"The book is a revelation and should be accepted as such. Not only regarding the fate of Romanian deportees in the Soviet Gulag, Anița Nandriș-Cudla's story provides essential testimony, but also for the reconstruction of the stature of the Bukovina peasant: a clearly aristocratic stature, which the metamorphoses caused by communism had thrown not only into the past, but, one might say, almost into legend.

Now, with Anița Nandriș-Cudla, the legend takes on the contours of the natural, and its reality imposes itself on us again. After such a book, any inferiority complex of ours as a nation should disappear.

This book, which not only requires reading, but would deserve to be placed, in libraries, on a shelf of classics, describes one of the most terrible destinies. (Monica LOVINESCU)