Elena Bagdad – a luminous figure
Lenuța Bagdad was also a luminous figure in our struggle. She came from the land of Craiova, as did comrade Nicoleta, with whom she was friends. Daughter of a colonel, from an old Romanian family, with the seal of nobility, she gave herself with all her energy to the Movement she loved, supporting comrade Nicoleta. She was a strong and beautiful girl, with her hair tied back in two small buns around her ears. With a figure that expressed health and joy, with a permanent smile that lit up her face and made it even more beautiful.
That is how she witnessed the tragic events that followed the death of the captain. She worked with comrade Nicoleta as the head courier. That cold, wet autumn, the grief of losing the captain and the boys, aggravated her illness. She asked to be admitted to a sanatorium, but with unparalleled determination she remained at work to the very end.
She was arrested and taken to the Sadaclia women’s camp in Bessarabia. There, after some time, she began to bleed. Concerned, not for herself, but for the girls with whom she was staying, she asked the camp commander to isolate her so as not to make the others sick, and then asked the girls to meet in a room next to hers on the days when they had some freedom, so that she could listen to everything they discussed and thus participate in the life of the camp. Her illness worsened and the camp authorities asked that she be admitted to a sanatorium. So she was taken from the camp to the sanatorium at Pârnova, near Iași. Two weeks before her execution, while she was in the sanatorium, she received a visit from her mother. She found her with her prayer book and death candle on her bedside table. She told her mother: “I don’t regret dying, what I regret is that I will die on a hospital bed instead of dying in battle.
But God granted her wish. After the execution of Armand Călinescu, hundreds of legionnaires were murdered in the streets, camps and prisons. We were in Sadaclia, waiting for the order, ready to die. But the order stopped at Lenuța Bagdad. She was taken from the sanatorium in a car with a few gendarmes and taken to the edge of a forest in the evening. There she asked to be allowed to light her candle and pray. She thanked God for granting her wish to die for the Movement. Then she stood up and asked them to shoot her. According to those who carried out the execution, the soldiers no longer had the courage to kill her and fired indiscriminately. Then the officer took the gun from one of the soldiers and fired. Then they huddled her in the carriage and stopped at the edge of a village where there was a cemetery. It was already evening. At the edge of the cemetery, where the rubbish was piled up, they dug a small hole and put her in it.
By chance, a woman from the outskirts of the village had come to the cemetery to gather grass for her animals, and she saw the gendarmes burying something. But she hid out of fear. In the morning she went to see what had happened. The dogs had already started to dug in that place. With the hoe, she covered the spot with as much earth as she could, and then she stomped on it. That’s how we found her in 1940 when they dug her up and took her to Predeal to the cemetery behind the chapel.
On the occasion of the exhumation, my mother (who had always been at her head) whispered to me: “Lenuța was never more beautiful than now!”
(Sofia Cristescu Dinescu – The Tear of Punishment, pages 19-21)