Dar de soare

1. Palace of the Pioneers and the Falcons of the Motherland, also known as “Gift of the Sun”, a symbol of the ideal socialist child: healthy, educated, disciplined, and prepared to serve the industrial project of the state. These images were publicly celebrated and broadcast on national television as representations of the socialist future. 2. Passive extermination camps for children with disabilities classified by the regime as “irrecoverable”, spaces where thousands of children were abandoned and left to die. Unlike the images of the Palace, these children were kept outside the field of vision of both cameras and society. Many were institutionalized as far away as possible from their families, making visits almost impossible and ensuring their disappearance from public life. According to investigations conducted by the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile, Romania had between 24 and 29 passive extermination camps, where more than 15,000 children are estimated to have died between the 1960s and 1989. While some children became symbols of the future and of productivity, others disappeared from public visibility precisely because they could no longer be integrated into the productive logic of the state. The families who agreed to have their children placed in these camps would, after their death, receive a bill covering the child’s daily institutionalization costs, which they were required to pay so that the state would not operate “at a loss.” Between these two images emerges a simple question: what value did a child have in a state that claimed to exist in the name of equality and socialism?