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TPS 60: Fleeing Communist Romania, A True Story

·56 min·4 clips

A nurse from the church gives the family sleeping pills for a 10-month-old baby before the border crossing.

The episode opens with Rob Walgate introducing a conversation with Cosman Bota, a new friend who escaped socialist communist Romania as a child. Cosman says he was born in Romania in 1981, grew up in a family of five as the middle child, and watched his father, a civil engineer, try to build a better future inside a system that limited nearly everything. The escape story sits at the center of the episode. Cosman remembers a border crossing with soldiers, a dog, and a baby that had to stay calm while the family waited. His father, speaking Hungarian, tries to bargain with two Hungarian soldiers and offers the cash in his pocket and the gold wedding band he has with him. One soldier wants to let them go, the other does not. A gun goes up in the air, a truck shows up, and the family ends up in jail. Cosman recalls the jail as strange before he recalls it as frightening. He says the soldiers were not mean or physically rough, and having his father there made the whole thing feel less threatening. Rob keeps circling back to the split between the two soldiers and how a quick decision can alter a family’s future. Cosman says he could not hear the full exchange, but it was clear enough that the soldiers had to decide whether to risk letting the family go or turn them in. Later, the conversation turns toward Cosman’s walk in faith and the work that grew out of it. Rob connects that faith story to the way Cosman is serving now, including a trip to Turkey to help run a soccer camp for 900 Ukrainian children living in three hotels. The segment closes by pointing listeners to the continuing episode, the podcast feed, and the full conversation on YouTube. Taken together, the piece reads as a testimony and reflection on memory, faith, and service, showing how a childhood escape can shape the way someone lives decades later.

As heard by us

A tense escape story that opens into faith, family, and the cost of freedom.

The episode follows Cosman Bota from childhood in communist Romania through the uneasy choices his family made to leave. The strongest parts stay close to the hard details: the border, the soldiers, the jail cell, the dog, and the bargaining for a future that was never certain.

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Hear Cosman Bota recount a childhood escape from socialist communist Romania with his family.

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