I Must Betray You

By: Rute Sepetys

Location: FIC SEP

Genre: Historical Fiction 

Jo says...

"‘when justice cannot shape memory, remembering the past can be a form of justice.’

powerful and haunting. a story to give proper justice to an often forgotten memory.

thank goodness for books like this - books that teach us and help us remember."

A gut-wrenching, startling window into communist Romania and the citizen spy network that devastated a nation, from the number one New York Times best-selling, award-winning author of Salt to the Sea and Between Shades of Gray.

Romania, 1989. Communist regimes are crumbling across Europe. Seventeen-year-old Cristian Florescu dreams of becoming a writer, but Romanians aren’t free to dream; they are bound by rules and force.

Amidst the tyrannical dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu in a country governed by isolation and fear, Cristian is blackmailed by the secret police to become an informer. He’s left with only two choices: betray everyone and everything he loves—or use his position to creatively undermine the most notoriously evil dictator in Eastern Europe.

Cristian risks everything to unmask the truth behind the regime, give voice to fellow Romanians, and expose to the world what is happening in his country. He eagerly joins the revolution to fight for change when the time arrives. But what is the cost of freedom?

Jan B wrote this review in Goodreads

"I applaud the author shedding a light on this dark time in history. In the author notes, she highlights the amount of research she did to ensure her story was historically accurate. I’m old enough to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall and Communism and recall the Romanian uprising in the news. In 2019, my husband and I also had the opportunity to visit a Communist museum in a former Eastern Bloc nation, a memorial in the actual building where atrocities took place. Included were video recordings of those imprisoned, interrogated, or tortured. It was a devastating experience, but one we were glad to experience. History that is forgotten is doomed to be repeated.

The deep desire to be a free people is built into the human spirit.
In 1989 the Romanian citizens rose up against a totalitarian government. Although the circumstances aren’t the same, we are currently watching the events play out on our TV screens as average Ukrainian citizens rise up against the Soviet invaders, using all means at their disposal to defend their right to be free."