This article is written in remembrance of the 73rd commemoration of the brutal pogrom in Bucharest and the savagery in Transnistria.
As one of the survivors of the Holocaust in Romania, author, and education-al speaker of this experience, I cannot help but ask why those hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews who were murdered still remain forgotten despite the proliferation of other historical material on the Holocaust. It is as if that chapter of the Holocaust was forgotten before it was remembered.
In fact, geographically, that was the largest killing field of Jews in the Holocaust, which is now a Giant Forgotten Cemetery. Are our lives less precious then those who were murdered in gas chambers or were just the methods used to murder our brothers and sisters less dramatic and therefore unworthy of remembering?
My need to write this article was trig-gered by the recent publication of a booklet titled “Holocaust under Marshall Antonescu’s Regime,” authored by Liviu Beris, the president of the Association of Holocaust Survivors in Romania. The booklet consists of 85 pages in which Beris presents excerpts from correspondence between high-ranking officers and Antonescu regarding the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Romania. The documents he researched have only recently been made available to the public. The savagery with which the Romanians executed their criminal tasks sounds more like a horror science fiction movie, and it comes “from the horse’s mouth,” the Romanian authorities themselves. That is why it is imperative that this booklet be translated into English and be available in the Western world. Luckily, we found somebody who already translated it.
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There are three main criminal actions through which mass murders were perpe-trated in Romania during World War II:
1. The brutal pogroms, which started in 1940 and continued for a long time throughout the many cities and villages.
2. The deportations to Transnistria that impacted many provinces. Bessarabia and Bucovina were particularly targeted because of the large percentage of Jews there. Transnistria, a name coined by Nazis for a territory of 16,000 sq km across the River Dniester (before the war the river was the border between Romania and the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine). Transnistria was under Romanian administration. There, the deportees died a slow agonizing deaths from starvation, freezing, typhoid fever, dysentery, exhaustion, herding from one camp to another and back again, and shooting;
3. Forced Labour camps on Roma-nian territory, where they suffered a similar treatment to those in Transnistria.
At its cabinet meeting of July 8, 1941, Mihai Antonescu, who was deputy prime minister and foreign minister during Marshal Ion Antonescu’s Government, addressed the ministers as follows: "… please be implacable, humanity is mushy, airy philosophy does not belong here … At the risk of being misunderstood by some traditionalists who may be among you, I am enforcing the migration of the entire Hebrew (Jewish) element in Bessarabia and Bukovina be thrown across the border …have no pity on them. I do not know how many more centuries the Romanian people will meet with total liberty of action, with the possibility of ethnic cleansing and National Review … If necessary, pull the gun. I do not care if we enter history as barbarians … I take formal responsibility and say that there is no law … so, without any formalities, actwith complete freedom. "(from Wikipedia)
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The barbaric actions of the Bucharest Pogrom started on Jan. 21 and raged until Jan. 24, 1941.
Members of the fascist Iron Guard, consisting of students, priests, intellectu-als of every kind, young and old, men, women, and children descended like birds of pray on the Jewish districts of the capital of Romania. They burned down synagogues, demolished Jewish stores, plundered apartments, raped, tortured, beat, arrested and murdered their Jewish neighbours. This pogrom is called by his-torians “The Kristahl Nacht of Romania.”
The Iron guards were fully aware that the state authorities of Marshal Antonescu would not stop the savagery.
“Jewish leaders, Zionists, and intellectuals were arrested in their homes and on the streets, taken to previously established destinations, where they were subjected to savage treatment. Some were forced to drink a mixture of bitters with gasoline, kerosene and vinegar, then beaten until they lost consciousness, and locked in the basement of the jail, where they were left to die in their own filth. Others were forced into trucks, and driven to the Jilava Forest, where they were shot. Yet others were driven to the city slaughter house, where they were stripped of their clothes, cut up with butcher knives, and hung up on hooks like carcasses of cattle.
“Their bellies were cut open and their intestines were tied around their blood drenched necks, and they had notices pasted on them saying ‘Kosher meat.’ “These atrocities were witnessed and reported by Reserve Lieutenant I. N. Vladesu (from Mr. Beris’ booklet)
As far as the Transnistria camps are concerned, they are described in detail in my book, Shattered! 50 Years of Silence. Some of the material from the book may be accessed on the Internet either under my name, or under Nizkor.
Romania was home to about 800,000 Jews before WWII, about half of them were murdered. After WWII many of the Jewish survivors managed to emigrate to Israel and the Western countries, so that presently there are only a few thousand elderly Jews left. Nevertheless, since communism imploded, anti-Semitism seems to be flourishing again. Recently, I received an e-mail from Romania with a video attachment presenting a folk choir singing a popular Christmas Carol on TV, in which the lyrics say “the smoke from our chimney is from burning kikes.” Tiberiu Groza, the director of the Center for Conservation and Promotion of Traditional Culture, “explained” in an TV interview, that they simply used carols from archaic traditional folklore, and no anti-Semitic content was implied. Yet, such a vision could not be imagined before the end of WWII, when the gas chambers and crematoria were discovered by the Allies.
It seems that for those who have been attacked by the virus of anti-Semitism there exists no cure. How very sad that some people are wasting their energy hating others, instead of using it to improve their lives and the weak economy in their country, which presently is almost Judenrein (German expression for clean of Jews).
In view of International Holocaust Day on January 27, following are two excerpts from Bogdanovka (a camp in Transnistria). A letter by Prefect Lt. Col. Isopescu to the Government of Transnistria on Nov. 12 1941: …” today, between the number that was here before and that which arrived recently, we pushed 11,000 kikes in the Sovhoz (Soviet Collective Farm), which previously barely held 7,000 pigs… Also today, the Maoer and the Chief of the Kolhoz arrived in des-peration because they were told that an-other convoy of kikes is on its way from the direction of Odessa with another 40,000 kikes.”(from Mr. Beris’booklet)
From a Romanian deportee, Liebe Havas Burihovici, who after being dragged through different camps ended up in Bogdanovka:… “I arrived in this camp when mass executions were in progress. Day and night, uninterrupted, carts were filled up with people, thrown on top of each other, to contain as many as possible, and they were transported to a designated area, where they were ordered to strip naked from their emaciated bodies and to dig a big trench, which meant to be their own resting place. They had to line up fac-ing the trench, and then the guns went into action. Some of them died and some were only wounded, all were pushed into the trench.. After that, the soldiers spilled some petrol over the ground and set fires over it. The trench was covered with merely a few shovels of ground. When there was no more movement around, starving dogs came and pulled pieces of meat for their meal from what was just a few minute ago a person. The smell of the fried meat in-tensified our own hunger. It is hard to believe that the few of us who could still drag ourselves to the trenches did the same thing…”(from Mr. Beris’ booklet)
In 1946, Ion and Mihai Antonescu among others were senteced to death for war crimes.
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