Elisabeta Rizea
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Elisabeta Rizea (1912-6 October 2003) was a Romanian anti-communist partisan in the Făgăraş Mountains of Northern Wallachia. After the Romanian Revolution of 1989, she became the symbol of anti-communist resistance.
Rizea was born in Nucşoara, a small village in Argeş County, in the Southern Carpathians to a family of peasants that lived off cultivating a plot of land. After World War II, as the Soviet Army imposed a Communist government in Romania, the peasants had to give up their land in order to implement collective farming. Out of opposition to this, Elisabeta Rizea and her husband joined an anti-Communist guerilla group Haiducii Muscelului led by Colonel Gheorghe Arsenescu, her task within the group being to provide food and supplies.
After she was captured by the Romanian militia in 1952, because she refused to give information about the other partisans, she was declared "duşman al poporului" (enemy of the people) and sentenced to death. Eventually this was commuted to seven years in prison. When the group's leader, Gheorghe Arsenescu, was arrested in 1961, her sentence was extended by another 25 years. However, she was freed under the terms of a general amnesty in 1964.
During her twelve years spent in jail, she was subjected to various types of torture: she was hung by her hair from a hook and beaten until she fainted due to broken ribs, and was also scalped, burnt and beaten with a shovel. When she got out of jail, she had no hair and she couldn't walk, as her knees were destroyed by the torture.
Her story became known after an interview included in the 1992 documentary Memorialul durerii by Lucia Hossu-Longin.
[edit] References
- "Elisabeta Rizea de Nucsoara". România Liberă, 11 October 2003
- Cristina Tanase, Elisabeta Rizea, forgotten hero remembered, Vivid, September 2004.
