Centre for Romanian Studies

Extract from: “Blouse Roumaine – the Unsung Voices of Romanian Women”
http://www.blouseroumaine.com
With the advent of WWII, Smaranda Bràescu enrolled with other women pilots in the ‘White Squadron’, active on the Eastern front, where Romania was trying to retrieve from the Soviets the provinces taken by Russia as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. After 1944, Bràescu joined the 13th squadron, which was fighting the Germans on the Western front, first in Transylvania, then in Hungary (Nyiregyhaza, Miskolc) and Czechoslovakia (Rimaska Sabota, Trencin and Piestany). Although a war hero Smaranda Bràescu soon fell foul of the communist puppet régime which was installed in Romania by Stalin’s armies. She protested to the United Nations about the legality of the 1946 elections and her letter of protest to the Allied Command in Romania fell into the hands of a Russian general. Thereafter Smaranda Bràescu became a pariah and had to join the underground resistance in order to escape imprisonment and certain death. She operated under an assumed name, first from a convent and then as an anti-communist resistance fighter. She died of cancer at the age of 51, and was buried in Cluj, under her assumed name of Maria Popescu, in a grave on which her merits and real identity could not be spelled out. The people who helped her were hounded out and given long prison sentences, including the doctors who looked after her in hospital.

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