On the day after her 16th birthday, Alina Sofronia awakes amid a clutter of blankets, old shoes, sodden cardboard and empty bottles in a gloomy concrete cubicle beneath the park in front of Bucharest's Gara du Nord railway station. She pulls on soiled jeans, oversize boots and a grimy sweatshirt reading yes on the front and no on the back. Rats and cockroaches scurry under two massive heating pipes occupying most of the space. The humid air reeks of urine and of glue fumes from the plastic bag Alina clutches in her right hand. Bringing the bag to her mouth, she blows into it, filling it like a balloon. She inhales deeply, slumps motionless for a long moment, then clumsily ties the top of the bag, puts it in her pocket and slowly climbs a steel ladder to the sunlight above.

Alina is among the hundreds of children who shelter in the underground labyrinth of pipes stretching out under the city from beneath the station. Thousands more populate parks and abandoned buildings in Bucharest and other Romanian cities, living their life at the very bottom of a society infamous for the dismal state of its child care. Most come from broken homes, telling tales of sexual and physical abuse by alcoholic parents or older siblings. Others come from the country's overcrowded orphanages or from Romanian hospitals where they had been abandoned by relatives--many because they were found to be HIV positive.

AIDS is just one of many scourges threatening the street children. Hepatitis B is common, as is tuberculosis. Syphilis is pandemic: some social workers have found that as many as 95% of sexually active street children are infected with the disease. The youngsters are prey to pimps and pedophiles, harassed by the police and gaunt from malnutrition. Most of those who want to find a job or decent living quarters cannot do so because they lack identification papers--impossibly difficult to obtain from a government bureaucracy that treats them as nonpersons. After Romania's communist government fell in December 1989, the world was shocked by the appalling orphanages in which babies and youngsters were packed. Most went unrescued. Now some of Romania's abandoned are children of the sewers.

The progenitor of this misery was dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who in the 1960s aggressively promoted population growth, banning contraception and abortions for women with fewer than four children, despite the wretched poverty of most families. His overthrow and execution did not solve the problems he had created. Romania has 3,279 victims of pediatric AIDS--more than half the total number of cases in Europe. The government of President Ion Iliescu, former Propaganda Minister for Ceausescu, has launched programs to ease the situation, but intransigent ministries and local officials block the initiatives and exacerbate matters with the heavy-handed communist techniques to which they cling.

Oblivious to the causes of her plight, Alina sits at the edge of the entrance to her hole, staring dully at the Gara du Nord passersby. A few, noticing her, shake their head and move on. She is joined by a man named Valentin who, though 20, is so short and pale he looks to be no older than she. Seeing that she is too intoxicated to speak, he sits on a nearby bench and begins working his own bag of glue--a common pastime among Romanian street urchins. "I have dreams when I sniff glue," he says, smiling to reveal a thin extra tooth between two front incisors. "I dream I am floating up in the middle of the stars and the moon, and then I am chasing the stars."

Alina's parents died when she was six. She was sent to a Bucharest orphanage, where she was so disobedient that she was expelled at age 14. Her brother, also expelled from an orphanage, was living at the Gara du Nord, and she joined him there but was immediately claimed by a man named Suraj. "He takes small kids from the station and rapes them, and then they work for him," says Valentin. When asked how Suraj treated her, Alina stares glassily and says, "A little bit of everything." Last winter she made her way into Valentin's group of half a dozen children, a relatively safe refuge, say social workers for Romanian Save the Children, a private organization. Valentin earns a little food money by sweeping in front of kiosks and selling newspapers and magazines. One of seven children, he was cut loose after his alcoholic parents split. He wound up at the station when he was 14. He looks after the younger residents, the social workers say--the closest thing to parental guidance they can get.

Although she does not like to speak of it, Alina, like many other boys and girls, became a prostitute at the station. Some of the children around the Gara du Nord are as young as eight or nine when they begin having sex for payment. One pimp for young boys is Marian, nicknamed Blondie, a tall, fair-haired, 22-year-old male prostitute who lives on cardboard in a bathroom stall in the station's public toilet. Both Romanians and foreigners buy his services, he says. "Some like the 13- to 16-year-olds," he says. "Others like the 18- to 20-year-olds. I hang around with the [younger] kids." The men, he says, pay them the equivalent of $1.50 to $3. Alina is paid about the same. "If I am hungry, what to do?" she says in English.

Getting the youths into safe shelters has proved difficult. "Most children want to leave the street," says Gabriela Alexandrescu of Save the Children. But even when shelter is available, "they need special attention," she says. "The children could be reintegrated, but it must be done with individual therapy. Adults must regain the children's trust." The government does little to help and often gets in the way. When the charitable organization Concordia set up a shelter and soup kitchen in an abandoned cargo area of the Gara du Nord, Health Ministry inspectors ordered it closed on the ground that the air was inadequate. They apparently did not sniff the urine stench of the youngsters' alternative dwelling. "We tried to do something for the children," says Thomas Preindl, an Austrian social worker for Concordia. "But the authorities didn't want it."

Alina and Valentin have scraped together enough money to go to a public bath. They float like wraiths through crowded back alleys before reaching a small stone entryway into the courtyard of a shabby building. The two buy tickets and soap and go inside. Twenty minutes later, they emerge, at least temporarily clean and sober. A visitor asks what they want from life. "First I want papers," says Valentin. "Then maybe a job. If I find a job, then I want to find an apartment." And Alina? She shrugs, shakes her head and says, "I want to die." She smiles slightly and sings a soft and childlike tune to fill the silence. She leans forward, coughs and says, "It's just like that."