When Peter was eight years old, two years after the end of the war, his father was free again, and went to work for the oil company. In the early winter of 1947, his parents took a scheduled trip to Exxon's headquarters in New York. When it was time to return, they weren't allowed back into Romania. The iron curtain had fallen around the new Soviet empire, including his homeland. The Communist putsch took hold, and now his parents were labeled dirty, bourgeois imperialists and evil capitalists. Had he returned, Peter's father - once again considered an enemy of the state - would have found himself back in prison, or worse.

Peter and his brother Costa retreated to Lipova, a small town in Transylvania, to live with their grandparents in their country villa, where they would be safe. Early one morning Peter and Costa found their two shepherd dogs dead in the garden, poisoned. They had no idea who had done it, or why. The next morning they awoke to the sound of boots on their marble floors. The Communists had burst into the house to arrest Peter's grandfather, then 79 years old, along with hundreds of thousands of Romania's intelligentsia, generations of politicians, and other would-be leaders. They were all to be exterminated, put to work in open fields, underfed and under clothed, or just locked up in century-old dungeons until they withered away and died. Peter will never forget the serene face of his old grandpa, trying to console his family, though he knew he would never see them again.

The Vilest of Tasks
Peter and his brother, along with his grandmother, were taken from their new home in Lipova and transported across the country, to a town close to the Russian border in Eastern Romania. They were given a series of humiliating, dangerous jobs, leaving for work at six a.m. and returning home twelve hours later, six days a week. He had to do the vilest tasks.

One year stretched into the next, and Peter and Costa received only an occasional letter from their parents - which were smuggled in. In the final years, they heard nothing.

Then, one day in March 1954 - six years after they were taken captive - Peter, Costa, and their grandmother were told to pack up what little they had. It was time to leave. Escorted by the usual phalanx of guards, they were taken to catch the overnight train to Bucharest. They arrived in the Romanian capital the next morning, where their uncle, Ionel Manolescu, met them at the train station. For two or three weeks, they stayed with their uncle in his posh Bucharest apartment, waiting for their passports. Finally, early in April, giddy with excitement, made their way to the train station, where they exchanged tearful farewells with their grandmother, who would stay behind. They boarded the overnight train for Vienna. On the way, they learned what seemed quite miraculous: the United States government had interceded to free them.