THE WORST of the early, popular violence was still to come. The initiation of war against the Soviet Union signaled the opportunity for the mob, bolstered by policemen and off-duty soldiers and now supported by elements of officialdom in the first primitive attempts at forced evacuations, to turn to murder and mayhem in the streets of city, town, and village; for the first time Jews were crowded onto trains and transported from place to place without water, food, or the chance to relieve themselves away from the rolling stock in which they were entombed, a new form of mass murder soon taken over by the central government as part of an overall strategy for handling “the Jewish question.” The mob’s cruelty and greed took the form of truly shocking torture, rape, killing, and robbery, all continuing earlier precedents but achieving spectacular new heights of barbarism. And yet the widespread occurrence of these episodes, their intimate connection to the war itself, the participation of Germans stationed in Romania, and the experience of murder by transport all combined to point to a new chapter in the history of Romanian anti-Semitism and the Romanian Holocaust that would get under way only as the state itself—under the inspiration of Marshall Antonescu and his cabinet—began to gain sway over events.
In late June and early July 1941, thousands of Jews were killed in one of the most savage pogroms of World War II, the Iaşi pogrom, perhaps the most infamous event in the history of the Holocaust in Romania. What follows in this section recounts an anti-Semitic outburst of immense proportions, one that was neither isolated nor happenstance but, rather, part of a larger pattern of mayhem planned and enacted by Romanism fascists inside and outside the government.
In the view of Matatias Carp, the Iaşi pogrom was a natural culmination of decades of state and popular anti-Semitism, that fervent nationalist bigotry manifested in no fewer than 196 restrictive laws adopted between 1867 and 1913 and given more virulent expression during those years when European fascism was ascendent. But these phenomena were not introduced by the fascists: mass expulsions; social, educational, and employment discrimination; mob violence and the terrorism of hooligans; the existence of social and political organizations for the promotion of the most lurid anti-Semitic propaganda; robbery, rapine, and vandalism; and murder and pogroms—these all developed slowly and grandly over the course of several generations.1
The Iaşi pogrom was conditioned by two sets of circumstances. The first, as Carp has emphasized, was historical: the city of Iaşi was steeped in a hoary anti-Semitic tradition stretching back at least a century; Iaşi was to Romanian anti-Semitism what Vienna was to Nazi Jew-hatred. Both A. C. Cuza’s violently anti-Semitic Christian National Defense League and its offshoot, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu’s Legion of the Archangel Michael (the Iron Guard), were born in Iaşi. The second set of circumstances involved the convergence of those factors conditioning Romania’s entrance into World War II. Both official and popular propaganda in Iaşi cast many of the events leading to this ill-considered adventure as part of a struggle against “world Jewry,” painting Romania’s Jews as “enemy aliens,” “Bolshevik agents,” “factors of dissolution,” and “parasites on the Romanian nation.”
On the eve of the war some 100,000 people inhabited the city of Iaşi, 50,000 of them Jews. Since the city was close to the Soviet frontier, it became the focus of many of the anti-Semitic measures that accompanied plans to join Germany’s invasion of the USSR. Several days before Romania joined the war Ion Antonescu ordered the compilation of lists of “all Jews, Communist agents, or sympathizers in each region.”2 More ominously, by Order No. 4147, issued at approximately the same time, he initiated preparations for the expulsion of all Jews aged eighteen to sixty from villages located between the Siret and Prut Rivers and their confinement in the camp established at Tîrgu Jiu in Walachia several years earlier for political opponents; trains would be leaving on June 21. The families of these deportees were forced to relocate to urban communities. Forty-eight hours were to be allotted for the operation.3 That order was countersigned by General Popescu, deputy minister of the interior, and was sent to the chief of staff of the army, the General Inspectorate of the Gendarmerie, the National General Directorate of the Police, and the administrations of all prefectures.
Several days before the onset of war, during a conference that brought together the leadership of the gendarmerie legions (units) of Romania, General C. Z. Vasiliu, general inspector of the gendarmerie, ordered curăţarea terenului (the cleansing of the land), meaning the liquidation of all Jews in rural areas, and the internment or deportation of those living in urban areas.4 While waiting to be assigned their positions in Bessarabia and Bukovina when the war should get under way, some of the gendarmes were stationed in Iaşi, where they were on hand just in time to take part in “action” against the city’s Jewish population. During his trial in 1946, Antonescu would try to justify the concentration and deportation of the Jewish population from Moldavia by citing “a military principle that states that the population living close to the front must be displaced.”5 Antonescu also claimed that there had been “German demands” that the Jews of Moldavia be “organized into ghettos.” None of this explained, however, the murderous intent of the population movement imposed on the Jews, nor, indeed, why the leader of Romania would submit to pressure by another country.6
It is obvious that the presence of a substantial Jewish population close to the front displeased both Romanian and German military officials. In a deposition of November 12, 1945, Lieutenant Colonel Traian Borcescu, former chief of the Secretariat of the Secret Intelligence Service (SSI), identified the brains behind the operation to remove that population: “the Second Section [i.e., army counterintelligence] under the chief of staff was handling the displacement of the Jewish population of Moldavia . . . under the leadership of Colonel Gheorghe Petrescu.”7 The Second Section included three statistical offices (in Bucharest, Iaşi, and Cluj) and followed the activities of political parties and ethnic groups. Borcescu may have had an ulterior motive in identifying the military as bearing greater responsibility than the SSI, but in actuality the two cooperated closely. But even when discussing the culpability of his own organization, Borcescu pointed to military complicity, if not leadership: while acknowledging that “the preparation and execution of the massacres at Iaşi were the work of the first operational echelon [of the SSI],” he reported that when Eugen Cristescu (the SSI’s director) returned from Bucharest, “he told me, ‘I scored the major achievements in Moldavia by working with [the Second Section], and particularly with Colonel Radu Dinulescu and Colonel Gheorghe Petrescu.’ ” In any case, Grigore Petrovici, former SSI agent, testified after the war that “in paving the groundwork for the Iaşi pogrom, Junius Lecca, SSI station chief [of Iaşi], had played a major role by supplying intelligence concerning Jewish residences and centers.”8
According to Cristescu’s postwar statements, the Iaşi pogrom had been orchestrated by the German Gestapo, the SD, the Geheime Feldpolizei (secret military field police), and their Romanian agents, but not by the SSI or the Abwehr (Military Intelligence Office of the High Command of the German Armed Forces).9 Cristescu’s statements suggest that those German security agencies had been working secretly in Romania, without the knowledge of Romanian officials; here one must recall that SD and Gestapo representatives had indeed been expelled from Romania for their role in the Legionnaire Rebellion. Cristescu underscored the fact that the only German secret service officially admitted in Romania was the Abwehr,
whose liaison officer with the SSI was Major Hermann von Stransky. The name of that German officer was often cited in testimony concerning the organization of the Iaşi pogrom. A nephew of Ribbentrop, married to a Romanian from Galaţi, after having spent a long time in Romania and speaking fluent Romanian, von Stransky [helped the Antonescu regime by informing] the SSI regularly on the failed attempts by Horia Sima to cross the border in January and February 1941.10
But it is not unthinkable that von Stransky might have been an agent not only of the Abwehr but also of other German services. In any case, von Stransky maintained strong ties with the SSI through the person of Lieutenant Colonel Ionescu-Micandru, chief of the “Germany” branch of the SSI.
Just before Romania’s entry into the war the “first operational echelon” of the SSI was created, based on orders of the Office of the President of the Council of Ministers and the Office of the Chief of Staff of the army; its official mission was “to defend the rear against sabotage, espionage, and acts of terror,” and the echelon was composed of about 160 men. On June 18, 1941, this unit traveled by motor vehicle to Moldavia.11 Lieutenant Colonel Borcescu later stated that one of the unit’s secret goals had been the elimination, through deportation and repression, of the Jews throughout Moldavia. SSI division director Florin Becescu-Georgescu, working toward that goal, had brought to Iaşi the files of Jews and Communists before leaving Bucharest. After the Iaşi pogrom the unit headed for Chişinău, where new versions of the Iaşi massacres were prepared by the same SSI teams. The echelon also journeyed to Tighina and Tiraspol, where it organized looting, and then to Odessa, where it took part in further massacres.12 Elements of the operational echelon engaged in systematic looting and murder in Bessarabia and Transnistria.
Events had begun to unfold more rapidly after German and Romanian military operations against the USSR began on June 22, 1941. Soon thousands of Jews from rural areas of northern Moldavia were put aboard trains and then interned in the camps of Tîrgu Jiu, Craiova, Caracal, and Turnu Severin. On that same day a report by Colonel Constantin Chirilovici, police superintendent of Iaşi, stated that some Legionnaires “were taking a sort of course under the tutelage of two uniformed officers, a captain and a sublieutenant.”13 These were apparently sessions organized by the SSI to prepare former Iron Guards for an anticipated anti-Jewish action. One of the officers was Gheorghe Balotescu, a head of the SSI in Iaşi; the other was probably Emil Tulbure, also a member of the SSI station there. Both held identification papers from the chief of staff of the Romanian army, indicating that not only the SSI was involved.
On June 24, the Soviet air force conducted a raid against Iaşi (in the Rîpa Galbenă area and the train station), producing minor damage and only a few casualties. But this provided the spark the fascists were able to fan into widespread anti-Semitic hysteria, which could be exploited by opportunists ready for plunder and by bullies afraid to fight the Soviets but prepared to assault defenseless civilians. Iron Guardists deliberately spread the rumor that the entire Jewish population of Iaşi was working for the Red Army and had signaled the Soviets where to drop bombs. The next day the menace gathered strength as the municipal police department systematically contacted home owners with an invitation to paint the sign of the cross on their windows and doors so that mobs would know which homes to spare.14
Things soon got worse. On June 26, a second—and this time devastating—Soviet air raid took place, hitting the headquarters of the Fourteenth Infantry Division, the telephone company, and St. Spiridon Hospital. Six hundred people were reportedly killed (including 38 Jews); other sources give a figure of 111 killed and hundreds wounded.15 This bombing further fueled the anti-Semitic fever. Romanian military reports claimed that Jews from Iaşi had been found among the Soviet air force crews that had been shot down. Soviet paratroopers and saboteurs were allegedly active in the city. Anti-Semitic activists and opportunists exploited such kindling to stoke the fire.
That same day soldiers from the Fourteenth Division were in Iaşi, including a company of one hundred men from the division’s Thirteenth Regiment and a battalion of three hundred gendarmes.16 Another three hundred policemen were in transit from other localities, ready for action not only in Iaşi but also in Bessarabia and Bukovina. German troops belonging to the 198th Division of the Thirtieth Army Corps, as well as SS and Todt Organization troops, were also ready for action against unarmed civilians.17
As important as the Soviet attacks may have been in setting off the violence, the still more important fact is that government officials had been plotting against the Jewish community for several days. According to the Jewish reporter Marius Mircu, local military authorities on June 20 sent Henry Staerman, the head of one of the compulsory labor camps (110 young Jewish men were already there), urgent orders to dig two long trenches (two meters wide and two meters deep; one of the ditches thirty meters in length, the other fifteen) in the Jewish cemetery of Păcurari; these measurements already had been formulated by the city government! The trenches were completed on June 26.18 The trenches also appear in the testimony of Braunstein, one of the leaders of Iaşi’s Jewish community; his report differs from Mircu’s only in that he places the order two weeks before the pogrom.19
On the twenty-sixth too, Major von Stransky arrived at the German command in Iaşi together with Ionescu-Micandru; several hours later they moved on to Holboca: it would seem the Germans were actively involved.20 According to witness Lieutenant Colonel Constantin M. Rădulescu-Siţa, Ionescu-Micandru and von Stransky recalled their own roles in the Iaşi events while discussing plans to “take care of” the Jewish community of Bucharest by the same means (at a December 1942 feast in honor of SSI chief, Eugen Cristescu).21
June 26 therefore marks the real beginning of the Iaşi pogrom. In its report for that day the Dorobanţi Thirteenth Regiment (a unit of the Fourteenth Division, named in honor of the infantrymen of the War of Independence) recorded its arrest of Iosub Cojocaru, Leon Schachter, and Herşcu Wolf, allegedly for having signaled to the Soviet air force the location of buildings housing Romanian troops. Officers at division headquarters interrogated and then released them; but since they now knew where headquarters was located, their escort, the Legionnaire Sergeant T. R. Mircea Manoliu, took them to the garrison firing range to shoot them. Schachter fled unharmed; seriously wounded Wolf lost consciousness but survived; Manoliu did manage to murder Cojocaru.22
On that same day five unidentified Jews were sent to locate unexploded bombs in the courtyard of the same headquarters. Although they had been sent by Commissioner Nicolae Crăciun of the Fifth Police Precinct, they were not released after the task.23 That afternoon the leaders of the Jewish community were convened at Central Police Headquarters, and “the Jews of Iaşi” were accused of having collaborated with Soviet Jewish aviators. Police Superintendent Chirilovici ordered that within the next forty-eight hours Jews had to hand over to the police all binoculars, flashlights, and photographic equipment.24 At four o’clock in the afternoon Colonel Dumitru Captaru (the district prefect), Colonel Constantin Lupu (garrison commander), Police Superintendent Chirilovici, Police Inspector Giosanu, and Chief Physician Cosma met in the prefect’s office to map strategy, assigning to each police sector a detachment of gendarmes to conduct house searches and arrest “saboteurs” and “spies.”25 Between 5:00 and 9:00 that evening the first searches took place, engaging 140 policemen and 677 gendarmes organized into forty teams. These placed 317 Jews under “temporary” arrest, detaining another 207 who owned flashlights or who owned decorative or clothing items made from red cloth as more serious suspects.26
On Friday the twenty-seventh sporadic rifle fire could be heard throughout the city; shortly after 11:00 A.M. Chirilovici called Lupu to tell him that large groups of Legionnaires had gathered, singing, in the Jewish cemetery; he then made his way (supported by a platoon of soldiers) to the cemetery, where, alarmed at the arrival of the law, the armed Legionnaires began to scatter:
In the building where they had assembled, I [Chirilovici] found two crates filled with weapons. Two of the Legionnaires . . . said that they had been sent by the [army’s secret service] to arm all those Legionnaires who might soon find themselves behind enemy lines [i.e., possibly the same men who may have been involved in preparing the Iron Guards for the pogrom]. I asked . . . why they had not reported this measure to us. I returned to the city military command with my soldiers, but about one hour [later] the two individuals showed up in officer uniforms and apologized, stating they had been preparing for an abortive secret assignment. These two officers [then] showed me the order from the Supreme General Staff.27
The two commanders turned out to be the aforementioned plainclothes SSI officers Gheorghe Balotescu and Emil Tulbure, who, wearing uniforms, had already organized one of the anti-Semitic training episodes of June 22.28 The explanation that they were preparing volunteers to remain behind the Soviet lines appears strange too: their “agents” had behaved so boisterously that they had roused the entire neighborhood. Just as strange was the behavior of Chirilovici, who had allowed the Legionnaires to be armed (they were still officially enemies of the state) and had allowed them to leave, even though he had enough soldiers to handle them.
The most significant events of the day represented various overt and covert preparations for a pogrom. Nevertheless, the day did not end without the spilling of Jewish blood: Dr. Marcu Caufman’s father, a resident of the Nicolina Quarter, had been shot by a “sergeant of the artillery.”29 That same evening the still captive five Jews, now charged with spying, were detained by the Thirteenth Regiment Dorobanţi; these men were handed over to Manoliu, the same sergeant who had murdered Cojocaru. This time Manoliu once again led the prisoners to the firing range and, aided by one Corporal Nicolau, lined up the “suspects” and shot them. The five corpses were found the following day, when the district prefect reported six (!?) casualties to the commander of the Fourteenth Division (near the border, Iaşi was under military jurisdiction).30
The Pogrom Unfolds
On Saturday morning, June 28, a group of thirty soldiers from the Thirteenth and Twenty-fourth Artillery Regiments abused and robbed several Jews on the pretext that the former were looking for a wireless transmitter set. German soldiers got in on the action in the Tătăraşi neighborhood, on Răchiţi Street, around the slaughterhouse, and on Aurel Vlaicu and Vasile Lupu Streets. The police superintendent arrived with the garrison commander, the city’s chief prosecutor, the military prosecutor of the Fourteenth Division, and a platoon of gendarmes to “investigate.” At about the same time Sergeant Manoliu was arrested, apparently for the record, because he was released soon after by the military prosecutor, Major Nicolae Scriban.31
Meanwhile, freshly printed posters incited the citizenry of Iaşi to take matters into their own hands: ROMANIANS! FOR EACH JIDAN THAT YOU KILL, YOU LIQUIDATE A COMMUNIST. THE MOMENT FOR REVENGE HAS COME.32 Civilians joined men in uniform to terrorize the Jews. That evening Police Inspector Gheorghe Leahu ordered the Iaşi police “not to interfere with what the army is carrying out inside the city.”33
At nine o’clock in the evening an airplane, apparently a Soviet one, fired off several flares, followed immediately by rifles of different calibers. Panic spread among troops heading for the front. There was shooting in the Păcurari, Toma Cosma, and Sărărie neighborhoods, and shots were fired on Carol, Lazăr Catargiu, and Lăpuşneanu Streets. Military units were deployed and “returned fire.”34 But there were no casualties, and no bullet holes were found on the walls of houses the next day. Shells from old-fashioned hunting weapons, however, were found.35
Rumors of “Soviet paratroopers” spread. Soon groups of Romanian and German soldiers, gendarmes, and civilians took advantage of these rumors to justify the widespread assaults on the Jews that began the robbery and mayhem to which they gave themselves over for the rest of the night. An eyewitness later recalled,
On the night of June 28–29, 1941, a group of young Christians led by the coachman Lepioskin and accompanied by [soldiers] entered . . . the slaughterhouse neighborhood and engaged in massacres and plunder. . . . Air-raid sirens went off at nine and lasted until eight the following morning. . . . A group of soldiers accompanied by paramilitary reservists . . . shot the owner of the Minca textile store, Iosif Smilovici. Another group entered the courtyard of the Binder Hotel on Lăpuşneanu Street and under the pretext that they had discovered a machine gun in the attic, arrested the owner, Blau, together with his wife, infant daughter, sister-in-law, and mother-in-law; following summary judgment these were executed by machine-gun fire. . . . Later it was learned that the machine gun from the attic had been placed there by Legionnaire soldiers guarding [a tax office].36
The authorities, steeped in the anti-Semitism of their culture (and some sympathizing with the mob), did nothing to restore order. Many were inclined to blame the Jewish victims, as appears in the report by Police Inspector E. Giosianu of June 29 to the General Police Directorate in Bucharest: “On the evening of [June] 28–29 at approximately 10:30, Communist Jews and Romanians fired an unknown number of shots with automatic weapons throughout the city of Iaşi in order to induce panic among the people and to slow troops on the way to the front. . . . The police [and representatives of] the Romanian and German armed forces . . . mounted house searches.”37 Another June 29 police report to Bucharest indicated that late on June 28 the garrison commander (Colonel Constantin Lupu) met at Central Police Headquarters with the military prosecutor of the Third Army (Colonel Gheorghe Barozzi), the inspector of the gendarmerie (Colonel Gheorghe Bădescu), Police Inspector Giosianu, and the military prosecutor of the Fourteenth Division (Major Scriban) to discuss the situation. They made the decision to reinforce the “patrols” already sent out to the scenes of reported “diversionary” activity and to gather “suspects” at police headquarters.38
The following day shots could be heard throughout Iaşi as goons—in and out of uniform—shot down Jews. Other Jews were lined up and marched through the neighborhoods of Tătăraşi, Păcurari, Sărărie, and Nicolina to Central Police Headquarters. Some columns stopped at the National Lyceum, the Dorobanţi Regiment site, the Wachtel School, and the Regional Police Inspectorate, but all were eventually herded to central headquarters; men constituted the majority of these parties, but they also included women, children, and senior citizens, many still in their pajamas. Beaten and bruised, they were forced to march in step, arms raised above their heads. Their captors, Romanian and German, as well as the mobs lining their path, spat on them; pelted them with rocks and bottles; and struck them with sticks, bars, and rifle butts. Those who could not walk because of injury or ailment were shot, so that the streets were soon strewn with corpses.39
In the neighborhood of Păcurari one Dr. Piker was shot in front of his wife. The manufacturers Fall, Holzman, Schneer, and Pulferman were murdered along with their sons and sons-in-law. In the Brătianu neighborhood the merchant Milu Goldner was also shot down in front of his wife, as was Dr. Manole Solomon. On Brătianu Street the laryngologist Solomonovici, who had been visiting his daughter, was similarly murdered. On Ştefan cel Mare Street someone murdered a little girl, Tauba Grünberg, leaving her disemboweled in front of Hirschensohn’s store. On the corner of Ştefan cel Mare and Lozonschi Streets the family of Samuel Leibovici was machine-gunned: father, daughter, and son died on the spot, the mother subsequently in Gelehrter Hospital. The hosteler Herman Rottman was shot on University Street.
Many of the perpetrators of these crimes apparently were motivated not so much by the lust for blood as the lust for lucre: the actor Vinovschi of the National Theater, a participant in the murder of the Leibovici family, managed to seize their business after the crime.40 If Vinovschi had to wait, other perpetrators robbed their Jews as soon as they had been rounded up. This is what happened to the baker Herscu Marcu of 27 Zugravi Street, forced to Central Police Headquarters with his wife and two children early in the morning by an opportunistic Gypsy from Iaşi’s outskirts. Forbidden to lock their doors, all of the family’s possessions were looted during their absence. Avram Ihil, a twenty-four-year-old office clerk, was turned out of his house with his family; he was severely beaten, his father struck by a man named Racoviţă, a mortician from St. Spiridon Hospital, and his mother dragged by her hair into the street. After chasing Jews away, the mob looted their homes. Solomon Steinberg of 24 Păcurari Street had rented a room to Colonel Mihail Niculescu-Coca, whose aide robbed the family’s valuables while the Steinbergs were being held by the police; when they complained to the colonel upon their release, he slammed his door in their faces.41
German soldiers took part in an outrage at 3 Xenopol Street, in which the merchant Jean Olivenbaum and his family were slaughtered together with the three members of the Marcusohn family. The soldiers draped the corpse of Olivenbaum over a machine gun, photographed it, and thus created “proof” that the Jews had fired on German troops; the photograph was reproduced in the German magazine Der Adler (The Eagle). Near the intersection of Stroescu and Vovidenie Streets German soldiers executed the pediatrician Cozac Averbuch. They had asked people in an air-raid shelter if there were any Jews among them, and having received a negative reply, they left; someone denounced Averbuch, however, and the Germans, furious at having been tricked, returned and shot him.42
Often the civilians, emboldened by the company of soldiers, gendarmes, and policemen, proved the most violent pogromists; very often they were armed, highly unusual for Romanian workers or peasants in peacetime or wartime. “Henry Staerman (7 Ipsilante Street) was taken from his house [to the prefecture],” one testimonial reported, “by several railroad employees who lived in the neighborhood. They carried revolvers just like the guards who accompanied them.”43 “Leon Davidovici (8 Pînzăriţei Street) was evicted from his house with his father by the watchman Roman, . . . who lived across the street from them,” said another account. Though Roman arrived at Davidovici’s doorstep in the company of a German officer, it was the civilian who struck the father on the head with an iron bar; he died in his son’s arms.44 Many other testimonials in files of Bucharest’s Office of War Criminals recount similar events:45 Stefan Scobai, a Legionnaire, is reported to have shot and killed Iţic Burstin and Herman Mihailovici;46 Dumitru Constantinescu killed several Jews by bludgeoning them;47 the shoemaker Dumitru Rusu killed five Jews by gunning them down.48 Other Jews died several hours after being beaten by Scobai and another civilian, Rudolf Lubaş (who, “working” with policemen Leon Cristiniuc and Constantin Blînduţ, had already murdered three Jews with a bayonet).49 Still other Jews were severely abused by the shopkeeper Dumitru Dădîrlat; the white-collar employee Nicolae Rusu; the teamster Vasile Velescu; the Legionnaires Dumitru Andronic, Ion Laur, and Dumitru Dumitriu; the student Aurel Gramatiuc; the policeman Mihai Aniţulesei; and other civilians identified as Gheorghe Tănase, Nicolae Lupu, Ion Mănăstireanu, Gheorghe Bocancea, Gheorghe Grosu, and Dumitru Ciubotaru.50
German and Romanian, cop and robber, civilian and soldier, the rioters soon transformed the streets of Iaşi into Brueghel canvases. Survivors of the Jewish groups that were led to police headquarters later recorded the visions that accompanied their passage: those who left the Fifth Police Precinct at 5:00 P.M. were greeted by the corpse of an old man on Apeduct Street, a few paces beyond that of a child (of the plumber Suchär); in front of the Chamber of Commerce building and the Ghemul Verde Store on Cuza-Vodä Street, two heaps of dead people (in which they discerned the bodies of women and children) awaited them. The following image decorated the front of the police station on V. Alecsandri Street: the corpses of Şmil Idelovici, Moise Şebraru, and the latter’s son-in-law lay on top of one another and thus provided the backdrop for a German soldier murdering an old man with a bullet to the back of the neck.51 Another group of Jews being marched down Smîrdan Street by soldiers ran into an old Jew coming from Central Police Headquarters bearing the pass marked “free,” to prove to vigilantes that he had already been cleared of suspicion, just in time to witness his murder by a German soldier unconvinced of his clearance. In front of Sirata Grossu’s dental practice lay the bullet-riddled corpses of the tavern keeper Schneider, a boy, an old man, and a few steps away, still others. At the Jelea pharmacy in Sărărie more dead Jews had been tumbled, one on top of the other.52
History may judge the Romanians kind in comparison with the Germans in occupied Poland or Ukraine, for two Romanian officers persuaded the guards of Isidor Sulemer’s group to let their people go.53 Others slated for the police station roundup managed to escape by bribing their Romanian guards. Mendel Sacagiu escaped the worst by treating the soldiers who mobbed his house at 55 Smirdan Street to one thousand lei apiece and each of the civilians who followed to fifty.54 However, to characterize all these Romanians as kinder than their German counterparts would be to deny them their due: the patrol headed by the shoemakers Munteanu, Cucu, and Turilă (armed only with sticks and a hoe, though backed up by jeering neighbors) marched a group of eighteen Jews—eighteen at first—some three kilometers to an airfield. Those who grew exhausted marching with their hands above their heads were bayoneted right in the street; the eleven who made it past the mobs taunting and spitting at them fell before the soldiers’ machine guns upon arrival at their destination.55
Some massacres in the making miscarried at the last minute: a convoy of eight hundred to one thousand men, among them Iosub Weissmann, David Iţic Meier, and Iţic Moriţ, was forced to lie facedown along several large trenches near the bank of the Bahlui River. There many were beaten by some laborers, clerical employees, and shopkeepers. But these Jews got off easy: their tormentors were forced to satisfy themselves with merely drowning a rabbi from Buhusi. Police Chief Chirilovici’s driver, witnessing the scene, called his boss, who arrived shortly thereafter with an aide. Chirilovici ordered a sergeant who was about to shoot some of the Jews to release them and thereby defused this particular situation.56 The director of the Dacia Mill, Grigore Porfir (later recognized by Israel as a “righteous gentile”), managed to save about one hundred Jews working at his business (some at hard labor, others recent recruits, still others regular employees); and he did so despite the fact that soldiers threatened to kill him if he interfered in their anti-Semitic revelry.57 The pharmacist Beceanu saved dozens of Jews at similar great peril to his own life.58 Commissar Şuvei of the Second Police Precinct freed a group of 350 being herded toward Central Police Headquarters, and Commissar Mircescu and Police Officer Sava saved many Jews by advising them to leave their homes or taking them into protective custody.59
But other rescuers fared less well. An engineer by the name of Naum, known to his friends as something of a left-wing activist, tried to protect a Jew who was about to be killed on Päcurari Street; an officer gunned him down too with the cry, “Die, you dog, with the Jew you’re protecting.” The priest Răzmeriţă was shot on Sărărie Street trying to save several Jews. Enraged railroad workers murdered the machinist Ioan Gheorghiu when he stood in the way of their rampage on Zugravi Street.60
And all this time very large numbers of Jews were being corralled into the courtyard of Central Police Headquarters. One official report of 9:30 A.M. had one thousand people in the courtyard, though its author confessed that “we do not know all the details.”61 And yet a report signed by Chirilovici said that there were already close to 1,800 on hand by 9:00.62 The superintendent of the Iaşi police counted 3,500 at noon, a figure District Prefect Dumitru Captaru gave the Ministry of the Interior at 1:00 P.M.63 Chirilovici estimated that by sunset some five thousand Jews had been arrested.64
General Stavrescu, commander of the Fourteenth Infantry Division, appeared at the courtyard of the station several times during the course of that day, indicating the involvement of the highest military authorities. By 11:00 A.M. Police Commissars Dumitru Iancu and Titus Rahoveanu had begun the process of sorting the arrestees, by identification papers, by their looks, or by whatever criteria struck them and their assistants as valid. Between two hundred and two thousand individuals, most of them women, were released with papers identifying them as having been cleared. Some made their way safely home, others were slaughtered before they got there, and still others were rearrested and brought back. Ironically, just as some Jews were leaving the courtyard, slews of others were arriving. Indeed, many came of their own free will, hoping for the now famous ticket bearing the word “free” with which they hoped to ward off the numerous self-appointed street patrols.
But around noon SS troops and other German soldiers from the Todt Organization created a perimeter stretching along Vasile Alecsandri, Cuza-Voda, Brătianu, and Piaţa Unirii Streets to funnel the rows of Jews entering the courtyard. By 1:30, Romanian gendarmes and policemen had joined them, as had civilian “volunteers” such as Ghiţă Iosub.65 All were armed with iron bars or sticks, with which they struck the Jews with all their might, primarily on the head. Among those who died from these blows were Iancu Şoicat of 22 Mîrzescu Street; his nineteen-year-old son, Sami; and his seventy-five-year-old grandfather, Haim Segal.66 According to witnesses, by midafternoon the situation seemed to have escaped all control. Around 2:00 P.M. the captors opened fire on their prisoners with machine guns, other automatic weapons, and hunting rifles. One of these was the Legionnaire Dumitru Dumitriu, who owned an adjoining mechanic shop.67
A crowd of panicked Jews broke through the enclosure and sought refuge in buildings and alleys around the nearby Sidoli Movie Theater. They were mercilessly hunted down and liquidated, as one of the leaders of the Iaşi Jewish community later reported:
In Alecsandri Street, toward the Zarifopol garage . . . I saw the crowd flee in total chaos, fired on from rifles and machine guns. I fell onto the pavement after two bullets hit me. I lay there for several hours, seeing people I knew and strangers dying around me. . . . I saw an old Jewish man, disabled after the war of 1916–1918 and wearing the Bărbătie si Credinţa decoration on his chest; he also carried with him papers that officially exempted him from anti-Semitic restrictions. However, bullets had shattered his thorax, and he lived his last moments on a garbage can like a dog. Farther down the young Segal, son of a leather merchant who had been killed with his two other sons, was dying and sobbing, “Mother, Father, where are you? Give me some water, I’m thirsty.” . . . Soldiers . . . stabbed [the dying] with their bayonets to finish them off.68
The corpses at the police station and in the neighboring streets were then relieved of watches, pens, and anything else of value. The massacre at the station and in the streets continued intermittently until around 6:00 that evening, easing off somewhat after the arrival of General Stavrescu at 4:30. It is not known exactly why the killing slowed down and stopped, but according to Police Inspector Leahu, at the time the massacre began about 2,500 Jews had already been gathered and taken to the train station—indicating that earlier plans for these Jews had already been implemented before the pogrom started; we will return to this point later.69
It is difficult to estimate the number of victims of the Iaşi pogrom. The moderate estimate of Mircu suggests nine hundred were killed (five hundred inside the police station, four hundred around the movie house).70 The day after the police reported only three hundred.71 A more forthright estimate comes from the witness Captain Constantin Darie: three thousand to four thousand Jews killed or injured.72
But how could anyone have counted? We know that at least 254 were buried in mass graves in the Jewish cemetery soon after the events of the pogrom, but we don’t know how many more and how many elsewhere. The bodies were slowly removed in four trucks and a couple dozen horse carts over a two-day period. Uncounted corpses were simply taken to the garbage dumps of Copou District, though not abandoned until stripped of their clothes. Many mortally injured were tossed in with the corpses,73 but if a few here and a few there walked away or were quietly saved, it seems unlikely that the overall numbers would be very different. To these totals must be added the tallies from other less well-documented slaughters at the waterworks and the electrical plant. We do not know the number of these victims.74
And it was precisely during that afternoon—the afternoon of that bloody Sunday, June 29—that the decision was made to “evacuate” the Iaşi Jews who were being held as suspects at the police station. Chirilovici later assigned the decision to Stavrescu, who was allegedly working with representatives of the district prefecture,75 an unidentified “high-ranking German officer,” Police Inspector Leahu, Stănciulescu (the director of the police station), Commissar Anghel, Major Scriban, and—of course—Chirilovici himself.76 District Prefect Captaru apparently conveyed some kind of signal to these gentlemen, for he had already been in telephone contact with Mihai Antonescu at the Interior Ministry, who told him that the ministry wanted to “evacuate” the “suspects” and ordered him to keep Bucharest informed of the measures this ad hoc council decided upon.77
Thus did the “transfer” of some 2,500 Jews who had survived the massacre get under way. Their movement to the train station began at 8:00 P.M. One police subinspector, two police officers, two police section chiefs, and twenty patrolmen escorted several convoys, bolstered by a group of German officers and soldiers with two tanks and two motorcycles.78 After a lengthy head count during which the guards made the Jews lie facedown on the ground, their captors packed them onto an ordinary freight train. During the boarding the German soldiers crammed the greatest possible number of suspects into each berth, though the train was not scheduled to depart until early Monday morning. At around 4:00 A.M. on June 30, another contingent of 1,900 Jews formed at the police station, to be loaded onto a second train. A summary report sent by Captaru at 9:20 A.M. referred again to the fact that Mihai Antonescu and the Ministry of the Interior were behind the project.79 The destination of the trains and what became of their unhappy passengers will become clear presently, but the continued events in Iaşi must detain us for the moment.
For the bloodletting of the twenty-ninth had only tapered off on the thirtieth: it did not cease. Dawn found forced laborers toiling to bury the previous day’s corpses—along with “moribunds” who were just going to die anyway—in the mass graves previously prepared at the Jewish cemetery. Labor to bury all of the dead was unavailable; the crowds so enthusiastic for beatings and robbery were nowhere to be found when heavy, less emotionally satisfying work required doing. Mircu tells us that “the Germans” forced temporary Jewish funerary workers to throw corpses into the Bahlui River, along with, again, some of the mortally injured.80 According to the same testimony, as late as six in the evening that night, when a white-bearded Jewish stonecutter named Rotmann arrived with a young assistant to bring food to the exhausted “undertakers,” the killing was still going on: three gendarmes ordered the arrivals at gunpoint to hand over their clothes and then executed the two, the old man dying instantly, but the youth begging for a second shot, which finished him off. They were then tossed in with the others already lying in the trenches.81
While this work was going on, yet more ghastly events continued elsewhere. It seems that sometime on Monday one hundred Jews who had earlier been set to hard labor at the tramway electrical plant disappeared without a trace.82 We don’t know what happened to this entire group, but we do know what happened to one family: on Monday morning the tramway ticket taker Constantin Ifras is reported to have killed with a crowbar the Segals (father, mother, and two children), who happened to pass him on the street.83 And the massacre continued throughout Monday in various parts of the city, less impressive in scale than Sunday’s efforts but producing a hefty total of fifty dead, not including those at the power plant. Nearly half of this figure derives from one incident, triggered around 1:00 P.M., when a group of tank crewmen claimed that they had come under rifle fire near the pharmacy on Brătianu Street. Some reports say the tank was German, others Romanian. Regardless, it is known that these men searched the building, assembled eighteen or twenty Jews in St. Spiridon Square, forced them to lie on the ground, and then murdered them with the tank’s machine gun.84 We also know by name some of the victims: Kunovici, owner of a hat store on Ştefan cel Mare Street; Filip Simionovici, a baker from Brătianu Street; an engineer named Nacht; and the tavern keeper Mille. A surviving photograph captures the body of a four- or five-year-old child lying among half a dozen older victims.85
So too, as the garbage crews carted away corpses and municipal crews washed blood from the streets, did the photographer’s lens surprise a new group of Jews set to cleaning, stone by stone, the courtyard of Central Police Headquarters.86 One of these laborers, eighty-year-old Leia Moise of 6 Apeduct Street, left verbal images as vivid as the photographer’s:
I went to look for my son [whom she never found—R.I.], who had been drafted for civil defense labor at the electrical plant. [Not finding him here,] I then went to Central Police Headquarters but was detained and forced to scrub the courtyard. . . . We were forced to clean the blood that had dirtied the courtyard and [thus] the traces of the crimes that had been committed. I removed spattered brains, and I rinsed away the bloodstains that speckled the stones. I remained there without food for three days. On the third day a general arrived to tell us that we were free, admonishing us that whatever had happened there was because of the Jews who had fired on the Romanian-German army.87
No further episodes took place that day in the city of Iaşi. The deportees on the two trains, however, continued to die.
The first of the two death trains consisted, by varying accounts, of between thirty-three and thirty-nine cars bearing 2,430 to 2,590 passengers. The cars were designed to transport freight and had no windows. With rifle butts and bayonets, the captors drove between eighty and two hundred Jews into each car. Many of the unfortunates began their journey already mortally wounded. The guards nailed slats over the small ventilation shutters, so that even breathing became increasingly difficult as the hours passed. The fascists decorated the cars with signs informing their countrymen that inside were COMMUNIST JEWS or KILLERS OF GERMAN AND ROMANIAN SOLDIERS. The leaders had originally designated the town of Tîrgu Frumos as the site at which the deportees were to be concentrated; they soon changed this to Călăraşi, and this was only the first of numerous changes in the itinerary. The first train left Iaşi somewhere between 3:30 and 4:15 A.M. on Monday the thirtieth, under guard of a police detachment led by Sergeant Ion Leucea.
Contradictory directives originating in the Ministry of the Interior, the Office of the Chief of Staff, and the district prefecture sent the train on an indecisive but deadly route. At 7:00 A.M. it crawled past Tîrgu Frumos, some forty kilometers from Iaşi. The train continued on to Paşcani and then Lespezi, only to return to Paşcani and thence to the town of Roman, where it remained from 11:45 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. It then set out once more for Tîrgu Frumos, arriving at 9:30 that night. Thus seventeen hours after departure it remained the same forty kilometers from Iaşi.
The guards had forbidden anyone to open the doors, to air out the cars, or to offer the inmates anything to drink. So densely packed in most wagons that they could not move, people went mad in the sweltering heat and drank their own urine or the blood that streamed from their wounds. The socialist Carol Drimer and the capitalist Solomon Kahane, the technologist Ghetl Buchman and the Talmudist Haim Gheller—all shared one experience alike: they went mad and died raving.88 Others who retained their reason shortened their agony by committing suicide. Perhaps the most fortunate were those who simply lost consciousness for hours at a stretch.
One of the few to survive this and subsequent horrors, Israel Schleier, testified later that in one of the cars only eight children and three old men disembarked in Tîrgu Frumos. The majority of the bodies, however, remained, stiffened in the positions in which their previous owners had departed from them: “intertwined and immobile, they seemed to form a single . . . uninterrupted mass.” The stench, Schleier recalled, was unbearable, “a horrible blend of blood, corpses, and feces.”89 Just before arrival, during a brief stop at the Săbăoani train station, some of the inmates had managed to break the slats covering the vents on their wagons, but the guards had opened fire.90 Upon arrival at Tîrgu Frumos the cars boarded last reportedly contained only “forty or fifty people who were still alive, but [they were] in precarious physical condition.” In the third car there was one dead person, “an old man with a white beard.”91 The two hundred Jews in the last car were escorted to the town synagogue, according to one witness.92 Before anyone else could disembark, a German captain and the Romanian commander of a railway battalion, Danubiu Marinescu, arrived to forbid the opening of the other wagons. A telephone conversation ensued between Marinescu, who wanted to execute the survivors, and the district prefect, who was reluctant to receive either the corpses or those yet living because he had received no instructions from the Ministry of the Interior.93 Meanwhile, the trains stood still, serving as ovens slowly baking their human cargo.
At the same time Police Commissar Ion Botez and guards escorted the disembarked Jews to the town synagogue, making sure “under penalty of death” that none of the townsfolk gave any aid to the “dangerous” internees.94 Nor might the internees help themselves either: when some of the captives fell on the puddles along the muddy road hoping to quench their thirst—many had not had a drink since Sunday morning—Botez shot them.95 Survivors long recalled the blows and injuries they received from their hosts, some with bayonets.96 At the synagogue guards and others freed the captives of their unnecessary pens, jewelry, watches, and money. The town schoolmaster, Dumitru Atudorei (a lieutenant in the reserves), is reported to have participated in the plundering. For refusing to hand over their valuables, a noncommissioned officer shot the two sons of David Blondel on the spot. The president of the local Jewish community, Freitag, arrived at the synagogue to succor the arrivals, but he himself was beaten and robbed.97
Someone somewhere in the administration had kept his head: at dawn on July 1, a truck came from Iaşi loaded with gendarmes under Second Lieutenant Aurel Triandaf to take control of the train, order the doors opened, and arrange for the corpses to be removed. The survivors were ordered “from afar” to throw the corpses out of the cars—those in charge approached only after “covering their noses with kerchiefs”—but the squad from Iaşi did call in the local peasants “to see the Communists who had fired on Romanian and German troops.”98 The mayor of the town later reported that it had proven impossible to unload the dead bodies relying solely upon the weakened survivors, so “I ordered the police to bring in some Gypsies to complete the operation. The latter agreed, anticipating the chance to steal some shoes or an article of clothing.” The piles of corpses filled some of the railway cars halfway to the roof, however, prolonging the task far beyond the two hours originally anticipated: “in some there were 140 to 145 people, 80 to 90 of them dead.”99 Many of the corpses “had broken heads, hollowed-out eyes, or deep indentations produced by blows, so I guessed some had been loaded dead at Iaşi.”100 Thus Jew and Gypsy loaded some 650 cadavers onto trucks or carts to take them to their final resting place in the town’s Jewish cemetery.101
The previous night the policeman Gheorghe Tănase seemingly had grown bored, so he reportedly amused himself by firing his revolver into the windows of the cars; now, as the deathly procession arrived at the cemetery, he climbed onto the mounting “heap of corpses” to hasten the local Jews he had brought to the cemetery, beaten, and forced to dig trenches.102 The most stupendous of these excavations, a trench twenty-five meters long, two and a half deep, and just as wide, had been started on June 29—one day before the train arrived.103
The priest Paul Teodorescu from Răsboieni heard screams coming from one of the mass graves, argued with a German noncom, and finally gained permission to pay the Gypsies to extract the buried survivor—“not an easy task,” as Teodorescu testified after the war, “because the survivor had been brought in the morning and was at the bottom of the grave, covered up by corpses.” Naked and covered in filth, “the man who returned from the dead” was permitted to wash, have a glass of milk, and put on some clothes removed from the dead. He was allowed to return to the train on the truck that had just unloaded a new pile of corpses.104
Back at the station the torment of the living dragged on. Some cars, indeed, were not opened. Some captives tried to get a drink by tying many strips from their shirts into a kind of rope, which they then tossed from the railcars toward nearby puddles to sop up water. At first the Romanian and German guards had prevented the mayor of Tîrgu Frumos from bringing bread and water to the Jews, but after a while they relented. However, “when we tried to open the doors of the cars,” a merciful witness later recalled, “those inside themselves asked us to close them because the soldiers in the train station were stoning them.”105
Delayed at the town’s Ruginoasa boarding dock, the train and its inmates just sat there. Nathan Goldstein describes the following scene he witnessed from his cattle car in Tîrgu Frumos:
Being so close to water and thirsty for so long, most could not resist: they would jump out through the small opening of the car to go drink the water. Most were murdered by the soldiers; . . . an eleven-year-old child jumped out the window to get a drink of water, but the [deputy of the train’s commander] felled him with a shot aimed at his legs. The child screamed, “Water, water!” Then the adjutant took him by his feet, shouting, “You want water? Well, drink all you want!,” lowered him headfirst into the water of the Bahlui River until the child drowned, and then threw him in.106
Finally, under Second Lieutenant Triandaf, his gendarme adjutant (Anastase Bratu), and the thirty other gendarmes who had just arrived from Iaşi, the death train resumed its journey to Călăraşi just before 4:00 P.M. When the train arrived at Mirceşti, forty kilometers from Tîrgu Frumos, the following morning, 327 corpses had to be unloaded and buried near the village of Iugani.107 A group of Jews frantic with thirst jumped off the train and ran to some ponds close to the railroad track. Triandaf reportedly ordered their execution on the spot, himself taking part by emptying his revolver into the unfortunates.108 The train passed through Săbăoani, ten kilometers down the road, on July 3, continuing on to Roman, whose authorities refused to let it stop because of its stench. On orders from the Supreme General Staff of the Romanian army, temporarily located in Roman in connection with the invasion of the USSR, the train was then sent back to Săbăoani, where three hundred more corpses were deposited.109
Triandaf had given strict orders to allow the Jews no water; at various train stops guards fired on the prisoners to keep them from piling out of the cars, while at others Germans and Romanians pelted with rocks any who tried to leave. At Roman and subsequent stops, however, railroad workers sold buckets or hats filled with water to the internees at fantastic prices. For unknown reasons the military authorities at Săbăoani ordered a check by military physicians, after which the train returned to Roman. Here fifty-three more corpses were unloaded. The local Red Cross washed and deloused some of the living but, having condemned their infested garments, left them completely without clothing.
The following day the Jews were transferred to other cars, and the train left Roman with fifty kilograms of sugar, presumably to feed the inmates. During the night of July 4–5, the train remained at Mărăşesti (120 km from Roman), where ten corpses were removed; the next night, at Inoteşti (100 km from Mărăşesti), forty more were unloaded. At Ploieşti the inmates received water and bread. On July 6, the train finally reached Călăraşi, its original destination, where 1,076 survivors, including the 69 moribund, emerged; 25 more corpses were removed from the cars.
And here ended the mission of the thirty armed gendarmes who had escorted the dangerous “subversives.” The guards returned to Bucharest, where their chiefs had arranged an expression of appreciation after their mission: bread and cheese, two glasses of wine, and seventy lei apiece.110
Here also ended the journey of the first train that left Iaşi on the morning of June 30 with 2,530 Jews, finally arriving at Călăraşi on July 6 with 1,011. The captives had covered some five hundred kilometers over a period of six and one-half days of tropical heat, most of that time without water. The train had yielded 10 corpses at Mărăşesti, 654 at Tîrgu Frumos, 327 at Mirceşti, 300 at Săbăoani, 53 at Roman, 40 at Inoteşti, and 25 at Călăraşi.111 With the shootings of those trying to get water at the stops, the total fatalities on the first death train amounted to some 1,400 Jews.
The first death train had stopped, but of course the story had not. At Călăraşi the Romanians detained the “suspects” at a makeshift camp in the courtyard of the Twenty-third Infantry Regiment. The death rates soon dropped, though during the first several days ninety-nine more internees died, including the sixty-nine who had been near death upon arrival. Two-thirds were stark naked or nearly naked during the first several days. The authorities kept them there to little purpose—some were set at forced labor in Gheorgheni or Pia Petrea—for nearly two months, until August 30. One of the reasons that conditions improved was that these guards were willing to accept bribes. The Jewish community of Bucharest in particular made strong efforts to improve the lot of the inmates. Those in charge also allowed the synagogues of Călăraşi to shelter one hundred of the children and one hundred “intellectuals,” though why they would have shown such mercy to precisely that latter element most likely to be identified with communism remains a mystery.112 Between sixty and ninety-five inmates received hospital treatment, though they did not receive a reprieve from their labor assignments.
At the end of August 1941, the government decided it would be safe to allow the surviving Jews to return to Iaşi; this time, however, their military escort protected them from the hooligans infesting a number of the train stations on their way home. The actions of the lieutenant in charge were particularly commendable, but history has not discovered his name.113
The second death train had a briefer history. At 6:00 A.M. on June 30, 1,902 Jews boarded eighteen cars. The last car contained eighty corpses removed from the station at Iaşi, people killed by gunfire, disemboweled with bayonets, or bludgeoned with sledgehammers. Six policemen under orders of Commander Ciuhat guarded the train.114 The transport took eight hours to reach its destination at Podul Iloaei, twenty kilometers from Iaşi, moving so slowly that the guard was able at times to follow it on foot. Some cars arrived with as many as one hundred dead and as few as three or four half-dead survivors; in some of the wagons a prisoner had died, on average, every two or three minutes.
At one of the stops a Dr. Peretz, whose father and son were on the verge of death from dehydration, slipped through a hole in the planks to get some water. A German soldier shot and killed him. Moments later his father and one of his brothers died of exhaustion and dehydration (another brother survived). Tili Şmilovici paid a soldier 100,000 lei for a glass of water; the soldier failed to return with it, so Smilovici jumped out of the car to get a drink from a nearby pond, where he was cut down by the guards’ gunfire. Married only three days before, the dentist Friedman paid twenty thousand lei for a glass of water. Gulping the liquid greedily, he realized too late that it was lye, thereupon suffering the inevitable agonized death. Another dentist, Goldman, tried several times to shorten his suffering by attempting suicide, but fellow riders stopped him.115 At one stop the inmates were permitted to drink from a pond where pigs wallowed; several fainted and drowned right there, others perished later from the ensuing gastrointestinal infections. Upon arrival in Podul Iloaei the 708 surviving passengers were locked up in synagogues or assigned to Jewish residences in the community; the 1,194 dead were buried in the local cemetery.116
The total number of victims of the Iaşi pogrom and its aftermath can never be determined. The sources vary the count from 3,200 to 13,000, the lesser of these two figures coming from revisionist Romanian historians, approximately as trustworthy as their Western revisionist counterparts.117 Raul Hilberg cites German diplomats accredited to Bucharest, who estimated four thousand dead.118 Curzio Malaparte, a fascist Italian war correspondent who later switched from justification of the pogrom to its condemnation, would report seven thousand victims.119 The Communist historian Gheorghe Zaharia (with every reason to discredit the fascist governments that preceded his own authoritarian regime but also not eager to emphasize Jewish losses and thereby justify one ideological underpinning of Zionism) cited documents from the archives of the Ministry of the Interior of the Romanian People’s Republic indicating more than eight thousand victims.120 These were the same sources that bolstered the charges at the Antonescu trial, proffered in an indictment that proclaimed the organizers of the pogrom responsible for ten thousand deaths. And yet an SSI report, dated July 23, 1943, and based on lists of the dead prepared by the synagogues of Iaşi, took perfectly seriously the figure of 13,266, including 40 women and 180 children; cited recently by scholars working in Romania, this figure seems not unreasonable.121
Many circumstances contribute to the difficulty of establishing the exact number of victims of the Iaşi pogrom. Such documentation is almost inevitably by nature incomplete and not fully accurate; much of what we know derives from testimony at the postwar tribunals. At those trials nearly all of the accused sought to minimize their own roles; but by the same token, some tried to buy the sympathy of the court by exaggerating those of others. Whether an element of hyperbole distorts survivors’ accounts is debatable; but in any case, they cannot be used to accurately gauge the number of deaths. The historian’s task is thus challenging; but whatever doubts remain as to the details, the following pictures seem more or less certain:
The SSI played a leading role in preparing the pogrom, though as an institution it apparently did not play the leading role in its execution. Still, many of its agents did get involved in the bloodletting. SSI Lieutenant Colonel Traian Borcescu acknowledged in 1946 that although it was not the “mission” of the operatives “to implement . . . the slaughter,” teams headed by Inspector Petrovici, Captain Balotescu, Major Tulbure, and Gică Cristescu (the brother of Eugen) rolled up their sleeves to participate in the work. Members of Petrovici’s team in particular confirmed their own involvement in the events that took place in the courtyard of Central Police Headquarters on June 29.122 All these teams were set into motion by one of the SSI’s top officials, Florin Becescu-Georgescu.123
It is especially noteworthy that the SSI supplied arms and provided leadership to the Legionnaires who incited the pogrom. But how could SSI head Eugen Cristescu arm the enemies of the Antonescu regime? This question remains unanswered. All we know—and those who testified may have been lying—is that former SSI agents claimed in 1946 that Cristescu was reporting to both Mihai and Ion Antonescu about events in Iaşi; the SSI’s first operational echelon (which some evidence suggests was comparable to the Germans’ Einsatzgruppen [Mobile Killing Units]) may have even sent to the Interior Ministry a photo album depicting the pogrom.124
The Second Section of the army, as well as local military authorities who, in the absence of explicit instructions, took the initiative to “go beyond the call of duty,” bore a large share of the responsibility. Chief among them was Colonel Constantin Lupu, commander of the Iaşi garrison. Though not actively involved himself, Lupu did nothing to disarm the troops under his command when they participated in looting and violence against civilians. Colonel Dumitru Captaru, district prefect, received and executed the order to evacuate the Jews of Iaşi by train; he had asked for and obtained approval to do this from the Ministry of the Interior and from Mihai Antonescu (for the moment replacing Ion Antonescu, then directing military operations, as head of state).125 Addressing the Ministry of the Interior on June 29, 1941, Captaru reported that “some individuals argued that the Jews themselves were to blame for the mass murder unleashed against them by the German and Romanian armed forces and the Christian population.”126 On July 2, 1941, in a second report to the same ministry, Captaru again blamed the Jews for the pogrom, branding them Communists and saboteurs and accusing them of firing on the Romanian and German forces.127 Colonel Chirilovici, the superintendent of the Iaşi police, had prevented some outrages, but at the same time he participated in the arrest—and therefore indirectly in the torture—of the Jews. General Stavrescu, who commanded the Fourteenth Division, also took part in all major decisions concerning the Jews. German complicity is obvious throughout.
To return to the chronology, at 11:00 P.M. on June 28, Ion Antonescu telephoned Colonel Lupu, who reported to him about the situation in Iaşi. The head of state ordered the “evacuation of the Jewish population,” considering it “necessary” to include the women and children.128 The morning of June 29, Mihai Antonescu ordered the city prefecture “to evacuate the Jewish population from Iaşi . . . one transport to Tîrgu Frumos and the other to Podul Iloaei.”129 And the next day Ion Antonescu himself ordered that “all Communist Jews . . . who were caught with red flags or weapons be executed that same night.”130
A communiqué issued on July 1 by the Office of the President of the Council of Ministers acknowledged that five hundred Jews had already died, but it rationalized the fact in such a way as to make it appear that the Romanians had only been defending themselves: “The Soviets try to generate acts of sabotage [and] disorder . . . in our rear [by parachuting] spies and terrorists who contact agents living [among our] Judeo-Communist populace. . . . Some of them were caught, and the acts of aggression that they tried to carry out were severely punished. Five hundred Judeo-Communists who had fired shots at German and Romanian soldiers were executed in Iaşi.”131 In an order sent to all prefects on July 4, Marshal Antonescu accused the Jews of having “insulted and attacked” the Romanian army. Nonetheless, even at this moment he staked a claim on behalf of the government’s monopoly on the right to punish the “guilty”: it is a “great shame,” he said, “when soldiers [take] their own initiative and often only to plunder or abuse, attack the Jewish population and kill at random, as was the case in Iaşi. . . . Only the government has the right to take the necessary measures.”132
Perhaps such statements were intended to leave Antonescu a means to evade possible future accountability. In 1946, he explained that he had known that “at least two thousand [Jews] had been thrown into wagons and asphyxiated. It is because of those two thousand that I left for Iaşi—I was even bombed at the Nicolina train station—and I mentioned this to the German general. I expressed the opinion that an investigation [of the pogrom] should be launched to find out who the perpetrators were; perhaps the German Gestapo? I uncovered only one Legionnaire [Sergeant Manoliu], whom I brought before justice, but he was acquitted.”133 Actually Manoliu survived the war and was one of the very few Romanians tried during the war for crimes committed during the Iaşi pogrom.134
General Leoveanu, general director of the police and state security, headed the Antonescu-launched investigation into the Iaşi events. As early as July 2, he presented Antonescu with a memorandum specifying that there had indeed been no casualties among either Romanian or German military units; that teams composed of Romanian policemen, gendarmes, and German soldiers had engaged in “strict searches” of Jewish homes; that in spite of the fact that Romanian policemen at the central station had released men more than sixty years old, women, and children, the Germans protested and rearrested some of them; and that the Germans had instigated the overcrowding of the train cars. He reported also that ninety-nine Romanian civilians and nine military personnel had been arrested for acts of plunder and that “the Inspectorate and the Central Police Headquarters of Iaşi [had] fulfilled their responsibility by setting up liaisons with local . . . authorities to ensure that order would be maintained and to prevent looting.”135
For his part, Leoveanu would state after the war that
following my observations I concluded that [the pogrom] had been a provocation engineered by the Germans through fake shots fired at the army. This fact was demonstrated by the cartridge casings found in the street, [cartridges that] came from starter’s pistols bearing the “Flobert” brand. They could not reach a target more distant than three or four meters. . . . No soldier died in the street, and . . . no one was wounded either. . . . The city police rounded up all the Jews . . . from their homes and led them to Central Police Headquarters during the days of the slaughter, aided by troops from the city garrison. . . . I concluded, based on my research, that during the pogrom of the Jewish population Legionnaire elements who cooperated with the police and units stationed in the city were implicated.136
Whatever the Romanian leadership thought it was doing, the entire world soon became aware of its actions. In particular the Iaşi pogrom produced a notable outcry among the various diplomatic corps. Ambassador Rivera of Chile announced at a press conference in Montevideo, Uruguay, that “it is very difficult to describe what the Nazi bands and the Romanians did to the Jews in Romania. Human language is too poor. . . . The Jews of Romania were stripped of their possessions, subjected to blackmail, brutally attacked, and many of them slaughtered in the most horrible fashion.”137 In a letter to Admiral Darlan, vice president of the Council of Ministers of Vichy, France, Ambassador Jacques Truelle maintained that “the horrors that took place in the city of Iaşi last July . . . could [never] be outdone.”138
As early as 1940, American chargé d’affaires Franklin Mott Gunther had warned Prime Minister Gigurtu “of the consequences that the anti-Semitic legislation of August 8, 1940, might bear on the image of Romania around the world.”139 In 1941, he reported to the secretary of state that “I often talked about these outrages with my colleagues” and that the latter were “as disgusted as I am by their hideous nature. . . . The papal nuncio alleges that he [commented on them] to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. . . . [The Brazilian, Portuguese, and Swiss ministers] asked me to recommend to my government that a joint international protest be filed.”140 The author wrote that he had related on several occasions to Antonescu and other Romanian officials the American horror at the “indifference” to human life in Romania.141 As late as August 19, Cloyce K. Huston, second secretary of the American legation, expressed astonishment at the official Romanian release acknowledging the execution of five hundred Jews in Iaşi, the death trains, and the widespread massacres in the zones of military operations.142 The U.S. legation and the Department of State had another reason for their interest: Iacob Nimovitz, a permanent resident of the United States, and Joseph M. Hirsch and Nathan Spitzer, both naturalized citizens, had been killed during these events.143
The Iaşi pogrom was no isolated episode. Romanian military units, Romanian gendarmes, and Romanian as well as Ukrainian peasants murdered Jews in many places during the following weeks.
At the very end of June Ion Antonescu had issued the instructions that gave the go-ahead to numerous central and local authorities to establish what was in effect a state of emergency in regard to the treatment of the Jewish population. What this meant essentially was that as far as the government was concerned, the Jews were outside the protection of the law. That the source of this stance of the Romanian government at all levels was indeed Antonescu himself becomes apparent in such documents as his order subjecting the Jews in principle to martial law, forbidding them to leave their homes between the hours of 6:00 P.M. and 6:00 A.M. His order also mandated rounding up Jews and concentrating them in appropriate “larger buildings.” To keep the most suspect Jews under observation and “to punish immediately any signs of trouble,” Antonescu’s order insisted on the taking of “hostages” from among “the Jewish leadership,” to be “immediately” executed in the event of any “civil rebellion.”144 The army transmitted this order to units stationed in various localities on June 30, as did the Ministry of the Interior to the police prefectures.
Nearly two weeks earlier other governmental agencies had already undertaken administrative initiatives that similarly placed the Jews outside the protection of the law. On June 17 and 18, 1941, the leadership of the gendarmerie organized regional conferences in Galati (for the Chilia, Ismail, and Cetatea Albă gendarme legions) and in Roman (Orhei, Lăpuşna, and Bălţi), at which the inspector general of the gendarmerie, General C. Z. Vasiliu, ordered local agencies to “cleanse the land” of Jews, entailing “the extermination on site of all Jews found in rural areas,” concentration into ghettos of all Jews in the towns, and the arrest of all “suspects,” Communist party members, and those who had held office under the brief Soviet regime.145 Though the order in some regions was transmitted downward in writing, in others regional bosses orally conveyed it to their subordinates, possibly to make sure that the spirit of the order is what got through rather than its letter: few were willing to leave a paper trail connecting themselves directly to the events most had reason to know would soon take place.146 Elsewhere, Vasiliu himself amplified his point (expressing himself in bureaucratic language rather than the more explicit words those who orally conveyed the order may have used): the government had to devote every effort to keeping the Jewish population under surveillance, he said, since everyone knew “that the Jews have for the most part collaborated with communism and have been hostile to the Romanian armed forces, authorities, and people.” Not one Jew, it was stressed, should be permitted “to escape the fate that he deserves.”147 Since Bessarabia and Bukovina were the areas that had been under Soviet rule since 1940, the gendarmeries in these areas in particular were prepared to enact Vasiliu’s orders, with the purpose of realizing the anti-Semites’ old dream of curăţarea terenului.
On July 3, Mihai Antonescu (as vice president of the Council of Ministers, he was responsible for leading the state when Ion Antonescu was at the front) sponsored a conference of administrative inspectors and military prosecutors being sent to Bessarabia and Bukovina. There he declared that the time had come for “complete ethnic liberation” and “purification of our lineage”:
Elements that are foreign to our [nation’s] soul have grown like a plague to darken our future. Let us be ruthless so as not to miss this opportunity. No one should allow himself to be seduced by humanitarian philosophy, which masks the interests of a most aggressive race . . . behind which we find a rapacious religion. . . . The act of ethnic cleansing will involve removal or isolation of all Jews in labor camps, from which they will no longer exert their nefarious influence, along with all others who are foreign to our lineage and whose behavior is suspicious. . . . The provincial governments will advise on the . . . foreign elements that must be transferred beyond the border, all those who have no reason to be in Bessarabia and in Bukovina.148
At the meeting of the Council of Ministers on July 8, 1941, Mihai Antonescu spoke in the same vein, stressing in particular his intent to reject any traditionalist humanitarian objections to the forced “migration” of the Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina. He also supported the cleansing from those lands of “the Ukrainian element,” which would also have “no reason to be here” any longer. Romanians who had “strayed” into “the darkness of Bolshevism” would be “annihilated without pity.”149 To put a fine point on things, Antonescu told his auditors they should be “indifferent if history adjudges us barbarians. The Roman Empire committed acts deemed barbaric by contemporary standards, and nevertheless it established the greatest political system. This is the most opportune moment in our history. If need be, use machine guns.”150
“Cleanse the soil of Communists,” “eliminate the Bolsheviks, all suspicious individuals, and Jewish provocateurs,” “rid the villages of all Jews”—such were the subsequent orders from Mihai Antonescu.151 And such were the orders elaborated at the next rung of the Romanian bureaucracy. The chief military prosecutor, General Ion Topor, ordered his subordinates “to have all Ukrainians and Romanians who took part in Communist activities taken across the Dniester River and to take all minorities [i.e., Jews] falling into the same category to be executed.”152 Vasiliu instructed Colonel Meculescu of the Chişinău Gendarme Inspectorate to “identify and arrest all Jews, irrespective of gender and age, who can be found in rural areas.”153 As early as July 9, the governor of Bessarabia, General Voiculescu, began to receive reports on the gendarmes’ “cleansing activity.”154 On July 11, Lieutenant Colonel A. Ionescu, chief of the Second Section, reported to his superiors that his section had already designed and implemented a plan “to eliminate the Judaic element from the territory of Bessarabia by organizing and activating teams to operate ahead of the Romanian troops.” The link from government to administration to the masses emerges clearly in his boast that teams were fostering in the villages “an environment hostile to Judaic elements so that the population will try to eliminate them on its own with the most appropriate means suited to the circumstances.”155 As General Topor put it on July 17, “This country does not need Jews.”156
Those rounded up faced dire prospects indeed. On July 19, Deputy Minister Popescu conveyed the following order of the leader to the General Inspectorate of the Gendarmerie: “All Jews who are in labor camps or who are imprisoned must be subjected to hard labor. If any flee, one out of ten [remaining] will be executed. If they do not work as required, do not feed them, do not allow them to receive food or purchase it.”157 Many Jews in Bessarabia and Bukovina being held as hostages were executed, killings that did not require any ex post facto justification.
The taking of Jewish hostages was widely practiced in Moldavia, Bessarabia, and Bukovina.158 Theoretically, for each Romanian or German soldier killed in the regions under Romanian control, fifty Jews were supposed to be liquidated. Mere orders issued by Romanian or German officers produced mass executions. Yet the hostage-taking and land-cleansing orders attest to the fact that responsibility for the murder of Jews also belongs to the central authorities. That the gendarmerie’s systematic massacres of Jews (and others) resulted from the determined purpose of the government clearly emerges from the account of the gendarme adjutant Vasile Ivanoiu during his January 1950 trial:
I reached my station at Gosinu in the district of Hotin on the night of July 10, 1941. Three to four days later I was called in by the section chief of Clişcăuţi, Dumitru Gheorghe, together with the nine gendarme station chiefs located in the area, . . . [who] told us that the time had come to cleanse the soil of all that was noxious to the Romanian state, adding that those elements had to disappear. He then read to us the names of those who had to be eliminated, . . . most likely . . . from lists [of] Soviet officials we had found when our troops had arrived. . . . I was given the names of people in two communes. When I heard the names of people who had to disappear, I informed my section chief that some of those people were not guilty of anything and that after their execution we would be hard-pressed when the relatives came to us for information about them; I let him know that I would not carry out such an action. [Thereupon] the section chief told me that we were at war, that the order had to be carried out without further discussion, and that if I refused, he would personally execute me. When I took my leave, the adjutants from the other sections asked me for advice on the matter. I told them that we were not execution squads and that each and every one of them had to act according to what his conscience dictated, and I added that I would not carry out those orders.159
Although the massacres under discussion got under way in July, in some sense they represent a continuation of executions of Jews on the west side of the Prut River, the previous Soviet-Romanian border. When Sergeant Manoliu signaled the beginning of the Iaşi pogrom by shooting at a group of six Jews on June 27, 1941, he may not have known that analogous events would immediately break out in other localities near the former border.
In the village of Sculeni, for example, Romanians and Germans were engaged in fierce fighting against Soviet troops. The Romanians belonging to Colonel Ermil Matieş’s Sixth Mountain Regiment, whose command elements had been garrisoned at Bălţi (Bessarabia), had allegedly been humiliated and attacked with guns and grenades by the local Jewish population during the unit’s withdrawal from Bessarabia in 1940; they now obtained from the German command an assignment to “assault” a sector centered on Sculeni. This would afford the Romanians an opportunity to take “revenge” on those same Jews.
The overall commander in the area at this time, the German Colonel Buck, ordered the evacuation of the civilian population of Sculeni, who were to be taken to Stînca Roznovanu west of the Prut. Here Captain Ion Stihi and Second Lieutenant Eugen Mihăilescu supervised the sorting of the evacuees, proceeding with the active participation of the former Legionnaire mayor of Sculeni, Gheorghe Cimpoesu (now on leave from the Twenty-third Artillery Regiment). The Christians were taken to the villages of Cârlig and Copou, but the Jews were held back. Mihăilescu, a former theology student and Legionnaire, forced forty of the Jews to dig ditches, he and his comrades then helping themselves to whatever gold, jewelry, or other valuables the Jews had carried with them.160 Next, together with Sergeant Vasile Mihailov, he killed at least 311 Jews with machine guns and automatic weapons. Cimpoeşu and Paraschiva Barlaconschi Moroşeanu, another civilian from Sculeni, then searched the bodies for remaining jewelry and salvageable clothing.161
It would seem that this “action” raised some eyebrows at headquarters because we find Matieş justifying it later that month. In a report to the Fourteenth Division on July 20, the colonel acknowledged that he had ordered Captain Stihi to arrest and execute “all the suspect Jews in Sculeni.”162 On July 30, Matieş responded to further questioning: “It is surprising that we are revisiting a case when soldiers from that regiment in Sculeni had to endure so much because of all those Jews who remained in the town. That is why they were executed pursuant to orders from our superiors.”163 On the following day Matieş maintained in a report to the division chief of staff that, “in my opinion, the regiment’s approach was too feeble. . . . Following [orders] Captain Stihi executed all those scum.”164 This detail was confirmed during Matieş’s postwar trial by Lieutenant Andronic Prepeliţă from the company commanded by Stihi (who placed most of the blame on Sergeant Mihailov, even though Stihi and Mihăilescu in fact wielded the submachine guns). “The Jews were standing in front of them in a triangular formation,” Prepeliţă recalled, “men, women, children. The three . . . fired at them. I saw it with my own eyes.”165
The 311 corpses buried at Stînca Roznovanu were exhumed from three mass graves during the second half of September 1945 in the presence of a delegation from the Jewish community of Iaşi, the coroner of the Iaşi court, and the new gendarme station chief of the commune of Holboca. It is likely that the number of victims exceeded the above figure: the eyewitness Alexandru Zaharia testified that another mass grave had been dug near a road that had since been relocated.166 German prisoners of war performed the excavation under Soviet guard, turning up, among other discoveries, thirty-three children between the ages of one and twelve, including seven under one year old and fourteen under six years old. Some corpses were clothed in two or three shirts, suits, shawls (indicating they had anticipated deportation), while others still wore pajamas or nightgowns, especially the women in the second mass grave. Most of the men in the first grave were barefoot, scantily dressed, with their sleeves rolled up. The pockets of their clothing contained everyday objects such as keys, combs, handkerchiefs, and cologne flasks. Some of the corpses still bore identification papers or wore jewelry.167 The corpses generally displayed signs of gunshot wounds to the chest, but some of them also exhibited cranial fractures. One child between two and four years old probably had been buried alive.168
The findings of the exhumation as they appeared in the original report tell us much about the way in which the Jews from Sculeni had been rounded up and executed:
• The three mass graves included the corpses of men and women of all ages.
• Papers found on the corpses, plus additional evidence of circumcision, indicated that these were the corpses of Jews.
• Forensic investigation indicated that the typical corpse bore signs of multiple wounds, predominantly produced by firearms, to the chest and abdomen; less frequently these wounds were located on the head.
• Wounds to the head included not only gunshots, but cranial fractures; reconstruction of the skeleton of one two- to four-year-old indicated no injuries to healthy bones.
• The first grave yielded mostly men of middle age; the second grave contained mostly corpses of women and old people; the third grave produced large numbers of infants, women, and the elderly; only six men of middle age were found there.
• Clothing was usually simple—home wear and night wear; many of the men and women were shoeless.169
An obvious and inescapable conclusion emerges: the victims had generally been rounded up very suddenly, to be shot and/or have their heads smashed.
Troops of the Sixteenth Infantry Regiment occupied the village of Ciudei in Bukovina on July 3, 1941; under the command of Valeriu Carp, they had murdered dozens of Jews there after their withdrawal before the Soviets. Now the same men undertook the murder of the entire Jewish population of the area. The number of victims ranged somewhere between 450 and 572. The following families appear in the lists of those murdered: Babat, Grünberg, Schachter, Moses, Rosenblatt, Kula, and Hartman.170 Peasants aided their soldier brothers. Some of them broke Nathan Schuller’s hands, chained him, and led him through Ciudei. A peasant murdered the schoolmaster Sumer Saltinger in front of his house; the mob then forced his wife to place him in a wheelbarrow, take him to the cemetery, and bury him.171 Peasants armed with axes, pitchforks, hoes, and pickaxes killed Smil Katz’s family in the village of Crâsnişoara Nouă. Jews were accused of blowing up the bridge at Crasna, though in fact Soviet troops had destroyed it. Fifty Jews were executed in Crasna Forest; this number included Puiu Hamer, Iacob Katz, Emanuel Hamer, Haim Besner, Hers Besner, and Adolf Katz.172
Romanian troops occupied the city of Storojineţ on July 4 and began their massacre right away, killing two hundred Jews in two days.173 Some of those slain included Solomon Drimer and his daughter-in-law; Moritz Loebel’s wife, an eighteen-month-old infant whom she held in her arms, and her mother—Moritz Loebel survived but later committed suicide; Mendel Schmeltzer, his wife, and their son-in-law; Mozes Iuhrman and his wife; and the Scheflers (three people), the Sieglers (mother and daughter), the Flinsteins (three people), the Liebermans (two), the Surchises (three), and the Rosners (three).174 A one-year-old infant was the only survivor from the Schmeltzer and Iuhrman families. The mob chopped up the merchant Leon Elicher and his father at the Margulius windmill; they cut off Roza Karpel’s arms in her own house, and though she was later hospitalized, she died while being carried on a stretcher during one of the deportation transports to Transnistria.175 The pogromists humiliated the old woman Sonntag by draping a cartridge belt on her before murdering her; a photograph of her wearing the belt was proffered as evidence that the eighty-year-old woman had fired at the army.176 Her daughter found her body in a ditch next to a dead chicken and a dead dog.177
The four thousand Jews whose lives were spared were locked up inside two school buildings, where they remained for three days without food or clean water. However, their captors did allow them to drink from the nearby ponds. The recently appointed mayor, the attorney Petru Bruja, wanted to send the Jews home, but Colonel Alexandrescu, who commanded the recruitment district, and the powerful landowner Şerban Flondor opposed him. The mayor resigned, and a man named Dimitrie Rusu replaced him. Under his leadership the authorities converted Grădiniţi, Ieronim, Malcinschi, and Lumea Noua Streets into a “ghetto” (after the mob had been permitted to loot Jewish residences). Deputy Mayor Stefan Tomovici (a former Liberal party senator) issued an order requiring the Jews to sweep the streets every day. Certain figures responsible for the Jews—for example, the commander of the gendarme legion of Bîrzescu and the mayor’s chief of staff, Isidor Palade—sought to minimize the suffering of their charges, but this did not prevent the transfer, in alphabetical order, of Jewish families to the Edineţi transit camp in the district of Hotin. With the exception of eleven of these families, all were eventually deported to Transnistria.178
The occupation troops were just as active in the neighboring villages. Matatias Carp provides details of the murders of some of them: the soldiers who had occupied the village of Ropcea rounded up the entire Hass family and forced them on foot to the Siret River. Eugen had to carry his father for much of the nine kilometers. The soldiers drove all onto a narrow bridge, off of which they shot them one by one. The elderly Osias, blind, amused them with his unstable gait; he was the first to be felled. His daughter, Rifca Schneider, followed him into the river, and it is most likely that the baby she carried in her arms was still alive when it hit the water. Eugen Hass, his wife, their son, and their daughter were shot and fell into the current, but the daughter had only been wounded, and locals rescued her from the river. But when she regained consciousness she begged an obliging soldier to kill her. The Meer brothers, Osias Rosen (brother of the martyred Rabbi Mark Rosen of Cernăuţi), and Rosen’s wife were also killed in Ropcea. The locals of Iordăneşti authored a massacre under the command of their small-time leader, Halache Telefon. Michel Donnenfeld, a man named Haller, and the latter’s two boys, Woloch and Heinich, were among those the crowd brutalized and then killed.179
One of the most horrible massacres took place at Banila on the Siret, whose inhabitants—urged on by the mayor, Moscaliu, and the self-proclaimed leader, Barbaza—slaughtered fifteen Jews. The victims included M. Satran, an eighty-year-old blind man, Iacob Fleischer, Iacob Brecher, and Brecher’s daughter. Iacob Brecher’s body was cut into pieces and the blood used to grease cart axles. The parish priest Ştefanovici refused to perform Sunday services the next day,180 telling his congregation, “I am ashamed to enter this church, when my coreligionists commit such crimes.”181 Dr. Salzberg was dragged out of internment in order to attend to the difficult delivery of a child, but his reward was to be savagely beaten afterward by the woman’s father, a certain Ciornei; one of the soldiers prepared to execute Salzberg, but at the last moment he relented. The doctor attempted suicide after being returned to internment.182 A mob of peasants led by two locals, Ioan Colodelo and Alexe Mateiaş, slaughtered 170 people in the Jewish cemetery of Banila pe Ceremuş (in Storojineţ).183
On July 5, massacres took place in all villages of Storojineţ District where Jews lived. A group of Ukrainians, Ruthenians, and Romanians (civilians and soldiers) shot or beat to death between eighty and eighty-eight Jews in the village of Stăneştii de Jos; forty more died in the village of Stăneştii de Sus.184 As early as 1945, Marius Mircu was able to give the names of forty-seven of those killed in his Pogromurile din Bucovina si Dorohoi (Pogroms of Bukovina and Dorohoi). Then they started gathering Jews from Băbeşti, Nepolocăuţi, and Călineşti, driving them to Stăneşti. The Count of Scala, a landowner from Călineşti and an officer in the army, convinced the gendarme chief not to send the Jews from his village to the newly established transit camps. The count thus managed to spare the latter many hardships, but they ended up being deported to Transnistria just the same.185
In the village of Jadova Veche local pogromists dragged Rabbi Ghinsberg around by his beard, struck him on the head, and wounded him with bayonets, but his life was spared; others such as Eli Schnitter, his wife, and Bubi Engel, however, were murdered. Many of the girls were raped; pogromists cut off the beards of all the old men. It is impossible to know for certain how many perished there: all we do know is that only 80 people out of the 543 Jewish residents survived the massacres in their hometown, the convoys to the camps of Edineţi, and deportation to Transnistria.186 In Costeşti Ukrainian villagers and former Legionnaires rounded up the Jews and then called upon the Romanian army to execute them in a field near the home of the peasant Honceruc. Between 360 and 420 Jews fell there; Mircu was able to identify the names of 33 families, accounting for 105 of the people murdered in Costeşti.187 “Of the eight Jews residing in Budineţ, six were killed, including Isidor Berghof, secretary of the Jewish community of Storojineţ, whose murderers finished him off only after gouging out his eyes.”188
None of the above crimes were in any way atypical for Storojineţ, and analogous abominations proceeded in other villages of the district. In Cires all twelve Jewish families were killed, including Haim Avrum Baruh, a very poor Jew, and his seven or eight children, as well as the farmer Krugman’s family (two people). Citizen Buhatir, a visitor from Budineţ, is reported to have lent a hand. He harnessed Mrs. Iungman and her sixteen-year-old daughter to a cart with the help of some other peasants and then whipped the horses so that the two victims were dragged, head against the ground, for four kilometers to the bridge of Ciudei. Also in Cires the peasant Burlă was said to have bludgeoned to death seventy-five-year-old Stein Avram, forcing his daughter to dig a grave and throw him in. He then reportedly killed her too, shoving her in with his foot. He then excreted on the corpses.189 Eleven Jews were killed on the same fifth of July in Vilavca.190 Still another slaughter took place in Milie, where Ukrainians killed nearly the entire Jewish population, somewhere between 110 and 180 people. These included Dr. Iakob Geller of Cernăuţi, who had sought refuge in Milie (his wife’s hometown) in order to evade deportation by the Soviets. Geller, his wife, and their twelve-year-old daughter were cut in half on a sawhorse.191
In Vijniţa twenty-one Jews were killed shortly after Romanian troops entered the town on July 5.192 The Romanian army took nineteen Jewish hostages in Văşcăuţi, executing them shortly thereafter.193 A massacre took place on that same day in Rostochi-Vijnita (Răstoace): the local residents joined with soldiers to kill at least seventy Jews, among them refugees from Seletin and from Şipote in Rădăuţi District.194 Seventy to 80 Jews were killed in the villages of Căbeşti, approximately 120 in Dracineţ, 100 in Broscăuţi, and a like number in Bobeşti.195 Nearly the entire Jewish population of Siret had been deported to a brick factory at Calafat in southern Romania on the eve of the invasion of the Soviet Union, leaving behind only a few old Jews and their families. Now eight old men, including the schoolmaster Meir Hers Schechter and the blind Moise Soihăr, the latter’s wife, and the tailor Merdler’s twenty-one- and thirty-one-year-old daughters, were all stripped and taken nude to a meadow, where soldiers raped two of the women and then killed everyone. Most of the village watched these events.196 The Romanian army also executed eighteen Jews in Tereblecea and ten in Oprişani, in Rădăuţi District.197 Jews were abused and tortured but not murdered in Lucavăţ (Storojineţ District) and a few other villages.198
Units of the Seventh Infantry Division, in particular Police Company 7, commanded by Major Gheorghe Vartic, made up some of the forces that entered the city of Herţa on July 5, 1941. Vartic ordered the creation of a “Civic Guard” composed of Herţa’s residents; thus Civic Guards Panait Chifu, Mihai Ştefănescu, Ilie Steclaru, and Iancu Alexandrescu compiled lists of Jews. About fifteen hundred were herded into the city’s four synagogues and one cellar. Some of these were next forced to dig a trench, and many were executed there at four o’clock in the afternoon. About one hundred were executed at the Kislinger windmill and thirty-two in a park behind the prefecture. A soldier guarded the heap of bodies at the windmill and fired at any that moved. There were also many rapes. A five-year-old girl, Mina Rotaru, who was still breathing after having been shot, was thrown alive into a trench; a woman carrying a baby in her arms was also executed, as were two ninety-year-old men.199 Sergeant Major Motrici killed thirty-five Jews by himself.200 Sulim Leibovici, whose father had already been murdered, was harnessed to a cart laden with the corpses of Soviet soldiers and a dead horse and was forced to pull it (perhaps with other Jews) around town as the townsman Ignat Costica beat him and taunted him with the name “Stalin.”201
Schoolmaster Victor Rusu proclaimed himself commander of the Civic Guard of the town of Sadagura on the night of July 5–6, initiating the murder of more than one hundred Jews there and in Jucica Nouă and Rohozna; he and his band of peasants raped the girls and looted everyone before killing virtually all of them in the forest. Several Jews survived this massacre by fleeing or remaining still among the corpses. Mircu identifies thirty-two victims representing thirteen families. One witness testified that a baby’s sobs could be heard coming from the mass grave for quite some time.202 Several days later a patrol of Romanian soldiers accompanied by Mayor Novac arrested four surviving Jews in Jucica Nouă, tied them together, executed them, searched their persons for any valuables, and then dumped them into an open ditch, where they remained for more than a month until permission was granted to bury them.203
One of the largest slaughters on that day took place in Cernăuţi, the capital of Bukovina, where two thousand Jews were killed by Romanian soldiers working in league with local residents, gendarmes, and German soldiers.204 Two mass graves at the Jewish cemetery received 250 corpses each, a third somewhat fewer.205 German troops executed another four hundred Jews on July 9, setting fire to the main synagogue with incendiary grenades.206
Further mass killings took place between July 9 and 12 in Cernăuţi, Hotin, and Soroca Districts. Specifically, German SS and Romanian troops executed 162 Jews in Zoniachie and Răpujineţ (both in Cernăuţi District) on July 9, another twenty-seven in Coţmani.207 The same Romanian unit under the command of Ermil Matieş that had killed the Jews of Stînca Roznovanu, near Mărculeşti, now robbed and killed, under the command of Colonel Matieş and Captain Stihi, another four hundred to five hundred in Gura Căinari, including a number of newborns.208 A similar massacre occurred in Mărculeşti proper.209 An officer who witnessed this testified after the war that on a procurement visit to Mărculeşti, many of the corpses he discovered in the streets “had been disemboweled” and that some of the women “had had wooden stakes shoved into their genitals.” According to the deposition of Colonel Romulus Mureşanu preparatory to one of the postwar trials, more than one thousand Jews had been killed in Mărculeşti and Gura Căinari.210
A group of soldiers from the Fourteenth Infantry Division came upon a group of fifty Jewish refugees on the Fălesti-Chişcăreni road between the villages of Tăura Noua and Tăura Veche, among them at least half a dozen children from Bălţi. The soldiers looted their victims, herded them into a pond, and shot them. Two wounded survivors, thirty-four-year-old Dina Frankel and thirty-two-year-old Leica Lambert, dragged themselves onto the road, where a Romanian officer discovered them and sent them to Chişcăreni Hospital. The Ninth German Army protested this incident that “diminished the prestige of the Romanian and German armies.”211 General Tătăranu, deputy head of the Supreme General Staff, ordered an investigation; it led only to the burial of the victims left behind in the pond.212
The Romanians reentered Hotin on July 8. The entire Jewish population there was locked up on that very day in two school facilities. Fifty Jewish hostages were selected on July 10 for execution by Romanian policemen and gendarmes.213 The military police executed 12 more in nearby Lipcani the next day, 40 in Lincăuti, and all 160 Jews in Ceplăuţi.214 Ten people were executed for political reasons in Milovăţ (also in Hotin District) during that month.215
And so it went elsewhere in the newly reoccupied territories. Three hundred Jews—men, women, children—were killed in Climăuţi (Soroca District) on July 12, 1941;216 gendarmes of the Lăpuşna legion under Colonel Nicolae Caracas executed 250 in Călăraşi in early July;217 500 were slaughtered in Edineţi on July 6 and 7. Many women were raped, some committing suicide afterward. The corpses were buried in three mass graves, and the Jewish gravediggers too were executed.218 On July 6, Romanian officials ordered the execution of sixty Jews being held in the recently created camp at the distillery in Noua Suliţa.219 Major Vartic requested in writing from his superiors permission to execute fifty Jewish hostages in Noua Suliţa on July 8.220 The Ninth Mountain Assault Battalion under Colonel Vasile Cîrlan killed 880 Jews in the streets and homes of the town; at least 100 more were killed by troops from the Thirty-seventh Infantry Regiment under orders from Second Lieutenant Savin Popescu.221 Police Company 7 executed at least 227,222 Romanian gendarmes killing another 30 to 40 Jews from Noua Suliţă in nearby Marşeniţa.223
Massacres occurred around the city of Bălţi on July 11. In Buciulueni Second Lieutenant Mihăilescu of the Sixth Assault Troops Regiment, coauthor of the slaughter at Stînca Roznovanu, executed the only Jewish woman in the village.224 Ten Jews were killed that day in Soborul Vechi Park in Bălţi, where Jews had been imprisoned in two camps under the German occupation, on orders from a Colonel Koller and his aide, Captain Prast. Carp’s Cartea neagră contains two photographs of the victims.225 Forty-four Jews from the city were loaded onto two trucks and taken to the village of Slobozia near Bălţi, where they were executed after having dug three mass graves. At the last minute the police superintendent, Dumitru Agapie, saved the life of Bernard Walter, president of the ghetto committee. According to Walter’s later testimony, Prast took part in the execution.226 German soldiers executed Soborul Vechi and another twenty Jews in the same park during the night of July 15–16.227 Several people provided support to the German troops during the slaughter of Bălţi on July 12–15: Police Superintendent Agapie; the secret police station chief, Gurie Filipenco; and the gendarme legion commander, Mihai Boulescu.228 The following eyewitness account could apply to almost any one of the aforementioned massacres:
The Jews were handed over to the sergeant major by a police representative whose name I do not recall; Sergeant Major Vasile Spintecatu gave each Jew a shovel and ordered them to deepen the trenches. [Next] the sergeant major ordered them to drop the shovels, and the police representative took down all their names. Then [Spintecatu] screamed, “On your knees,” and the Jews obeyed, facing the ditch, back to the platoon. [He] whistled a signal, and the gendarmes discharged their weapons. Nine [of the] Jews dropped into the ditch, but the tenth was [temporarily] spared because the weapon destined for him had malfunctioned. Major Boulescu, who attended the execution along with Police Superintendent Dumitru Agapie, sent me to check why the weapon had misfired. When I examined it, I noticed that the hammer had not been properly adjusted. They replaced the weapon and executed the tenth Jew.229
A total of seventy-six Jews were executed as “hostages” in Bălţi from July 10 to July 17, according to the list of names that the Bălţi police compiled, including the ten from the first execution.230
German and Romanian troops entered the historic capital of Bessarabia, Chişinău, on July 18, 1941, almost immediately giving themselves over to the mass slaughter of its Jews and those of its environs: it is estimated that about ten thousand ultimately died.231 This is how the “purification of the Romanian land” proceeded in the neighboring Orhei District. The Orhei gendarme legion, under orders from General Vasiliu, headed by train from Roman to Ungheni at the very onset of the war, crossing the border where they commenced the “cleansing of the land.” Commander Filip Bechi, now in charge of the Orhei legion, his deputy (Captain Iulian Adamovici), and his second deputy (Lieutenant Constantin Popoiu, prefect of Orhei under the Goga-Cuza government) implemented Vasiliu’s land-cleansing instructions (as described earlier).232 On July 16, 1941, Bechi ordered the execution of more than one hundred Jews in the new ghetto camp of Teleneşti, an order carried out at dawn on July 17 by Popoiu and fifty other gendarmes; twenty women and an unspecified number of children were executed the next day at Teleneşti on orders from Adjutant Filip Mincu.233 Five other Jews were murdered in Teleneşti after July 18, four of these transferred from other gendarme stations.234
The new Orhei legion commander took up residence in the town on the evening of July 19 and immediately began preparations to exterminate Jews imprisoned in three locations of the city: six hundred in the industrial school and another two hundred or three hundred in the synagogue and a large private house. Yet five hundred other Jews remained in the police courtyard. The first massacre involved those incarcerated at the synagogue and in the house: thirty-six Romanian gendarmes murdered them in the village of Siliştea on the afternoon of July 21.235 Those in the industrial school were escorted that same evening to the suburb of Slobozia Doamnă. A platoon of German soldiers (who, on the way there, had already executed sixty or seventy elderly Jews) accompanied the Romanian gendarmes. Of the six hundred Jews now in Slobozia Doamnă, about five hundred were executed. The same Romanian gendarmes who murdered them shot down another group of Jews (we do not know if they were from the school, the synagogue, or the house) on the Răuţ Bridge.236 One of the murderers, Sergeant Major Andrei Croială, was subsequently seen opening the mouth of a corpse with a bayonet to extract the gold teeth and cutting the finger off another to steal a ring.237
The gendarme section commanded by noncommissioned officer Ion Stoenescu settled down in the village of Bravicea (also Orhei District), where he reissued the land-cleansing orders. Thereupon, a group of seven gendarmes (including Vasile Mihalache, Adjutant Nicolae Burada, Sergeant Major Nicolae Stoian, and Privates Andrei Blech and Nicolae Vintiloiu) shot twenty-five Jews at nearby Delineu in the same jurisdiction.238 A few days later peasants in the village of Onişcani brought four Jews into the local gendarme station with the request that they be shot: Private Blech was the executioner. The next day the gendarme Vasile Anghel obeyed an order to execute two women, but he refused to shoot a girl in the village of Hagiesti.239 Thus spared, the twelve-year-old wandered aimlessly for one day and one night, but having no one to turn to, she came back to the Onişcani station. Adjutant Burada handed her over to Blech, who slit her throat with his bayonet and finished her off with a bullet.240
Twenty-two Jews were executed in the village of Chirova on orders from Adjutant Florea Glugojanu.241 Another mass murder took place in Tibirica, where Adjutant Carol Urzică served, aided by Sergeant David Călugăru. Having just arrived with the conquering armies, these men had no sooner begun to exercise their responsibilities than the first military unit arrived with twenty-five Jewish arrestees. New on the job but by no means irresolute, Urzică led these prisoners one by one to the village market, where, with the help of Călugăru and conscripts Ion Oprean and Mihai Maurer, he rifled their belongings and then exterminated them. Maurer was responsible for checking whether the victims were indeed dead; at one point he fired a bullet into a child’s head because he was still moving (“even though,” according to our source, “seven bullets had already entered his body”).242 Adjutant Mihai Băhnăreanu executed fifteen Jews in Saharna all by himself.243 In contrast, the priest of the Orhei village of Morozeni gave asylum to a Jewish couple and their young daughter (hoping they would agree to baptism), but a gendarme station chief, Gheorghe Bâra, and Sergeant Major Ioachim Stoian took them to Vatici Forest and murdered them. Bâra, Adjutant Ion Budica, and the village notary raped four of the Jewish girls locked up in the gendarme station.244
Adjutant Budica, Sergeant Major Tasache Ciutac, Sergeant Ion Isbota, and Private Dumitru Popescu shot thirty-one Jews (including women, old people, and children) two kilometers from Vârzava (Orhei District) but buried them in graves so shallow that stray dogs soon were seen dragging around their remains.245 The Onesti station chief, Adjutant Andrei Sârbu, ordered Private Aurel Roşu to execute a Jewish woman who had lost both hands and one leg, as she was deemed a “dangerous element.” After this execution Roşu shot a twenty-year-old Jewish man.246 Romanian gendarmes in Bravicea (Adjutant Radu Barbu, Sergeant Major Panait Dinu, and Privates Blech and Nicolae Paraschiv) murdered three Jews; three others belonging to a family that had evaded the murderers in July were killed at the end of August, pursuant to new orders by Adjutant Major Grigore Stavarche.247 Sergeant Constantin Miran of the First Tank Regiment, left behind by his unit in order to guard a few damaged tanks, executed a group of ten Jews in Cabălea (Orhei District) and threatened to shoot gendarme Ioan Soare because he refused to fire at these Jews. Their execution took place on orders from Adjutant Ivan Rusca, the gendarme station chief.248
Innumerable other Jews perished in the Orhei District sphere of operations: three Jews in Budăi (denounced by the village priest),249 sixteen in Negureni,250 three in Soldăneçti,251 four in Alcedar, four in Tarasova,252 and twenty-two in Ghirova, sixteen of these latter women, including one with babe in arms.253 Eleven Jews were killed in Sărăţeni.254 A total of twenty-one Jews were exterminated in Crăsnăeţeni, Chiţcani, and Suhuluceni—twenty shot, one drowned.255 Also murdered in Orhei were fourteen Jews in Leuşeni, thirty in Chiperceni, seven in Horodiştea, six in Busovca, twenty-five in Tiribica, seven in Minceni, twelve in Crăsnăuţi, three in Răspopeni, two in Trifeşti, twenty-seven in Cineşeuţi, eight in Cobilca, two in Furceni, two in Onişcani, five in Beresloci, three in Zăhăicani, two in Cucuruzeni, and twenty-five in Delineu.256 Juveniles were raped at three sites—Mateuţi, Echimăuţi, and Chiperceni—before being shot.257 Generally the murderers shot their victims, but thirteen were drowned (three in Zăhăicani, ten—including one infant—in Peresecina).258
The slaughter of the Jewish population also took place in Cetatea Albă District; 360 Jews from the rural parts of this district were jailed together with 2,500 from the town proper in preparation for the mass executions at the end of July and the beginning of August. According to several witnesses, these took place near a stone quarry on the outskirts of the city. Alexandru Ochişor, leader of a military unit in Cetatea Albă, commanded the execution squads. Others involved were Major Virgil Drăgan, Colonel Marcel Petală (military prosecutor of the Eighth Army), and Horia Olteanu of the SSI (according to some witnesses, the latter was a lieutenant colonel in the Supreme General Staff of the army). Olteanu subsequently acknowledged “having taken part in the mass slaughter of a group of eight hundred to one thousand Jews” between July 28 and 29, 1941.259 According to the former gendarmes, the 360 Jews from rural areas perished in early August at the hands of the above-named Captain Ochişor.260
The mass murders in Bukovina continued to the end of July 1941. On the night of July 20–21, more than 150 Jews from Sişcăuţi, Iujineţi, Stănceni, and Babin were brought to Sişcăuţi under the pretext of being deported. Once local peasants finished digging a large grave, however, Romanian gendarmes executed the Jews. Adjutant Major Marin Pavel caught five hiding in a large wine vat in Tarutino. According to fellow gendarmes Nuţu Toma and Ion Budisan, Pavel killed them with a stake right in the vat.261
The postwar investigation revealed that approximately 250 political suspects and 500 Jews were executed in the territory of the Chilia legion, victims of “political and racial intolerance.”262 Those arrested for political reasons were liquidated in the same way as the Jews, most often en route between two villages, typically at the edge of a ditch prepared in advance. Escorting one such group from the gendarme station in Dumitreşti, Sergeant Major Andrei Sîrbu and two other policemen executed six political prisoners (their names were all either Romanian or Ukrainian) near the village of Cişmele.263 Non-Jewish political suspects also were killed in Cetatea Albă District. On September 4, 1941, Adjutant Stavar Balmoş executed seventeen Romanians for allegedly collaborating with Soviet officials in Fărăoani.264
During the massacres in Bessarabia and Bukovina, Romanian soldiers and policemen operated independently of German tutelage. But in some instances the “brotherhood-in-arms” of Romanian and German soldiers found expression in joint operations against defenseless civilians. According to its own documents, Einsatzgruppe 10b was responsible for the murder of 682 Jews in Cernăuţi, 551 in Chişinău, 155 in Tighina, and a total of 4,425 between Hotin and Iampol.265 It has already been noted that German troops participated actively in the massacres of Bălţi. Hundreds of Jews were killed by the so-called paramilitary Civic Guards composed not only of Romanian but also of Ukrainian and Ruthenian townspeople and villagers.
All this anti-Semitic internationalism notwithstanding, relations between the Romanian and German armies were sometimes strained. As we saw earlier, following the execution of forty-eight Jews at a pond between the villages of Tăura Noua and Tăura Veche, the Ninth German Army protested the disorderly action. German experience in joint operations with the Romanians throughout Bessarabia and Bukovina had brought the Germans to the conclusion that although the Romanians had the right idea, they were sloppy in their work.266 A report of Einsatzgruppe D from July 21, 1941, clarifies the sources of German dissatisfaction:
The Romanians take action against the Jews without any preconceived plan. There would be nothing to criticize about the many executions of Jews had their technical preparation and their manner of execution not been inadequate. The Romanians leave the bodies of those who are executed where they fall, without burying them. The Einsatzkommando [Mobile Killing Squad] has enjoined the Romanian police to be more orderly from that standpoint.267
Raul Hilberg estimates that more than ten thousand Jews were murdered in Bukovina and Bessarabia during July 1941.268 Most of these were killed by Romanian and German military units acting on superior orders. Others, however, fell victim to Romanian and Ukrainian peasants who wanted (or even felt it their duty) to murder (and, of course, rob) their Jewish neighbors.
World War II transformed what might otherwise have remained a period of severe anti-Semitic outbreaks into a true Romanian Holocaust that, while part of the broader German-European Holocaust, remains at the same time a specifically Romanian story. As in Germany, the immediate background to Romania’s Holocaust tapped archaic anti-Semitic traditions and was crafted by the militant agitation of anti-Semitic parties, itself followed by state legislation and then compounded by wartime circumstances. Bloody mob violence was the result, but now, drawing in government elements, the riot took on the character of a social enterprise and thus invited takeover by the state. This transitional phase, when mass robbery and mass murder evolved from a societal to a governmental enterprise, took place in the months immediately preceding and immediately following Romania’s entrance in the war. The tempering of the Romanian-German diplomatic alliance into one of wartime fraternity augured more deliberate and more systematic ill for Romania’s Jews. Finally, during this time the Antonescu regime became more directly involved in encouraging the violence, though still more in the sense of indirect inspiration. Soon, however, it would openly take things over, as will be seen in the following chapters.