Mr. C's grandfather came to Bucharest from Butimanu at the beginning of the last century. He came from a large family and moved to the city in order to go to school and make it on his own. He became a construction engineer and, for some time, his life went on at slow pace, with the regular concerns of a family with four daughters. The house where Mr. C lives at present was built by his grandfather, and so were the rest of the houses on the little street with an entrance from Calea Dorobanţi. Mr. C says that some buildings were sold as early as 1925, and, with the money from his grandfather, Mr. C bought some land nearby – the city outskirts lay here in those times, but today the area is central – and he built more houses. One of these houses is his parents'– the one where Mr. C lives now – and the other two were built very close for the four daughters; both houses have two three-room apartments, each with their own bathroom and kitchen.
The girls, including Mr. C's mother, did not get to live there, as they were very young when the communists came to power. Mr. C's luck was – as he says – that his family was allowed to keep on living in the parental house. The entire ground floor, except for one room, remained for the use of the family. One single girl out of the four left the house when she got married, her husband having received a state housing on Giurgiului Road. A nationalization paper was only made for the parental house, the other two were simply taken away by force – recounts Mr. C., the present co-owner. He was born in 1956 and up until 1995, when the house was retroceded, he had never gone upstairs, were the tenants from ICRAL lived. "We were in our house and we paid rent to the state. This is the idea of nationalization, to get you crowded, to have you under control".
Even today, one of the four girls – aged 87 now – who has been living at the ground floor of her parental house all her life, is living in fear of being thrown out. Mr. C., who in the '90s undertook the legal proceedings to recover the real estate lost by his grandfather, recounts that his family was one of the privileged ones, only because they were allowed to stay in their house and were not "spurted out, thrown away God knows where". Mr. C's was eight when his grandfather died, and one of his most vivid memories pictures the old man taking a chair and going to a corner of the garden in the evening, amid roses and sweet tobacco, lingering there alone with his thoughts until dusk. "I wondered many times what he was thinking about. I used to say, (…) – as I put myself in his shoes – I had a big family, then the state came and took my four houses, it took this, it did that, it forced tenants into my home. How did he get over all these? He was a strong man, other people couldn't do it".
