[4] According to his account from an interview,[1] he curried favor with Pavel Ștefan, a local communist boss, who found work for him at Căile Ferate Române.
[1] Țandără spent several years doing forced labor at the Danube–Black Sea Canal, and served as an informant to the communist authorities in the re-education camps there.
[8][3] In a review of the book, literary critic Virgil Ierunca wrote: "The torturer of the Securitate, Franț Țandără, describes the tortures in which he had specialized, takes his share of the blame, implicates the communist system in charge of the horror, and above all (here the uniqueness is indisputable), asks to be tried in a country which, after ten years of transition, has not yet found judges and a tribunal".
[1] His story is presented in The Afternoon of a Torturer, a 2001 Romanian biography film directed by Lucian Pintilie based on Jela's book and starring Gheorghe Dinică in the role of Țandără.
[9][11] The story was revisited in a play staged in 2022 at Teatrul Dramaturgilor Români in Bucharest, with Răzvan Vasilescu as Țandără and Maia Morgenstern as Jela.