The kids at a Bucharest children’s home had a brand-new playground, and the man who paid for it was about to walk through their door.
It was September 30, 1992. Michael Jackson had landed in Romania two days earlier to thousands of screaming fans, but he had something else on his mind.
Only three years before, Romania had thrown off its communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu. When the outside world finally got a look inside the country, what it found was heartbreaking. News reports at the time said about 100,000 children were living in grim state-run orphanages, many of them crowded and starved of care.
Those kids had become famous for all the wrong reasons, and Michael wanted to do something about it.
That afternoon he went to a children’s home known as Sfânta Ecaterina, or Saint Catherine. Romania’s president, Ion Iliescu, went with him. The two men were there to open the playground Michael had paid for, and a crowd had gathered outside hoping to catch a glimpse of him.
This clip catches him arriving.
Michael Jackson visits an Orphanage in Bucharest, Romania 1992
Years later, Iliescu still remembered that day. He described Michael as “a very simple man, very open, unsophisticated, with a certain innocence specific to childhood.” He said Michael felt “extraordinarily good” around the kids and clearly loved talking with them face to face.
The home’s name came with a story of its own. Saint Catherine’s Cradle was a group of orphanages started long ago by the mother of Princess Catherine Caradja, a Romanian noblewoman who had cared for downed American airmen during World War II. The communists seized the orphanages in 1949. When the princess finally came home in 1991, at 98, she moved into the attic of her family’s old orphanage.
Michael had heard about her. According to Romanian reports, he insisted on meeting her before his concert and spent a few dozen minutes alone with her while the president waited outside.
Later he spoke to reporters about the Heal the World Foundation, a charity he’d started that year to help children around the globe. Romania, with its orphans in headlines everywhere, was one of the first places he put it to work.
He talks about why he came in the press conference below.
[HQ] Michael Jackson in Romania 1992 Heal the World press conference
The next night, tens of thousands of fans packed the national stadium for his Dangerous tour concert. Some had spent more than a third of a month’s wages on a ticket. Newspapers before the show reported that the money raised would go to Romania’s orphans, and the promoter, Marcel Avram, later said neither he nor Michael kept any money from the show.
His crew got caught up in it too. Backstage that night, members of the tour’s staff and technical team started passing around a pink sheet of paper and writing down the cash they were giving to abandoned Romanian children. Thirty years later, volunteers at a Romanian museum found that sheet in an old charity archive.
It listed $3,929, plus some British pounds, German marks, Hungarian forints and 460 Romanian lei, all handed over by the crew that night.