[1] The Constante family left the city during the World War I German occupation, and Lena spent much of her childhood in Iași, Kherson, Odessa, London, and Paris.

[2] Returning at the end of the conflict, she studied Painting at the Romanian Art Academy in Bucharest, and established friendships with leading intellectuals of her time, including Brauner, Mircea Vulcănescu, Petru Comarnescu, Henri H. Stahl, Mihail Sebastian, and Paul Sterian.

[7] In early 1946, when Pătrăşcanu, who was Romania's Minister of Justice, decided to go against the will of his party and intervened in the standoff between King Michael I and the Petru Groza executive (greva regală – "the royal strike"), she mediated between him and two well-known anti-communist figures Victor Rădulescu-Pogoneanu and Grigore Niculescu-Buzești, in an attempt to ensure their support for a political compromise.

[8] Together with her friend Brauner, as well as Remus Koffler, Belu Zilber, Petre Pandrea, Herant Torosian, Ioan Mocsony-Stârcea [ro], the engineer Emil Calmanovici, Alexandru Ștefănescu, and others, she was implicated in Pătrășcanu's 1954 trial, being sentenced to twelve years in prison.

[12] Throughout the rest of her life, she maintained a highly critical view of Zilber, and expressed her admiration for Pătrășcanu, who had for long resisted pressures and had been executed in the end.

[6] The volume, which Vladimir Tismăneanu has compared to the works of Margarete Buber-Neumann,[4] is written as a diary, and makes use of her prolific memory, which allowed her to record an immense succession of days, years after events had passed.