Exiled Romanian Hopes to Aid Relief Effort : Homeland: Engineer plans to take medical supplies to Bucharest to help “newborn democracy.”

A Romanian living in San Diego who barely escaped his native country in 1977 now says he wants to return to act as a temporary liaison between the newly installed democratic government and outside relief agencies.

Ovidiu Talpos, a 32-year-old computer engineer, says he will leave for Romania when he gets clearance from the U.S. government, possibly in the next few days, with donated medical supplies. The U.S. State Department’s Office of Foreign Disaster recently suspended some volunteer visits to Romania, reportedly because a native Romanian from Fullerton was killed while traveling there, sources said.

“Anything I can do, I am ready to do,” Talpos said. “The democracy is only a few days old and its needs all the help it can get. It’s like a newborn baby that has been set free.”

Talpos’ account of his flight from Romania and how, as a 19-year-old student, he crawled his way to Yugoslavia through an eight-kilometer border area filled with barbed wire, land mines and soldiers, contrasts sharply with his plans to return.

After escaping with three fellow students, Talpos spent weeks in Yugoslav and Austrian refugee camps before being allowed to immigrate to Austria, where he found work as a machinist with a heavy equipment manufacturer, he said. In 1980, he moved to the United States and later completed his engineering studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills.

In 1982, he married a U.S. citizen who is now a physician in training at UC San Diego Medical Center. Talpos, who has applied for U.S. citizenship, is part owner of two high-technology companies in San Diego and Tijuana.

Talpos volunteered to go to Romania after reading news accounts of relief efforts being organized by Southwest Medical Teams, a nonprofit agency based in San Diego that collects medical supplies, equipment and services for distribution to disaster areas.

On Friday, Talpos drove a truckload of medical supplies collected by Southwest Medical Teams to offices of Romanian Relief, a nonprofit relief group in the Los Angeles area. The supplies are scheduled to be shipped today from Los Angeles to Bucharest on a Yugoslav cargo plane.

Southwest Medical Teams staff member Karen Brookes said Talpos is one of four or five Romanian-speaking San Diegans who have stepped forward to help since the Romanian civil strife broke out last month. Talpos’ wife, Diana, will accompany him on the trip to care for those wounded in the Romanian revolution, he said.

Talpos said that Romanian relatives and friends in recent days have told him that the relief operations are chaotic in Romania, particularly in outlying areas of the big cities.

“Timisoara (the site of initial uprisings against the deposed Ceausescu regime) and Bucharest have received lots of attention and relief but other areas have not received any attention,” Talpos said, adding that he will work on improving awareness of the neglected areas.

A native of Baia Mare, a city in the Transylvanian mountains 15 miles south of the Soviet Union border, Talpos said he was a third-year mechanical engineering student in Timisoara when he was arrested in May, 1977 by the Securitate, the Romanian secret police that is still skirmishing with the country’s newly installed government.

Talpos had imprudently voiced his displeasure with Romania’s system of paying engineers the same salaries as janitors while talking to a professor and some fellow students. One of them reported Talpos to the secret police, which led to his arrest, he said. He was picked up, stripped down to his underwear and placed in a cell, with only a glass of milk mixed with a raw egg to eat, he said.

After three days of questioning, Talpos was released along with many other students then in custody, perhaps because rising student protests made the releases politically expedient, he said.

Then the Securitate told him to withdraw from the university but to remain in town and be available for further questioning, Talpos said. He was sure he was destined to be sent to a labor camp where prisoners, many of them dissidents, worked on a project to build a canal from the Danube River to the Black Sea.

Living conditions on the canal project were miserable and many of those sent to work there never returned. So, within a half hour of his release, Talpos rounded up three fellow students and they were on their way to the Yugoslav border.

The seven days that followed were filled with close calls and near captures, during which the four ate grass to survive, Talpos said. To avoid being seen in the heavily guarded border area, which was dotted with Romanian soldiers hiding in foxholes, they crawled much of the final few kilometers at night, he said.

At the border, one of the four tripped a land mine that luckily didn’t explode. One Romanian soldier discovered them, but let them continue with their escape, Talpos said.

Although he will remain a resident of the United States, Talpos now feels obligated to contribute to his native country’s fledgling democracy.

“I was born there, I grew up there, the people are absolutely wonderful in spite of the impressions people have from the person who ruled the country with an iron fist for so many years,” he said, referring to late dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

Those wishing to donate to Romanian relief efforts may contact Southwest Medical Teams in San Diego at 284-7979 or Romanian Relief at 213-724-8360.