at the hospital for a couple of weeks.

His parents left him there and never returned.

“Not being able to afford the transportation, they just thought I might be better off there,” Ruckel told the Standard-Examiner in an interview at Szalay’s home.

Ruckel said children could stay at the hospital until they were 3 years old and then were sent off to an institution. Based on his disability problems, he was sent to the Home for Irrecoverable Children, or what would later become known by the western media as the Institute for the Unsalvageables.

He said the conditions he lived in were unimaginably horrific.

He said children were beaten, fed rat poison disguised as medicine that was supposed to help them calm down, and slept in beds with one to two other kids, urinating and defecating on each other through the night.

“When I became adopted, it was as if I became born as a whole new human being again,” Ruckel said.

Once Romania allowed foreign press coverage in 1990 after being freed from communism and Nicolae Ceausescu’s grasp, American journalists discovered Ruckel’s orphanage and the system was exposed for the world to see. The coverage jump-started a movement of adoptions in the ’90s, and Ruckel’s was one of the first.

When adoptive parents Danny and Marlys first saw him in an ABC “20/20” October 1990 special, “Shame of a Nation,” they said, “done.” It was the closing chapter and there was no going back, Ruckel said. He was adopted in 1991, at 11 years old.

“She (Marlys) didn’t care what my problems were — ‘We will take him just as he is,’” he said.

Returning and reliving

Ruckel first met Szalay when he arrived at the San Diego airport after getting adopted. Szalay had been assigned to photograph his arrival for the San Diego Union-Tribune, and was touched by the energetic and effervescent little boy Ruckel was. Szalay decided Ruckel, along with his adoptive sister Isabella, who had been adopted a year previously, would make a captivating photo essay, so he followed them around for about a year.

Szalay was then asked by director John Upton to photograph for another “20/20” story on the “unsalvageable” children, “Take Me to America,” in 1993.

After moving to Utah in 1994, Szalay lost touch with the Ruckels.

“I’d been looking for Tom since Facebook came out,” Ruckel said. He had no luck, but eventually found him on LinkedIn last year.

Ruckel, who has been advocating for adoptees through public speaking and other forms of awareness for the past 13 years, was invited by the talk show “La Maruta” to return to Romania. He invited Szalay to come with him.

Returning would give Ruckel an opportunity to officially close his life chapter of living in the orphanage.

“I think Tom Szalay going to Romania with me and helping document the history of the institution as much as possible, I can actually go ahead and close that chapter,” Ruckel said. “To visit and see the place again and again — I can actually let that go. I feel like we’ve captured enough memory and history that I don’t need to see it again.”

Ruckel decided to turn the trip into a two-month stay so he could meet with Romanian delegates to discuss problems that still exist within the child welfare system. Ruckel visited various institutions and towns across Romania, including Brasov, Cluj, Oradea, Arad, Baia-Mare, Gasti and Timis. Szalay later joined him to visit ones in Bucharest and Ruckel’s hometown, Sighetu Marmatiei.

And while Ruckel wouldn’t say the institutions are as bad as they were in the ’90s, there are still problems. Romania closed international adoptions in 2003 and many children became stuck in a system that Ruckel believes is seriously flawed. Once children reach the age of 18 they will be kicked out and put on the streets or transferred to an “old folks’ home.”

“I think it’s come dramatically a long ways,” he said. “You’re not going to have kids in a straitjacket, you’re not going to have kids locked up. They’re (allowed) to hang around, watch TV, play and do their things. But because they never received … the proper nourishment as a child … they’ve developed their own strategies of how to keep themselves going, and when they develop these strategies it’s hard to get out of.”

Ruckel said many  children in these institutions rock their bodies back and forth.

“The hardest thing to come out of is the rocking back and forth,” he said. “If you can’t sleep at night, how do you find yourself to go to sleep? Sometimes rocking back and forth can create dizziness; it will put you to sleep easier.”

Szalay remembered seeing an entire floor of children, sitting on tables and chairs, all over — just rocking back and forth — when he came with “20/20” in 1993. As he and Ruckel visited an old folks’ home in Sighetu Marmatiei this spring, Szalay realized how hard it is to let go.

“And then when we went back this time, to the old folks’ home and we were behind the gate waiting to get into the grounds, and in the distance — all these adults were rocking back and forth. The same kids I probably saw when they were 3 or 4 years old might be in that place now, still rocking,” Szalay said.

Ruckel had returned to Romania and his orphanage once before, in 2001, accompanied by “20/20.” The Institute for the Unsalvageables was still running, but closed two years later.

“This is the first time since it closed that I actually got to see all the rooms, all the floors, and it actually is like a ghost town,” he said.

Admitting that it was hard for him at some parts, Ruckel said he felt like he was going back in time.

“At some parts it was like I could just re-envision — you know, when you close your eyes you can see everything back in time and relive it — I was able to do that a couple of times. Some parts were difficult and some parts were good moments that I want to be able to have as a treasure,” Ruckel said.

A broken system

Something Ruckel is very passionate about is exposing the flaws of Romania’s child welfare system. The biggest problem Romania has, he said, is that the institutions still don’t separate children who are perfectly normal from the ones who are mentally and physically disabled. Furthermore, there is no proper place or opportunities for them once they come of age.

“If I wasn’t adopted, four options: one is to be homeless, kicked out of the system; being in an old folks’ home; and number three, be at home with my birth family; or number four, be dead,” Ruckel said.

Now, more than 20 years later, those options remain the same for others like Ruckel.

“Ideally, we’re trying to share (my) story so people may know and hope that a foundation or a system will come into place for them that will give them a better life and a better opportunity,” he said.

He also said that if the state really cared for these children and their well-being, they would make dramatic changes and put them into group homes and foster care, and not allow them to live with over a hundred other kids where it is easy to get neglected.

“I think Romania needs to set up some funding for children who have grown up in institutions. For example, children who are more advanced  … should not be placed in an old folks’ home with special needs,” Ruckel said. “They need to separate the mentally and the normal as a big priority. Because the one thing they don’t realize, if you have a combination of normal and disabled, you’re dragging the normal ones to become mentally disabled and I don’t know if they’ve realized that or not.”

Ruckel had the opportunity to speak to fellow Romanians and tell his story at a five-star hotel in Brascov, with some former and current government officials in attendance. He said within five minutes of his speech beginning, men and women were crying.

“It was great for me to see that part of Romania, emotionally touched, because it told me, these people care. And I have always said that I believe the majority of the Romanian population never knew of the existence of these horrible conditions that Romanians had with orphans,” he said.

On that journey back to Romania, Ruckel said he could finally see that his 13 years of public speaking on Romanian awareness has made a difference.

“We need advocates like this,” he said.

Even though Americans cannot adopt from Romania anymore, Ruckel said simply talking about the problems and creating a conversation can help tremendously.

Where is he now?

Two decades after his adoption, Ruckel is striving to not only improve the lives of those still in Romania, but to help adoptees who may be struggling as well.

“I talk to a lot of adoptees. I try to help them and encourage them because they struggle with their adoption … they’re looking for answers and they’re angry and bitter,” he said. “And because I went through it on my own, I feel like in some way I can relate to what they’re going through.”

Ruckel, who lives in Denver, is employed by Romania’s largest television network, ProTv, to help Romanian adoptees reunite with their birth families. Their stories will be covered and shared on “La Maruta.”

He has also written an autobiography, “Abandoned for Life,” which is in the process of being turned into a motion picture. Ruckel’s manager, Sarah Padbury, is writing the script.

“I never felt like I wanted to be taken away by death as a child in the institution,” Ruckel said. “I had wished a lot of times after being adopted, educated and learning about salvation, that if I could go back to Romania and switch my place for 10 kids to come to America and for me to remain in an institution or old folks’ home, if that were possible I wish I could do that.”

Ruckel may not be able to take their place, but he can stand tall knowing that he is making a difference, one step at a time.

To learn more about Ruckel, visit http://izidorruckel.com.”

Romanian orphan advocates for change[Standard Examiner 7/27/15 by Sonja Carlson]

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