Gheorghiu's best-known book depicts the plight of a naive Romanian young farmhand,

Johann Moritz, under German, Soviet and American occupation of Central Europe.
Johann is sent to a labor camp by a police captain who covets his wife, Suzanna. At first,
he is tagged as "Jacob Moritz", a Jew. Then, he and fellow Jewish prisoners escape to
Hungary, where he is interned as a citizen of an enemy country. The Hungarian
government sends its foreign residents as Hungarian "voluntary workers to Nazi
Germany". Later, "Moritz Ianos" is "rescued" by a Nazi officer who determines he is a
perfect Aryan specimen, and forces him into service in the Waffen SS as a model for
German propaganda. Imprisoned after the war, he is severely beaten by his Russian
captors, then put on trial by Allied forces because of his work for the Nazis. Meanwhile,
Traian, son of the priest Koruga who employed Moritz in their Romanian village, is a
famous novelist and minor diplomat whose first internment comes when he is picked up
as an enemy alien by the Yugoslavs. Once imprisoned, the two heroes begin an odyssey
of torture and despair. Traian Koruga is deeply unsettled because what he sees as the
machinism and inhumanity of the "Western technical society", where individuals are
treated as members of a category. He was writing a book within a book, "The 25th Hour",
about Johann Moritz and the ordeal awaiting mankind. In the end, Traian suicides in an
American-Polish concentration camp, while Johann is forced by the Americans to choose
between either enlisting in the army, just as World War III is about to start, or to be
interned in a camp (as well as his family) as a citizen from an enemy country.
The book was published in French translation in 1949 and was not published in Romania
until 2004.
In 1967, Carlo Ponti produced a film based on Gheorghiu's book. The movie was directed
by Henri Verneuil, with Anthony Quinn as Johann, Virna Lisi as Suzanna, and Serge
Reggiani as Traian.