{"id":5546,"date":"2006-11-04T15:39:59","date_gmt":"2006-11-04T20:39:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5546"},"modified":"2024-10-27T17:09:40","modified_gmt":"2024-10-27T21:09:40","slug":"the-legion-of-the-archangel-michael","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5546","title":{"rendered":"The Legion of the Archangel Michael"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reading The Historian<\/a>\"\"<\/i> it is pleasing to me to discover that my own library is kind of a reference library for me. I have had that sensation before (tracked down a post I wrote about it<\/a>) – but it doesn’t happen often. Normally, they are just my books, background, sitting around my apartment like watching sentinels. I barely notice them. But then … when I need something? There they are. I know where to go. I know WHAT I have, and I know in what book … or sometimes I know only: Hmmm, I know I have read more information about this topic … not sure in WHICH book, though. But I am my father’s daughter and with a bit of searching (usually no more than a couple of minutes) – I can locate, to the exact passage, what I am looking for. I’m kind of autistic that way. All of my books on the Balkans, and the Ottoman Empire, and Byzantium has made much of the subject matter in The Historian<\/i> old hat to me. I’m like, “Oh yeah, Carol II, sure, yeah, that guy …Whatever …” “Wallachia, awesome, yup, know all about THAT …” etc. I feel like quite an expert, however ridiculous that may be, and it’s a lot of fun. The Historian<\/i> is not well written, I don’t think, but it’s the kind of thing where you can’t put it down. I cannot. put. it. down. I am tearing<\/i> through it – and the damn thing is 9,001 pages long. So it’s taking me a while. You just have to turn the page. You just MUST! So … to write a page turner that is 9,001 pages long is quite a feat. So hats off, Ms. Kostova, hats off.<\/p>\n

I often have Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History<\/a>\"\"<\/i> lying beside me as I read The Historian<\/i> – so I can look up to see what HE said about this or that. More books as well. I love cross-referencing. It doesn’t matter what the topic. Ann Marie and I, years ago, when we discovered our shared love for all things Lucy Maud, had a brief idea of creating a database for every single character that shows up in every single Lucy Maud book … because many of them are interconnected … many show up in different books … Kind of a 6 degrees of separation database for the Lucy Maud world. Also, you could look up: “Okay, so in what other story does SHE show up??” Because some of the short stories contain character that show up in the novels … etc. This kind of stuff is FUN for me. And from the insane GLEAM in Ann Marie’s eyes, as we planned our database, I knew I had found, in the words of Anne Shirley, a kindred spirit.<\/p>\n

From The Historian<\/i>:<\/p>\n

We had reached a clearing in the woods, and it was, astoundingly, full of men. They stood two rings deep around a bright bonfire, facing it and chanting. One, apparently their leader, stood near the fire, and whenever their chant rose to a crescendo each of them lifted a stiff arm in a salute, putting his other hand on the shoulder of the next man. Their faces, weirdly orange in the firelight, were stiff and unsmiling, and their eyes glittered. They wore a uniform of some sort, dark jackets over green shirts and black ties. “What is this?” I murmured to Georgescu. “What are they saying?”<\/p>\n

“All for the Fatherland!” he hissed in my ear. “Stay very quiet or we are dead. I think this is the Legion of the Archangel Michael.”<\/p>\n

“What is that?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Oh yes. Legion of the Archangel Michael. Oh yes, of course. THOSE guys. Hmmm, I have read about them before. Where is that passage …<\/p>\n

From Balkan Ghosts<\/i>, by Robert Kaplan:<\/p>\n

It was 10:30 a.m., November 30, 1940. Snow was beginning to fall in Bucharest. Inside the Church of Ilie Gorgani, built in the seventeenth century to honor a Romanian general who fought the Turks, hundreds of candles illumined the red-robed Christ in the dome. Coffins, draped in green flags with gold embroidery, lined the sides of the nave. Altar boys carried in trays of coliva<\/i> (colored sugar bread) for the dead. Fourteen members of the Legion of the Archangel Michael – the fascist “Iron Guard” – including the organization’s leader, Corneliu Zelea Codreaunu, were about to be buried and canonized as “national saints” by priests of the Romanian Orthodox Church, who had been chanting and swinging censers all night.<\/p>\n

Two years earlier, in 1938, King Carol II’s police had strangled the fourteen men, stripped the bodies naked, and doused them with sulfuric acid in a common ditch to hasten their decomposition. But in late 1940, Carol fled and Romania fell under an Iron Guard regime. The victims’ remains, little more than heaps of earth, were dug up and placed in fourteen coffins for reburial. At the end of the funeral service, the worshipers heard a voice recording of the dead Legionnaire leader, Codreanu. “You must await the day to avenge our martyrs,” he shrieked.<\/p>\n

A few weeks later, revenge was taken. On the night of January 22, 1941, the Legionnaires of the Archangel Michael – after singing Orthodox hymns, putting packets of Romanian soil around their necks, drinking each other’s blood, and anointing themselves with holy water – abducted 200 men, women, and children from their homes. The Legionnaires packed the victims into trucks and drove them to the municipal slaughterhouse, a group of red brick buildings in the southern part of Bucharest near the Dimbovitsa River. They made the victims, all Jews, strip naked in the freezing dark and get down on all fours on the conveyor ramp. Whining in terror, the Jews were driven through all the automated stages of slaughter. Blood gushing from decapitated and limbless torsos, the Legionnaires thrust each on a hook and stamped it: “fit for human consumption.” The trunk of a five-year-old girl they hung upside down, “smeared with blood … like a calf,” according to an eyewitness the next morning.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Good times, good times. Those Legionnaires sound like a barrel of laughs, huh?<\/p>\n

Hmm, back to The Historian<\/i>, although I am still pondering the Legion … and I read:<\/p>\n

“Who are they?”<\/p>\n

He tossed his match into the fire. “Criminals,” he said shortly. “They are also called the Iron Guard. They are sweeping through the villages in this part of the country, picking up young men and coverting them to hatred. They hate the Jews, in particular, and want to rid the world of them.” He drew fiercely on his pipe. “We Gypsies know that where Jews are killed, Gypsies are always murthered, too. And then a lot of other people, usually.”<\/p>\n

I described the strange figure I’d seen outside the circle.<\/p>\n

“Oh, to be sure,” Georgescu muttered. “They attract all kinds of strange admirers. It won’t be long till every shepherd in the mountains is deciding to join them.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I need to know more.<\/p>\n

I knew there was more in my book. I dug through Balkan Ghosts<\/i>. Found what I was looking for.<\/p>\n

In 1938, Carol had abolished all political parties and declared a royal dictatorship. After bankrolling the fascist Legion of the Archangel Michael for years, that anti-Semitic organization turned against him on account of his liaison with the Jewish Lupescu. So Carol had the Legionnaire leaders murdered. This angered Hitler, whom Carol for a time ignored. But after the Nazi conquest of France, Carol formed his own fascist party, which passed a series of anti-Semitic laws, forcing Romania’s 800,000 Jews to live virtually an underground existence. When Stalin, in the summer of 1940, demanded that Carol cede him Bessarabia, Carol appealed to Hitler for help. Hitler answered Carol by forcing him to yield the northern part of Transylvania to the pro-Nazi regime in Hungary.<\/p>\n

The population felt these territorial losses like hammer blows. Roars of “abdica<\/i> [abdicate]” rose from the crowds assembled in the square by the Athenee Palace. Carol “had been too clever,” in his dealings with Hitler and Stalin, writes Manning in The Balkan Trilogy<\/i>. “He had played a double game and lost.”<\/p>\n

Carol and Lupescu left Romania in the dead of night in late 1940, in a nine-car railway train filled with the country’s gold and art treasures. The fascist Legion got wind of the couple’s departure and tried stopping the train, but to no avail.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Carol II. What a guy.<\/p>\n

But I knew there was more on the Legion itself. So I found it, with a distinct feeling of “A-ha … here it is …”<\/p>\n

In 1927, the twenty-eight-year-old [Corneliu Zelea] Codreanu heard the voice of God calling him from an icon of the Archangel Michael, a fighting saint that Balkan peasants associated with the struggle against the Muslim Turks. Codreanu, an educated peasant influenced by the anti-Semitic teachings of his university professors in Jassy, heeded this voice and formed the Legion of the Archangel Michael, whose military wing would later by known as the Iron Guard. In Codreanu’s view, the Legion was “a religious order” uniting all Romanians “dedicated to a heroic existence”: those alive, those not yet born, and those already dead. He organized the Legion around cuibs<\/i> (“nests”) of thirteen members each. To join a cuib<\/i>, an initiate had to suck the blood from self-imposed slashes in the arm of every other member of the nest, and then write an oath in his own blood, vowing to commit murder whenever ordered to do so. Before setting out to kill, each man had to let an ounch of his blood flow into a common goblet, out of which all would drink, thus uniting the entire nest in death. Members were also obliged to wear crosses and packets of Romanian soil around their necks. Romanian fascism, like Romanian Communism, was by no means standard-issue.<\/p>\n

Tall and handsome, Codreanu had riveting eyes and the chiseled features of a Roman statue. His followers called him Capitanul (“the Captain”). He liked to dress completely in white and ride a white horse through the Carpathian villages. There, he was worshiped as a peasant-god – the Archangel Michael’s envoy on earth. When Codreaunu married, 90,000 people formed a bridal procession.<\/p>\n

King Carol II saw Cordreanu as a dangerous rival, especially after Hitler told Carol to his face, during a 1938 meeting in Berchtesgarten, that he preferred Codreanu to the ‘dictator of Romania”. Carol, perhaps because of his overweaning arrogance, was no coward. He answered the Fuhrer by having Codreanu and thirteen other Legionnaires strangled to death in November, 1938, and then spread rumors that Codreaunu had “sold out to the Jews” (exactly what Codreanu had accused Carol of doing, on account of the King’s liaison with Lupescu).<\/p>\n

But the Romanians could never believe that their “Captain” had sold out to the Jews. To the peasant masses, Codreanu was still very much alive: “a tribune who stood in the imagination of the Rumanians as both martyr and prophet,” writes Countess Waldeck. Many peasants claimed that they had seen “the Captain” riding his white horse through the forests at night, in the weeks and months following his supposed execution. Later, the Romanian Orthodox Church proclaimed Codreanu a “national saint”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

God told you to chop up 5 year old Jewish girls, “Captain”? Rot in hell.<\/p>\n

And of course, there is MUCH more on the Legion in my books … horrible stories, all of ’em, I mean – they’re all horrible – Carol is horrible, eveyrone is horrible – but that was the bit I had been looking for. To provide a little bit more depth, a little bit of the history, the context, if you will … and then back to the novel.<\/p>\n

More on Codreanu and his murderous Iron Guard here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I have been reading the entire book in this back-and-forth manner. Which is why it is taking me forever, by the way.<\/p>\n

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