Toma Arnăuțoiu (14 February 1921 – 18 July 1959) was a Romanian officer who led a small group of anti-communist resistance fighters in the Southern Carpathian foothills between 1949 and 1958.

In January 1949, Arnăuțoiu met Gheorghe Arsenescu, a discharged colonel who had fought on the Eastern Front, to discuss the possibility of mounting an anti-communist resistance.

They believed a war between the West and the Soviet Union was imminent, and partisans would be able to neutralise the local authorities and speed up the overthrow of the regime.

In March, Colonel Arsenescu, having failed in a first attempt to organise a local resistance around Câmpulung and fearing arrest, joined Arnăuțoiu in Nucșoara to set up a group of anti-communist partisans in the surrounding hills.

Securitate (security police) troops then ambushed four members of the group; in the ensuing shoot-out two sub-officers were killed and Arnăuțoiu was wounded.

Towards the end, the group was reduced to Arnăuțoiu, his younger brother Petre, Maria Plop[7] (who had fled her village, Prisăcani, in Iași County when the Red Army arrived in 1944), and Constantin Jubleanu, whose mother had been killed while trying to flee a platoon, and whose father was in prison serving a 25-years sentence.

Maria Plop, and the two year-old child were summoned to surrender and came down a ladder from the hideout the partisans had carved in a hill close to the village of Corbi.

[8] A military court sentenced the Arnăuțoiu brothers to be shot alongside 14 villagers who had supplied them with food, medicine, clothing, a radio set, or weapons.