Fancying himself as “an adventurer-correspondent of the old school,” Paul Kenyon in 1994 accepted an assignment from the bbc to go to Romania to investigate a shameful trade in babies, current practice there at the time. The assignment took an unexpected turn. He acquired a Romanian wife and in-laws who could tell him that the trade in babies was not the worst of it. Romania seems not to live up to its potential, something Kenyon has been thinking about for the best part of thirty years. All the countries of Europe have Hitler and Stalin in their historical memory, and perhaps the shame of what was done in the name of the two dictators will always be there. Children of the Night sees Romania as a country whose rulers have all been bad characters.
Even by the standards of the Middle Ages, Vlad III was conspicuously cruel. In recognition of his favorite way of killing whomever he thought fit to kill, he was given the sobriquet “the Impaler.” On the grounds that beggars were potential criminals, he murdered hundreds by inviting them to a feast and then setting fire to the hall in which they were eating.
Wallachia and Moldavia, parts of which make up modern Romania, were European provinces within the Ottoman Turkish Empire. The Ottoman use of corruption and bribery, Kenyon thinks, was so deeply ingrained in the country’s psyche that it flourishes to this day. Nothing is done on merit, he
