Marion, the founder of the "Orphelins de Roumanie", was once Mariuca, a child brought to the orphanage immediately after birth
Marion grew up in an orphanage in Romania for two years.
The girl was adopted and taken to France by a couple of foreigners.
In time, Marion realized that Romania was a market for adoptions.
Mariuca left an orphanage in Romania, after two French women adopted her. Today her name is Marion and she is the founder of an association that helps offenders find their origins.
Mariuca has pressing memories from the Children's Home in Alba Iulia. She still doesn't forget the screams of the children she heard at night. She stayed there between 1976 and 1980. She was brought by her mother, who was 17 when she gave birth to her.
The headmistress of the center discouraged the girl who had just become a mother. He told her that he would not have a chance to raise his daughter and convinced her to sign the act approving the adoption.
"What happened to me was that there was a request for adoption and at that moment they operated on my eyes, because I had strabismus. From that moment they said "Ana, your daughter died due to an eye operation" , said Marion Le Roy Dagen, founder of Orphelins de Roumanie.
Mariuca becomes Marion in 1982, at the age of 6, after being adopted by a French couple
In 1980, Mariuca arrives at a children's home in Bucharest, where she is visited by Edith and Robert, a French couple. The adoption procedure lasts two years, and in 1982, when Mariuca is 6 years old, she leaves for France. And she becomes Marion.
"It's a total rupture with our biological ties, with our roots, our cultures and that takes a long time to reintegrate into this new family, to create a bond. And sometimes that doesn't happen , "Marion said.
Impressed by the images that the international press publishes from the Romanian orphanages, Marion comes to Romania, for the first time, in 1994.
The director of the orphanage tells what she had also told her adoptive parents in France: that her natural mother had died in a car accident.
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It's been 17 years since my first visit to my homeland, and Marion realizes that what she sees on TV is not really the truth. Images in orphanages were, in fact, paving the way for the children's trade.
"Judging the country, judging the people who were unable to take care of the children. This led to the development of a system to say that in Romania there are only bedrooms of death, that there are only children, we, rich families, rich countries, we will take care of these poor children, who are abandoned. Which is false , " said Marion.
Romanian adoptions become the subject of international negotiations
From 1994 to 2001, statistics show that 15,112 Romanian children are adopted by families abroad. But there are independent reports that speak of tens of thousands of children.
For Gunter Verheugen, Commissioner for Enlargement of the European Union, the mission to protect the fate of Romania's children was the most difficult moment of his career.
"I realized very quickly that, in fact, it was legalized child trafficking. The Romanians had put in place a bonus system. Organizations that wanted to adopt, or created the impression that they were doing so for humanitarian reasons, scored points in direct proportion to the donations they were able to make. Obviously, a market was created and I saw with my own eyes catalogs with children, from where you could choose one " , explained Gunter Verheugen, Commissioner for EU Enlargement.
Marion Le Roy Dagen made a documentary and wrote the volume "The Child and the Dictator" . In both works, the theme is the author's life.
In 2015 he founded the association "Orphelins de Roumanie" , an organization that helps those who have been adopted in Romania to discover their origins.
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