Artist Spy Prisoner: My Life in Romania under Fascist and Communist Rule

AN ENVELOPEBOOKS CLASSIC 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. ___________________ DENNIS DELETANT Woodrow Wilson Public Policy Fellow (Sept 2022–Sept 2023)Emeritus Professor, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College, London “”Jane Reid deserves praise on a number of counts for her enterprise in restoring to history George Tomaziu. First, she persuaded him to write an account of his life. Second, in doing so she highlights the courage of a small group of Romanian, French and British figures who served the Allied cause in Romania during the country’s alliance with Nazi Germany in the years 1940 to 1944 by providing intelligence to MI6. Third, she draws attention to the fact that most of the Romanians who did so were arrested by the Romanian Communist authorities under the direction of Moscow in 1950, tried on a charge of ‘high treason’, and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. Jane was determined to get his story into print and EnvelopeBooks is to be congratulated for rewarding her persistence.”” (For the full review, see SEER (the Slavonic and East European Review), the quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal of the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London. Deletant, Dennis, review of George Tomaziu, Spy, Artist, Prisoner: My Life in Romania under Fascist and Communist Rule , in Slavonic and East European Review , 100.4 (2023), pp. 783–87.) —- ISBN: 9781915023063 | ISBN10: 1915023068 | ISBN-13: 978-1915023063