Kirsty Wark brings together a group of people whose lives were changed by the discovery of long neglected orphanages in Romania in 1990.

It was a revolution triggered by the fall of the Berlin Wall a few weeks earlier. On Christmas Day 1989, Nicolae Ceacescu, the communist leader of Romania was overthrown and executed, along with his wife Elena. A few days later, western journalists started to discover abandoned children living in horrifying conditions in orphanages throughout the country. They were often run down, providing inadequate, verging on squalid, living conditions.

For many years, the state policy in communist Romania was to encourage large families. However, as the economic situation worsened, many Romanians struggled to make ends meet and over 100,000 children were abandoned and given to state orphanages to look after.

Joining Kirsty are the presenter of Challenge Anneka, Anneka Rice, whose programme followed the restoration of a children's orphanage, the former teacher Monica McDaid who first inspired the programme and now lives and works in Romania, Jane Nicholson founder of the Romanian orphanage charity FARA, Mark Cook of Hope & Homes for Children, Iuliana Georgiana who was taken in by an orphanage in Buftea when she was 7 years old, and Alexandra Smart who was abandoned as a baby and grew up in Bucharest’s notorious “Number 1” orphanage before being adopted as a two year-old and brought to Britain in 1990.

Presenter: Kirsty Wark
Producer: Emma Jarvis
Series Producer: David Prest
A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4 Show less