Constantin Virgil Gheorghiu was a Romanian writer, best known for his 1949 novel, The 25th Hour, Editura Omegapres Bucharest & Editions du Rocher Paris.
Life
Virgil Gheorghiu was born in Valea Albă, a village in Războieni Commune, Neamţ County, in Romania. His father was an Orthodox priest in Petricani. A top student, he attended high school in Chişinău from 1928 to June 1936, after which he studied philosophy and theology at the University of Bucharest and at the Heidelberg University. He traveled and stayed in Saudi Arabia to learn the Arabic language and the Arab culture, before writing the biography of prophet Mohammed. The book was translated from Romanian to French and to Persian in Iran and in Urdu in Pakistan. Unfortunately, this book was never translated into English. Its Hindi translation is being printed in India and expected to be available by Jan. 2020, with the Hindi title saying "A prophet you do not know". Between 1942 and 1943, during the regime of General Ion Antonescu, he served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Romania as an embassy secretary. He went into exile when Soviet troops entered Romania in 1944. Arrested at the end of World War II by American troops, he eventually settled in France in 1948. A year later, he published the novelOra 25, written during his captivity. Gheorghiu was ordained a priest of the Romanian Orthodox Church in Paris on May 23, 1963. In 1966, Patriarch Justinian awarded him the cross of the Romanian Patriarchate for his liturgical and literary activities. He is buried in the Passy Cemetery, in Paris.
''The 25th Hour''
Gheorghiu's best-known book depicts the plight of a naive Romanian young farmhand, Johann Moritz, under German, Soviet and American occupation of Central Europe. Johann is sent to a labor camp by a police captain who covets his wife, Suzanna. At first, he is tagged as "Jacob Moritz", a Jew. Then, he and fellow Jewish prisoners escape to Hungary, where he is interned as a citizen of an enemy country. The Hungarian government sends its foreign residents as Hungarian "voluntary workers to Nazi Germany". Later, "Moritz Ianos" is "rescued" by a Nazi officer who determines he is a perfect Aryan specimen, and forces him into service in the Waffen SS as a model for German propaganda. Imprisoned after the war, he is severely beaten by his Russian captors, then put on trial by Allied forces because of his work for the Nazis. Meanwhile, Traian, son of the priest Koruga who employed Moritz in their Romanian village, is a famous novelist and minor diplomat whose first internment comes when he is picked up as an enemy alien by the Yugoslavs. Once imprisoned, the two heroes begin an odyssey of torture and despair. Traian Koruga is deeply unsettled because what he sees as the machinism and inhumanity of the "Western technical society", where individuals are treated as members of a category. He was writing a book within a book, "The 25th Hour", about Johann Moritz and the ordeal awaiting mankind. In the end, Traian suicides in an American-Polish concentration camp, while Johann is forced by the Americans to choose between either enlisting in the army, just as World War III is about to start, or to be interned in a camp as a citizen from an enemy country. The book was published in French translation in 1949 and was not published in Romania until 1991. In 1967, Carlo Ponti produced a film based on Gheorghiu's book. The movie was directed by Henri Verneuil, with Anthony Quinn as Johann, Virna Lisi as Suzanna, and Serge Reggiani as Traian.
Books
Ora 25, 1949. The twenty-fifth hour, Alfred A Knopf, NY, 1950
