Nicolae Ceaușescu the country in the three days since the Ceaușescus fled Bucharest. Similarly, Victor Stănculescu, who had been defense minister before going over to the revolution, said in 2009 that the alternative would have been seeing the Ceaușescus lynched on the streets of Bucharest. The Ceaușescus were the last people to be executed in Romania before the abolition of capital punishment on 7 January 1990. Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu were originally buried in simple graves at Ghencea Cemetery in Bucharest, on opposite sides of a path; their graves were often decorated with flowers and symbols of communist rule. In April 2007,
I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day as a lieutenant but, in November, he was severely wounded in the Battle of New Hope Church (in Virginia), during the Mine Run Campaign. Charles eventually recovered, but his time as a soldier was finished. Longfellow first wrote the poem on Christmas Day in 1863. "Christmas Bells" was first published in February 1865, in "Our Young Folks", a juvenile magazine published by Ticknor and Fields. References to the Civil War are prevalent in some of the verses that are not commonly sung. The following are the original words of Longfellow's poem: <poem> I heard the bells on Christmas Day Their