My research will examine the flow of Romanians that, from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, fled the country. In the first part of my paper I will discuss on the one hand the terms that I will use throughout my research and, on the other, I will challenge the previous categorizations of Romanian political refugees, advancing a new demarcation within the group, underlining the differences between those who fled in the first years of the Cold War and those who fled the country later on. In the second half of the study, I will dwell on the reasons why people fled in the late 40s to early 50s, on the preparations required, the methods they used and the places of interment they chose, not overseeing the deep human dramas each and every one faced. Some crawled through barbed wire. Others swam the treacherous Danube. A few hid in the ships that departed the ports. The daring ones seized planes and flew beyond the Iron Curtain. All
of them hoped to escape Communist Romania. Those who succeeded faced the harshness of being a political refugee.