Woman Behind Bars in Romania

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In 1949 Annie Samuelli and her sister Nora were seized by the Communists on trumped-up charges in a mass arrest of all Romanian nationals working for the US and British Legations in Bucharest. After nine months of torture and interrogation, the two sisters were sentenced to long prison terms. Then in 1961, after 11 years and 340 days in separate security prisons and cells, the two were quietly ransomed out by a relative in the United States, and exiled as stateless refugees. While Annie was granted British citizenship within only a few months, it took three years, two presidents and the passage of Bills on her behalf in the US Congress for Nora to receive the same privilege in America. In Woman Behind Bars in Romania, an authentic graphic record of one woman's twelve-year odyssey in the shadow world of the Iron Curtain's prisons, Annie Samuelli writes of her experiences with great sensitivity and a remarkable lack of bitterness. Despite the brutality, dreadful food and living conditions that she and her fellow sufferers were forced to endure, they were grateful for many small blessings. For Annie Samuelli, one was that she never lost that extraordinary ability to communicate her feeling that the bars between them and the outside world could be made to disappear in more ways than one. Annie Samuelli describes her efforts to sustain her own and others' spirits through the seemingly endless ordeal; the pitiful and touching attempts of men and women to communicate with one another secretly (such as tapping or signalling in Morse Code) under the permanent surveillance of the guards; and the constant horrors to which they were all subjected.

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