A legendary hero: Colonel (r) Gheorghe Arsenescu
The cloak of oblivion seems to have fallen over the sacrifices and sufferings of those who took part in the resistance movement in the Mioritic lands of Muscel. Decades have passed since then, wounds that have healed in the great suffering of the Romanian people. The revolution of December 1989 ushered in a new era in the country’s political life, but the scars of those decades of communist oppression are still visible. Most of the victims of that vile regime have passed into eternity. Today’s free society refuses to remember their suffering.
Faced with communist oppression after the abolition of the monarchy, the Muscel district was abolished. It had given the Marxist rulers too much hassle. As a natural reaction to the abolition of property, the abolition of all freedoms through the establishment of a totalitarian regime, the conscious society of the Muscelans began to close ranks and act clandestinely against the measures to communise the country. Colonel Gheorghe Arsenescu, the elite soldier from the voivodeship town of Câmpulung, was among the conscientious people who decided to act against the regime being established under the cover of Soviet tanks. Little has been written about him, although his name is part of the legends spread at the foot of the Muscel Mountains.
Born on 31 May 1907, the year of the peasant uprisings, Gheorghe Arsenescu was brought up by his father, Captain Ion Arsenescu, one of the heroic officers who was seriously wounded and died in a field hospital during the dramatic battles of 6 August 1917 at Mărășești. The widowed mother of six had to work hard to raise her children. As the eldest, Gică was an invaluable helper in the agricultural and domestic work, which earned him the sympathy of relatives and friends.
Attracted to the military uniform, Gheorghe Arsenescu entered the infantry school in 1926, graduating as one of the first with the highest mark of “excellent”. Promoted to lieutenant, he was briefly assigned to a border guard regiment before enrolling at the Higher School of Infantry in Sibiu, where he graduated with honours, being one of the top five officers out of 225 students.
Out of concern and love for his mother and his five younger brothers, he asked to be transferred to the 30th Dorobanți Regiment in Câmpulung. A talented marksman, he enrolled at the War College, where he was one of the firsts to graduate, and then went toTârgoviște to complete his training as a staff officer with the rank of captain. Here, during the “legionary uprising” of 22 January 1941, at the head of a tank unit, he thwarted the rebels’ attempt to occupy the prefectural headquarters and public institutions in the town of Târgoviște. Back in Câmpulung, he helped to rebuild his parents’ house.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Gheorghe Arsenescu was in charge of the Operations Office of the 20th Mountain Division, under the command of the heroic General Dumitrache, and took part in the campaign in the East to recover the stolen provinces. He was wounded in Crimea. Recovering, he returned to the front and was promoted to major in August 1944. At the end of the war, he was appointed head of the county commission for the implementation of the armistice. Through his skill he was able to contain the exaggerated demands of the Soviets. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1947. Dissatisfied with the new model of military education introduced in the army, a faithful copy of the Soviet one, the elite officer, decorated with the Order of the Star of Romania, was listed as stand-by operator.
He retired to Câmpulung, where he had built a house and a small farm that for a time supplied the town market with milk, butter and cream. He joined the National Liberal Party, where he was co-opted into the urban leadership of the party. He was outraged by the overthrow of the King and the establishment of the People’s Democratic regime. He believed that the international political situation would lead to the outbreak of a new war, which would force the communist government to decide to arrest the unblocked officers and opposing politicians, as well as to eliminate all valuable elements in the country, Gheorghe Arsenescu, together with Nicolae Enescu and the brothers Ion and Gheorge Purnichescu, industrialists, initiated in their house in Cetățeni the creation of a resistance group with a firm commitment to act in defence of freedom and property, for the restoration of the monarchy. This initiative was joined by other friends, among whom the following stand out: the lawyer Ion Constantinescu, the engineer Radu Rosetti, the colonel Gheorghe Duțeanu, the captain Petre Cojocaru, Gheorghe Chiriță, Florian Potcoavă, the teacher Dumitru Burtea and many others, to the extent that their action spread to the north of the county.
At the end of March 1949, Gheorghe Arsenescu, having been informed by his contact Miron Grigore that some members of the group had been arrested as a result of an unforgivable escapade on the part of Traian Marinescu, left the capital, where he had taken refuge during the winter in order to expand the movement, and moved to the valley of the river Doamnei, to the village of Nucșoara. In the house of the teacher Ion Arnăuțoiu, he met the group led by Toma Arnăuțoiu, a discharged officer, among whom were intellectuals and peasants from the village, in order to immediately expand the resistance movement and act against the security organs that were suffocating the austere life of the local population. At that time, he also met the group of the lawyer Dumitru Apostol from Curtea de Argeș, who had already had several confrontations with the Securitate, which led to the arrest of the whole group some time later.
One night (19 June 1949), some of the group’s leaders, surrounded by Securitate troops in the old teacher’s house, managed to break out of the encirclement by shooting two Securitate sergeants who had stormed the fugitives. It was a hard night. The arrests were widespread.
A few weeks later, Gheorghe Arsenescu, accompanied by a peasant, left the area, leaving behind the Nucșoara group under the leadership of Toma Arnăuțoiu. On their way to Câmpulung, the two were surrounded in an old man’s house in Bughea. They managed to escape and took refuge in the stable of a tax collector in Mățău.
With his courage and experience, Gheorghe Arsenescu managed to confuse the vigilance of his pursuers by slipping among them. He took refuge in the area of Dragoslavele and Rucăr and continued his action with other refugees from the Muscel Mountains.
The raids by the communist police continued. The first group of 40 people arrested were interrogated under the most heinous torture and sentenced to years of hard labour. This was followed by the arrest and sentencing of the brothers Ion and Gheorghe Purnichescu, together with their wives and friends, and the arrest and sentencing of other local people, peasants and intellectuals, suspected of having helped to provide food for the refugees.
After the arrest and sentencing of a group of active officers from Major Dumitrache’s group, Gheorghe Arsenescu had to go through all the traps almost alone. On the night of 14 September 1951, while crossing the peak of Măgura towards the Târgului River, he was ambushed and shot in the abdomen and left shoulder without being captured. Returning to the hiding place provided by old Apostol Poștoacă on the outskirts of the town, he treated himself with medicines that the old man had brought from his father-in-law, Gheorghe Buduluca. It was not easy for him to live in total isolation and constant danger.
His greatest disappointment was the capture and annihilation of the Nucșoara group, with almost a hundred arrests. One night, the brothers Toma and Petre Arnăuțoiu, through an unforgivable imprudence that would prove fatal to them, found themselves in the house of their friend Grigoruță Poenăreanu in Corbșori, where they had been invited. With the complicity of Captain Cârnu, head of the intervention force and investigator, the host, their good friend, put sleeping pills in their drinks so that the Securitate could easily arrest them. All the fugitives were then arrested in a hideout dug into the wall of a ravine. Four of them were shot in the ambush. Arrests continued, with intellectuals and peasants being investigated and tried. By decision of the Bucharest Military Tribunal no. 107 of 19 May 1959, they were sentenced to severe punishments, 12 of them to death. On the night of 19 July 1959, the following were executed in Jilava: priest Ioan Drăgoi, priest Ion Constantinescu, priest Nicolae Andreescu, Toma Arnăuțoiu, Petre Arnăuțoiu, Gheorghe Tomeci, Titu Jublean, Nicolae Băsoiu, Ion Săndoiu, Benone Milea, Cârnu’s informer, Nicolae Ticu, teacher Ion Nica.
Life in hiding had become dramatic for Gheorghe Arsenescu. After his wife’s release from prison, he contacted her through letters in which Maria drowned her tears and suffering.
“Be strong,” she wrote to him. Carry your cross with unshakable faith that God will not forget us. I live only with the memory of the moments we spent together and the hope that the happy day of our reunion will come. I came back suffering. I see myself wandering the streets of the capital looking for a place to live for me and our son, without work, without a penny. I have nothing left of everything I had. My old friends shun me as if I were a plague. I haven’t seen your brother since he told me not to go to him because he was afraid too.
I got a job as a painter in a carpentry cooperative, where I work with two old men from 6 in the morning until 6 in the evening for a few lei, because we can’t make a living. We don’t even have enough food for two. I’m followed everywhere, me and the boy, but we’re tough. They took me to the militia in a jeep and are pressuring me to get a divorce. If I don’t, they’ll take me to Aiud. I’m afraid I won’t resist. I’ve been faithful and dignified to you. I’m fighting for Gigi, this child who is also being singled out. This is the eighth Easter we’ve spent away from you. But the Resurrection gives us the strength to see this ordeal through to the end. I don’t know how much more I can bear.
Demoralised and ill, Gheorghe Arsenescu bore his suffering with gritted teeth in the hiding place from which he sometimes escaped to keep in touch with other refugees from the Dâmbovița valley and to make a move. It had been almost 11 years of loneliness, torment and illness, with no light at the end of the tunnel. In the meantime, his wife had told him that the first group of 42 convicts, including myself, who had been tried twice, had been retried for a third time after the public prosecutor, Alexa Augustin, had appealed to the Supreme Court, and that the court, after 17 gruelling hearings, had sentenced them to much longer sentences.
A neighbour of the elderly Poștoacă saw Gheorghe Arsenescu in the garden one night. He had gone for a walk. Croitoru, who had been arrested for sabotage, had revealed Arsenescu’s presence in exchange for a promise that he would be acquitted. On the night of 1 February 1960, Gheorghe Arsenescu was arrested. After a long investigation lasting 2 years, during which he was subjected to the most sadistic torture and interned in the psychiatric hospital of Poiana Mare – Dolj, he was tried and sentenced to death by Criminal Decision no. 107 of 11 February 1962.
Isolated in the infamous Cell Zero of Jilava, with green walls covered with dirt, wet concrete on the floor, water dripping from the ceiling, no bed, no mat and fed only on a quarter of bread and a cup of hot water every two days, Gheorghe Arsenescu awaited the day of his execution. On the night of 29 February, at 8.30 p.m., he took the minutes: “We, Lieutenant Colonel Csako Eduard, Judge of the Military Tribunal of the Military Prosecutor’s Office and Major Alexandrescu Gh., Director of the Jilava Prison for the execution of sentence no. 107 of 11 February 1962, by which Arsenescu Gheorghe was sentenced to death. After being identified, the condemned man was taken from his cell, blindfolded and executed by pistol shot by a team of three soldiers recruited from the prison staff. The prison doctor pronounced the condemned man dead, after which the body of the executed man was taken by the commander of Jilava prison, who ordered his burial in the place where the other prisoners who died in prison are buried”.
A copy of the medical certificate issued by Dr. Gheorghe Alexandrescu certifies that the 53-year-old Arsenescu Gheorghe suffers from hypertension, ulcerous disease (he underwent surgery for gastric syndrome), sinus tachycardia, acute amygdalo-pharyngitis and a wound scar on the right thigh, left abdomen and left shoulder.
This was the death of the legendary hero about whom there were many rumours among the inhabitants of the northern county. He was captured in his sleep, before he could use the grenade he had under his pillow for his last moments of freedom.
(Ion Constantinescu Mărăcineanu – Memoria Magazine No. 49, 2/2004, pp. 82-87. Compare also another version of the text published under the same title “A Hero of Legend. Colonel Gheorghe Arsenescu” in Analele Sighet, Vol. VIII, 2000, pp. 565-571).