The Convolutions of Historical Politics

Caught Between History and Politics: The Experience of a Moldovan Historian Studying the Holocaust

Caught Between History and Politics: The Experience of a Moldovan Historian Studying the Holocaust DiAnA DuMitru In 2003, while a visiting fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I managed to read Jan Gross’ Neighbors.1 Gross’ study is focused on a single event, which occurred on July 10, 1941, when in a Polish town, Jedwabne, local Poles murdered the entire local Jewish population—men, women, and children—without mercy, using “primitive, ancient methods and murder weapons: stones, wooden clubs, iron bars, fire, and water.”2 After reading this book I wondered what happened in the summer of 1941 in Moldova—the country where I was born—and how my compatriots behaved towards Jews, after the Soviets left and Romanian and German troops entered. My family is not Jewish, and I could be considered a typical “product ” of both Soviet and post-Soviet education. During Soviet times I studied in a regular Moldovan village school and was well aware of the Fascist brutality towards “Soviet citizens.” While in school, I went for excursions to the “hero-cities” of Brest, Kyiv, Sevastopol, as well as to a memorial in Katyń (Belarus), where, as I then managed to learn, the entire population of the village (149 residents) was burned alive during a Nazi reprisal action. I read the novel of Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, the book of Anatoly Kuznetsov, Babi Yar, and my memory was marked by terrifying pictures of the Nazi concentration camps, as shown in the Soviet documentary Ordinary Fascism.3 However, the issue of Jewish genocide during WWII did not have a central place in 1 Gross, Neighbors . 2 Ibid., 80–81. 3 Grossman, Zhizn’ i sud’ba and Kuznetsov, Babi Yar . Roman-dokument. 240 The Convolutions of Historical Politics my awareness about history. Presumably, I was not too much different from a typical Soviet teenager of the era. In this naive ignorance I remained during the first part of the 1990s, when I was an undergraduate student in Chişinău, majoring in history. During those times Moldovan professors were doing a great job in recovering the “white pages” and correcting the distortions of the Soviet history. We, the first graduates from History Departments in independent Moldova, were set to read and be lectured about the crimes of Stalinism, Katyń, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, as well as about the suffering of the Moldovan people, such as deportations, the 1946–1947 famine, forced collectivization, destruction of the churches, Russification, etc. None of the classes and the recommended books touched upon the history of local Jewry during WWII. Moldovan universities and school history programs omitted mention of the Holocaust during the 1990s.4 In part, this situation was a reverberation of the state of affairs in Romania, where initially the issue of Holocaust study raised serious debates and denial of it surfaced both in historiography and political declarations.5 After intense professional and social debates, and pressured politically by the West, the attitudes towards the issue of the Holocaust in Romania suffered visible changes in the late 1990s. Curiously, this transformation did not have any impact on the Holocaust study in Moldova. While in graduate school, I researched nineteenth century diplomatic history, again failing to learn about tens of thousands of Jews killed in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and south of Ukraine in the summer of 1941 by Romanian soldiers. I did not know about the deportations organized by the Romanian authorities and the imprisonment of the Jews, who survived the murder campaign, into ghettoes and camps in Transnistria.6 Meanwhile significant publications about the Holocaust in 4 Regarding the study of the subject of the Holocaust in schools of Moldova see Dumitru, “V labirinte politizatsii,” 27–38. 5 On this topic see the chapter “Holocaust Denial in the Post-communist Public Discourse” in the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, Final Report, 349–379. 6 During WWII the territory between the rivers Dniester and Bug, which in August 1941 came under the civilian-military administration of Romania, was named Transnistria. The region was comprised of the contemporary territory of Transnistria—part of the Republic of Moldova, as well as 241 Caught Between History and Politics Romania started to appear in the West at the end of 1990s–early 2000s. At the first encounter with the literature on the Holocaust in Bessarabia, I was startled by the fact that while I was a trained historian...