One of the closest friends of Sebastian who became rabidly anti-Semitic under the influence of the Iron Guard was Mircea Eliade, whose fanatical involvement with the Iron Guard Sebastian records in a subtle and sad way. He continued to socialize with them, acknowledging that this represents for him something almost unbearable. Already in 1937 Sebastian did not have too many illusions about his friends who became Iron Guards. As the diary enters the war period the physical space around Sebastian gets narrower many of his friends are deserting him, and the heavy anti-Semitic legislation makes him a pariah. The diary refers often to Sebastian's friends, but it represents more than that: It is the political chronicle of the free falling of the Romanian intelligentsia toward fascism. From a population targeted for extermination the Romanian Jews became a bargaining chip, a possible way through which the Romanian authorities were hoping to buy the goodwill of the Allies.

Like about half of the Romanian Jewry Sebastian remained alive because of the change of tactics of the Romanian authorities in terms of the solving of the 'Jewish problem.' When he saw that Romania might not win the war in alliance with Nazi Germany, Antonescu and his clique tried to win the war changing sides. If Klemperer lived in an ultimate Nazi society Sebastian survived in a world of opportunistic fascism. Like Sebastian, Klemperer registered the systematic shrinking of the physical and intellectual space around him. Like Sebastian, Klemperer was in a brutal and merciless way rejected by this society only because he was Jewish. Perhaps the closest example of a similar diary is Victor Klemperer 's I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941. Of course Sebastian's diary was not the first literary description of the nazification of a European society seen through the eyes of a Jewish intellectual. Sebastian's diary covers the not-so-glorious period of three anti-Semitic dictatorships in the Romanian national history: the dictatorship of Carol II (1938-40), which followed the short-lived, rabidly anti-Semitic government of Goga-Cuza (December 1937-February 1938) the dictatorship of Ion Antonescu in alliance with the Iron Guard (September 1940-January 1941) and the dictatorship of Antonescu without the Iron Guard (1941-44).

Jurnal (1938–1945) by Helga Weissová