Product details
- ISBN 9781915023063
- Weight: 230g
- Dimensions: 127 x 203mm
- Publication Date: 01 Oct 2025
- Publisher: EnvelopeBooks
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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An anguished memoir of one man's political struggle and physical resilience.
The Romanian artist George Tomaziu must have anticipated being imprisoned for monitoring German troop movements through Romania during the Second World War.
He may also have imagined that if the Allies won, and if he somehow survived the brutalisation of captivity and torture, his personal fight against Fascism would be acknowledged by his liberated compatriots.
It wasn't. Under the Communist government that came to power in late 1947, he was sent back to prison and stranded there, for 13 years, in the most inhuman conditions.
Against the odds, he survived. This is his story, translated from the French by Jane Reid, whose husband at the British Embassy in Bucharest managed to persuade the Romanians to allow Tomaziu, his wife and child to leave the country. Tomaziu settled in Paris, where he wrote this account but could not find a publisher for it. He died in 1990.
George Tomaziu (born 4 April, 1915 in Dorohoi; died 3 December, 1990 in Paris) was a Romanian painter, graphic artist, memorialist and poet. He was the godson of Romania’s most celebrated composer and musician, Georges Enescu, who was married to Princess Cantacuzino and lived in a palace. Nothing in his early life suggested the toughness needed to withstand abuse. On the contrary, his artistic spirit expressed itself in a voracious bi-sexuality and hunger for pleasure. At one point during the war, he was artistic director of the Odessa Opera, but he also worked for the British secret services, transmitting information about German troops on the Eastern Front and in Romania. From the autumn of 1942 he was made a lieutenant and ran a group of collaborators, one of whom was Alexandru Balaci. A year later, he was in Romania’s most notorious prison.
