I was born in communist Romania. I remember the lines for bread, the black-and-white television with two hours of programming a day, and the strange silence that fell over a city that never quite trusted itself. When the Revolution came in December 1989 — right here, in the streets of Bucharest — I was a child watching history explode in real time.

That’s why the Communism Investigation Tour is one I guide with everything I have. It’s not just history to me. It’s memory.

We start at the Palace of the Parliament — Nicolae Ceausescu’s megalomaniacal legacy, the second-largest administrative building in the world after the Pentagon. It took 700 architects, 20,000 workers, and the demolition of an entire historic district to build it. Standing in front of it, you feel its weight in more ways than one.

From there, we trace the story of communism in Romania through the city itself. The wide boulevards Ceausescu modeled after Pyongyang and Paris. The buildings that were too loyal to their ideology to be beautiful. The apartment blocks — bland, uniform, grey — that housed an entire generation and somehow became home.

We walk through Revolution Square, where the uprising began and see the balcony of the Central Committee building, from which Ceausescu gave his last speech before fleeing by helicopter. You won’t believe what happened next — the chaos, the executions, the slow and difficult transition toward democracy. But we will talk about it, for me it always feels as it was yesterday.

The Cold War looms large in American history and memory. Many of our US visitors grew up with Romania on the news — Nadia Comaneci defecting, Ceausescu’s brutal regime, the shocking Christmas Day execution of 1989. For them, walking through the actual places where all of this happened is extraordinary.

Others simply want to understand what life under a totalitarian regime actually felt like for ordinary people. What did you eat? What did you say — and not say — in public? How did a system like this rise, and how did it fall? I answer these questions from the inside. Not as a historian, but as someone who was there.

I don’t paint Romania’s communist era as either a monster story or a nostalgia trip. The truth, as always, is more complicated. Some people remember the security of guaranteed employment. Others remember only fear. I share both sides, because that’s what the people who lived it deserve.

By the end of the tour, most people tell me they feel like they understand not just Romania, but something bigger: how ordinary societies slip into extraordinary circumstances, and how ordinary people find their way out.