On my last visit to Romania in 2000, I came across Carmilia, a dark-eyed, five-year-old girl and her four-year-old brother, Ion, in a small family unit with eight other children. They had come from an institution and, when they arrived two years earlier, neither could speak or walk. Carmilia wasn’t toilet-trained, couldn’t hold a spoon or sit in a chair and was terrified of grass and running water. She would sit rocking back and forth in the way that seriously disturbed children do and was violent to anyone who approached her. She was utterly unaware of Ion, then an underdeveloped sickly baby. It took months of patient therapy to explain what a “family” was and that they were brother and sister. By the time I first met her, she had just began to hug him and proudly did so in front of me. She was such a sweet child that I had often wondered what had happened to her. Luckily, Carmilia could be traced and I went to see her.