In case you were wondering what it takes to have the world “defiant” appear in the headline of your obituary, I present Elisabeta Rizea. There is much work to do.
Elisabeta Rizea, 91, a Defiant Romanian, Dies
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
BUCHAREST, Romania, Oct. 9 (AP) — Elisabeta Rizea, an anti-Communist resistance fighter whose defiance made her symbol in the battle against tyranny, died on Monday. She was 91.
Ms. Rizea died in Pitesti, in the south, said Constantin Ticu Dumitrescu, another well-known anti-Communist.
After the Communists came to power in 1945, Ms. Rizea joined a resistance group in the Fagaras mountains, providing its members with food and money. Captured by the Romanian militia in the summer of 1949, she was sentenced to seven years in prison for “aiding criminals.”
After the arrest of the anti-Communist leader Gheorghe Arsenescu in 1961, Ms. Rizea was sentenced to an additional 25 years, but she was pardoned three years later under a general amnesty.
After Communism faded in 1989, details of her story emerged in Romanian newspapers and films.
“When these wretched Communists came to power, they took everything from us, the land, the wooden carts — the hair off our heads,” she said to reporters in 2001 during a visit to her home by Michael, the former king of Romania. “Still, what they could not take was our soul.”