Kent Klich - Children of Ceausescu

More than a decade after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the overthrow and execution of brutal Romanian dictator Nicholas Ceausescu, the worst AIDS epidemic among children in the world bears out its infamous legacy in Romania, still one of the poorest and most fractured societies in Eastern Europe. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, tens of thousands of children in government hospitals and orphanages were systematically infected by unsterilized needles and HIV-tainted blood transfusions given to them instead of food. When the scandal broke initially, help poured in from all over the world. Blood testing improved; hospitals got disposable syringes; nurses were retrained. But the damage to the children was irreversible, and many began to die. Over this last decade, thousands have died-yet almost 10,000 children with AIDS remain.

More than a decade after the overthrow and execution of brutal Romanian dictator Nicholas Ceausescu, the worst AIDS epidemic among children in the world bears out its infamous legacy in Romania. In Children of Ceausescu, Magnum photographer Kent Klich gives us visceral images and brief life stories of the boys and girls who are still suffering. Compassionate yet unflinching, these photographs give us a glimpse of the daily lives of these children, who run and splash in puddles and play with puppies, but also know disease and death intimately and live, and die, facing the realities of their infection.

Kent Klich was born in Sweden in1952. He studied psychology at the University of Gothenburg. After earning his degree he worked with adolescents with a history of social problems. Klich's other publications include The Book of Beth (Aperture, 1989) and El Nino: Children of the Streets, Mexico City (journal/University of Syracuse 2000). He has been a Magnum photographer since 1998 and has exhibited widely, including the Recontres de Perpignan, France in 1999.; Herta Muller was born in Romania in 1953. After refusing to cooperate with Ceausescu's Securitate, she lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats before she was able to emigrate in 1987. She is the author of The Land Of Green Plumbs (Henry Holt & Co., 1996) among other publications, and is the winner of Germany's most prestigious literary award, The Kleist Prize. Herta Muller now lives in Berlin.