WAristide or Aristid Blank, also spelled Blanc or Blanck, was a Romanian financier, economist, arts patron and playwright. His father, Mauriciu Blank, an assimilated and naturalized Romanian Jew, was manager of the Marmorosch Blank Bank (BMB), a major financial enterprise. Aristide took up jobs within the same company, and, after seeing action in the Second Balkan War and World War I, began expanding its investments, branching out into maritime transport and founding CIDNA/CFRNA airlines. This period witnessed his attempt at setting up a press empire around the twin dailies Adevărul and Dimineața, and his brief engagement with Epoca.
WGheorghe Calciu-Dumitreasa was a Romanian priest and dissident. He served 21 years in prison during the Communist regime. He was first imprisoned in 1948, but claimed his 1978 imprisonment was harsher. He had criticized Nicolae Ceauşescu's repressions and became seen as an "enemy of the state". Reportedly he suffered beatings and harassment in prison. He was released from prison due in part to pressure from supporters such as U.S. president Ronald Reagan. He spent years in exile in Virginia and ultimately settled there permanently. In the mid-1980s he preached on the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.
WCorneliu (Cornel) Coposu was a Christian Democratic and liberal conservative Romanian politician, the founder of the Christian Democratic National Peasants' Party, the founder of the Romanian Democratic Convention, and a political detainee during the communist regime. His political mentor was Iuliu Maniu (1873–1953), the founder of the National Peasant Party (PNȚ), the most important political organization from the interwar period. He studied law and worked as a journalist.
WValeriu Gafencu was a Legionnaire who was active during the Legionary Rebellion. Arrested by the state authorities in 1941, he died 11 years later at Târgu Ocna Prison.
WSîdîyîk Ibrahim H. Mîrzî (1909–1959) was a Crimean Tatar spiritual leader, imam, Mufti of the Muslim community of Romania, and activist for ethnic Tatar causes.
WIon Ioanid was a Romanian dissident and writer. Ioanid was a political prisoner of the communist-led regime after the Second World War and spent 12 years in prison and labour camps. He is best known for taking part at the 1953 Cavnic labor camp escape and for his book "Give us each day our daily prison", a reference to the verse from the Christian Lord's Prayer. The book is a comprehensive recollection of his time spent in detention. He is considered a Romanian Solzhenitsyn, as his description of the communist detention regime in Romania is the most detailed one submitted by one of its victims.
WGheorghe Mihail was a Romanian career army officer.
WElisabeta Rizea was a Romanian anti-communist partisan in the Făgăraș Mountains of northern Wallachia. After the Romanian Revolution of 1989, she became the symbol of Romania's anti-communist resistance.
WEugen Țurcanu, Romanian communist criminal and torturer, who was executed for his role in the Pitești Experiment. Initially sentenced to seven years' imprisonment for his membership in the Iron Guard, Țurcanu became the leader of a group of detainees whose role was to mistreat and torture other inmates, in order to "re-educate" them in the spirit of Marxism–Leninism and obtain information that could be used by the Communist organs of repression. Although initially, his activities were accepted, encouraged and directed by the communist regime, once information about what was happening inside Romanian prisons reached the West, he was investigated, tried and sentenced to death for his deeds.
WAbraham Leib Zissu was a Romanian writer, political essayist, industrialist, and spokesman of the Jewish Romanian community. Of lowly social origin and a recipient of Hasidic education, he became a noted cultural activist, polemicist, and newspaper founder, remembered primarily for his Mântuirea daily. By the end of World War I, he emerged as a theorist of Religious Zionism, preferring communitarianism and self-segregation to the assimilationist option, while also promoting literary modernism in his activity as novelist, dramatist, and cultural sponsor. He was the inspiration behind the Jewish Party, which competed with the mainstream Union of Romanian Jews for the Jewish vote. Zissu and Union leader Wilhelm Filderman had a lifelong disputation over religious and practical politics.