61 Adopted Romanian Children Met by New Families in France

A plane carrying 61 Romanian children whose adoptions by French parents had been blocked by Nicolae Ceausescu’s government landed Saturday to a joyful welcome from their new families.

“We are in debt to the Romanian people for winning freedom for these children,” said Jacques Lellioz, of St. Nazaire in western France, who waited more than three years for his adopted daughter, Maeva.

“I would have liked a little more intimacy, with everything more discreet,” Lellioz said amid the tumult of reporters and television cameras covering the arrival of the government-chartered plane at Orly Airport.

A planeload of anxious adoptive parents flew to Bucharest on Saturday to meet their children. Also on Saturday, an Italian air force plane flew from the Romanian capital to Italy with more orphans for waiting parents.

Philippe Chabin’s daughter, Roxanna, opened presents from her new French cousins after rushing into the arms of her adopted father, who had staged two hunger strikes to try to pressure the Romanian government into letting her go.

In the early 1980s, hundreds of French parents sought and found children in Romania when the demand for adoptive children in France was greater than supply.

Ceausescu’s policies encouraging large families, combined with widespread shortages of food and other necessities, produced large numbers of children available for adoption.

The prospective parents had to pay thousands of dollars in official fees and often thousands more to corrupt officials to get a child.

But in July, 1988, Ceausescu’s government halted any new adoption cases for foreign parents.

“We are happy for the happy futures of these children,” Dumitru Mazilu, a Romanian government official, said at a short ceremony organized at the Bucharest airport.