“If there were a secret Gulag hidden above New York, maybe it was Maine, thrust into the dark Atlantic Ocean like an angry fist. Not only was this northeastern most point of the United States a border state with Canada, but it was also the most obscure, its face turned into the wind.”

So writes Colin Sargent, Portland playwright, novelist and publisher, near the outset of his new true story “Red Hands.” His latest book begins with a bit of sleuthing on our own turf. Sargent has a knack for finding and expanding upon little-known historical nuggets; he’s previously written about Italian sub-mariners stationed in Portland late in World War II and about Portland-born Mildred Gillars, who became the radio propagandist for the Nazis known as “Axis Sally.”

Local review

“Red Hands”
By Colin Sargent
Barbican Press, 295 pages
$16.99

Here his story follows a mysterious woman in Maine, so out of place he refers to her as “a black swallowtail in the snow.” The woman turns out to be Iordana Borila Ceausescu, daughter-in-law of the brutal Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu (1967-89). “Red Hands” gives a unique insider’s view of the rise and fall of the dystopian regime of Nicolae and his wife, Elena. It is also a love story of Iordana for the couple’s eldest son, Valentin, as told to Sargent by Iordana during her exile in Old Orchard Beach, where she hid for several years after the bloody 1989 revolution that toppled (and executed) her in-laws.

Told in a literary Truman Capote “In Cold Blood” fashion, “Red Hands” gives the reader a clear picture of privileged life in Romania, where the couple’s tense lives hovered somewhere between the communist East and the capitalist West. Her marriage to Valentin brought Iordana many privileges. At the same time, she lived a life of constant uncertainty because her powerful mother-in-law detested her.

The Romanian government led by the Ceausecus practiced repressive surveillance and thought control on its citizens, from the lowliest workers to the highest government officers. Nicolae and Elena ruled as harshly and effectively as any dictators of the 20th century, yet they were seen as liberal, even progressive by western governments. How this Potemkin Village façade was achieved is clearly spelled out in “Red Hands.”

Even trivial things are fraught. In one scene, Iordana travels to the countryside in a lavish but dusty official car on which someone had written “wash me. ” While Iordana is visiting friends, the terrified villagers wash the car. The fear across the land was palpable. Nobody dared to say anything that might upset the Ceausescus. I have always wondered how Hitler was able to come to power in an educated nation. Even though I studied the subject with a professor who had served in the Hitler Youth, I was still somewhat incredulous. But after reading “Red Hands,” I finally understood.

Both Nicolae and Elena began as committed communists who fought the fascists in Spain and the Balkans. They were true believers – part of the old guard that rose to rule Romania with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej after World War II as part of the Eastern Bloc. But in their rise to the top, they became worse than their fascist and royalist predecessors. The joke was that everyone knew what was going on, but nobody dared to speak up.

Young people at the top, like Iordana, had access to western culture, films like Lawrence of Arabia and To Kill a Mockingbird, music like that of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, but they were not allowed to travel, and they lived in the same atmosphere of terror as everybody else.

In Iordana’s case, her mother-in-law, especially, disapproved of her Western ways and found devious ways to punish her for them. Slowly, Iordana learns that her own parents, once trusted, high-level Communist party members, were being stripped of party privileges as a backhanded way to hurt her. She thinks she is being watched (the Secret Police in Ceausecu’s regime were infamous) or even poisoned. The terror comes from both sides: She receives strange and frightening telephone calls from anti-government individuals. When the police are able to identify the callers, they tell Iordana “not to take the calls seriously, we had no dissidents or criminals in Nicolae’s Romania, ‘only crazy people.’ ”

Eventually, life grows so pressured, her marriage falls apart. As the situation for her and her son Dani worsens, they escape Romania through Yugoslavia and then Israel before coming to the United States by way of Canada. Mother and son settled in Old Orchard Beach in the 1990s, where Dani eventually graduated from high school.

Writer Colin Sargent was introduced to Iordana by a Romania race-car driver whom he’d interviewed for a previous article. When Sargent showed her a version of his book, she asked that he delay publishing it while she lived. In 2006, he learned that she and Dani had returned to Bucharest, where she died in 2017.

The taut, vivid writing in “Red Hands” – there are no wasted words – makes for a fast-paced, heartfelt book for our time, when many Americans seem to have fallen under the spell of a man who spouts dangerous nonsense. The fate of the individual caught in distressing social and political times is sadly eternal.

William David Barry is a local historian who has authored/co-authored seven books, including “Maine: The Wilder Side of New England” and “Deering: A Social and Architectural History,” and is now at work on a history of the Maine Historical Society. He lives in Portland with his wife, Debra, and their cat, Nadine.