The “Terrorist” Gheorghe Arsenescu, a precious man devoted to the point of sacrifice to his country and his nation

Yes, the man who was labelled a “terrorist” by a crooked communist military tribunal was my husband. And he was a real man. And a great Romanian. Who gave himself selflessly for his country and for the people of Romania.

He was born in 1907, on 31 May, in the same town as me, in Câmpulung Muscel.

As if by destiny, he came from a family of patriots and fighters. His father had fought in the 1916-1918 war of rebellion, returned home sick and died early. And of the six children his wife – the mother of my future husband – had left behind, all three boys went into the military. But the three daughters – all of them – also married soldiers.

Gheorghe – Gicu, as we called him, those close to him – attended the “Dinicu Golescu” high school in our town. Later he studied at the military school in Sibiu and at the Higher War College in Bucharest, from which he graduated with honours. Naturally, the young officer experienced a rapid and spectacular rise in his career, and his superiors assigned him to the General Staff.

Of course, I had known him since he was a teenager. And I admired him. I heard so many good things about him when I came back from the “Pitar Moș” boarding school in Bucharest, where I went to high school.

For some time, it seemed, there was more than admiration and friendship between us. He asked me to marry him.

And in 1932 we were married. It was a marriage of great understanding and love. He was 25 years old. I was 18.

But the dramatic course of events that was to befall our country would put a brutal and cruel end to this fulfilment. Just as it would change the good life of most Romanians.

The first heavy blow was the loss of Bessarabia and Bucovina in 1940. The second – no less painful for us – was the war fought on Soviet territory.

From the outset, Colonel Gheorghe Arsenescu, who became chief of staff of the Vânătorii de Munte (romanian army elite special forces), saw this action as an adventure doomed to failure. 

This war will be lost! – he said, even in his advice to the Romanian army commanders. He was the only one who dared to express this opinion.

– “Are you a Russophile?” he was severely reprimanded by Marshal Antonescu.

Of course he was not a Russophile. He was simply a good strategist. And he was also – or more importantly – a Romanian. But the obsessive idea of reuniting the country and the nation warmed his heart. This war, with all the risks it entailed, was, at that moment in history, the only way to fulfil our desire. Understanding this call, my husband resigned from his position in the General Staff and asked to go to the front. He wanted to contribute directly to the natural recovery of the two Romanian provinces.

In fact, it soon seemed to us that the dream was coming true. Liberated, Bessarabia and Bucovina returned to their roots. Unfortunately, the war did not end there. And Colonel Gheorghe Arsenescu, Chief of Staff of the 2nd Mountain Division, had to continue fighting, against his will, on Soviet soil. Returning home would have looked like desertion. And he couldn’t leave his men anyway.

So he ended up in Crimea. Where he was surrounded, along with the entire division he commanded.

The news came to me like a thunderbolt. From then on I lived in fear of what would happen to him. First I received hopeful news from the General Staff. My husband had come up with a daring plan to involve the rest of the army, which would fall behind the besiegers in order to break the siege.

But soon I was informed that this plan, sent by special couriers, had been intercepted by the enemy. My husband and his soldiers had only one hope left: to fight to the death to break the siege and repel the Soviet soldiers who had trapped them. The attempt seemed almost madness. But with uncommon courage and manliness, Gicu launched the attack. And he managed to break through the encirclement and repel the enemy troops. However, in this unequal – but victorious – battle, Commander Arsenescu is badly wounded. One of his shoulder blades and his arm are shattered. Nearly unconscious, he was taken by ambulance to the military hospital in Bucharest.

He underwent surgery to remove the bullets from his flesh. His shattered bones were set. And yet he recovers. Then, without a moment’s hesitation or pause, he returned to the front. He had promised not to abandon those who believed in him.

What follows is the catastrophe we know. The Soviets won the battle of Stalingrad. The German front collapses. The retreat of the Romanian army is imminent. 

The country was overrun by savage and cruel forces in the service of an inhuman ideology. In the name of “hate” and “class struggle”, the Bolshevik justice system hunted down the elite. In the middle of the night or in broad daylight, vans no longer hesitate to round up the most chosen individuals. And prisons sprang up like mushrooms.

My husband was one of the first to be targeted. He’s out of the army and his arrest can’t be far off. But a patriot and a fighter like him can’t stand idly by. In accordance with the nation’s ancient and sacred tradition, he’s gone the way of the forest. As early as 1947, he climbed into the mountains. From there, to fight the foreign occupiers.

He left without telling me. Only later did I learn that he was the organiser and commander of several resistance and action centres. From Câmpulung, from the heights to the north of the city, up to the Făgăraș mountains – not to mention the Red Mountain – he had set up a network of fires. As his main refuge and hiding place, he chose the Cetățuia hermitage in the village of Cetățeni, where the Purnichescu brothers – Ion and Gheorghe -, Petre Cojocaru, Gheorghe Hachenzelner, Longin Predoiu, Ion and Gheorghe Zechil gathered around him. And they were not the only ones. An uninterrupted river of solidarity, sympathy and hope flowed from the neighbouring regions and even from the whole country. It flowed towards my husband. Even my father – who was of a certain age – had willingly become a kind of messenger.

And in spite of all the pain of parting, I was actually very proud of him. It helped me to bear all that I had endured.

Like me, my father, Gheorghe Buduluca, did not know the hiding place or the paths leading to it. My father only reached the village of Chilii, near Câmpulung, where the Poștoacă family lived. I didn’t ask how, but I was told that some of the things he needed reached my husband through these supporters of the cause they were fighting for. How news from him reached us. Mostly by word of mouth. Very rarely on paper. Sometimes a note would come that would make me live. “The earth is burning beneath me with longing for you and the child” – he wrote to me once.

In the winter of 1948-1949, for a short time – and for the last time – we were together again. I had secretly rented an apartment in Bucharest, at 19 Aviator Jean Texier Street, in the name of a benefactor. Here we were a little happy. Although the worry about what was happening in the country and the thought of the “brothers” he had left behind did not leave him for a moment.

Then we learned that not long after hiding in Cetățuia, he had crossed the mountains alone to Nucșoara, the “tainița” of the Arnăuțoiu family’s patriotic action group. He met Toma Arnăuțoiu, the group’s commander, and the two made a pact. They swore loyalty to each other and unity in their struggle. And since Toma Arnăuțoiu had reached the front with the rank of captain and my husband had the rank of colonel, he was also recognised as the commander of this nucleus.

 

But our happiness in the house on rue Jean Texier didn’t last long. Through the same lively and moving network of partisans of the holy cause for which Colonel Gheorghe Arsenescu had sacrificed himself, we were informed that our hiding place had been drawn. The very night we received the news, we parted company. He went to Cetățuia. I returned with our boy to the cellar on Vasile Lascăr Street, where the communist authorities had thrown me.

One day, as I was walking down the street, I was approached by two men in civilian clothes. They ordered me not to say a word and not to try to escape. To follow them, to make a statement. I made a few steps under their escort when they covered my eyes with dark glasses and pushed me into a car that stopped beside us. Then they drove off.

A four and a half year old child was left alone in the world. It was Dragos, our little boy.

I was taken to the basement of the Ministry of the Interior Affairs. Insulted and brutalised. Threatened with bad things that would happen to the child. I was forced to answer questions about the ‘criminal’ activities of the ‘terrorist’ who was my life partner. I kept saying that I knew nothing. And I begged to be released so that I could take care of the child. But nobody cared. The investigation went on for days and nights. I could hardly catch my breath.

Then, without knowing why, I was transferred to Jilava and put in room 4, an inferno where dozens of women layed.

One day, thirty of us were taken out of here and sent, under heavy guard, to a sorting camp in Ghencea. I was astonished to learn that I had been condemned. How? When? Without trial? Yes, I had been sentenced… An “administrative” sentence of two years – the maximum.

And in the sweltering heat, without a drop of water – because food was out of the question – we were put into a “cattle-wagon”, one of the wagons used to transport cattle to slaughterhouses. Our first stop was the Cernavodă prison. Then came the Saligny prison. And then the prison at kilometre 8.

Throughout this passage I was part of the 9th forced labour detachment. We pushed iron wheelbarrows, loaded to the brim, over long distances. I was also sent to the Caraș Valley to pick cotton. It was hard, my hands were bleeding, but it all seemed wonderful compared to what was to follow in the Târgșor prison.

That was a bunch of disused stables with no ceilings. It was winter, deep winter. Snow, falling unnoticed, was drifting down the walls where the roof should have been. And because the roads were also snowed in, there was nothing to drink. For about three days we were kept on a black fast. But if the hunger tormented us as never before, the cold was even more unbearable. We didn’t know what to do, what hole to crawl into to stop shivering. You just felt like you were losing your mind. And it seemed a blessing at night, when we were forced to pull heavy, unmounted sewing machines that barely moved. The ordinary prisoners worked during the day. We, the political ones only worked at night!

In this hell hole, in Târgșor, I almost envied Mrs. Rășcanu. She was unconscious, gasping for breath. Some of the prisoners were banging on the door, shouting: “Open up! A woman is dying inside!” But no one opened. In fact, only common criminals or thieves were entitled to medical attention. And only they were allowed to receive letters and parcels.

So Mrs. Rășcanu closed her eyes forever in agony. Then she was thrown naked into the mass grave. Her skirt, blouse and the rest of her clothes were stolen and put on by someone else.

Also in the stables of Târgșor, one day Mrs. Elena Brătianu, wife of the historian George Brătianu, was pushed through the door. As usual, when a new fellow-sufferer appeared, we “old ones” crowded around her. She came “from the outside” and could tell us what was going on in the world of the living.

The first news she told us concerned me directly. She told us, in great secrecy, that while listening to the radio station “Free Europe” in Munich, she had learned that a high price had been put on Colonel Arsenescu’s head, believing that this would enable them to get him. In the meantime,” the newcomer said, “he, my husband, had become a myth for most Romanians. They called him “the peacock of the forest”.

These words really touched me. I burst into tears. That’s when Mrs. Brătianu found out who I was and asked me to forgive her. Unwittingly, she had stirred up my most painful memories.

In the days that followed, I came to appreciate this lady more and more. She was of great dignity. Dignified and especially brave. She defied the torturers. She was always on hunger strike. But – for understandable reasons – the guards were ordered to keep her alive. They forcibly opened her jaws and forced the food down her throat. Her mouth was a wound. And to bring her further to her knees, she was told that she was not worthy to work in a workshop like the rest of us. So she was given the task of washing the common prisoners’ toilets.

Late one night I asked her why she didn’t go abroad with her daughters. She told me that she wanted to stay with her husband, Professor George Bratianu, in the hope that she could be useful to him.

When, under pressure from abroad, she was released to earn a living, she had to sweep tram carriages. And when, tormented to her heart’s content, she answered the call of the girls, Joan and Mary, and went abroad, she always longed for home.

I was haunted by the thought that in 1950 I had been sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, supposedly for administrative reasons. But the term had long since expired and there was no talk of release. I could no longer bear to worry about my child, who had been left alone. My God, what will happen to Gicu? Would he still exist? I kept asking to go outside to report, to see an elderly guard to whom I could explain and who would understand… Almost two years had passed since the end of my administrative sentence.

In 1954, I was admitted to the prison hospital in Văcărești with serious illnesses. I was finally released. But – unfortunately – this release comes at a high price. It’s a conditional release: I’m forced to divorce Gicu. Otherwise I’ll be right back where I started.

I can’t do such a terrible thing. Leaving my husband at the most dramatic moment of his life? To shake off Gicu when he’s fighting for us in the mountains? When his life is in constant danger? My relatives advised me to take this step, which I felt was unacceptable for our child. Returning to prison would have been a real misfortune for him.

Five years have passed since ’54, when I was released on the condition that I give up being the wife of the “bandit” Gheorghe Arsenescu. In 1959, I obeyed the orders of the Securitate with heartbreaking pain, believing that I would be left to raise my son. But I was deceived. One morning in February 1960, while I was “at work” – in a canteen of the People’s Council, where I was a worker and did all sorts of things, including selling borsch outside – a woman approached me and handed me a bottle to fill… But before I could pour her the borsch, before I could take her money, two militiamen came up behind her. With them came the familiar words, hissed through teeth, rattling in my head: “Follow us! No screaming, no running away! You must make a statement!”

With lightning speed, the black glasses were put on, then I am forced into the “black limousine” that pulls up beside me, without anyone having called for it.

One of the agents sat in the front, next to the driver. The other next to me. I’m like a rag. I could hardly breathe. As if in a dream, I realised that the car was running and that I’d arrived in a suburb of Bucharest. I only jumped when I heard the man next to me ask the driver, “How’s your petrol?” “We’re filling up at Pitești!” comes the reply.

My God, Pitești! The worst dungeon of all that has appeared in the country since the terror broke out!

And here we are. I’m handed over like a bale of hay. The man who took me in signed my name.

My first year in Pitești was 1960. From the beginning I was locked in a cell alone. I’ll forget how to talk – I was telling myself. But at some point I found myself with a visitor. She stayed with me for about ten days. I realised she was a “spy” and I kept quiet all the time. The “spy” had to leave, unable to serve her bosses.

Instead, I find myself being investigated every day.

– Tell me all you know about your husband.

– I don’t know anything anymore! He must be dead!

– Then why didn’t you bury him? – the executioner taunts me.

– I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t know anything about him!

The days and nights I spent in Pitești, “in secret”, were for me the hardest punishment I had ever endured. My memories, my obsessions, the accusations I made against myself, tormented me incessantly. Where is my child? What about Gicu? My God, is he still alive? Two things in particular haunted me. I had found out about them from people close to me, who sometimes came down from the heart of the mountains in great secrecy… I found out that several peasants from the area had been hired to bring some food rations to Arsenescu and his comrades-in-arms. A certain Purnichi also carried out this mission several times. But soon a true friend told them that he was being used as a decoy by the Securitate. This was immediately confirmed. Ion Purnichescu, my husband’s right-hand man, surprised him in the middle of the night in the cave of the Cetățuia hermitage. He crawled like a snake and stood with his ear pressed to the plank that pierced the small cave where the patriots were planning an action. Without thinking, Purnichescu fired. And the traitor was silenced forever. When the commander heard the explosion, Gheorghe Arsenescu rushed to the aid of his subordinate. But he also had to admonish him:

– What have you done, John?! Have you killed a man?!

Another episode was told to me by a contact who had even been sent to me by Gicu. I learned that my husband, alone and in great secrecy, had climbed to Nucșoara, the place where the Arnăuțoiu resistance group had settled, on paths known only to him. On his return, he took the same route over the mountains, but of course in a different direction. Via Gruiu. But when he arrived there, he was met by bullets. From where? – He couldn’t say, but they were shooting at him. Wounded, bleeding profusely, he managed to crawl through the bushes to Mățău. But he could not go any further. He had lost too much blood and his strength was failing him. Two old men – a man and a woman – found him. They took him into their home – at great risk – and cared for him as best they could. They knew he was the “Peacock of the Woods” and they didn’t leave him.

When he recovered, he returned to his family in the hermitage in the heart of Făgăraș and sent me a letter. He told me the story and asked me to send him syringes and some medicine by the same courier. This time, little Dragoș himself slipped into the North Station, through the crowd of hurried travellers. He drew the liaison man to him and handed him the small package containing the requested items.

Of course, even then I didn’t know where our dear Gicu was, let alone the child.

And even though these events had happened a long time ago, here in the hole in Pitești where I was sequestered, the memory of them pained me terribly. How many other such moments of hardship and danger must my husband have experienced since I knew nothing more about him! It was hard to believe that he was still alive!

But in Pitești the nights were particularly unbearable. I desperately tried to close my eyes. But I couldn’t. The prison cellars were filled with the groans, screams and cries of the unfortunates who had been beaten by the torturers. I remembered that someone – I don’t remember who – had whispered to me that the communist power in our country had imported modern instruments of torture from China and the Soviet Union. And now I had the misfortune to witness, almost ‘live’, the effects of these sophisticated devices used to punish rebels.

These events, all of them, have shaken my health. Especially my nerves. I felt I couldn’t take it any more. I did everything I could to get to the infirmary. I hoped to get a sleeping pill… Anyway, to make you stop hearing. Maybe even stop feeling anything. I struggled. I screamed. I cried. Finally I reached the door of the infirmary. Under supervision, of course.

The doctor inside told me to wait. There was a silence that raised my blood pressure. Then, through the door I was leaning against, I heard someone go through the other door of the infirmary. A sick person. And suddenly the door opposite me opened and the doctor beckoned me in.

I almost let out a cry. Down, eyes in the back of his head, white beard and sideburns, Dad! His eyes met mine for a moment. He tried to draw a smile. I couldn’t. On the contrary, tears began to stream down my cheeks. The doctor asked my father to leave the room. He gave me a sedative. And it all happened so quickly that none of our guards seemed to be the least bit enlightened. Instead, I understood that by matching our names – we had just been divorced and were again named after my father – the doctor, this man with a soul, wanted us to find each other.

I returned to my lonely, frozen cell. My head hurt like never before. So did my father! He too had fallen into the hands of the executioners!

I was in so much pain that I didn’t get up from that hard, hard bed for days.

After another three or four days – I think – the cell door opened and a major came in. He had an open face and everything about him looked unusually distinguished.

– Good day – he said politely.

I was so stunned that I was speechless.

The Major continued in a low, hurried tone:

– Your husband is here. Under arrest.

– He’s alive!” – I barely mumbled.

But the “guest” vanished already.

Soon I was informed that the trial of the “Arsenescu gang” was about to begin. I was told this by a lawyer, a “public defender”, who appeared in my cell. I refused his services. And, as I found out later, the same thing happened to the other members of the lot – my father, the Purnichescu brothers, Pimen, the abbot of the Cetățuia hermitage. Even the commander, Gheorghe Arsenescu, says he will defend himself.

And here we are, on the first day of the trial. In the courtroom, Colonel Arsenescu Gheorghe, the organiser and leader of the resistance nucles in the mountains of Muntenia, was introduced first. He was given the first seat in the dock, with his back to all the other “co-accused”. They were brought in later.

When my turn came and I entered the courtroom, I felt the blood rushing to my temples. And I felt like I was suffocating. My eyes fell on him. My husband. After how many years I was able to see him again? And how beautiful he was! Proud and dignified! And – strangely enough – freshly shaven and neatly dressed. Why, after two years of hard imprisonment, beaten bloody and tormented like horse thieves, did the executioners present him so handsomely?! Because, as we immediately learned from the indictment, two years earlier, in 1960, he had fallen into the hands of the secret police. And now it was 1962, the 12th of February.

I was later to learn that he had been discovered – probably by treachery – in the house of the Poștoaca family. That an impressive force of Securitate troops had been deployed around this modest country house. And shots were fired, shots were fired from all sides, shots were fired to such an extent that it was clear that the walls could no longer hold. So as not to destroy the home of these poor people, so generous, so as not to make their situation any more difficult, Gicu went outside and fanned a piece of white cloth. A sign of surrender.

Now in the box, I found it impossible to take my eyes off him. I watched his every move, no matter how small. I wished I could touch him. At least touch him.

I’m woken from my dreams by the call of the accused. I hear his name. He answers in a calm voice: “Present”. Then we’re called, the rest of us. One after the other, like voice recorders, we answer: “Present”… “Present” ….

A moment later, my thoughts were storming again…. But he is alive… He’s alive… And I am alive… What if a miracle happens? What if one day, which can’t be far off, we’ll be together again…

I didn’t even notice when the arraignment started… Yes, it was wake-up call. And I was listening with trepidation. The clerk’s words broke my eardrums:

“Between January and February 1960, the organs of state security arrested the terrorist Arsenescu Gheorghe, member of the PNL-Tătărășcu, former high-ranking officer in the bourgeois-mestizo army, on the run since 1948, initiator of a terrorist gang, together with other hostile elements, who favoured and supported the terrorist and other members of the gang materially and morally, who acted against the state and committed a series of terrorist acts.”

“Buduluca Maria, the ex-wife of the accused, Gheorghe Arsenescu, was aware that he had disappeared from his home in the summer of 1947 in order to escape prosecution for the sabotage acts he had committed, and she was in contact with him during the time he was hiding in the “Cetățuia” hermitage in the commune of Cetățeni, where he had also taken his arsenal, which he secretly possessed.

He also knew that, in the spring of 1948, the accused, Arsenescu Gheorghe, together with other hostile elements, such as Hachenzelner Gheorghe, Cojocaru Petre, Predoiu Longin, Purnichescu Ion, Purnichescu Gheorghe and others, formed a terrorist gang, whose members armed themselves and hid in the mountains.

On several occasions, when Arsenescu Gheorghe and other members of the gang were hiding in Câmpulung-Muscel, the defendant Buduluca Maria was in contact with them.

In the autumn of 1948, following an agreement with the defendant Arsenescu Gheorghe, the defendant Buduluca Maria went to Bucharest to look for a secret place where she could stay with her husband during the winter”.

“The defendant Buduluca Maria, through his father, the co-defendant Buduluca Gheorghe, maintained contact with Arsenescu Gheorghe until 1956, sending him parcels of food, clothes and medicines, as well as a series of letters, in an attempt to keep his spirits up and wait for the possible change of the popular democratic regime in the P.R.R.”.

And the trial that began on that 12 February 1962 lasted for many days. If I remember correctly, about two weeks.

I saw him every day, and every day I missed him more.

The day I was taken in for questioning and had to walk all the way across the room to sign my statement, I walked past him.

– Courage, Mary, courage! he whispered to me, his voice choked with emotion.

At the end of the trial, each of us was given five minutes to defend ourselves. I denied everything, claiming that I had nothing to do with my husband’s activities. Ion Purnichescu refused to defend himself, but asked for clarifications. It was not Colonel Gheorghe Arsenescu, the commander of the group, who shot the traitor Purnichescu – as the indictment showed. He himself, Ion Purnichescu, was the author of Purnichi’s suppression. He goes on to explain that Colonel Arsenescu did not protest when he, too, was accused of killing a man, only out of generosity and in order not to aggravate his friend’s situation. When it was his turn to defend himself, my husband didn’t say a word about him. Instead, he asked the court for mercy for me, for his wife, who remained a stranger to his activities. He also asked the military judges to bear in mind that the accused, who had offered him shelter, a piece of bread or a drop of water, were simple people, generally farmers, who, not knowing the laws of the land, did not realise the seriousness of their actions.

The next day we were told the verdicts. I, Arsenescu-Buduluca Maria – 10 years hard labour; Buduluca Gheorghe – my father – 15 years hard labour. For Arsenescu Gheorghe, my husband, the death penalty. Death!

From that moment on, my collapse was total. What followed was meaningless. The fact that I was going to be imprisoned again, to complete the years I had already served and to complete 10 years in total, made me indifferent. It even seemed to me that what happened to me was nothing compared to Gicu’s fate.

I was immediately transferred to Gai, near Arad. Then to Miercurea-Ciuc, where there was a prison built by Maria Theresa, but “improved” by the communist regime. Everything was long and scary, but I didn’t care.

In Miercurea-Ciuc, Laurenția Arnăuțoiu, the wife of the teacher from Nucșoara, Iancu Arnăuțoiu – who also died in prison as a result of the tortures he was subjected to – died, tortured and tormented, especially in her soul. This tough woman also had three sons – Ionel, who died at the front in Crimea, Toma and Petre, who joined our resistance movement and were both executed by the communist regime in 1959.

It was also in Miercurea-Ciuc prison, in the cell of the “lifers” – those sentenced to life imprisonment – that Maria Plop, who had stood by Toma Arnăuțoiu with all her strength and devotion, ended her short and dramatic existence.

One fine day in 1964, however, I was released. My first thought was of Dragoș, our son. He was all I had left. I learned from my former neighbours that the security service had taken him to Nicu, my husband’s brother. When I knocked on the door, he opened it himself, the little boy.

– Who are you looking for? – he asked politely.

– Dragoș! I shouted, bursting into tears.

Then he hardly recognised me. He started sobbing and clung to my neck.

Together we were put into two small, unhygienic and damp rooms on Labyrinth Street, in a courtyard with many tenants.

Dragoș was almost 10 years old, in primary school and learning very well. But when he got to secondary school, things started to go wrong. At some point, his name became an insurmountable obstacle. It took my husband’s sister Lili, who was married to Mușatescu, to adopt him and change his name. So, under the new name of Dragoș Mușatescu, he did well at university. But as soon as he graduated in engineering and was on his feet, he left for other countries. He had suffered too much at home.

With all the worries about our son’s life and education, I never stopped thinking about Gicu for a moment. I struggled in every way to find out about him. For years and years – 37 of them – I knocked on every door and cried in front of all those heartless political fools to find out about his fate. And finally I did. An address of the Territorial Military Tribunal of Bucharest, number 27 of 27 February 1991, informed me that on 29 May 1962, at 8.30 p.m., in the courtyard of the Jilava prison, the hero collapsed under the bullets of the firing squad.

A day and a half later he would have been 55 years old.

But on that night in May 1962, a great heart given to others stopped beating – brutally and unjustly. The light of a particularly gifted mind was extinguished. A precious man, devoted to his country and his people to the point of sacrifice.

(Maria Arsenescu-Buduluca – “I am the wife of the “terrorist” Gheorghe Arsenescu” in Memoria. Journal of Arrested Thought no. 8, pp. 50-61)