“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” ― Elie Wiesel
On a cold winter’s night in January, I’m seated in a darkened theater, with a smattering of other moviegoers in the audience, watching a film that essentially amounts to a three-hour slideshow, each successive image depicting a black and white photo of a Holocaust victim, with a short accompanying caption providing a brief synopsis of how this young man’s life was snuffed out.
On Sunday, June 29, 1941, my husband and son were taken from our home to the police station and shot. My father. My son. My brother. Beaten up. Robbed. Tortured. Shot. Killed by a German soldier. On June 30, 1941, my son was shot outside our home, in front of my eyes. Forced to watch. Dragged away. Slaughtered. Taken to the police courtyard and murdered. Put on the Death Train. I never saw my husband and son again.
All of them, victims of the Shoah. But this tapestry of faces isn’t from Germany, Poland, Austria, Hungary, France or Italy. These men were all victims of the unfathomable pogrom that took place in Iasi. Each of them belonged to the significant, thriving and prosperous Jewish community in Iasi, Romania before being obliterated during World War II, in a large-scale shooting rampage lasting just two days, or through deportations on trains — just like in Germany and with the help of German soldiers. Mass graves outside of Iasi still today bear testament to these atrocities. Sound familiar? Not likely. After all, this is not Auschwitz.
After Germany, Romania’s Jewish community suffered the heaviest losses during the Shoah. From a pre-war population of over 750,000 Jews throughout Romania, the community had dwindled to approximately half that size by the end of WWII. According to Yad Vashem, 380,000–400,000 Jews were murdered in Romanian-controlled areas such as Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transnistria under the dictatorship of Marshal Ion Antonescu. Did you know? Probably not. But you should. And so should I.
These mass murders in Iasi were preceded, only a few months earlier, by the smaller but no less vicious massacre of January 1941 in Bucharest, when over 125 Jews were killed and butchered, some of them left hanging on hooks in a slaughterhouse.
Until recently, I knew close to nothing about these crimes against humanity that took place in Iasi, and across Romania. But, for so many reasons, I should have known.
I should have known because I grew up in a vibrant Jewish community in Canada where a sizable population of survivors found safe haven — and where they continue to live to this day, though their numbers continue to dwindle.
And I should have known because my 12 years of private Jewish schooling ensured that my classmates and I would be steeped in all things Shoah-related. In all those years of Holocaust education, replete with films, Anne Frank, Auschwitz, and first-person survivor testimonies, Romania was not mentioned a single time.
I should have known because my father fled Romania with his parents while still a child. I knew it only as a little fact of my father’s young life, mentioned almost in passing. And when you hear “we left to Israel” rather than “we escaped” why would you even think to prod further?
And I should have known because my paternal grandparents lived well into their late 80s and 90s, which afforded them plenty of time to share stories from that period of time, but instead they chose not to — or, more precisely, they chose only to speak of their glorious lives in turn-of-the-century and interwar Bucharest, before their world fell apart.
But I knew as close to nothing as possible. And my family, even less. The clarion call to begin educating myself about Romania’s role in the Holocaust grew loud and incessant; it became impossible to remain in the dark about an unknown chapter of my family’s history in this country.
My first step was to sift through the personal possessions left behind by my grandfather, Iuliu Iancu (Jules Janco), important papers that he had diligently packed up and preserved, always traveling with him from Romania to Israel and on to Canada. I found enough strands of evidence — that still did not convey the full weight of his experiences — to build a case that I presented to the Claims Conference, requesting a determination of my nonagenarian father’s status: A short time later, he was designated a Holocaust survivor.
Even then, I still didn’t understand the magnitude of what had unfolded in Romania over the decades leading up to my father’s family’s sudden departure from their beloved native country. I would return again and again to my grandfather’s papers, snugly stored in his antique leather suitcase, each time spotting another paper, and with it a new clue.
In a signed attestation from 1964, my grandfather recounts the humiliating and savage instances of antisemitic abuse he suffered (in 1940) at the hands of the nationalistic Legionary movement — a short-lived extremist faction of the Nazi-aligned Iron Guard. When they broke into his office located on his business property in the center of Bucharest (Strandul Kiseleff), a group of Legionnaires threatened and kicked him, called him “jidan” (Jew), and beat him up. One of the Legionnaires ripped a photo off the wall — of a group comprising King Carol II and my grandfather — while claiming that the time had come for all the Jews and their protectors to be annihilated as Hitler had done in Germany.
My grandfather was then thrown into jail for four days with his friend and business partner, scion of an esteemed noble family of Romanian heritage. (My father had no recollection of this fact; he says that was probably told that his father was away on business). My grandfather writes further, that he and his business partner were forced to sign over their ownership rights to the Strandul Kiseleff, after which my grandfather took refuge in Moldavia where he suffered further before deciding to flee the country with his wife and son.
But my grandfather’s and, as a result my father’s, distant history, suddenly catapulted itself into my present consciousness. It only told the tale of my one, small family’s grievances. Significant though they were, I was certain it was just the tip of the iceberg.
It was only when I leapt in with both feet, and landed in Bucharest to find out more — about my grandfather’s life and the early years of his architectural career — that I began to learn in earnest about his country’s rotten and deliberately-ignored active involvement in the Shoah; extensively documented, it turns out. I doubled down on my efforts to learn about the origins and results of widespread Jew-hatred in Romania, and how it came to impact my grandfather’s life.
At the Center for the Study of Romanian Jewish History, after my initial explorations into this subject matter showed me that Romania had aligned itself with Nazi Germany between 1940–1944, I unearthed a photocopied booklet published in 1942 by the United Romanian Jews of America. “Blood Bath in Rumania” depicts horrific images of corpses that had been grotesquely mutilated, bludgeoned, hung from posts; it also goes into great detail about specific instances of mass murders and deportations.
This publication, issued after the Holocaust had begun and (eerily!) was still in progress, states the following: “.. the blood bath that continues even now in Roumania — an orgy unparalleled in modern history in which the Nazis and their Roumanian disciples share equally. The victims of this savage collaboration are Roumanian Gentiles as well as Jews but for the greatest part Jews.” Among its pages were accounts of “bestial and systematic suppression of Jews,” and statements confirming that the Romanian Orthodox Church “was from the beginning a staunch supporter of the Iron Guard and advocated Nazi ties with Rumania.”
There were accounts of men being ripped from their beds or offices and sent to Jilava prison, where many were ‘liquidated.’ One photo shows rows of corpses of Jewish men and children massacred by the Iron Guard in the notorious prison on the outskirts of the capital, while another depicts Jewish corpses at the morgue in Bucharest.
The Nazis, who had entered Romania under the guise of “Instructionary Forces,” were complicit in the Legionary movement. The very same Nazis who confiscated and took up temporary but forceful residence at the expansive property my grandfather had built up and owned (with his relatives and other investors). In 1942, marking the first anniversary of Romania’s entry into the war on Germany’s side, the military leader Marshal Ion Antonescu celebrated his country’s murderous achievements thus: “Rumania fulfills today the dreams and the ideals of A.C. Cuza and Octavian Goga to solve the Jewish Question after the Nazi program.” Cuza and Goga were virulently antisemitic leaders that King Carol II put into place in 1937; the same king who less than a decade earlier, had appeared at the inauguration of the Strandul Kiseleff.
Long before the massacres that began in early 1941, the civil rights of Romanian Jews were already facing erosion. In 1923, Jewish students, trying to enter the University of Bucharest were prevented from doing so, booed, pushed and kicked out. Over the subsequent years, numerous draft laws sought to significantly reduce if not outright extinguish rights for members of the Jewish communities around Romania. Between 1925–1930, antisemitism grew, with reports of attacks by the Legion of the Archangel Michael (later called Iron Guard) occurring against Jews across Transylvania. The first acknowledged antisemitic ‘numeris clausus’ law came into effect in 1934, when 80% of employees and 50% of board members had to be of ethnic Romanian origin (i.e. non-Jewish).
In early 1938, the Goga-Cuza government promulgated a law (Decree-law no. 169) with the view to rescinding the Romanian citizenship of Jews, who were faced with an impossibly high burden of proof, and little time, to document their right to citizenship, effectively stripping 250,000 Jews of their Romanian citizenship, one third of the Jewish population at the time. Jews began to be barred from practicing many professions, and were forced to shut down their businesses. In this same year, my grandfather lost a highly lucrative architectural project because he was a Jew; as documented by his business partner, this opportunity was instead given to a pair of reputable ethnically Romanian architects whose edifice still today graces one of the royal palace’s most prestigious neighboring properties.
By August 1940, with the passage of Decree-law no. 2650 (aka “Statute of Jews”), a majority of Jews living in Romania became second-class citizens. The brutal acts that were leveled against my grandfather took place, to the best of my knowledge and time-line, between September — December 1940. By the end of that year, my grandfather’s passport had apparently been confiscated. However, just days before the Bucharest pogrom of late January 1941, he had somehow and through whatever means necessary, gathered enough resources and paperwork — in the form of a “Visa in lieu of a passport” — to facilitate his family’s quick escape, by land and sea, to British Mandate Palestine.
Fast forward to today.
October 7th, 2023: All hell broke loose in Israel. But still the world turned on Israel.
Just days after I returned to Romania, on October 4th, to resume my research — and where until that moment, I believed that antisemitism was a relic from this country’s past — all the latent vile and virulent Jew-hatred that lay below the earth’s crust began to surface, thinly disguised as something else but, always and forever, indistinguishable from its progenitor.
It didn’t take long to realize that this virus is still alive — if not hidden away, or dismissed by way of subtle attempts to sideline the topic whenever I would broach it. The level of discomfort among those I’ve asked about the brutality of Romania’s Nazi-like treatment of its Jews in the 1930s and 40s, has been startling. It doesn’t help that a representative of a local Holocaust research institution boldly asserted that locals are more concerned about the “Red Holocaust” (i.e. Communism) than the Jewish one; this, from an entity founded for the sole purpose of studying and, arguably, disseminating the horrors of the actual Holocaust with the intention of preventing any possible resurgence of those genocidal atrocities or anything approximating them.
Here in Bucharest, like elsewhere around the world, the Palestinian flag has made an appearance in protests en masse, graffiti has cropped up — Stars of David and “Free Palestine,” and hostage posters have been ripped off walls, or spray-painted in denunciation of Israel’s ‘genocide’ — a ridiculously misunderstood and manipulated misappropriation of a legal term conjured in the wake of THE Holocaust, and defined as murderous acts committed on a mass scale, with the intent of exterminating a people in whole or in part.
Last week, not for the first time, I visited my ancestors in their resting place — my great-grandfather among them. Herman Iancu was a father of four, a prominent Bucharest merchant and property owner at the turn of the century; the eldest of nine siblings and family patriarch whom my grandfather greatly admired. Herman passed away in 1935, fortunately before he could witness the devastation and displacement that would break his family apart just a few years later.
As I stood there gazing across the expanse of broken, tilting, misshapen, washed-out stones and flora that extended towards the far end of the property, I marveled at how a jungle of vines had taken over the Filantropia cemetery, glomming itself onto and around gravestones marking the deaths of Jews in Romania that go back over one hundred years. I pondered the many generations of Jews who preceded me, walking this land long before my grandfather’s birth, their lives ending far beyond what my eyes could see. But could others see what was so plainly coming into focus for me?
The Holocaust is not just Auschwitz or Bergen Belsen or Dachau or Treblinka. It is not just the trains that crossed Germany, Poland, and Austria. It is not just Kristallnacht or Babi Yar or Schindler’s List. Nor is it the village of Trochenbrod, as depicted in the 2005 movie Everything is Illuminated, which screened, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, to a sellout Bucharest crowd. Would it have been so well-attended if the featured village where atrocities took place was located in Romania rather than Ukraine?
When we are faced with the horrors of humanity, it is far easier to look and point fingers at others, outside one’s home turf. Any potential for collective guilt is assuaged when fault lies elsewhere: “That was them, we are OK.” Much easier to do when you can turn away, or are not required to learn about the egregious nature of crimes that your own country, your forefathers committed eighty years ago.
But some bad things, including collective denial, must come to an end. As other countries before it, Romania too has a responsibility to commit itself to a full and truthful reckoning with its bloodbath of a past. It is not enough to pay lip service by building a Holocaust memorial; nor is it sufficient to make halfhearted promises to implement Holocaust education in the schools (when staff is neither Jewish nor properly trained by internationally acknowledged experts on the topic) or erect a museum of the Holocaust (especially when beset by controversy, lack of expertise and delays).
May the day soon arrive when Romania will choose to do the right thing.
#holocaust #neveragain #Romania #notonlyAuschwitz
