The author of these memoirs, Maurice, was born on the year when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. As told in the first part of his memoirs, he spent forty-seven years in Romania, an Eastern European country, where he experienced a fascist regime and survived World War II and the Holocaust. This was followed by life under a communist regime behind the Iron Curtain, a fence enclosing a labor camp with hundreds of millions of captives. He became an expert in medical research but, not being a Communist Party member, was refused professional promotion. Accused by the Securitate, the KGB-like Romanian secret police, of transferring results to visiting Western scientists, he was banned from teaching medical students. Sidonia, his wife, was refused a doctoral degree because her father owned a land that was taken away by the communist regime. Under Ceausescu's increasingly oppressive regime, Maurice and Sidonia decided to leave the country. After a year of struggle with the Securitate, they got passports to visit Maurice's family in France. In France, Maurice received an offer for a teaching position in the United States. The two indispensable conditions that Maurice was considering when planning for this breakaway, a tourist passport and a job, were fulfilled. When Maurice and Sidonia were informed by HIAS, the agency that assisted refugees, that it would take nine months to have their two teenage children released from Romania, Sidonia had to return to care of them and her old father. This was the start of a fight between the Securitate and Maurice and Sidonia. An eighteen months' separation ordeal followed. The Securitate was blackmailing Maurice to force him not to claim being a political refugee while persuading Sidonia to divorce him. In this clash, the Securitate was using informers, censorship, and public meetings. The most harmful was their threat of endless separation. Fighting back, Maurice pressured the Ceausescu regime to release his family by garnering support from United States congressmen and threatening the regime with public demonstration. Providing moral support to Sidonia and the children through letters, phone calls, and packages was essential. The bonding between them based on love and trust was the best defense against the conniving Securitate.
