A few days ago, I visited the (re)construction site of the Heroes’ Monument in Oarba de Mureș and the area where fierce battles were fought in the autumn of 1944 to liberate Transylvania from German-Hungarian occupation.
The entire memorial complex in Oarba de Mureș is undergoing renovation and restoration. Work began this year and is scheduled to be completed by the end of February 2027.
For Romanians, Oarba de Mureș has the same significance as the Katyn Forest has for our Polish friends. This is because Romanian troops were forced by Russian commanders Rodion Malinovski and Sergei Trofimenko to launch several suicidal attacks on the extremely well-fortified German positions on a hill (Sângeorgiu).
In order to conquer this hill, a key point for the continuation of the Allied offensive towards the West, Romanian troops were ordered to cross the Mureș River (deep and turbulent in the area) and attack head-on the positions defended by some subunits of the 8th SS Cavalry Division „Florian Geyer.” All this without engineer troups support, without bridges, and with almost no artillery support.
Romanian generals Ion Dumitru and Edgar Rădulescu asked Soviet commanders to allow them to attack on the flanks and encircle the German defenders. Their proposal was categorically rejected by the Russian commanders.
This was because the Soviets had some scores to settle with the Romanian army. The latter (on the orders of Marshal Ion Antonescu) had allied itself with the Wehrmacht and participated, alongside other foreign troops (Hungarian, Italian, Finnish etc), in Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the USSR, from June 1941 to August 1944, when Romania broke its alliance with Nazi Germany and joined the Allies.
The stake for Romania was the liberation of Bessarabia, an ancient Romanian territory that is now an independent state, occupied by the Red Army in 1940. However, unlike Finnish Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, who attacked the USSR alongside the Axis Powers and who, after liberating the Finnish territory invaded by the Russians after the Winter War of 1940, stopped his troops at the old Finnish border, Marshal Ion Antonescu went alongside Hitler far beyond Romania’s borders. Actually, all the way to Stalingrad.
So, in retaliation, the Russian army turned the Romanian army’s 9th and 11th infantry divisions into cannon fodder. The Romanian army lost over 11,000 men in the suicidal attacks at Oarba de Mureș. Among the fallen was one of the authors’ grandfathers: he was severely wounded and died a few days later in the hospital in the nearby city of Târnăveni. The other grandfather, who also took part in the fighting at Oarba de Mureș and was among the soldiers who guarded the train carrying Poland’s National Treasure on Romanian territory, was also wounded, but survived.
In the end, with enormous losses, Sângeorgiu Hill was conquered, and the offensive continued westward with the outcome we all know.
What should be remembered here is that this is how the USSR treated its new allies. It treated them the same way in the half-century that followed, during which the peoples behind the Iron Curtain suffered enormously. Only now, some 35 years after the fall of communism, are the countries of Eastern Europe beginning to recover. In the meantime, the former communist countries of Europe have changed. A lot, and for the better.
What has not changed is Russia’s aggressiveness, its terrible hatred of democracy, and its expansionist tendencies. Europeans still have lessons to learn from the tragedies of Katyn and Oarba de Mureș. Because the Russian leopard cannot change its spots.
Pictures and video by ArgeșulOnline.ro/Sorin Simion
