Elisabeta Rizea

Who was Elisabeta Rizea?

Elisabeta Rizea was a Romanian anti-communist partisan in the Făgăraş Mountains of Northern Wallachia. After the Romanian Revolution, she became the symbol of Romania's anti-communist resistance.

Rizea was born in Nucșoara, a small village in Argeş County in the Southern Carpathians, to a family of peasants who lived off plot of cultivated 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 guerrilla group, Haiducii Muscelului, led by Colonel Gheorghe Arsenescu. Her assigned task within the group was to provide food and supplies.

After she was captured by the Romanian militia in 1952, she was declared "duşman al poporului" and sentenced to death because she refused to give information about the other partisans. Eventually her sentence was commuted to seven years in prison. When Arsenescu was arrested in 1961, her sentence was extended by another 25 years, but three years later, in 1964, she was freed under the terms of a general amnesty.