Something about Colonel Arsenescu
A brigade of peasants from Arges, led by their priest (I forgot his name), worked alongside the priests from Olt. In the midst of the propaganda for collectivisation, they had the inspiration to overturn the car in the ditch with the chief responsible for this action, who was none other than Comrade Ceausescu. Their morale was high and their determination showed that they came from the land where an Arsenescu, or the Arnăuțoiu brothers, or Elisabeta Rizea from Nucșoara had risen up in armed resistance.
Also in the garden¹ I met, helpless and with a wooden leg, the one who had been Colonel Arsenescu orderly. He was reserved and quiet in his own way, but when we nagged him too much, he began to tell us about his life as a partisan and the Colonel’s exploits. His eyes widened at the intensity of the images he was reliving, he spoke of Arsenescu with the same pathos with which Napoleon’s grenadiers spoke of the Emperor. So great was Arsenescu’s fame as an invulnerable man and possessor of the “grass of the beasts” that allowed him to be anywhere at any time, and so terrible was the fear in the ranks of the Securitate Service soldiers who hunted him, that once, surrounded by them, he walked through them, rifle in hand, without any of them pointing a gun at him. Many years later, in a village in the foothills of the Oltenia Mountains (Rugetu), this fact was confirmed to me by a church teacher who had received his military training in a Securitate unit that had followed in our hero’s footsteps:
“I was lying down with my rifle in my hand and my finger on the trigger when I saw him emerge from the bush in front of me and come towards me with his rifle in one hand and his cloak fluttering. I put my head to the ground, sweat broke out and my finger began to tremble on the trigger. He walked past me, I felt the wind in his neck from the pockets of his coat, and then he disappeared like a mist…” – the teacher told me.
Almost alone and without any chance of continuing the fight, he left the forest and lost his way in the urban world. But for years afterwards (it seems to have been nine or even ten), Securitate units searched for him in the mountains, surrounded his shadow countless times and fought fierce battles with his purely legendary presence, making the mountains and valleys echo with the sound of bullets fired in vain.
He was captured in a townhouse, the result of treachery.
(Radu Mărculescu – Mărturii pentru Judecata de Apoi adunate din gulagul românesc, Editura Humanitas, București, 2012, pp. 205-207)
- The action takes place in the Periprava camp.