Catherine Caradja was born in Bucharest, Romania, on Jan. 28, 1893. By the time she met Michael Jackson, she was 99 years old and living in a small attic room.
That attic sat at the top of an orphanage. And the story of how she got there is one most Michael fans have never heard.
She was known as Princess Catherine Caradja. That title came to her by marriage, into one of Romania’s noble families. But the people who loved her most didn’t call her “princess.” They had a different name for her, and it came from World War II.
During the war, in the summer of 1943, a large number of American and other Allied airmen came down in Romania, a very long way from home. Princess Caradja stepped in. She took charge of the surviving crews herself, looked after them in her hospitals and helped them get to Italy.
Over the course of the war, she made life easier for more than 1,000 Allied flyers who had been captured. The airmen never forgot her kindness. They called her the “Angel of Ploiești.”
Years later, she had to flee Romania. She made a new life in America, where she lived for more than 35 years, mostly in the small town of Comfort, Texas. And she didn’t let the past fade. She tracked down more than 500 of the former prisoners she had helped and organized a reunion for them in Dallas in 1972. They kept getting together every year for many years after that.
In 1991, she finally went home to Bucharest. She moved into the attic of Saint Catherine’s Crib, the orphanage her own mother had started long ago. Over the years it had cared for more than 3,000 children.
That’s where Michael comes in.
On Sept. 30, 1992, in the middle of his Dangerous World Tour, Michael visited the St. Catherine’s orphanage in Bucharest. Hundreds of children were inside, and thousands of people gathered outside just to catch a glimpse of him. He spent time with the kids, visited the ward where the newborn babies were and opened a brand-new playground for the children.
Romanian fans who organized the plaque say Michael met her that day, the 99-year-old princess who lived upstairs.
So the King of Pop’s visit to Romania took place in the house of a woman American airmen had called an angel. The visit marked the start of his new Heal The World Foundation’s work in Romania. He had founded the charity that same year.
This footage of Michael’s 1992 visit to the orphanage is the next best thing to being there that day.
Michael visits the orphanage in Bucharest in 1992
The very next night, Oct. 1, Michael played a sold-out concert for 90,000 people in Bucharest. HBO’s broadcast of the show became the channel’s highest-rated special at the time.
The story doesn’t end in 1992, either. This past Aug. 29, on what would have been Michael’s birthday, Romanian fans unveiled a restored “Heal The World” plaque at the former orphanage. It took them almost two years of work. The same day, they re-dedicated his monument on Michael Jackson Way in Herăstrău Park, a monument first unveiled for his first birthday after he passed away.
Princess Caradja’s name may not be well known in America today. But hundreds of airmen and their families once knew it well, and so do the fans in Bucharest who are still telling the story of the day Michael came to her orphanage.