The Kishinev Ghetto, 1941−1942: A Documentary History of the Holocaust in Romania’s Contested Borderlands by Paul A. Shapiro (review)

This volume treats the history of the Jewish ghetto in Kishinev (Chişinău, capital of today’s Republic of Moldova) from July 1941 to April 1942. Established by the Romanian authorities on German advice and following the example of German-created ghettos elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe, the Kishinev ghetto housed at one time more than ten thousand Jews—more women, children, and elderly people than able-bodied men. Shapiro makes the story part of the Holocaust, since the ghetto was conceived as preliminary to the inmates’ deportation “to the East,” and indeed was emptied in successive deportations between October 1941 and June 1942. Even earlier, the Romanians massacred as many as one thousand inmates during two mass shootings justified as “reprisals” for inmates’ transgressions. In the ghetto, Jews suffered privation, overwork, malnourishment, and a lack of medical care. In Transnistria—a part of southern Ukraine transformed into a dumping ground for “undesirables”—the deportees were severely abused. On the way, gendarmes and policemen shot those who could not walk. Conditions in Transnistrian camps and ghettos were so poor that only a small portion of those deported from Kishinev survived to the region’s liberation by the Red Army. In the end, Romanian “treatment” of Kishinev Jews differed little from that in other places in Nazi-dominated Eastern Europe.

Shapiro offers this volume as a “memorial to the Jews of Chişinău … who perished in the city, or who suffered ghettoization and deportation to Transnistria, and to the survivors, who were forever changed” (xiii). For him, reconstruction of their story represented a moral duty. He has covered all aspects of the history: from government actions to Jews’ struggle to survive to the local Christians’ attitudes towards their neighbors’ plight. One aim was to document the culpability of the government of Ion Antonescu, his appointees in Bessarabia (the province in which Kishinev was located), and the Romanian military and police services. Another aim was “to demonstrate the richness of documentation that relates to the Chişinău ghetto” (xii): as director of the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Shapiro was responsible for the acquisition of much of that documentation. The exhaustive notes invite future scholarship on Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine. Shapiro’s volume reproduces a selection of the original documents in graceful translation and with thorough annotation.

Two notes of caution: first, Shapiro tends to ascribe a greater degree of planning and consistency to Romanian actions than they may have actually reflected, seemingly following in the footsteps of the late Jean Ancel, who offered an unapologetically intentionalist interpretation of Romanian practice. Thus, he dates to June 16/17 General Constantin Vasiliu’s order to gendarmerie units to “cleanse the land,” as did the postwar indictment before the trial of gendarmerie officers. But in fact, the eyewitness accounts that provide the basis for the charges suggest that the consultations at which the instructions were issued came only after the July 2 German-Romanian invasion of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. It is, however, extremely improbable that such an order was issued before the war started (June 22), especially since the actual date of Romania’s entry remained top secret until the very last hours before the July 2 attack. Shapiro seems, likewise, to assume that the instructions issued by Vasiliu clearly indicated that he wanted all Jews in the rural areas dead and all Jews in the urban areas interned—he quotes the same source—but both eyewitness accounts and records of gendarmerie units in Bukovina and Bessarabia suggest that instructions were vague and that Vasiliu left considerable leeway to local authorities as to how they should proceed.

Second, Shapiro’s notes on German policy (drawing in part upon the detailed analysis...