Bob Graham on uncovering the plight of Romanian orphans, 31 years ago

Reporter Bob Graham, 71, was the first to expose the plight of the Romanian orphans 31 years ago

It was New Year’s Day in 1990: the snow lay thick in Bucharest and the temperature was way below zero, but groups of tiny children, dressed in thin tattered clothes, clung to a wire fence watching the last vestiges of fighting between forces in the Romanian revolution.

We stared at the children, shocked by the emaciated, skeletal figures. Our interpreter explained they were from the local orphanage. Every town and community had an orphanage, he said, sometimes more than one. Bucharest, the capital, had five or six, to his knowledge.

When we went in to see for ourselves the scene was unforgettable: the rooms were rammed full of beds or cots, with two, sometimes three children, in each one.

The children, dressed in filthy clothes, often had their legs or arms tied to the cold, metal cots to prevent them moving. There was a fetid stench of dried urine and vomit, which could be seen on their clothes.

Each room was freezing because of broken or non-existing windows, the walls were yellowed by years of neglect and the paint was peeling.

But what shocked me the most was the silence. We found out later that the children knew it was pointless crying or complaining in any form, they would only be ignored.

When Nicolae Ceauşescu came to power in 1965, he used the old Stalinist dogma that population growth would fuel the economy. In the first year of his despotic rule, his government issued Decree 770, which outlawed abortion for women under 40 with fewer than four children. ‘The foetus is the property of the entire Romanian authority,’ he announced.

The birth rate increased rapidly as fertility became an instrument of state control. But this, coupled with the country’s poverty, meant more and more unwanted children were abandoned into state care.

The orphanages were shocking, but almost luxurious compared to the homes for ‘irrecuperables’, where the Romanian government sent children born with disabilities of any nature. In these I found some of the worst cases of inhumanity imaginable: it was a new depth to the country’s darkest secret.

With the backing of the late Sir David English, then editor of the Daily Mail, we published the scandal of Romania’s childcare system and were inundated with thousands of letters and donations from readers.

When people from the West, not only Britain, but most civilised countries, came and saw the horrors for themselves, they often broke down in tears.

Truckloads of aid, including powdered milk, nappies, toys and second-hand clothes, poured in from communities all over Britain and Western Europe. But bribery and corruption was endemic in Romania and I witnessed donations for the children getting delivered to the orphanages, but then disappearing through the back doors to be sold on the local market.

Many people all over the world – an estimated 80,000 – adopted Romanian orphans, who were usually not orphans, but children abandoned by parents who could not afford to keep them. In the UK, the number was in the thousands.

In 2003, a ground-breaking study on some of those children by Michael Rutter, professor of child psychiatry at King’s College London, found that they all suffered profound deprivation and malnourishment. It showed that lack of attention in the early years could have permanent repercussions, many of them psychological.

I haven’t been back to Romania for about 10 years, but I can only hope the situation has improved. But at the time, the greatest indictment of Romania was when you mention the name of the country, the first thing people think of is those horrific orphanages.

Above and below Thousands of children were placed in Romanian orphanages during the Ceausescu regime