ANTI-COMMUNIST RESISTANCE
– FAGARAS – SOUTHERN SLOPES
(I)

Apart from the stalinist drive to destroy the independent peasantry, the peasants were subjected to special persecution not only because they exerted charity, or were suspected of being capable of charity towards the partisans, but also merely because they held religious beliefs (hence, “subversive” with respect to the newly installed communist system). On March 10, 1949, the armed forces of the MIA (Ministry of the Internal Affairs), including heavy artillery troops, descended upon the village of Fundul Racaciunii, in Moldavia: they demolished the church; tortured the village schoolmaster Anton Benchea in front of his wife and children until his body was mangled and then slain; the women who had fled the woods with their children were run down and arrested, together with their husbands (after a week of beatings they were released, bleeding and disfigured). On March 15, the same procedure was applied to the village of Faraoani, in Moldavia. Secret police troops killed Ioan Farcas, the village cantor, by throwing him from the height of the bell tower. They seized four priests, Ion Butnaru, Anton Damec, Petre Dinca and Anton Olaru, together with their congregation, beat them up, bound them in heavy iron chains and threw them into the deep winter snow to freeze there. Only one, 80 years-old Anton Ciceu, was not chained and thrown into the snow to freeze but was let loose and told to go home, only to be shot to death in the back with machine-guns as soon as he started walking. Victorious in this battle, the MIA troops then arrested from the remaining villagers enough to fill the trucks they had driven up in, and took them to political imprisonment in Bacau. The direct methods resorted by this “government of workers and peasants” were arrest, killing, beating and torture. Nicolae Ceausescu and Constantin Doncea led a team among whose members were Dorobantu, Badea, Bizin, Moraru, all of whom were promoted to the rank of officers in MIA. They had absolute power and were past putting on a show of legality over their brutality and absolute inhumanity. They murdered Gheorghe Mihai, attorney-at-law, and Tica Popescu, a school teacher, during “questionings”, right in the office of the Chief of the Tribunal of Pitesti. Frequently, secret police officers provoked the citizens to respond to mistreatment, so as to be “justified” in beating up and murdering their victims. Incidents of this type happened in Leicesti, Badesti, Stalpeni, in Muscel County, and in Cumpana and Costesti in Arges County. Under those circumstances, many peasants fled to the mountains. On the southern slopes of the Fagaras Mountains, General Gheorghe Arsenescu was organizing a group of partisans, aided by Petre and Toma Arnautoiu. General Arsenescu led the partisans until 1952, when he went into hiding. He lived in hiding until 1960, when he was captured and killed.
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