[4] After spending time at Doftana Prison and at labor camps in Caransebeș and Târgu Jiu (where he got close to Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej's group),[5] he was retried and acquitted in 1932.
[2] On August 23, 1944, he was an active participant in the Royal coup d'état, when he helped draft King Michael's address to the nation, announcing the fall of the Ion Antonescu regime and Romania's switch from the Axis to the Allies.
In the fall of 1945, Zilber entered in contact with Mark Ethridge,[5] a journalist appointed by President Harry S. Truman to serve on a mission to study whether to grant diplomatic recognition to Bulgaria and Romania.
On May 20, 1947, Scînteia announced that he had been expelled from the Communist Party,[9] and in the fall of that year he was forbidden from teaching at the university, on orders from the Education Minister, Ștefan Voitec.
During interrogation, after being subjected for months to horrible torture,[10] he gave in to Securitate pressures and confessed to the charges,[3] implicating Pătrășcanu in some delusional scenarios of conspiracy and treason.