A Luminous Future

Growing up in Transylvania in the Shadow of Communism

By: Teodor Flonta

Narrated by: Teodor Flonta

Length: 15 hrs and 21 mins

Publisher's summary

The story of the young Teodor unravels on the background of the drama that his family and his country lived in the terrible days of the 1950s in a Stalinist Romania. While the Western countries were engaged in post-war reconstruction, the communist regime, imposed on Romanians by the Soviet Union, was committed to depriving its citizens of the most elementary freedoms and reducing an entire people to starvation.

The regime threatens to eliminate the Flonta family, declaring Pavel, Teodor's father, an "enemy of the people". As a consequence, he is arrested, imprisoned and tortured. When the wave of persecution reaches its climax, Pavel is forced to live in hiding. A job Pavel learned in his youth saves him: The Russians, who extract uranium in the Carpathians for their atomic bomb, hire him. There, at the mine, the long arm of the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, cannot reach him.

As in communism children were made to suffer for the “sins” the secret police invented for their parents, Teodor goes through a lot of strife while growing up; he is expelled from high school and prevented to undertake studies at the faculty of his choice.

The fall of communism will find Teodor "at the end of the world", in Tasmania, while his father will be involved in the recovery of the land that the totalitarian regime had confiscated from him decades earlier.

©2013 Teodor Flonta (P)2020 Teodor Flonta

This IS Communism

Wow. It's an understatement to say that "A Luminous Future" is a frightening glimpse of what communism is in action. While it takes awhile to get past some of the culture references, largely because they are so different from the West, it is worth it. The book builds on itself. Even though it is a bit jumbled at times and hard to follow at times, that doesn't take away from central focus of the book. This is communism lived out through the life of Teodor Flonta, starting from his early youth. Transylvania and Romania, and all of Eastern Europe, were subjugate to Nazi totalitarianism before being handed to Communist Russia after World War II. To say that this was the worst possible fate is an understatement. Though this inconvenient fact is glossed over now, it's the most evident truth. This book should be required reading. THANK YOU Teodor Flonta.