Paul Goma

Goma was born on 2 October 1935 in Mana, then in the Romanian county of Orhei. During the war the family left Bessarabia and ended up in Transylvania. As a student he was arrested in 1956 because he wanted to organise a strike at the university. He spent two years in the prisons of Jilava and Gherla and was then kept under house arrest until 1963.

In 1977 he publicly supported the Czechoslovak Charter 77 and wrote letters to Ceaușescu and to the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe demanding human rights in Romania. He was arrested and expelled from the Writers' Union. On 20 November 1977 he left for France, and a year later he lost his Romanian nationality. His best-known books include Ostinato (1971), Gherla (1976), Les Chiens de la mort (1981) about Pitești prison, and the autobiographical Din calidor (1989).

After 2000 Goma came under heavy fire for his writings on the Second World War and the Holocaust in Romania. His book Săptămîna roșie (2003) in particular led to accusations of antisemitism, which he himself rejected.

The link with Moldova

In 2013 Goma obtained Moldovan citizenship. According to Jurnalul, that year he was also to head a centre for the study of communism in Bessarabia and Bukovina, set up by the Writers' Union of Moldova. His family home and the graves of his ancestors are still in Mana. He died of Covid-19 on 24 March 2020 at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris.