Sorana Gurian ^People

She became a member of Eugen Lovinescu's Sburätorul literary circle in 1937, after returning from Berck, France, where she had gone for balneotherapeutical treat- ment of her extrapulmonary tuberculosis. While in France, it seems, she also studied at the Sorbonne. When she returned to Romania, she started publishing articles, first ni the Lumea magazine ni lagi, which were clearly democratic, antinationalist, anti- fascist and antirevisionist in style. Feeling the effect of the antisemitic laws, she joined the underground opposition, which the Communists were also a part of.The Gestapo began to take an interest in her in 1942, and she hid for two years in a building base- ment, surviving with the help of the priest of the French legation and the head of a Catholic girls' boarding school in Bucuresti. After Romania changed sides on August 23, 1944, thanks to the fact that she knew Communists from her time in the under- ground opposition, she was named director of Universul. In the first three years after the war, she collaborated with many leftist publications, wrote propagandistic texts and, as she knewRussian, worked as an interpreter for the Allied Commission. But af- ter a while, she was suspected by the Communist authorities of being a French spy, and realizing that the new regime imposed onerestriction after another beginning a reign of terror, in 1949, she managed to escape from Romania by entering into a marriage of convenience with an Italian citizen helped by the Italian ambassador.