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15. Public Perceptions of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Romania
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451 felicia waldman and mihai chioveanu 15. Public Perceptions of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Romania During the Second World War, between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews, 12,500 Roma, and thousands of Ukrainian and Russian civilians died at the hands of the Romanian authorities.1 Most of them perished due to starvation, disease, death marches, death trains, and mass killing operations.2 The toll of victims was the direct result of an intentional , state-sponsored and organized policy of ethnic cleansing implemented from 1940 through 1944 by an authoritarian regime with certain fascist features, which was backed for a short period of time by a fascist party. A century-long anti-Semitic rage and hate, anger as a strong political motivation, and ethnic cleansing as an ideological core component indicate that Romania’s government was not simply a puppet and one of “Hitler’s willing executioners.” Romanians followed their own path by developing, and later implementing, their own genocidal project, somewhat independently of Nazi Germany.3 In 1937 anti-Semitism, which was already a major component of Romanian political culture, was turned into state policy. After having been naturalized as late as 1923, following a century-long struggle for civil rights, in less than one year over two hundred thousand Jews were stripped of Romanian citizenship. In June 1940 there were numerous but scattered deadly assaults on Jews by civilians and soldiers during the Romanian troops’ withdrawal from Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to Moldova, and one massacre : the Dorohoi pogrom. In August 1940 a decree law enforced racist Nuremberg-like legislation across the country. The worst was yet to come in September 1940, when the royal dictatorship of Romania’s 452 waldman and chioveanu King Carol II facilitated the advent to power of the authoritarian and nationalistic general Ion Antonescu and the Legionary Movement, also known as the Iron Guard, a fascist party and militia.4 The Antonescu–Iron Guard partnership failed in January 1941, when the legionnaires attempted a coup. Part of their strategy was civil disruption, which led to riots and street violence. In less than three days, legionnaires, acting on their anti-Semitic platform, slaughtered more than 120 Jews, burned down synagogues, and devastated Jewish stores in a bloody pogrom known as the Legionary Rebellion. Despite the fact that the legionnaires were eventually defeated, the situation of the Jews did not improve. Except for the reduction of random terror, the Ion Antonescu regime, which emerged after the defeat of the legionnaires, differed little from the fascist one. As Romania sided with Nazi Germany, the Antonescu regime and its politics were marked by perpetual and ubiquitous paranoia, which turned increasingly punitive towards Jews and Roma. The Romanianization process (confiscating Jewish and Roma property and assigning it to ethnic Romanians), which had been started by the legionnaires, continued and was justified as part of the process of national rebirth and puri- fication. As the Romanian troops advanced in Bessarabia and Bukovina in an attempt to recover the two provinces annexed by the Soviet army in 1940, soldiers killed twenty-five thousand Jews in less than one month.5 By the time the Romanian army conquered Odessa on 22 June 1941, the war against the Jews had turned genocidal. The Iaşi pogrom of 29 June–2 July 1941, carried out by Romanian state institutions and resulting in more than ten thousand victims, was yet another step in the ethnic cleansing program.6 Plans were designed for the deportation of the Jews from the liberated territories to Transnistria , the area between the Dniester River and the Bug River, which the Romanian government saw as a dumping ground for ethnic undesirables . This was the place where most of the victims of the Romanian Holocaust lost their lives. While it is true that half the Romanian Jews survived the war, it was not due to the Romanian government’s efforts. Rather it was domestic and international protests, interventions, massive bribes, and a rapidly changing military and political situation after the battle of Stalingrad that enabled Jewish survival. Postponing the deporta- [44.200.74.73] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:01 GMT) 15. Holocaust in Postcommunist Romania 453 tions, later on abandoning the plan altogether, from late 1942 to early 1943, the government made several attempts to improve Romania’s image in the West, as it realized Germany would lose the war. From 1943 onward, Jews were allowed to return from Transnistria, but there were few left to bene...