> our next door neighbor is just gone one day, replaced with another family. Nobody asks why or what happened. You just don't ask.

These sorts of things were happening in the Stalinist "dark" '50s, that's for sure, but when I grew up, in the '80s, the regime had become a little bit more "civilized". I think it was mostly because Ceausescu had signed the Helsinki Accords (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki_Accords) and in general because he wanted to detach Romania from Moscow's grip. The regime wasn't technically allowed, so to speak, to imprison people for political reasons, so this is why the authorities were resorting to either fake psychiatric assessments or to made up petty theft charges in order to take away "inconvenient" people.

Anyway, it's a very long and complicated story, 20 years after the facts even us, Romanians, don't have a single view on the whole thing (surprisingly enough, there's a quite big percentage of the population who'd rather relive those times than having to deal with the realities of the present).