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An immigration lawyer fights to keep her client from being deported to the country where his family was murdered many years ago. Then she finds out the killers are coming here—for both of them.

Our Borders: A Scrap of Evidence for the Genocide Story (1988)

When Radu Codrescu (name changed for privacy reasons), the protagonist of Our Borders, told me what he had seen at Orşova in 1982, he was a little concerned that people would not believe his story.

Michael Domniței, who himself had done time for trying to flee Romania in the ‘80s, and who managed to cross the border in 1984, has kept all these years a newspaper clip that confirms that Radu’s account is part of a larger story of longstanding repression and murder.

The clip is from The Oregonian, reprinting a story published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 1988.

Michael Domniței now lives in the United States.

Our Borders: Radu’s First Escape Attempt (1982)

September 6, 2013

The forest there reached close to the waterline and the river was wide, but smooth as a lake. Scores of people had crossed through there—the story went—and the lack of news thereafter was good news. That meant that they had made it to the free world and wouldn’t contact their relatives back in the country in order to protect them from Romanian authorities...

Our Borders: Lost at Sea (1983), Part 1

September 19, 2013

They were afraid of being heard, being seen or spotted on the radars. They waited in the dark and figured out the moving patterns of the vessels. The boats covered long distances, always in pairs, moving toward each other and passing each other. They waited and slipped through right after the boats moved away from each other. The dolphins followed...

Our Borders: Lost at Sea (1983), Part 2

October 1, 2013

They didn’t know where they were, no shore, no light to guide them. The brine was cold, but not too cold on that August night, and it kept them afloat even though they had no lifejackets. Their muscles were weak from not standing up for days, their sense of direction gone inside the rollercoaster of that storm…

Our Borders: Lost at Sea (1983), Part 3

October 10, 2013

On the third day, the Romanian and the Bulgarian authorities reached a compromise: they were going to meet at the border, in Vama Veche, and make the exchange. A major and a lieutenant from the Romanian border patrol forces in Mangalia were waiting for them…

Our Borders: Nineteen Eighty-Four

October 30, 2013

During the day, a handful of officers came to see the prisoners to their beds. They came close, checking their wounds, touching their swollen bodies. They asked the prisoners how they felt, but the men couldn’t answer. Their mouths were swollen shut, their throats crushed, their lungs barely took in air. The officers looked worried…

Our Borders: Doing Time (1984), Part 1

December 3, 2013

There were problems with that escape plan. One was that, if caught, they would’ve added another five years to their sentences. Another was that they didn’t have extra clothes to wear after they jumped out of the mixers. In fact, the matter of clean clothes became a huge problem even besides their jailbreak ideas…

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