WITH THE UNDERTAKING of systematic deportation of Jewish populations from and within Romania and occupied Ukraine, Ion Antonescu and his lieutenants became architects of untold sufferings for hundreds of thousands of innocent victims and the death of at least a quarter of a million of them. Their story falls into two halves, the first being their expulsion from their homes and livelihoods, the second their misery and often death in Transnistria. This chapter examines the first half of the story, itself a complex web of events falling into several categories. Overall the experience of the Jews in the territories temporarily occupied by the Soviets in 1940 (those suspected of Communist sympathies) was far worse than for those inhabiting the Old Kingdom, or Regat. The process of concentration in ghettos before ultimate deportation involved unique humiliations and physical sufferings; this was especially so for Jews from rural or small-town Romania, who sometimes had to be moved several times before final deportation. For many thousands, the transports—whether by rail or by march—amounted to murder by deprivation, as the various phases of the process offered numerous opportunities for the majority population to despoil their defenseless victims. Pogroms and outright massacres accompanied events. A few thousand Jews in Regat fell victim to one or another deportation too, and 1941 and 1942 witnessed serious discussion at the government level of plans to clear Regat of its Jewish population in its entirety, just as Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and other lands were being cleared of their Jewish populations. It seems that only the turn of the tide at Stalingrad convinced government leaders that they might eventually have to answer for their crimes, which is probably why the deportations were never systematically applied in Regat.
In Moldavia, Walachia, and southern Transylvania Jews suffered less at the hands of the Romanian fascist governments than did their fellows at the hands of these same regimes in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria. Yet this is a generalization to which there were exceptions: about thirteen thousand Jews were murdered during the pogrom in Iaşi, then the Moldavian capital. The district of Dorohoi had been transferred in 1938 from Bukovina to Regat, delimited by the country’s pre—World War I borders. During deportations from Dorohoi about twelve thousand Jewish inhabitants were sent to Transnistria, at least one-half of which perished. By and large, however, conditions in Regat (and that part of Transylvania remaining after the north was transferred to Hungary in 1940) remained significantly better than those in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria.
These tribulations were nevertheless horrendous in and of themselves. As early as June 21, 1941, Ion Antonescu ordered that all able-bodied eighteen- to sixty-year-old Jewish males in all villages lying between the Siret and the Prut Rivers be removed to the Tîrgu Jiu camp in Oltenia and to villages surrounding that camp. Their families and all Jews in other Moldavian villages underwent evacuation to the nearest urban districts.1 In addition to Tîrgu Jiu, the Ministry of the Interior and certain military garrisons set up camps in Craiova, Caracal, Turnu Severin, and Lugoj.2 Matatias Carp has estimated that more than forty thousand Jews were uprooted in Moldavia and Walachia during the first two weeks of the war, nearly half of them transported hundreds of miles from their homes. In Carp’s words, “entire populations (in Constanţa, Siret, Dărăbani), able-bodied men (in Galaţi, Ploieşti, Huşi, Dorohoi), or majorities of the men (in Piatra-Neamţ, Focşani, Fălticeni, Buzău, etc.)” found themselves interned. Throughout Moldavia and in much of the rest of the country, hundreds more were interned as hostages against anticipated “actions” by other Jews. These internments would last only until January 23, 1942, when the policy of taking hostages was abandoned.3
We do have the following victim’s testimony of one of these events, the June 19, 1941, deportation from Dărăbani District to Dorohoi District. It took place even before Antonescu’s order, one of a few in northern Moldavia under way even before Romania entered the war:
At 9:00 A.M. we got the order to evacuate the community in thirty minutes . . . and to move toward Havâna Gara Vorniceni, thirty-five kilometers away. . . . We locked our houses, where we had left all of our possessions, without being permitted to bring [even] clothing, shoes, or linen. . . . We were placed on freight cars at the station in Vorniceni, about sixty to seventy persons per car. . . .
We spent a night in the fields in the rain and cold. . . . The chief of police of Vorniceni, Găluşcă, confiscated cows, horses, and carts belonging to some among us, giving no receipt in return; others were forced to sell their animals at ridiculous prices.
Two days later we arrived famished at . . . Dorohoi, where two hundred Jews from that town [joined us]. Between Dorohoi and Tîrgu Jiu we spent six days, suffering atrociously and . . . forbidden to buy provisions in the villages we passed. . . . At the station of Bucecea in the district of Botoşani the Jews who had come to distribute bread to the children were . . . beaten and taunted by the police. . . . At almost every station soldiers and civilians . . . insulted, threatened, [or] stoned us. On the other hand, some soldiers took pity and gave bits of bread to the starving children.4
From other evidence we can imagine details of experiences elsewhere. One needs only to read between the lines of messages such as that which the Iaşi prefect, Colonel Dumitru Captaru sent to the Ministry of Internal Affairs a few days later to fill out the picture. He recounted the concentration of Jews from northern Moldavia in the southern part of Romania: 829 Jews (275 adult men, 377 women, 98 boys, and 79 girls) in twenty-four railway cars (twelve passenger cars for the women and children, twelve freight cars for the men). But with the exception of sixteen admitted to the Jewish hospital in Iaşi, all were deported to Giurgiu. Ironically, this cohort was lucky: they suffered nothing worse than forced labor, and nearly all of them survived the war.5
On November 12, at Marshal Antonescu’s request, the Supreme General Staff offered statistics showing that 47,345 Jews were then employed in “socially useful”—or, more precisely, forced—labor,6 the luckier at projects in their own communities, others in “external work detachments” hundreds of kilometers away. An undated list from the Supreme General Staff shows that these assignments sent more than seventeen thousand Jews to twenty-one districts.7 Engaged in enterprises such as breaking rocks and repairing roads, these Jews toiled in a state of pronounced exhaustion.8 A letter from the General Staff to Radu Lecca, the governmental representative charged with oversight of the Jews, noted that internees were often minimally clothed and shod: “a recent inspection,” Lecca was informed, “uncovered a highly precarious situation: 50 percent of the Jews had torn clothes and shoes; 80 percent had no change of underwear.”9
In the sketchy bureaucratic parlance of another official report, this one dating from November 1943, we can discern something of the conditions on a dike-building project, the prisoners/laborers of which—1,400 to 1,800 of them—had been at work for anywhere between one and two years:
Housing: In wooden barracks or partially buried huts. The workers are not sheltered from rain, cold, and so on. Most sleep on the ground.
Food: Insufficient, since foodstuffs do not reach the kitchen in sufficient quantities in accordance with allocations.
Clothing: Most of the workers are completely naked. A fragment of a sack or an old rug is used to cover their genitals, and they walk around barefoot.
Work: Excessive, since those who can get out of work by giving money can go home, while those miserable persons who remain are forced to perform the work of the others as well as their own.
Sanitary conditions: Catastrophic, given the conditions described above. Parasites proliferate. Parasite extermination cannot go forward because of a lack of materials (. . . pesticides, but especially linen . . .).
Doctors: Have no authority. The sick [formally] exempted from labor are nonetheless forced to work, and even struck. Doctors’ reports are met with derision.10
Even the management of the Army Supply Corps acknowledged the harsh circumstances of Jewish artisans at army shops in their hometowns: “They work nine hours per day. Because they earn nothing . . . they are forced, after carrying out their duties, to work in town to earn their living. For this reason they come to work exhausted, and their productivity is often less than mediocre, although not from any lack of goodwill on their part.”11 The tragic experience of the forced laborers would later emerge in the indictment against Second Lieutenant Nicolae Crăciunescu of the Sixty-eighth Fortifications Infantry Regiment, who had commanded the detachment in Heleşteni. Crăciunescu had often struck his charges with his riding crop. Those who had money could purchase his benevolence and go home at the end of the week; others could not. The workers ate beans mixed with oil and moldy bread. When the irregular food consignments arrived, the commander “confiscated” them.12
The advantage that Jews in Regat enjoyed over those living in the territories that had been lost to and then regained from the Soviets reflected a distinction the government made between the two categories of Jews. Nonetheless, through the first half of the war, numerous laws and regulations ate away at whatever relative security membership in the first category entailed. Most important, a series of orders in the summer of 1942 sought the elimination of all Jews suspected of Communist sympathies, a purpose explicitly formulated in the July 24 instruction of the Office of the President of the Council of Ministers to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. All Jews who were Communists or Communist sympathizers were to be deported to Transnistria; as a result 1,045 Jews were sent to Transnistria in July.13 On September 3, the Bucharest Prefecture of Police arrested 395 Jews, many of whom were suspected of being Communists, including three who, in December 1940, had petitioned to go to Soviet-occupied Bessarabia under the exchange of populations arrangement; their petitions had just been unearthed in the archives of what had been the Soviet legation in Bucharest.14 A mere five days after their arrest, all of them were deported to Transnistria. During their trip their number grew to 578 as more Communists, sympathizers, suspects, and would-be émigrés arrested in provincial towns were boarded onto the trains. Another 407 who had already been interned in Tîrgu Jiu were likewise packed into the freight cars. Yet a further 554 Jews from still other towns, all suspected of Communist activity but not previously arrested, and 85 others already sentenced and imprisoned soon joined the caravan.15
Suspected Communist affiliation was not the only justification for deportations from Regat. On July 11, 1942, the Supreme General Staff ordered evacuation to Transnistria as punishment for violations of the forced labor regime.16 Thus on September 22, 1942, a new group of 148 Jews and their families were sent to Transnistria following reports by General Cepleanu of their evasion of forced labor.17 Another group was arrested on October 2, 1942, but these Jews were freed eleven days later and not deported.18 However, 126 Jewish youths working on a farm belonging to the aforementioned Radu Lecca were transported. Long “treated like slaves,” they had been harshly exploited, crammed into overcrowded quarters, and inadequately fed. Lecca’s wife in particular was known for abusing them.19 When these boys petitioned for transfer to another camp, Lecca arranged through headquarters their deportation to Transnistria, where most died.20
Non-Jews too suffered torture, beatings, and exhausting labor in the Tîrgu Jiu camp.21 The General Staff coordinated and oversaw the forced labor of these other minorities. Just as the Hungarian authorities in northern Transylvania had dragooned Romanians into forced labor gangs, Ion Antonescu ordered able-bodied Magyars to be brought into his own forced labor detachments.22
As late as May 13, 1943, a detachment of 250 Jews was sent from Bucharest to perform labor in Balta, Transnistria,23 but this appears to have been the final “deportation” from Regat.
The Massacres
In the chapters that follow there will be ample occasion to recount massacres in many contexts; but it was the war, including the events immediately preceding it, that set the stage for mass murdering. As we saw in the case of Iaşi, panic associated with the outbreak of war in Romania triggered some of the most horrific events; one should bear in mind, however, that the increasing likelihood of ultimate defeat following the battle of Stalingrad seems both to have cooled Romanians’ ardor for anti-Semitic excess and to have made them more receptive to foreign rescue initiatives. The early months of the war saw numerous smaller-scale events analogous in many respects to those in Iaşi. One of the earliest—only a month after the outbreak of hostilities—was also one of the worst. On July 25, 1941, Romanian troops led a convoy of 25,000 Romanian Jews beyond the Dniester River to German-occupied Ukraine (the province of Transnistria was formed only later), apparently in the hope that the Germans would swiftly dispatch them. They arrived at Coslar, where they were forced to wait in a field. One eyewitness recalled how an adult Jew and his three children were shot merely for edging away from the group.24 However, the German military authorities refused the convoy, which had to return to Bessarabia. But even before their return crossing, the Germans did manage to cull about one thousand of the “old, sick, and exhausted” on the pretext of interning them in a home for the elderly; after the others had moved on, all were murdered and buried in an antitank trench.25 On August 13, as the original convoy approached the crossing at Iampol (a small town just east of the river), the Germans killed another 150 who had stopped in the woods without permission. The Germans shot eight hundred more on the banks of the Dniester for “holding up the operation.”26 Of the 25,000 Bessarabian Jews originally herded beyond the Dniester, only 16,500 returned: more than 8,000 had perished between July 25 and August 17. The Germans reported on what appears to be a massacre at the Iampol crossing: Einsatzgruppe D claimed that while returning 27,500 Jews to Romanian territory, it had shot 1,265, mostly young people. But the report included another 3,105 Jews murdered at Cernăuţi, clearly a separate incident.27
These weeks saw a number of comparable episodes. On August 1, Germans stationed in Chişinău rounded up 450 Jews, mostly intellectuals and young women, whom they then took to the suburb of Vistericeni to murder. All but thirty-nine were murdered, and these few were returned to the ghetto. We don’t know why Germans, not Romanians, perpetrated these deeds, why those categories were selected, or why those few were spared.28 On August 3, the Office of the Police Inspectorate of Chişinău reported that five Jews had died in the Răuţel-Bălţi camp because of “hemorrhaging.”29 The next day a group of three hundred Jews driven from Storojineţ under Sergeant Major Sofian Ignat and Privates Vasile Negură and Grigore Agafiţei was barred by German soldiers from crossing the Dniester. Near the village of Volcineţ the Romanians stole their valuables, drove them into the river, and began shooting. Ninety of those who knew how to swim saved themselves.30 Another massacre took place near the river on August 6, when a Romanian military gendarme battalion shot two hundred Jews and threw their corpses into the Dniester.
A week later the Chişinău police office laconically reported on another incident of this sort: “the Jews from the Tătăraşi-Chilia camp [whom we mobilized for field labor] refused to work and, when they became unruly, were shot.”31 This massacre had taken place on August 9 after Captain Ion Vetu presented himself to the apparent commander of the camp, invoking an order from Marshal Antonescu that was for some reason transmitted to him by SS Second Lieutenant Heinrich Frölich to execute 451 Jews in the camp. Having obtained the approval of the district gendarmerie commander (the camp commander—if one even existed—seems to have been irrelevant), Vetu and Frölich prepared a “protocol,” a copy of which still exists, and carried out the mass murder with German and Romanian soldiers.32 Captain Vetu later served as scapegoat in one of the regime’s rare but sporadic attempts to demonstrate enforcement of law and order, when he was convicted of robbing corpses.33
On August 14, two hundred Jews returned to the Chişinău ghetto after a week-long stint at the Ghidighici work site—minus 325 others who had set out with them a week earlier. Two weeks later Romanian Police Battalion No. 10 completed a report stating that while “a Jewish detachment” had been working at the train station, a “skirmish” took place and “some Jidani were slightly wounded”;34 this killing was actually the handiwork of the Tenth Machine-Gun Battalion of the Twenty-third Regiment. The officers in charge included Colonel Nicolae Deleanu, Captain Radu Ionescu, Lieutenants Eugen Bălăceanu and Mircea Popovici, and Police Lieutenant Emil Puşcaşu.35
The Transit Camps
The deportation of Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina entailed a systematic, wide-ranging process that Marshal Antonescu and his immediate collaborators put in place and that was implemented largely by the Supreme General Staff. While the Antonescu administration pretended that this was an orderly evacuation of a civilian population, it was in fact one of the major atrocious crimes of the Holocaust. But the official version remained the same from beginning to end. A memorandum from the general secretariat of the Council of Ministers on January 24, 1944, for instance, offered the following official justification for the deportations:
The deportations [from Bessarabia and Bukovina] were carried out to satisfy the honor of the Romanian people, which was outraged by (a) the Jewish attitude toward the Romanian army during its retreat from the territories ceded [to the USSR] in June 1940; and (b) the Jewish attitude toward the Romanian population during the occupation. . . .
Deportations of Jews from Moldavia, Walachia, Transylvania, and Banat occurred after Marshal Antonescu ordered [on July 17, 1942] that all Jews who had violated laws and provisions then in effect regarding prices and restrictions on the sales of certain products—that is, the Jews of Galaţi regarding the sale of sewing thread, the Jews of Bucharest regarding the sale of shoes, and others [regarding] similar infractions—would be deported beyond the Bug [River].36
The intention “to satisfy the honor of the Romanian people” was, however, by no stretch of the imagination a determinative factor in actual events. The historical record proves that baser motives were at play: the desire to find scapegoats for Romanian failures; the eagerness for revenge—on anyone—for Romanian sufferings; the boundless, violent greed of both state and mob; unrestrained sadism; and blind, unquestioning, boundless bigotry. Between the lines even Antonescu hinted that lust for revenge was central, when, for example, he spoke of “Jewish agents who exploited the poor until they bled, who engaged in speculation, and who had halted the development of the Romanian nation for centuries”; for him, the deportations meant satisfying the ostensible “need to get rid of this scourge.”37 On July 8, 1941, the dictator’s kinsman, Mihai Antonescu, expressed the leadership’s intent still more explicitly when he stated his indifference about whether history would consider his regime barbaric, and that this was the most propitious moment to deport the Jews.38
Pronouncements and directives over the following weeks continued to foster the vindictive attitudes that would spell destruction to hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews. Two days after Mihai Antonescu’s statement, the Conducator himself explained to government inspectors and military prosecutors being sent to Bessarabia and Bukovina that ethnic cleansing would require deportation or internment of Jews and other “dubious aliens” so that they might “no longer be able to exert their injurious influence.”39 By the very date of Mihai Antonescu’s statement, following directives issued by the National General Inspectorate of the Police and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Office of the Police Inspectorate of Chişinău had already ordered the arrest of all Jews living in rural areas in Bessarabia; strangely, this followed even earlier (mid-June) orders to kill them. Ten days after this Marshal Antonescu ordered that all Jewish prisoners be put to hard labor.40 On August 5, the Council of Ministers ordered the Jews of Moldavia, Bukovina, and Bessarabia to wear a seven-centimeter-wide yellow star on a black background; Colonel Radu Dinulescu, head of the Second Section of the Supreme General Staff of the Romanian army, transmitted the order to the prefectures.41 On September 5, 1941, General Ion Popescu at the Ministry of the Interior issued a different order to the governors of Bukovina and Bessarabia: exempting converted Jews, all others were required to wear a black star measuring six centimeters on a white background.42 The central military authorities, following Antonescu’s instructions, renewed the order to employ Jews at hard labor projects such as road repair; garrison commanders were made responsible for strict enforcement.43
Let us look now in greater detail at some of the incidents already mentioned briefly. As early as the end of July 1941, the Romanian military began assembling Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina for deportation across the Dniester River, succeeding in sending across tens of thousands before the Germans became aware of what was going on. However, Romanian soldiers and police soon met resistance from the Germans, who thought their program “precipitous.” Transit camps would have to be created because the Germans did not want the Jews in what was still a war zone. Raul Hilberg describes the situation:
During the last week of July the Romanians, acting upon local initiative, shoved some 25,000 Jews from northern Bessarabian areas across the Dniester into what was still a German military area and a German sphere of interest. . . . The Eleventh German Army, observing heavy concentrations of Jews on the Bessarabia side, . . . attempted to block any traffic across the river. The order was given to barricade the bridges.44
On July 29, the Ortskommandatur (German Military Administration) of Iampol reported to his superiors the unexpected arrival of several thousand Jews, left to their own devices under minimal supervision. They could not buy anything to eat, and they sheltered in abandoned buildings. On August 5, the Germans returned an initial convoy of three thousand to the river town of Atachi.45 On August 6, a Romanian-German dispute became overt. The Germans prohibited their Romanian counterparts from bringing those Jews previously concentrated in Noua Suliţă and Storojineţ into Ukraine; the Romanians escorted them instead to Secureni, soon to emerge as one of the major transit camps.46 On August 7, the Germans attempted to send another 4,500 of the Romanian Jewish deportees back across the Dniester into Bessarabia, but now it was the Romanians’ turn to refuse them. The Germans took them instead to Moghilev (Mogilev-Podol’skiy). In the meantime, Lieutenant Colonel Poitevin ordered reinforcement of the checkpoint at Iampol, anticipating that the Germans might try to send the Jews back.47
On August 6, 1941, an alarmed General Popescu telegrammed General Tătăranu at army headquarters that the Germans would not allow Jews from Cernăuţi, Storojineţ, Hotin, and Soroca to cross the Dniester, demanding that the army intern them in camps in each department and asking that Tătăranu keep Marshal Antonescu informed.48 That same day General Palangeanu, chief of the Fourth Army (in whose sphere these events were taking place), worried that “thousands of Jidani . . . have been forced to cross the Dniester without guard and without food.” He ordered the operation halted for “military” and “public health” reasons.49 On August 7, Sonderkommando (Mobile Killing Unit) 10b prevented a large contingent of Jews from entering Moghilev. Members of Einsatzgruppe D in Bessarabia observed “endless processions of ragged Jews” turned back by German troops and security police; they thought the Romanians were playing a deliberate game, driving the Jews back and forth until the elderly collapsed in the mud.50
August 9, Carp reports, found one group of two thousand Bessarabian Jewish refugees, escorted by Germans toward Bessarabia, “huddled on the roads in Ukraine in a state of terrible destitution on the left bank of the Dniester at Rascov, near the Vadu Roşu Bridge. The Romanian military authorities sent an officer and twenty soldiers with orders to send the convoy as far as possible into Ukraine.”51 A stalemate was the temporary result.
All of this was becoming a major problem, one that worried the Germans. On August 12, German intelligence informed Berlin that Ion Antonescu had ordered the expulsion of sixty thousand Jews from Regat to Bessarabia; assigned to “building roads,” German intelligence warned that these Jews might actually be slated for deportation across the Dniester. The Germans began to discern the specter of more than half a million Jews driven into the rear of a thinly stretched Einsatzgruppe D, already staggering under the task of murdering the Jews of southern Ukraine with only six hundred men. The German legation in Bucharest made haste to ask Deputy Premier Mihai Antonescu to eliminate the Jews only in “a slow and systematic manner.” The latter replied that he had already recommended to the marshal that he revoke his order since the Conducator had overestimated the number of Jews “capable of work”; indeed, police prefects had already been told to stop enactment of the measure.52
On August 14, another Romanian-German misunderstanding erupted. Sonderkommando 10b asked the Office of the Police Inspectorate of Cernăuţi to supply twenty-seven Jews from the Secureni transit camp; perhaps this was for some sort of labor detail. The police inspector did not know what to do and asked for the opinion of the Supreme General Staff, which replied a week later that “to approve the request, we must know its precise reasons.”53 The matter seems to have died in the bureaucracy, but what is clear is that even at the dawn of their collaboration in Jewish matters, the Romanians did not automatically comply with every German request.
On the evening of August 16, despite the opposition of Romanian units, the Germans forced 12,500 Jews back from their territory across the bridge at Cosăuţi into Bessarabia; the Romanians hastily interned them in the camp at Vertujeni.54 Soon thereafter the Germans escorted back a large mass of Jews whom the Romanians had deported to Ukraine on July 25; the Romanians had taken them there in disorganized fashion, after which the Germans had had to gather them in Moghilev on the Dniester, short of four thousand of those who had been shot or had died of exposure, exhaustion, and hunger.55 One phase of this particular operation was the slaughter of the elderly and the sick at the town of Scazineţ on August 6. The survivors remained in Moghilev until August 17, when the Germans sent them to Bessarabia via the crossing at Iampol. Coordination among the Romanian police, the Romanian army, and the Germans had never been complete, and as late as August 19, Colonel Meculescu, commander of the Bessarabian gendarmerie, was still ordering—unsuccessfully—that Jews be deported to the other side of the Dniester.56 At the same time the Germans were returning the last of the Romanian Jews: 650 were escorted to Climăuţi in Bessarabia on August 20 and were subsequently interned in Vertujeni.57 On August 29, Einsatzgruppe D calculated that it had sent back about 27,500 Jews.58 Ultimately, as we have seen, only about sixteen thousand Jews survived all phases of this three-week ordeal.59
In Tighina on August 30, 1941, the chief of the German military mission in Romania, Major General Hauffe, and a representative of the Romanian Supreme General Staff, General Tătăranu, signed what would be called the Hauffe-Tătăranu Convention for Transnistria; this agreement stipulated that Romanian authorities would govern Transnistria, and it gave them jurisdiction over any Jews living there. But the document also stated that deportation beyond the Bug River would no longer be allowed; consequently, Jews would have to be concentrated in labor camps until the completion of military operations could make further evacuation to the east possible.60
In outline, two stages of the deportation of Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina can be distinguished. The first phase occurred during the summer and early fall of 1941, when the Jews living in rural areas were herded into transit camps and urban Jews into ghettos. The second stage took place from September to November, when Bessarabian and Bukovinian Jews were systematically deported to Transnistria to complete implementation of Ion Antonescu’s orders.61 These expulsions were accomplished by administrators selected by Mihai Antonescu as “the bravest and toughest of the entire police force.”62
The preparations for the deportation of Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina included an intense press campaign. In a typical diatribe, the editor of the fascist newspaper Porunca Vremii wrote:
The die has been cast. . . . The liquidation of the Jews in Romania has entered the final, decisive phase. . . . Ahasverus will no longer have the opportunity to wander; he will be confined . . . within the traditional ghettos. . . . To the joy of our emancipation must be added the pride of [pioneering] the solution to the Jewish problem in Europe. Judging by the satisfaction with which the German press is reporting the words and decisions of Marshal Antonescu, we understand . . . that present-day Romania is prefiguring the decisions to be made by the Europe of tomorrow.63
Meanwhile, the internment of Jews in transit camps accelerated. The Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina were assembled in Secureni, Edineţi, Mărculeşti, Vertujeni, and other, smaller transit camps. To reach these camps, the gendarmerie dragged the Jews in all directions over the Romanian countryside’s rutted roads, most often without water and food; at least seventeen thousand died in August alone during these forced marches.64 Young children were among the first victims. On the road to Secureni, Roza Gronih of Noua Suliţă saw her former neighbor, Mrs. Sulimovici, carrying the corpse of her child for a week, having completely lost her mind.65 Rabbi Horowitz of Banila on the Siret covered an excrutiating serpentine route on foot: Banila-Socoliţa-Banila-Ciudei-Storojineţ-Stăneşti-Văşcăuţi-Lipcani-Secureni (Bârnova)-Atachi-Volcineţ-Secureni (Bârnova)-Atachi-Volcineţ-Secureni (Bârnova)-Edineţi. On the first day his group numbered 30 persons; one day later there were 1,000; and by the time they reached the Edineţi transit camp they numbered 25,000.66
Though many cases of criminal abuse took place, some of the guards on this route behaved relatively humanely. On July 6, between Banila and Ciudei, Adjutant Roşu thwarted hooligans’ attempts to rob and humiliate the expellees.67 In two cases, on July 4 in Socoliţa and on July 5–6 in Văşcăuţi, Romanian officers saved Jewish lives by prohibiting mass executions planned by lower-ranking officers.68 Unfortunately, such guards were the exception. Others refused the Jews permission to sleep or go to the toilet when nature called. Food was not provided, and the prisoners were forced to sell watches or other personal valuables to obtain bread.69 In Storojineţ the Jews encountered Colonel Alexandrescu, commander of the local recruitment center; he struck some of them, forced all to perform various forms of harsh labor, and encouraged the populace to plunder them.70 Many Jews sought edible plants growing near the roads, and often they were reduced to drinking rainwater from ditches and puddles.71 In Edineţi they were herded into stables, where hunger and exhaustion claimed seventy to eighty per day.72 On July 7, a camp was created at Văşcăuţi to hold 1,500 “undesirable, suspect, and Communist” Jews. Three days later another transit camp with a capacity of 2,500 persons was created at Storojineţ.73
Also in July 1941, another group of thirty thousand Jews traveled a similarly complex route from Secureni to Cosăuţi-Vertujeni. Villagers eagerly awaited the procession in order to “purchase” well-dressed Jews for a few hundred lei, then to kill them for their clothes and shoes. In the village of Bârnova, near Lipnic, this trade took place on a significant scale.74
Some of the newly created transit camps were short-lived. For example, on July 20, 1941, the camp at Văşcăuţi was evacuated and the internees driven eastward to other camps. Thousands of Jews were concentrated in urban ghettos as holding centers until they too could be deported. On that same July 20, the Storojineţ ghetto, enclosing two streets, was established. There Jews were robbed and made to perform forced labor. Four days later the Chişinău ghetto was set up, where eleven thousand Jews were interned.75 On July 27, this ghetto was reportedly sealed. Pillaging committed by Romanian soldiers reached extraordinary proportions, prompting Ion Antonescu to later order an investigation. Military police reports both before and after this date confirm the widespread chaos that reigned in the transit camps during the deportations. On July 17, 1941, for instance, the chief military prosecutor, General Topor, reported to the Supreme General Staff on about three thousand Jews recently sent to some of the centers (1,546 to Făleşti-Bălţi; 1,235 to Bălţi; and about 700 to the concentration camp at Limbenii Noi), saying that “there is no one to guard them. There is no one to feed them. Please tell [us] what to do with these Jews.” Topor’s message was more desperate than his words alone suggest: the Eighth Division was about to send another five thousand Jews.76 Also on the seventeenth the Chişinău police reported that in Bălţi District 3,725 Jews had been assembled: 1,540 in Făleşti; 1,535 in Bălţi; 450 in Chirileni; and 200 in Tîrgu Cerneşti.77 (Bălţi and Făleşti-Limbeni later became transit camps.) The next day Topor, still not having received instructions from headquarters, telegraphed the Ministry of Internal Affairs: “[The Jews] have nothing to eat and there are no troops to guard them. . . . Their stay in Bessarabia is inadvisable. . . . Please transport them to the interior to perform labor. . . . Please send us orders.”78
On July 22, Topor ordered the Chişinău police office not only to send Jews to forced labor, but to continue interning them all over Bessarabia.79 Accordingly, on July 27, 1941, 1,904 Jews were interned in the Limbeni camp in the district of Bălţi.80 On August 7, 1,200 Jews from southern Bessarabia were assembled at Tarutino and transferred to the Cetatea Albă gendarmerie legion’s jurisdiction.81 Between July 22 and July 31, 2,452 Jews were interned in the camp at Răuţel.82 On August 2, 4,043 Jews were deported from Hotin and 2,815 from Noua Suliţă to be interned in transit camps.83 On August 4, 8,974 more Jews were interned in Limbeni (3,000), Răşcani (3,024), and Răuţel (2,950);84 in early September 9,141 Jews from these camps were deported to Mărculeşti (2,633 from Limbeni; 3,072 from Răşcani; and 3,436 from Răuţel).85 On August 8, the Hotin police reported that “the Jews brought together from . . . Hotin (3,340), Rădăuţi (4,113), Storojineţ (13,852), Vijniţa (1,820), [and] Cernăuţi (15,324)—a total of 27,849 [in fact 38,449!]—are being held between Secureni in the district of Hotin and Atachi in the district of Soroca.”86
Conditions in the newly created transit camps grew increasingly harsh—in large part reflecting the virtually complete lack of planning that went into the deportations, a problem we can observe, for example, between the lines of an August 8 report by the Soroca gendarmerie legion to the chief military prosecutor: “About 25,000 Jews in the northern part of the district (Lipnic, Atachi) have come from the Cernăuţi Inspectorate, which no longer has any Jews in its territory.” The Soroca legion had neither food, nor housing, nor staff to organize camps for its prisoners. The earlier elimination of the local Soroca Jewish community deprived the authorities of even the hope of supporting a camp by plunder. The authors of the report therefore pleaded with the military to force the Cernăuţi Inspectorate “to organize camps [for the Jews] in the district of Hotin.”87
The August 8, 1941, temporary solution to the German-Romanian dispute over transit across the Dniester River spelled further overcrowding of the deportees, as evidenced in communications from Romanian military authorities warning subordinate agencies that all “evacuated” Jews would have to remain in the camps:
The camps must incorporate a medical aid service organized by the Jewish physicians. . . . Jews are to be fed using foreign financial resources collected by the camp inmates or using assistance extended by the community. Guard duty will be set up to prevent escapes. This will be a temporary arrangement lasting . . . until new orders are issued.
Jews transferred to [our] side of the Dniester by German troops must [be] interned. . . . Those from Bessarabia and Bukovina whom the German troops are returning to Bessarabia and persons who earlier fled to the other side of the Dniester with [the evacuating] Soviet troops will be interned in camps kept separate from the other Jewish camps.88
This order—Order No. 528—from the chief military prosecutor then provides information regarding the systematic organization of the transit camps.
The response was not long in coming. On August 9, the military prosecutor of the Third Army, Lieutenant Colonel Poitevin, reported that in the community of Edineţi (Hotin District) ten thousand Jews were being made to live in abandoned houses; no soap having been supplied, the Jews were as filthy as their new domiciles.89 More disturbing—from the point of view of the military—was the fact that the Jewish camps might soon become the source of typhus epidemics among the Romanians themselves. And the numbers of internees were growing so quickly as to become unmanageable. On August 10, the Office of the Police Inspectorate of Cernăuţi reported to the chief military prosecutor the internment in Secureni of seventeen thousand Jews; in Bârnova three thousand; and in Berbeni some two thousand. All Jews in the district of Hotin were interned, though we have no precise numbers. The remaining Jews found themselves under the jurisdiction of the Soroca police, whose area of jurisdiction included the crossing point at Atachi. About ten thousand Jews, the authors of the report estimated, remained under the control of the Germans beyond the Dniester. “Despite all measures taken by the administrative and communal authorities,” the report stated, “and despite the efforts of the gendarmerie to supply the camps, it was impossible to meet the growing needs of such a large number of persons. . . . The lack of food was very pronounced, bread in particular. Many Jews had no money and faced death from hunger. Measures were taken to have peasants from the surrounding areas bring food to the Jews.”90
On August 11, 1941, the Cernăuţi Gendarme Inspectorate reported to the chief military prosecutor that the camp set up at Secureni in Hotin already held thousands of Jews from a variety of sites:
“Medical assistance for these people has been assured,” the report said, but “given the excessive numbers, supply [of food] is impossible. To this end, we suggest setting up a second camp in Edineţi” (in the same district). The report then warned that the Germans were about to transfer back to Romania some twelve thousand Jews currently waiting in Moghilev, and that the inspectorate could not assume responsibility for them.91
On that same day the Cernăuţi Gendarme Inspectorate asked higher authorities “to speed up the solution to the problem of the Jews in the Secureni camp, who, because of a lack of food and hygiene, are exposed to an epidemic that could threaten the entire region.”92 On August 15, the Office of the Chief Military Prosecutor relayed its concerns to the Supreme General Staff, and as a consequence, a camp was established in Edineţi. Twenty thousand Jews had been herded there, the Cernăuţi Gendarme Inspectorate having received Order No. 518/1941, though not necessarily the means, from the General Staff to supply food and to guard the prisoners.93
Another order from the Second Section, signed by Colonel Dinulescu and sent to the Office of the Chief Military Prosecutor on August 17, called for setting up a camp at Vertujeni:
The thirteen thousand Jews transferred by the Germans west of the Dniester to Cosăuţi (opposite Iampol) will be interned. . . . Lieutenant Colonel Palade, chief of the Military Statistics Office in Iaşi, is assigned to carry out this operation. To this end, we ask that you order the Flamura Military Prosecutor’s Department to help with the supervision and transfer of those interned. The assistance of the Soroca Prefecture should also be required in order to ensure transport, supplies, and so forth. . . . The Chişinău Gendarme Inspectorate should, through the Soroca legion, give full support to Lieutenant Colonel Palade in carrying out the mission.94
Dinulescu and Palade then established that camp (in 1945, Palade would declare that the camp had been set up by the General Inspectorate of the Gendarmerie on orders from army headquarters).95 In fact, all three statistical offices—those of Bucharest, Iaşi, and Cluj—under the Second Section, played a role in monitoring and persecuting those whom they described as “subversive elements.”96
Along with Secureni, Edineţi, and Mărculeşti, Vertujeni was one of the four principal transit camps. As we have seen, the military, anticipating the forced return of the Jews deported over the Dniester to Romania, had first proposed the creation of the Vertujeni camp.97 It eventually harbored the 13,500 surviving Jews earlier taken by the Romanians to the forest of Cosăuţi on the other side of the river and sent back by the Germans on August 17.98 And they comprised only the first group of internees. Measures were taken on August 19 to intern at Vertujeni 1,600 Jews from the Alexandru cel Bun camp (Rediu) in Soroca; also on that date 2,000 able-bodied persons from the Rubleniţa camp were interned. The following day 1,500 of the disabled, the elderly, and women and small children from Rubleniţa were also transferred.99 In all, Vertujeni received 23,009 inmates.100
The numbers were growing steadily from the middle of August through late September. By the second half of August the Jews in the Bessarabian transit camps were distributed as follows:
Approximately twenty thousand Jews from the other side of the Dniester—Jews whom the Romanians had refused to accept in spite of pressure from the Germans—were now confined by the latter in Skariuci (probably Scazineţ). A contemporary report gave different figures:
| District | No. of Jews |
| Bălţi | 8,614 |
| Lăpuşna | 9,984 |
| Orhei | 648 |
| Soroca | 22,969 |
| Tighina | 65 |
| Total | 42,280 |
Of the 9,984 prisoners in the Chişinău ghetto of Lăpuşna, 2,200 were under sixteen years of age; 3,872 were aged seventeen to fifty; and the remaining 3,912 were fifty-one or older. In the Vertujeni camp in Soroca District, 8,182 of the total number of prisoners were women; 8,540 were men; and 6,247 were children.
We note from the above information that by the summer of 1941 Vertujeni was already the most populous camp.101 This observation is supported by a report of the Chişinău Gendarme Inspectorate presented at about the same time, which offers a further breakdown by category (note that the figures for Vertujeni are identical in both tables):102
Still further information from a report of August 19 of the same inspectorate shows the following distribution of Jews among Bessarabian transit camps:103
As of August 23, there were 22,960 Jews interned in the Vertujeni camp, 10,356 Jews in the Secureni camp, and 11,762 Jews in the Edineţi camp.104
According to the report of the Bessarabian gendarme inspector, Colonel Meculescu, the statistical breakdown of the Jews in the Bessarabian camps differed somewhat by August 30:105
Mărculeşti was not even mentioned in the above because it was in Bukovina, not Bessarabia; but according to Carp, there were already about ten thousand Jews there at that time.106 A government census of Jews in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina on September 1, 1941, produced the following overall figures: 20,909 in Secureni and Edineţi; 24,000 in Vertujeni; 10,096 in Chişinău; and 10,737 in Mărculeşti.107 To these we must add the 49,497 Jews confined as of October 11 in the ghetto of Cernăuţi.108 The census gave a total of 65,742 Jews in the camps and ghettos of Bessarabia as of September 1.109
Yet another report, this one from August 31, gave slightly different figures for the number of Jews in Bessarabian camps:110
The Cernăuţi Gendarme Inspectorate reported to the Office of the Chief Military Prosecutor on September 1 that there were 12,248 Jews in Edineţi and 10,201 in Secureni.111 Note No. 7438 of September 11 from the same inspectorate to the provincial administration of Bukovina gave the same exact numbers, which leads us to believe that they were simply copied from the earlier report.112
On September 4, General Topor reported to headquarters on the number of Jews in the camps of Bessarabia and Bukovina and in the ghetto of Chişinău, pursuant to the Second Section’s Order No. 5023/B:113
The number of Jews in Bessarabian camps peaked around September 25, after which the major deportations got under way. At that point the numbers were as follows:114
| District | No. of Jews |
| Bălţi | 9,061 |
| Cahul | 524 |
| Cetatea Albă | 0 |
| Chilia Nouă | 316 |
| Ismail | 96 |
| Lăpuşna | 11,323 |
| Orhei | 333 |
| Soroca | 22,969 |
| Tighina | 68 |
| Total | 44,690 |
According to Hilberg’s assessment, “more than 27,000 Jews died in July and August 1941 in Bessarabia and Bukovina, in August alone 7,000 in the transit camps and 10,000 in Transnistria.”115 An unpublished document by Romanian historians Ion Calfeteanu and Maria Covaci pushes this figure up to 27,500 deaths over the same time period.116 We shall now explore some of the stories behind this massive number of victims.
The quantitative picture is terrible enough, but the testimony of survivors, perpetrators, and witnesses paints an almost surreal canvas that more clearly conveys the horror of the transit camps. The Răuţel camp, for example, established in the woods twelve kilometers from Bălţi on July 17, amassed Jews from the city ghetto into dilapidated cottages and antitank ditches, all surrounded by barbed wire.117 Between 2,600 and 2,800 competed for the six cottages, which together could hold 100 people at the most; those forced to seek shelter in the ditches covered themselves with makeshift roofs of branches.118 A Romanian officer stated that fifty or sixty prisoners died of hunger and maltreatment every day and that “the entire population of Bălţi spoke with horror of the camp.” Behind the Pămînteni train station the same witness watched as a convoy of inmates swept mud off the streets: “Most were barefoot with no head wear; all were dressed in rags, dying of hunger.” At one point workers from a restaurant took the inmates a crate of potato peelings and other garbage, upon which “the poor Jews . . . flung themselves like animals.” Some of the local roughnecks tossed them table scraps in the hope of starting scuffles. The witness himself tried to give a pack of cigarettes to a man he knew among the “convicts,” but “the sentinel threatened to hit me with his rifle butt, even though I was wearing a military uniform and was armed.”119
The transit camp of Secureni opened at the end of July 1941. Initially, Jews from Hotin District were interned there, as well as some from Noua Suliţă and other Bessarabian localities. According to Joe Gherman, the Hotin prefect, eating raw cereal grain caused the death of 30 or 40 percent of the internees during the first several days, though this later decreased to one-tenth of that rate. The Jews in Secureni, however, were generally in a better financial position—they came directly from the surrounding district—than those in Edineţi, who had come from Cernăuţi, Storojineţ, Noua Suliţă, and Rădăuţi, totally destitute after having been plundered during previous transportations across the Dniester River and back again.120 At Edineţi conditions were so atrocious that in October 85 percent of the children perished.121 Whatever their differences, though, the features common to all the camps were more important, as M. Rudich’s description of life as he knew it in one of the major transit camps shows:
The little houses [were] abandoned, ruined, [their inmates] sheltered between walls eaten by the rains. . . . Dirty because they could not wash and did not have a change of clothes, in rags, almost naked, [the new residents] haunted the alleys or lay in their dirty rooms, . . . covered . . . with tatters that the wind lifted, making it seem as if their skin had been torn off.
Then the epidemic came. People suffered for days on end because of their illnesses, with no help, burning with fever, eaten away . . . by suffering that drained them . . . on frames with no bedding. People died like flies. . . . In tiny huts, . . . in barracks, or wherever they could find some shelter for limbs overwhelmed by exhaustion, the Jews sought refuge, . . . leaving behind them, by the roads or in cemeteries, loved ones whom they had cherished. . . . Food? What they could carry with them in their bags, what people sent to them, what they could beg. . . . Misery stalked at the gates . . . and gradually seeped into the alleyways, the crumbling hovels, the courtyards, and the barracks.122
In Secureni rape became frequent as the Romanian guards took advantage of their life-and-death power over the imprisoned women and girls; suicides sometimes followed.123
The Cernăuţi Gendarme Inspectorate reported to the chief military prosecutor on September 1 that it had arranged “good housing” in Edineţi and Secureni, but it conceded that the Jews lacked all means and that in Edineţi scarlet fever, mumps, dysentery, and typhoid fever had appeared. In Secureni 1,698 Jews from Lipcani had been confined in a “deplorable [state], having not eaten for four days, in rags and covered with parasites.”124 The same inspectorate reported to the governorship of Bukovina on September 11 on these camps, particularly on Vertujeni, in which
there are a lot of old people, children, and women. . . . Housing conditions are presently acceptable; they will [however] need to be prepared for winter. Despite . . . measures that we take to prevent it, it is easy to escape; for that reason we need barbed wire and lumber. . . . The Jews say that they have no more money with which to buy food. [This will get worse] in the winter when we will not be able to provide any transportation and the residents of neighboring villages will no longer be able to come to the market with foodstuffs. . . . The little wood there once was is gone, and now they make fires with wood from fences or with pieces of the roof. Most of them have no clothes or anything to cover themselves. Most were transferred into Ukraine, then sent back by the Germans, [having] lost everything [they once had]. . . . They suffer a shortage of medication.125
One recently discovered document provides a list of rules that governed the transit camps in Bukovina, suggesting something of the conditions in these camps:
a. No one may enter the camp.
b. No one may leave the camp without the approval of General Calotescu; such approval will be communicated by the inspectorate of the Hotin legion.
c. The prefectures can handle supplies, housing, and medical assistance, but they cannot be empowered to release [inmates] from the camps.
d. The prisoners may not communicate with anyone [from outside] under any circumstances.
e. The internal policing is to be conducted by the prisoners, and the legion commander is to intervene when there is a lack of discipline.
f. No one may receive or send any mail.
g. It is forbidden to purchase or sell valuable objects belonging to those who are imprisoned in the camps.
h. Those who have been slated by the prefecture for civic duties must clearly be identified in order to prevent the substitution of other persons.126
The testimony of a survivor from the Edineţi camp reveals even more:
The Bessarabian Jews suffered the worst fate. While the Jews in Bukovina still had enough that they could sell or trade (clothes, silver, gold), those from Bessarabia were already in rags. They did not have the right [even] to leave the houses. They were allowed to go out for only two hours [a day]. There was a shortage of water, [and what there was] was polluted. They paid with their life if they left the ghetto; sometimes they were abused. . . . Then there was the typhoid epidemic. The camp commander warned us that if typhoid spread, he would be forced to execute everyone in the ghetto.127
As noted earlier, the Vertujeni transit camp had been established in mid-August to house the Jews returned by the Germans, along with the contingent from Soroca District. On August 19, the Bessarabian governor’s office cabled the Soroca Prefecture instructions to undertake the creation of this and other camps.128 There were 22,884 Jews in Vertujeni on September 6, guarded by 248 soldiers.129 One man assigned to a subsidiary road gang later recalled conditions in the new camp:
Sanitary conditions were horrible. . . . Water came from four or five wells. There were about 25,000 people. There were endless lines to the wells, where we spent entire nights waiting for a little water. Each family received a small iron pot to cook meals in; we would take that pot to get water. The bread that we were sold was made from [substitutes]. People became so ill from eating fat and [ersatz] bread and from drinking dirty water that they died by the hundreds every day. One day I went to the ditches to move my bowels. . . . As I got closer, I heard moaning . . . and I saw men who had been thrown alive into the latrine.130
Lieutenant Colonel Alexandru Constantinescu, the first commander of Vertujeni, came from the Second Section. During the postwar trial of all the commanders of the Vertujeni and Mărculeşti camps, Constantinescu, an honest man who had requested to be relieved of his commission, testified as a witness rather than as an accused criminal.131 He termed the crowding of the Jews from Bukovina and Bessarabia into the Vertujeni camp a “horrific concentration” for whom “we could not even guarantee a place to rest.” The overcrowding was almost “indescribable,” he recalled, “women, children, young girls, men, the sick, those who were dying, and women in labor—all having no way to feed themselves.”132 Four or five hundred Jews were forced to stay in one building designed for seventy or eighty. The Jews reached Vertujeni “covered with lice and abscesses, so worn out that . . . before we could take charge of them, some died, others fainted, and pregnant women gave birth. . . . The suffering of the officers, especially mine, just to see them produced such a state of tension that I could neither eat nor sleep.”133 A former guard, Gheorghe Petrişor, seconded his chief: “Jews died every day and didn’t even have the chance of receiving a proper funeral.”134
Colonel Vasile Agapie replaced the malcontent Constantinescu as commander of Vertujeni on September 8. Though he and his deputy, Captain Sever Buradescu, remained for a mere three weeks, they wasted little time in exploiting the opportunities this assignment offered.135 One survivor recalled that their cruelty was equaled only by their greed:
They made us pave the streets of the village, but where could we find the stones? From the banks of the Dniester! To satisfy this whim they set us to task: people weakened by hunger, women, teenage girls, children. Imagine a column of thousands of people [almost naked because their things had been stolen] all carrying stones that weighed twenty to thirty pounds, prodded with rifle butts.136
The gendarme station chief for Vertujeni, Ion Oprea, stated during a 1941 inquiry into abuses in the Chişinău ghetto that Captains Buradescu and Rădulescu had often raped Jewish women in the camp.137 The prisoners were beaten on the slightest pretext. Agapie and Buradescu systematically looted the prisoners. A two-lei fee was levied on prisoners who wanted to make purchases from peasant marketers allowed in the ghetto.138 The Jewish community of Iaşi sent aid totaling 300,000 lei on September 9, but Colonel Agapie pocketed the sum.139 Some of the inmates improvised the manufacture of soap, but although the soap was successfully marketed, the camp commander kept the money.
The horrors of what was going on also affected the majority population. For example, soldiers guarding the camp began to suffer from lice. Drunk with his power, Colonel Agapie began to abuse the Romanian villagers as well. Agapie’s men looted the village salt storehouse and even helped themselves to its roofing. Buradescu went so far as to take a coat and bed linen from some peasants who had temporarily lodged him.140 It hardly comes as a surprise, therefore, that upon the camp’s liquidation on October 8, its staff didn’t even bother to clean up the remaining corpses, simply leaving them for the villagers to remove.
The transit camp at Mărculeşti was established on September 1. Initially, Jews from the immediate vicinity were confined there. Later in the month Jews from Bălţi District were brought, following the liquidation of camps at Răuţel, Limbenii Noi, and Răşcani on orders from General Topor and the Second Section.141 A few weeks later some of the Jews from Cernăuţi and Rădăuţi on their way to Transnistria also transited through Mărculeşti.142 A qualified specialist by now, Colonel Agapie was transferred with his subordinates to Mărculeşti on September 28.143
On October 5, Colonel Radu Davidescu, chief of Marshal Antonescu’s military cabinet, conveyed his superior’s order (No. 8507) to the governors of Bessarabia and Bukovina to coordinate with the National Bank of Romania “the exchange of jewelry and precious metal owned by Jews who have been evacuated from Bessarabia and Bukovina.”144 The order required payment in reichsmarks in the camps or at crossing points in Ukraine.145 Ion Mihăiescu, official representative of the National Bank for these matters, reached the Dniester River on October 9, 1941, working at the crossing points at Rezina and Orhei until October 14, when he moved on to Mărculeşti.146 Mihăiescu soon recorded his first impressions in a report to the bank: “thousands of mice scampered about the streets and houses. More than once did they climb up our pants. There was an unusual number of flies that were extremely annoying. . . . As you know, our mission was to collect jewelry and specie and exchange them.”147 Even though a representative from the Ministry of National Defense dispatched to Bucharest three train cars full of rugs, sewing machines, bedding, soap, and fabrics in November 1941, Mihăiescu complained that similar loot worth millions of lei had been left in abandoned houses, protected by neither window nor door, in Mărculeşti.148 Mihăiescu and his National Bank team thus looted 18,566 Jews in Mărculeşti, even paying a midwife 12,000 lei to conduct body searches of the women for them.149
Scolnic Mayer later recounted how, upon his own arrival at the train station in Mărculeşti, “we were greeted by Colonel Agapie and Mihăiescu, who fired pistol shots in the air and waved a stick—threatening to kill those who did not hand over their valuables and surplus clothing”;150 those who refused were shot right then and there.151 At his subsequent trial Mihăiescu declared that it had been “a representative of the army” who “confiscated” personal possessions and that these possessions had consisted only of “identification papers and diplomas.”152 (In 1941, when Camilla Tutnauer’s husband asked Mihăiescu to leave him his credentials because he was an attorney, the latter replied, “Now you are a dog, and you no longer need documents.”)153 Berura Mehr’s mother underwent one of Mihăiescu’s beatings and died a few days later; according to Henriette Harnik, Mihăiescu enjoyed beating elderly women. Harnik also witnessed Mihăiescu savagely beating a Jew who had requested a receipt for his stolen belongings; the man died several days later from his injuries. Ruhal Kamar’s father died the same way. Mitea Katz’s seven-year-old granddaughter denounced her grandmother to Mihăiescu for having hidden jewelry, after which both “disappeared forever.” Aron Clincofer stated that Mihăiescu confiscated shoes from deportees, while others reported that he ripped earrings from female prisoners’ ears.154 Ella Garinstein, soon to be orphaned in Transnistria, later recounted how Mihăiescu took the coats her family had been wearing, brutally hitting her mother on the ears with a stick to force her to hand over her earrings; when Ella’s fifteen-year-old brother refused to give him his boots, Mihăiescu beat him so brutally that he died an hour later.155
Stefan Dragomirescu testified that he had seen “thousands of deportees” living in Mărculeşti “in a state of misery that defied description.” Corpses lay “in cellars, ditches, and courtyards. You could always find Ion Mihăiescu with his truncheon, beating up [even] deportees who had done nothing wrong. He pushed bestiality beyond the limits.”156 One might sometimes find corpses floating in the camp’s only well.157 Brutes such as Mihăiescu and his men confiscated everything down to baby cribs “for the benefit of the state.”158 The looting of Agapie, Buradescu, and Mihăiescu certainly reached extraordinary proportions, but since an insufficient amount of the booty made its way to the appropriate state coffers, the Supervisory Board of the Defense Ministry undertook an investigation in the spring of 1942.159
Unfortunately, as the following sections of this chapter make clear, conditions in other ghettos were similarly awful.
The Ghettos of Chişinău and Cernăuţi
The ghetto of Chişinău was the largest in Bessarabia, in operation mainly from July to November 1941, after which time only a few hundred Jews remained. It had been established on July 24 by Order No. 61 of General Voiculescu, the provincial governor, and eventually housed as many as eleven thousand Jews;160 on August 19, somewhere between 9,984 and 10,578 residents inhabited the ghetto, of whom 2,200 to 2,300 were children and 5,200 to 6,200 were women.161 Throughout its short existence the ghetto never quite sealed its inmates hermetically from the outside. Some of the guards helped the Jews get food from the outside in return for any valuables the prisoners could offer. Voiculescu worried that the authorities maintained only an “illusion” of control, and at one point he warned that if measures were not taken to assert control, “we will be surprised and overwhelmed by the Jidani, or see them flee.” To minimize commerce between the guards and the inmates, he ordered the former to be changed every ten days.162
As heartless as his attempts to suppress the “black market” may seem, Voiculescu nevertheless worried about certain elements of the situation that were detrimental to his inmates. In an August 31 report to the president of the Council of Ministers, for instance, he stated that Chişinău had the capacity to employ only eight hundred Jews to earn their daily bread; indeed, even their semilicit trade with the locals provided sustenance for only “a small group.” The majority of them had no means whatsoever and had to rely on handouts from an overtaxed ad hoc ghetto committee. Reflecting his own anti-Semitic prejudices—and perhaps a cynical understanding of world politics—Voiculescu proposed that the government approach the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (H.I.A.S.) in the hope of obtaining aid from the United States.163
In the early days of the Chişinău ghetto Jews were permitted to exit with passes from the city’s military commander, facilitating soldiers’ and gentile civilians’ exploitation of their plight. Colonel Meculescu reported on August 20 that guards here allowed Jews to leave without a pass or without donning a star in exchange for wedding bands and other valuables.164 When Marshal Antonescu learned of this business early in 1942, he was so angered that he demanded the names of those involved.165 To reimpose control, Colonel D. Tudose, military commander of the city of Chişinău, addressed the problem by reducing the area of the ghetto on August 29 to better “isolate the Jewish population.”166
But further overcrowding meant a further reduction in the quality of life. An SSI report covering the period August 20–31, 1941, stated that hygiene in all the camps and ghettos was worsening from day to day because of a lack of soap and underwear, presaging a possible typhoid epidemic. Another report stated that in the Chişinău ghetto—with a population base of 5,377 families (as of September), or 11,380 individuals—the Jews lacked clothing and bedding, and ten to fifteen were dying every day.167
Mandated by Antonescu and the Council of Ministers on December 4, a commission investigating the conditions that produced these statistics determined that 11,525 Jews lived in the ghetto at its peak, 3,000 of whom had been utterly destitute. The commission’s findings indicated that 441 Jews had died there, 20 of them suicides.168 Most had died from “natural” causes, especially the elderly or the very young. The commission assembled the following mortality figures:169
| Date | No. of Deaths* |
| August 16 | 4 |
| August 18 | 3 |
| August 19 | 4 |
| August 31 | 5 |
| October 2 | 12 |
| October 3 | 9 |
| October 4–5 | 14 |
| October 9–10 | 18 |
| October 11 | 16 |
| October 12 | 10 |
| October 14–15 | 14 |
| October 15–16 | 11 |
| October 18 | 10 |
| October 21 | 12 |
| October 22 | 5 |
__________
*These numbers do not match the commission’s findings. Consistency was not a priority for the Romanian bureaucracy.
Though deportation of nearly the entire surviving population of the ghetto took place during the fall, some flaw in the system permitted a reprieve for about 150 sick prisoners; others exempted for various reasons totaled fewer than this figure.170
The second ghetto under discussion here, that in Cernăuţi eventually attained a population of about 55,000 Jews, 30,000 of whom were deported in the fall of 1941 and 5,000 the following summer.171 Those remaining survived in the ghetto until the end of the war.
The Bukovina administration served under three governors during the war: Colonel Alexandru Rioşeanu, who died on August 30, 1941; the aforementioned General Corneliu Calotescu, one of the chief authors of the 1941 and 1942 deportations; and General C. I. Dragalina, who became governor in 1943. After Romanian troops reoccupied Cernăuţi in the summer of 1941, Rioşeanu organized a banquet attended by the king, Marshal Antonescu, Dr. Nicolae Lupu (the pro-Jewish leader of the National Peasant party), Colonel Mardare, General Topor, and representatives of Germany. Topor would testify on April 26, 1945, that he had heard Antonescu tell Rioşeanu at this dinner to “get rid of the Jews of Bukovina or I will get rid of you”; Antonescu reportedly told Topor more or less the same.172 General Ioaniţiu was said to have confirmed the same message shortly thereafter during a conversation with Topor on Antonescu’s train.173
Thus, over the course of a nine-hour operation on October 11, the entire Jewish population of Cernăuţi was locked inside the ghetto.174 But it was earlier, under Rioşeanu, that the system of segregation in the region had been initiated. It was Rioşeanu who signed Order No. 1344 on July 30, 1941, barring Jews from circulating outside their quarters except during the hours between 6:00 A.M. and 8:00 P.M. (an order by the government of Bukovina changed this permitted span in late 1942 to the period between 10:00 A.M. and 1:00 P.M.). Rioşeanu also signed (on orders from the central authorities) a directive requiring Jews to wear a yellow star. The stars turned into a source of income for the local authorities under Calotescu’s administration, which issued further regulations governing the Cernăuţi ghetto on October 11, 1941, placing the Jews under military jurisdiction and establishing penalties ranging from terms in concentration camps to execution for refusing to wear the Star of David or inciting others to do likewise.175 It is not known if the death penalty actually came into play over this issue, but hundreds of people were certainly sent to the concentration camp at Edineţi for having been caught without the star.176 Several thousand Jews were permitted to remain there subsequently, the only such locale in Bukovina. During the 1944 retreat General Dragalina suspended the requirement of the yellow star for the Jews at Cernăuţi because he feared the Germans would press for mass executions. If evasion of deportation spelled life for many, circumstances nevertheless remained hard; it is indicative of the struggle that only those holding special permits enjoyed the right to work and that these numbered only one thousand out of the fifteen thousand residing in the ghetto as of 1943–1944.177
Bessarabia
Ion Antonescu stated on October 6, 1941, at a meeting of the Council of Ministers, “I have decided to evacuate all [of the Jews] forever from these regions. I still have about ten thousand Jews in Bessarabia who will be sent beyond the Dniester within several days and, if circumstances permit, beyond the Urals.”178 The Bessarabian Jews were deported from the Chişinău ghetto, the Vertujeni camp (where the Soroca District Jews were imprisoned), and the Mărculeşti camp (where the Băiţi District Jews, previously imprisoned in the Răşcani, Limbenii Noi, and Răuţel camps, were interned). The Jews from the ghettos of Orhei, Cahul, Ismail, Vâlcov, Chilia Noua, and Bolgrad were also deported.179
The Supreme General Staff organized and supervised the expulsions. Gheorghe Alexianu, governor of Transnistria, later recalled during the Antonescu trial how
two colonels whose names I do not remember came to Tiraspol in mid-September [insisting] that Marshal Antonescu had sent them to organize the deportation to Transnistria of Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina and that those from Moldavia and Walachia would soon follow. . . . The Supreme General Staff had sent them, and they showed me [a] map, stating that all the transports of Jews would be under the jurisdiction of the army and the gendarmerie and that the administration [of Transnistria] had to . . . obtain housing and food for them.180
Alexianu specified twice during his testimony that the initial order indicated that the Jews were supposed to only cross through Transnistria, their final destination being Ukraine, beyond the Bug River.181
General Topor, the chief military prosecutor, ordered the Transnistria Gendarme Inspectorate to lay the groundwork. It planned to begin on September 6, sending groups of one thousand people to the crossing points of Criuleni-Karantin and Rezina-Râbniţa,182 even though the Transnistria legion warned on September 3 that the deportations should begin only on the fifteenth.183 The Second Army Territorial Command ordered the UER to collect resources for the Bessarabian Jews, but no supplies could ever be delivered.184
General Topor sent the following order to Colonel Meculescu on September 7, 1941:
1. The operation to evacuate the Jews must begin on September 12 with the Vertujeni camp toward Cosăuţi and Rezina, pursuant to directives from the Chişinău Gendarme Inspectorate.
2. Groups of not more than 1,600, including children, will cross the Dniester at a rate not exceeding 800 per day.
3. Forty to fifty carts should comprise each group.
4. The groups are to leave Vertujeni every other day.
5. At each crossing a legion gendarme officer should be posted.
6. Passage of the groups should occur with no formalities.
7. Itineraries are to be drawn up by Lieutenant Colonel Palade, with the help of the legion commanders.
8. Two additional platoons [of gendarmes] are to be assigned for assistance.
9. The territorial station gendarmes will help cleanse the land [i.e., of Jews] and bury the dead with the help of locals.
10. The way to handle those who do not submit? ALEXIANU.
11. Do not take the prisoners through customs. Those who loot will be executed.185
What was the meaning of “ALEXIANU” in Topor’s order? Lieutenant Augustin Roşca, in charge of deporting the Jews interned at Secureni and Edineţi, clarified the term when he stated on December 23, 1941, to a commission formed by Antonescu to investigate irregularities in the Chişinău ghetto and the deportations, that he had received the following order from the Supreme General Staff via Lieutenant Eugen Marino and Commander Drăgulescu:
The Jews from the Edineţi and Secureni camps will be evacuated beyond the Dniester. [We were ordered to] form groups of one hundred per day, supply them, and request a cart for every one hundred persons, and we [were given] the special task of executing those who could not keep up with the convoy because of weakness or sickness. . . . I was ordered to send two to three days before the departure of the convoys . . . a [blank space in text] which had to be presented to the station chiefs of those localities [on the itinerary] and to request paramilitary personnel and tools (shovels and picks) to dig ditches for about one hundred people at appropriate places, specifically away from the villages so that no one hears the screams and the rifle shots, and not on a hillside so that the water does not wash away the bodies. The ditches must be dug every ten kilometers. . . . For those who could not reach the ditches, the standard code word for on-site execution was “ALEXIANU.” I was told to transmit this order to Edineţi and also to Lieutenant Victor Popovici in my own company.186
During his trial in 1945, Drăgulescu confirmed that he had transmitted General Topor’s order, which had been previously conveyed by Marino to Roşca, an order specifying that “all evacuees who could not follow the convoys for reasons of illness or exhaustion must be executed.”187
On September 11, 1941, Colonel Meculescu ordered the evacuation of the Vertujeni camp. His report that day to the Office of the Chief Military Prosecutor emphasized that this operation would be carried out with the participation of Lieutenant Colonel Palade, who, you may recall, was chief of the Military Statistics Office of Iaşi (directly subordinate to the Second Section of the Supreme General Staff).188 This order is so telling that it deserves reproduction in full here:
Pursuant to the order of the chief military prosecutor, please carry out the evacuation of 22,150 Jews from the Vertujeni-Soroca camp as of September 12, 1941, [starting] at exactly eight in the morning so that they can be transferred beyond the Dniester into Ukraine. . . . We have selected the following two itineraries:
a. An itinerary the crossing point of which is Cosăuţi, leaving from Vertujeni, along which route we go to the west of the village of Cremenea, then on the Gura-Camenca-Soroca-Cosäuţi route.
b. The second itinerary will consist of the Rezina crossing point and the following route: Vertujeni-Temeleuţi-Văşcăuţi-Cusmirca-Rezina.
The Jews in the camps will be rounded up in groups not exceeding 1,600, including children. . . . Those convoys [will be] under the direct supervision . . . of the camp officers and gendarmes. . . . Subsequently, the camp leadership will provide an officer for each itinerary as well as the gendarmes required for supervision.
The march will pace itself at thirty kilometers per day, and each journey will include stages, as follows:
• Itinerary a—Cosăuţi, the first stage of the march from Vertujeni to the village of Rediu located on the Gura-Camenca-Soroca route, the second stage from the village of Rediu to Soroca, and the third stage from Soroca to Cosăuţi.
• Itinerary b—Rezina, the first stage of the march from Vertujeni to the village of Voinova, the second stage from Cuhureşti to Mateuţi, and the third stage from Mateuţi to Rezina.
The camp officers will lead those convoys and will accompany them, especially on the first itinerary to Soroca and the second itinerary to Mateuţi, and from there the convoy will be led by legion officers.
Captain Victor Ramadan’s responsibility is to lead the convoys from Soroca and Mateuţi on the Soroca-Cosăuţi itinerary, and Lieutenant Popoiu’s responsibility is the Mateuţi-Rezina itinerary. Those officers will be in Soroca and Mateuţi at eight at night on September 14 in order to organize the departure on the next day to the crossing points.
The crossings will not require any [bureaucratic] formalities. Eight hundred people will be transferred on September 15, [resting] before the crossing points so as not to block the bridges, and another eight hundred people will be transferred on September 16.
This operation should be carried out as follows: every other day two convoys equal in size (1,600 people) will set out along the same itineraries, stop at the same locations, and be handed over to the legion officers at those localities. The legion officers will be aided by [local] gendarmes, who will receive the Jews at the crossing of the Dniester so as to keep watch over them. Two legion officers will therefore be located at the Mateuţi-Soroca-Cosăuţi and the Rezina crossing . . . points, taking into account the fact that those convoys will leave Vertujeni every other day and the time needed for one transport, and they will [conduct the deportees over the river], thereafter returning immediately to receive other convoys. The commanders [of the gendarmerie] legions and administrative officials will outfit each convoy with fifty carts that will carry part of the baggage and those who cannot walk. [The number of carts per convoy was soon drastically reduced.—R.I.
The commanders [of the gendarmerie] legions will also be responsible for giving orders to the posts along the itineraries to help with the curatarea terenului [cleansing of the land], burying of the dead, and setting up in timely fashion lodgings at village outskirts, inside barns, in shacks, and the like, so as to keep any epidemic in check. . . .
Jews may not be robbed by the escorts; those who commit such acts will be executed. With those who disobey, we will proceed according to standards set forth in the law.189
On October 10, Colonel Meculescu ordered the deportation of the Jews from the Chişinău ghetto and southern Bessarabia. The order was sent to the Gendarme Inspectorates of Cahul, Ismail, and Orhei and to Police Companies 23 and 82. Order No. 2830 stated that an interim ghetto had to be established at Tarutino190 and that the Jews from Chişinău were going to cross the Dniester at Rezina and Tighina, those from southern Bessarabia at Tighina. Other instructions pertaining to the Chişinău cohorts mandated the following: convoys of 1,500 people proceeding primarily by foot; 100–120 carts per convoy for the sick, the elderly, and the children; a starting date of October 12, 1941; and two itineraries—one consisting of four stages (one between Chişinău and Peresecina [28 km], one from Persecina to Orhei [14 km], one from Orhei to Chiperceni [20 km], and one from Chiperceni to Rezina [18 km]) and a second consisting of three stages (one from Chişinău to Mereni [18 km], one from Mereni to Bulboaca [22 km], and one from Bulboaca to Tighina [16 km]). The crossings were to be carried out at a rate of 750 Jews per day.
With regard to the Jews from southern Bessarabia, the same Order No. 2830 anticipated that from Cahul, Ismail, Bolgrad, Chilia, and Vâlcov, one convoy to Tarutino from each locality would suffice, envisioning three or four stages of eighteen to thirty-four kilometers each. In Tarutino all would merge in a single column heading for Tighina, sixty carts having been provided for the sick and the children. The order included specific instructions to consider this a “land cleansing,” exact times of departure for all convoys, and very specific itineraries with maps.191 Colonel Meculescu signed another order on October 23 elaborating more precise instructions for handling the Jews after arrival in the interim ghetto at Tarutino. At that time there were 2,270 Jews there, then slated for two convoys, one on the twenty-fifth and the other two days later, each divided into three twenty-four-kilometer marches to the crossing point of Iaska.192 Yet another order, No. 24206, pertaining to the same deportation of Jews from Bessarabia was issued by the army’s Third Corps on October 26.193
The Bessarabian Jews were systematically fleeced—and not only by peasants in the villages they crossed, official orders to the contrary notwithstanding. Indeed, it was Governor Voiculescu himself who charged a committee of the National Bank of Romania in Chişinău with confiscating gold and other valuables from the Jews.194 All furniture from the deportees’ homes was distributed to local civilian and military officials.195 According to General Tătăranu, a similar committee of the bank in Atachi robbed the Jews, assisted by officers of Police Company 60.196 As General Tobescu reported on November 20,
[when the] deportees arrived at the Dniester, large quantities of luggage remained in the train stations or in the fields. The local authorities ordered the luggage stored in private homes [!] and depots, but the measures taken to guard it were inadequate. We began to inventory [the possessions] today, and we will proceed with their distribution to the army, hospitals, Red Cross, and Patronage Society [i.e., Comisia de Patronaj, a national charity run by Ion Antonescu’s wife, Maria]. So far the Fourth Territorial Command of Mărculesti has taken ten railroad cars [of the Jews’ property] and the Ministry of National Defense another three.197
The deportations to Transnistria signified death for thousands, and the roads leading to the Dniester River were soon littered with corpses. Sometimes the convoy guards executed Jews who wore the best clothes and then “sold” the corpses to neighboring peasants for their clothes at prices varying between 1,500 and 2,000 lei.198 The report of the committee set up by Marshal Antonescu to examine irregularities in the Chişinău ghetto contains details of the instructions to the convoy gendarmes and their manner of fulfilling them. Lieutenant Roşca, for example, carried out the orders in a manner that produced the death of five hundred of the Jews evacuated from Secureni to Cosăuţi. Roşca himself provided the following images:
On the road peasants waited like crows to steal something. At the first ditch, which was about five kilometers [into our journey], we ordered six gendarmes to guard fifty or sixty [Jews] until the evening came [when they were shot]. The columns were moving . . . in disorderly fashion because of the children, the women, and the elderly. In other ditches we buried 120 Jews from the first convoy. We executed 120 persons in each of the last three convoys, . . . or a total of about 500 [sic].199
The Jews from the Secureni camp had been organized into two large cohorts on October 2 in preparation for departures for Transnistria stretching through October 5. Abused and robbed during preparations for departure,200 they were again humiliated and their increasingly meager possessions pillaged at various way stations along the roads. Riva Leivadman, a survivor, testified that
while other prisoners of the Secureni camp were being transferred toward Atachi on the other side of the Dniester, we were being robbed by the convoying soldiers and forced to sing embarrassing songs [while] the women with small children . . . who initially were given permission to ride in the horse carts were thrown off. In the night a gendarme officer . . . told all those who could not continue . . . that they would be executed. About five hundred elderly people, women, and even children were executed in groups of ten.201
A survivor of the last convoy, a member of a group originating from Hotin recalled:
We were told that the sick who could not leave the camp would be executed. It was impossible to describe how people, consumed with typhoid fever, dragged themselves through the mud or mothers carried agonizing babies in their arms. Throughout the journey we learned that the convoy before us had been robbed and partially eliminated by the escort. Our numbers diminished as we were forced, day and night, through hills, valleys, and swamps, under the rain and during the first frost of the fall. On the road we abandoned everything we had because we were so exhausted that we could not carry any luggage. At the Dniester, before entering Atachi, we were told under threat of execution to hand over all identification papers and documents.202
The same conditions prevailed among the Edineţi-Cosăuţi convoy, directly under Lieutenant Popovici and indirectly under Lieutenant Roşca.203 The Edineţi camp was evacuated in two phases, on October 10 and 13, 1941. In one of the convoys one hundred people were executed because they could no longer move.204 Right after that, on October 15, the convoy reached the outskirts of the village of Corbu, where it spent the night in an open field. “Exhausted, famished, with bones broken by the blows from the guards, drenched through and through by the rain,” one survivor recalled, “we had to rest that unforgettable night in the mud of the field. The strong wind, the icy night, the first snow killed 860 people.”205
Observing the digging of ditches and the burial of corpses, peasants living along the route of the Edineţi Jews figured out what was going on and began to hide in nearby fields or simply wait openly by the roadside “before rushing to the corpses to rob them.”206 Among the Jews from the Edineţi camp was one group originally evicted from the villages of Bukovina that had already endured a torment of two months’ pointless wandering just to get there and that then had to endure the Edineţi camp regime itself. One hundred from this group were executed near Atachi on November 15, too exhausted to proceed further, including Rabbi Iehosua Frankel of Seletin and his entire family, Rabbi Frankel of Nepolocăuţi, Eti Birnbaum, Eti Wagner, Sura Schertzer, Erna Sin, Zlotschewer, and another man by the name of Reinis.207 Dr. Siegfried Wittner was part of the last convoy from Edineţi, dubbed “the convoy of death.” He later testified:
The people at the rear were executed. The order was given to round up in a shed all the sick, convalescent, those falling behind. Our protests, as doctors, were greeted with these words: “Yes, once upon a time you were doctors, but today you are disgusting Jidani, and if you do not obey I will shoot you like dogs.” The carts at the rear came back empty, and the sergeant, weapon in hand, said, “I got rid of the excess weight.” On the road to the left and the right lay the corpses of Jews murdered on previous convoys.208
The deportation of the Vertujeni camp was originally planned to extend over three weeks, from September 16 to October 8, 1941. But, as the Soroca gendarme legion would soon report (in Telegram No. 5433), the operation had begun only after delays caused by the defective state of the bridges at Cosăuţi-Soroca and Rezina-Orhei; 22,969 Jews had been deported from Vertujeni between September 22 and October 4 (i.e., ahead of schedule) in seven groups of approximately 3,200 Jews each.209 The Jews were forced to walk thirty kilometers a day, though the number of carts was much smaller than planned—anywhere from four to eight per convoy instead of the fifty required. In the chaos, and as those too weak to keep up fell behind, many families were separated, their members never to see one another again.210 During one of the postwar trials, one witness, Captain Stoleru, described the progress of the deportees:
The people had no food when they left the camp, no carts to accommodate all the elderly, the sick, and the children. The route led across open fields; there was not enough supervision, which enabled the civilian population to steal from the Jews throughout the journey. So did the convoys of those unfortunate deportees—exhausted by hunger, misery, and sickness, [and] robbed by everyone—follow their path, . . . harassed by the shouts and blows of the gendarmes, until they could find some rest, either in Cosăuţi Forest or in the “regions of death” beyond the Dniester. The road from Vertujeni to Cosăuţi Forest was lined by the corpses of those who no longer had the strength to reach the crossing point.211
Another survivor recalled arrival with a group of evacuees at the Mărculeşti-Cosăuţi Forest on November 4, soaked to the bone by the rain that dogged their trek. No sooner had the wretches huddled together for their night’s rest when “someone let out a terrible cry. He had found a ditch, filled with the corpses of men, women, and children.”212
A report dated September 30, 1941, of the Chişinău Gendarme Inspectorate sent to the government of Bessarabia mentioned that 3,150 Jews had been transferred on September 27, 28, and 29. Another similar report dated October 2, 1941, pointed out that 2,981 Jews had been transferred beyond the Dniester on September 30 and October 1, 1941.213
The deportation of Jews from the ghettos of Cahul, Ismail, Bolgrad, Vâlcov, Chilia Noua, and Orhei began in the first half of October and continued throughout November 1941.214 Some 367 (alternate figures range from 300 to 400) Jews then in Orhei were deported to Transnistria when the ghetto next to the Church of St. Nicolae was liquidated on November 6.215 General Voiculescu worsened their circumstances when he ordered the Orhei gendarme legion on October 24 not to waste too many carts on them.216 The gendarmes escorted convoys of Chişinău Jews from Orhei to the crossing point at Rezina. After the war one of these soldiers, Anghel Lungulescu, admitted at his trial that anywhere from fifteen to twenty Jews were missing when each convoy arrived, murdered by their escorts.217 Gendarmes regularly beat, robbed, raped, and killed their charges. Peasants and soldiers who were not part of the escort attacked the convoys and looted deportees. Enterprising escorts occasionally sold corpses wrapped in covers to peasants as “clothing packages.” In Rezina Traian Saftenco used a big stick to hit Jews. By mistake he struck one of his fellow gendarmes, Ion Ciurea, who fell to the ground. Lieutenant Constantin Popoiu, the same man responsible for killing many Jews earlier in Orhei District, now orchestrated their fleecing in Rezina.218
As early as September 29, Colonel Meculescu could report that his men had deported to the other side of the Dniester well over 3,000 Jews: the Bălţi legion accounted for 816, the Orhei legion 1,589, and the Soroca legion 770.219 Between September 27 and October 16, 1941, the legions of Orhei and Soroca escorted 28,903 Jews beyond the Dniester.220 Three thousand were deported through the Cosăuţi crossing point between November 8 and 15.221 The daily breakdown for two of these gendarme legions suggests something of the tempo of operations:
The inmates of Limbenii Noi, Răuţel, and Răşcani were transferred to Mărculeşti on September 28, before being sent to Transnistria.222 Some of the Jews from Edineţi also transited through Mărculeşti. Every day convoys of two to three thousand people were transferred to Rezina on the other side of the Dniester.223 From October 8 to December 16, 1941, the commanders of the Mărculeşti camp were Colonel Vasile Agapie and his deputy, Captain Sever Buradescu, formerly together at Vertujeni. One unique feature of the “evacuation” of Mărculeşti was that certain gendarmerie officers protected the Jews against robbery;224 unfortunately, those instances were rare. The last 1941 deportation of the Bessarabian Jews started from Mărculeşti on November 10.
Preparations for the deportation of the Chişinău ghetto began on October 4, 1941. The Chişinău Jews sent desperate letters to Ion Antonescu, Mihai Antonescu, and General Voiculescu requesting postponement; they went unanswered.225 According to Colonel Eugen Dumitrescu, Colonel Tudose’s successor as military commander of Chişinău, there were no lists of names for the 1941 deportation of his district (the Romanians seem not to have begun relying on lists of names until 1942).226
The first convoy of 2,500 Jews left the city of Chişinău at 10:00 A.M. (they had been roused at 6:00) on October 8.227 On the previous day the civilian population had been allowed to purchase the Jews’ belongings, but on the eighth only military personnel could do so. A rumor circulated among the Jews that they would be executed or thrown into the Dniester.228 Convoys of seven hundred to one thousand Jews left the city on foot or in carts, frequently assaulted and robbed; those falling behind were executed. The 1941 deportation ended on October 31.
Through Order No. 15035, Marshal Antonescu exempted from deportation on October 22, 1941, Jews married to Christians and their children.229 As a result of that order, 57 men, 123 women, and 477 children living in the rural areas were allowed to remain in Bessarabia even in 1942.230
On October 28, 1941, General Voiculescu ordered a cart for every seventy people so as to transport the elderly and the invalids, he demanded that the number of escorts per each seven hundred–person transport be doubled to forty men, and he asked that the National Bank conduct its exchanges during the daytime only, presumably to render pilferage more difficult.231 In some convoys such as those escorted by Captain Brotea, however, the elderly and the sick were not allowed to ride. Brotea even beat gendarmes who tried to stop three Jews from slitting their wrists.232
A total of 1,004 Jews were evacuated from Chişinău on October 29, another 882 on the thirtieth, and 257 more on the thirty-first.233 Colonel Dumitrescu reported: “Jews gone as of October 31: 10,225. . . . On Monday, November 3, 1941, about seventy to seventy-five Jews will leave with the children of the orphanage. Those from the hospitals [will be deported] after they recover. . . . There are still about two hundred Jews for deportation in Chişinău.”234 Another of Dumitrescu’s communications specified further: “I am honored to inform you that the last transport of Jews left on October 31. We also need to evacuate the children’s orphanage of thirty-eight children, including four newborns and the rest between one and six years of age, as well as the nurses and support staff.”235 On November 14, Dumitrescu sent to the government of Bessarabia a list of Jews exempted from these deportations: former members of the local parliamentary body, which had proclaimed the unification of Romania in 1918; veterans of World War I; and spouses of Christians.236 Four days later General Voiculescu proudly reported to the Council of Ministers that despite the fact that 118 Jews remained in the Chişinău ghetto—fifty-three of them in the hospital and all soon to be sent off—“the Jewish question has been resolved in Bessarabia.”237
On January 3, 1942, as a result of an order issued by Voiculescu, fifty-five Jews from the Chişinău ghetto were interned in the Onesti Noi camp in Bessarabia.238 The deportation of the last Bessarabian Jews to Transnistria was planned according to Order No. 462/CBBT issued by Ion Antonescu. In direct application of that order Voiculescu decreed on May 7, 1942, the review of all permits granted to Jews who remained in Bessarabia.239 He mentioned in a letter sent to the government of Transnistria his intention to deport the remaining Jews of Bessarabia in four transports, the first one containing 250 people.240 Governor Alexianu of Transnistria approved these transports, provided they were escorted to Vradievka by Bessarabian gendarmes.241 On March 29, the Chişinău gendarme inspector, Colonel Meculescu, even suggested to the Bessarabian administration that the 314 Jews remaining in Bessarabia who had converted to Christianity or were married to Christians should be deported.242
Through Order No. 2141/1942, Marshal Antonescu approved in May the deportation of 425 more Jews from Bessarabia.243 Meculescu drew up the plan. The chief of the escort was Adjutant Grigore David of the Lăpuşna gendarme legion. The first transport, containing 156 Jews, had already left Chişinău on May 20.244 This transport included forty-eight mental patients from Chişinău Hospital, but five critically ill and untransportable Jews were exempted.245 A train of nine merchandise wagons thus arrived at Vradievka Station at 6:00 P.M. on May 22. The 206 Jews placed on those wagons were confined in the Bogdanovka camp.246 Voiculescu told his colleagues later at a meeting of the Council of Ministers that a final transport with two hundred Jews had left Bessarabia for Transnistria shortly thereafter.247 But in actuality, yet one more transport—with nine Jews—left Chişinău on July 10.248 The Bessarabian administration nevertheless informed the Council of Ministers on June 30, 1942, that the Chişinău ghetto no longer existed, the last Jews having been deported on June 25 (!) to Vradievka.249
As a final note concerning the deportations from Bessarabia, it is important to mention that members of other minority religious sects were also persecuted in Bessarabia. Thirty-nine members of the Milenaristi (an Orthodox Christian) sect were confined to Onesti Noi in December 1941. As late as 1943, Jehovah’s Witnesses were still interned in that same camp, as were seventy-four Baptists.250
Bukovina
Colonel Gheorghe Petrescu of the Second Section, responsible for “displacement of the Jewish population of Moldavia,”251 and General Topor arrived at the Bukovina Military Command and informed General Vasile Ionescu, military commander of Cernăuţi, and General Calotescu, governor of Bukovina, that they had a telegraphic order concerning the deportation of Jews from Bukovina. Petrescu would declare in 1945 that this had been a follow-up to Marshal Antonescu’s order that all Jews from Bukovina be transported east of the Dniester, an order countersigned by Colonel Dinulescu, chief of the Second Section.252 Indeed, on October 4, 1941, the Supreme General Staff sent Order No. 6651, signed by Dinulescu, to the Cernăuţi Military Command: “All Jews from Bukovina will be sent east of the Dniester within ten days, in accordance with instructions by Marshal Antonescu.”253 On October 9, the Bukovina administration ordered the military authorities of Cernăuţi to set up strict surveillance on the outskirts of the city to prevent Jews from leaving that municipality.254 Traian Popovici, mayor of Cernăuţi, met on the following day with General Calotescu and later recalled: “I was aghast. All I could do was mumble as I spoke to the governor: ‘You have gone this far, Governor?’ to which he responded: ‘What is there to do? The marshal gives the order, and here we have the representatives of the General Staff.’ General Topor, who was the chief prosecutor of the army, and Colonel Petrescu of the General Staff, witnessed the exchange.”255
The discussion among the men took place in the office of General Calotescu, during which Popovici told the high-ranking officers:
“You are sending fifty thousand human beings to their death in early winter.” As I [Popovici] pointed to General Topor and Colonel Petrescu, I said, “Those men will set up shop in several days at Dragomir Niculescu’s and will congratulate each other for their exploits in Bukovina, and you, you will remain here in your capacity as governor of a province that was handed to you so that you could take care of it and protect it. You have no right to take the lives of anyone. How do you wish to be remembered by history, at Robespierre’s side? As for me, I do not wish to see history tarnish my name. Think of what you are doing. You still have time. Talk to the marshal and ask him to postpone this measure until at least the spring.”
I was the only one who spoke up like an idealist, and I was shaking from emotion. They were all standing upright. Leaning against a stove, the two [officers] and the governor [Calotescu] at his desk listened to me, in stony silence. After a pregnant moment the governor said: “Mister Popovici, I said the same thing to those gentlemen, I feel the same concerns, but these gentlemen were sent here to supervise the enforcement of this order; I will think about it more.” At that moment Colonel Petrescu turned to me and said, “Mister Mayor, who will write this history, the Jidani perhaps? I have come here to pull out the weeds from your garden, and you are against this?” I replied in a cutting way: “Colonel, I pull the weeds out of my garden by myself; as concerns history, not only will the Jidani write it, because the world does not belong to them; history will be written by historians belonging to all people; we will write it and sooner than you think.” . . .
General Vasile Ionescu entered the office, amid this heavy atmosphere. Looking somber, deeply saddened, he saluted us all, then said to the governor: “I ask you not to do this. It is a scandal, what you intend to accomplish. It is a shame, it is awful. It would have been better for me not to have come to Bukovina to witness such barbaric acts.” The governor hesitated and decided to take his time, in order perhaps to relent somewhat.
I left the governor’s office with General Ionescu. While going down the steps, he told me: “I have refused them categorically, I have asked them for those orders in writing, but they did not want to give them to me. Can you believe it? No written orders. They assert that these types of operations are carried out on the basis of verbal instructions, so that there is no evidence. Dear, Traian! Let’s try to convince Calotescu that he should not do something this stupid; it is truly shameful. Furthermore, I am sure that you shattered their conscience. Well, I will talk to him about it again this afternoon.”256
However, Calotescu issued the following order on October 10, 1941:
I have the honor to announce that we have decided to evacuate the Jewish population from Bukovina. . . . The Jewish population of the municipality of Cernăuţi will first be rounded up inside the ghetto set up by the mayor, and from there it will be gradually transported on Romanian railroads. The operations aimed at rounding up the Jews, supervising the ghetto, boarding them, and transporting them to the border points are incumbent upon the Command and Inspectorate of Gendarmes of Cernăuţi. You have at your disposal the First Gendarme Battalion, which will be assigned control over the ghetto and transport escort; the 430th Infantry Battalion; and another infantry battalion brought to Cernăuţi to safeguard the exits from the city [and to maintain] internal order and security. After the roundup in the ghetto all troops that are present in the Cernăuţi garrison will assist in control.
Two trains with fifty cars each, departing from the Cernăuţi railroad station, will be used every day. The roundup in the ghetto will take place on October 11, 1941. . . . All security measures will be taken on that day, at dawn, to prevent any actions that might disrupt order. . . . All Jewish assets become the property of the state as of that moment.257
Calotescu also signed the following roundup schedule:
7:00 A.M.: The assembling of [leading] members of the Jewish community of Cernăuţi and the suburban Jewish communities at the Military Command (to be announced between 5:00 and 7:00 with the assistance of the Regional Police Inspectorate of Cernăuţi). The enclosed notification (Order No. 38 and the ghetto regulations) will be given to them. We announce that all permits to engage in civic employment are revoked and [that] the entire Jewish population is to enter the ghetto.
8:00 A.M. to 9:30 A.M.: The members of the community make the announcement to all the Jews of Cernăuţi. Meanwhile, Regional Police Inspectorate agencies also announce [the order to] the Jewish population by reading the notification at intersections.
9:30 A.M. to 6:00 P.M.: Time allotted to move into the ghetto.
6:00 P.M.: Sealing of the ghetto.258
On the basis of this order more than fifty thousand people were forced into a space adequate for only twenty thousand.259 National Bank teller windows were set up inside the ghetto on October 12, 1941, where Jews were required to exchange money and valuables for rubles.260 Calotescu signed the regulations for the Cernăuţi ghetto and stated that Jews could leave it only with the written approval of the Bukovina Military Command. Any exchange with the surrounding society was forbidden; violators could be executed.261 The Cernăuţi Jews were permitted to take only warm clothes and food supplies with them.262 Calotescu was quite right when he declared, on April 26, 1945, that all orders on the deportations from Bukovina had been drafted by Petrescu, but Calotescu issued them and therefore bore a more-than-criminal responsibility for their implementation.263
Storojineţ was not the only place whence deportations started on October 13;264 deportation of the Jews of Cernăuţi began as well on that date.265 The homes of the latter had already been looted by the Ukrainian and Romanian residents, as noted in a memorandum of the Siguranţa (the Romanian security police).266 The first train left from the nearby Sadagura camp with four hundred families brought there for that purpose, but the nineteen other trains left directly from Cernăuţi. Half of the trains left at 9:05 each night for the Mărculeşti camp; the other half left at 2:05 each afternoon for Atachi.267 The Jews who had not received permission to remain in Cernăuţi were removed from the ghetto there (one witness recalled how it “smelled of stale sweat, urine, fecal matter, mildew, and dampness” due to the shortage of water and the overcrowding).268 “The people who were to be deported were sorted out in groups of two thousand and then driven through mud to the loading docks at the main train station,” runs one account:
Forty to fifty were packed in each car; at Atachi and Mărculeşti they crossed the river into the empire of hell. Heartbreaking scenes unfolded at the loading areas and at train departures. Members of families were separated, children leaving, parents staying, or vice versa; brothers losing their sisters, husbands losing their spouses. The air was filled with wails, and this broke the hardest hearts. The separation often was forever, some leaving to suffer and die, others staying to feel pain and endure slavery.269
While the Cernăuţi Jews were transported beyond the Dniester, the mortality rate was high. According to one witness, “In one transport all but one of the sixty infants perished.”270 It was said that the only people who evaded this deportation purchased the favor for very large sums of money, usually in foreign currency.
Popovici tried to oppose the deportations, and he managed to win—with the help of the governor of Bukovina—the approval of Antonescu (who was in Tiraspol at the time) to retain in the city some 15,600 Jews as “specialists,” along with some 4,000 others to whom he himself had issued “temporary permits.”271 Popovici stated that after Antonescu made this grant on November 15, 1941, General Calotescu assigned the mayor and General Ionescu the task of deciding who would stay. The German consul Schellhorn declined participation.272
Deportation of the remaining Jews of Southern Bukovina in 1941 continued for several weeks after the end of the Cernăuţi deportations. Dorohoi District officially had been absorbed in 1938 into Southern Bukovina, an administrative measure still in force in 1941. Southern Bukovina had not been occupied by the USSR in the summer of 1940; hence, the charge of “collaboration” should not have been leveled against its Jews. But with the exception of four or five thousand Jews from Dorohoi deported in the summer of 1941 (after the onset of the war) to Tîrgu Jiu and Craiova in southern Romania and later brought back, as well as the exception of several hundred Jews killed at the beginning of the war in the region of Herta, the entire Jewish population of Southern Bukovina was deported to Transnistria on that basis.273 According to Carp’s estimates, based partly on the last census, 39,000 Jews had lived in Southern Bukovina. Of them, 24,000 lived in the districts of Suceava, Cîmpulung, and Rădăuţi, the other 15,000 in the district of Dorohoi.274 The number of Jews deported from Southern Bukovina is fairly easy to estimate, because the Jews of that region had not had the opportunity to evacuate with the Red Army (nor, of course, had any been deported by the Soviets). Owing to the fairly long distance from these areas to the Dniester River, the deportations were by train up to the crossing points. In addition to the above-mentioned districts the following localities were affected by the deportations: Solca, Burdujeni, Iucani, Gura Humorului, Vama, Vatra Dornei, Siret, and several rural communities.
The deportations proceeded from October 9 to 14. Suceava was evacuated in eight hours, Iucani in four. The 8,000 Jews in Rădăuţi were deported in four transports of about 2,000 Jews each between October 12 and 14 (the trains were numbered K3501 through K3504). There were at least four suicides among the deportees.275 On October 13, “of the 2,000 Jews of the three southern departments (Rădăuţi, Cîmpulung, and Suceava), there remained only 179 Jews. Permission for 76 Jews to remain in Cîmpulung, 72 in Rădăuţi, and 31 in Suceava was granted on the insistence of gentiles who could not live without their services, mostly in the sawmills. Dr. Schurtzer, the only gynecologist in Rădăuţi, stayed, and Dr. Teitelbaum was recalled from Atachi, as its only dentist.276
Dr. Meyer Teich, head of the Jewish community of Suceava, later recorded his impressions of the deportation, worth quoting at length due to its immense detail:
On Thursday, October 9, 1941, at 5:30 A.M., I was awakened by a bailiff from the prefecture, who told me to come immediately to the deputy prefect’s office. In the street I met several Jews who were crying and who informed me that all the Jews of Suceava were to be evacuated that same day. I did not believe them, and I asked them not to spread panic. I reached the office of Deputy Prefect Ioachimescu at around 6:00, where I found Major Botoroagă and the mayors of Burdujeni and Iucani from the district of Suceava.
The deputy prefect opened an envelope, as if he had received it at that very moment. He read it to me and showed me the evacuation order according to which the Supreme General Staff stipulated that all Jews were going to be evacuated from Suceava in two shifts: those of Burdujeni, Iucani, and half of the town of Suceava in two hours and the other half of the town of Suceava on the following day. The order set forth the death penalty for any attempt to evade, especially those who refused to leave, those who attempted to leave valuables behind with Christians, and Christians who would keep valuables belonging to the Jews. Later, the CNR [National Center for Romanization], the prefecture, and even the judicial bodies of Suceava, selling valuables left behind by the Jews, wrote (I found sales publications in the Bucharest newspapers being sold in Transnistria) about valuables that the Jews had “abandoned,” as if they had left them there of their own free will. Prefect Stroiescu later organized a kind of bazaar to sell such “abandoned goods.” The attorney Popiniuc and the clerk Païs sold our items. [Others were involved too.—R.I.]
Major abuses . . . were reported by the police chief, Apreutesii, under Governor Calotescu. A commission of inquiry arrived on site, consisting of Prosecutor General Andruhovici and Appellate Court Counselor Iliescu. However, the government did not adopt any measures. Prefect Stroiescu and the people cited above continued to sell our assets and dispose of them as they saw fit, distributing furniture and various items to their friends.
The order stated that we were allowed to bring only small bags and food for eight days. When I asked why they were adopting a measure that would lead to our death, Major Botoroagă replied, “The higher interests of the state.” He asked that the leaders of the community inform the population of these decisions. I refused, arguing that I no longer considered myself to be the leader of the Jewish community and that each official had to take care of his own family first and foremost. The evacuation order was announced to the population through the roll of drums. The first transport left several hours later on that day, the second one on the following day. Perhaps because there were not enough cars, about 1,200 Jews remained in the town of Suceava, for whom a third transport was organized on Saturday, October 11. Pursuant to the published order, large quantities of valuables, jewelry, gold, silver, and the like, were deposited at the town hall, in the presence of a representative of the BNR (National Bank of Romania) and the mayor, Ion Janca—the one who later invited the population to a mass meeting where he congratulated the Germans and Antonescu for the . . . evacuation and thanked God for having freed Suceava of the Jews. As a reward he received the “Order of the Black Eagle” from Hitler. . . .
We were promised that the seriously ill, the elderly, and in general those who could not be transported would remain in Suceava. The police chief assured me that all of them would be assembled and cared for. He then told me that if the prefect had been in Suceava, not all the Jews would have been evacuated but . . . only [those who were no longer productive] and that Deputy Prefect Ioachimescu and Colonel Zamfirescu were guilty of an excessive display of zeal. . . . Despite the threat of the death penalty contained in the deportation order, Deputy Prefect Ioachimescu, Major Botoroagă, Police Chief Apreutesii, and other officials received many valuable items from Jews to safeguard them, hoping that no one would come back.
When I asked the mayor to preserve the archives of the Jewish community and especially the civil registries, the communal official Foit told me, “You are not coming back. And even then, you would not be needing such a thing.”
I left with the third transport. We were packed into cattle cars that had not been cleaned. When our train was about to start off, Colonel Zamfirescu arrived and postponed the departure. Police Chief Apreutesii and Major Botoroagă stated that Zamfirescu had ordered that even persons unfit for transport should be evacuated. . . . Indeed, old and sick people appeared, wrapped in hospital linen and without any baggage. The chief physician of the hospital, Dr. Bona, was evacuating all the sick Jews from the hospital, even those who were in serious condition; the coachman Isac Mayer, whose leg had been amputated a few days before, was in agony. He died one hour after we left; his corpse was removed at the train station of Cernăuţi. Dr. Bona evacuated even his [former] colleague at the hospital, Dr. Bernard Wagner, who was more than seventy years old, seriously ill, and no longer capable of enduring his suffering and who committed suicide upon his arrival in Moghilev. The worst is that Dr. Bona and Colonel Zamfirescu put us into the train together with some of the patients who had been sick with typhus abdominalis, for instance, Isac Terrenhaus, who died upon arrival at Moghilev. I then told Colonel Zamfirescu that the fecal matter did not distinguish between races and that those who had been sick with typhus abdominalis not only placed the Jews in grave danger but also other travelers. Colonel Zamfirescu began to laugh and told me that he did not care, that they were all supposed to leave, and that not one Jew must remain in Suceava. . . .
We also were forced to take on board several mentally ill passengers, and since it had not been possible to identify all of them with certainty, two mentally ill Christians were assigned to the transport. Colonel Zamfirescu even wanted to bring Jews from the penitentiary to send them off with us. The head of the penitentiary, who had to request the advice of the Ministry of Justice by telephone, successfully opposed it. Zamfirescu brought to the station [Jewish] women who had been baptized after marrying Aryan men, but at the last minute the governor’s office canceled this move. Zamfirescu screamed that there should not be any traces left of Jews: sick with infectious diseases, crazy, whatever; nothing could disturb his plans. Everything occurred as a result of his own initiative. . . . He screamed, threatened, terrorized everyone. There were horrible scenes: the lunatics screamed, the sick cried; their families no longer knew what to do with them. Next to Isac Mayer, who was dead, his daughter held a candlestick [and prayed]. During the transport the cars were locked, and at several stations military personnel fired rifles at the trains, and this is how we journeyed to the station of Volcineţ, near Atachi, on the evening of October 12.
We learned there that the . . . first transport had been robbed by the soldiers and gendarmes; many of them had been executed. [This was the case too with] the second transport, which indicated that . . . we would also be victims. I then intervened with the station chief and a border guard officer, and, by bribing them, I was able to arrange a layover at Volcineţ until the following morning. I discovered a living hell in Atachi: several thousand people from various transports coming out of Bessarabia or Bukovina, no organization, a complete lack of shelter and food. The new arrivals were led into ruins of homes with no doors or windows, most often lacking a roof, exposed to wind and rain. Bread cost up to two thousand [lei] a loaf.
On October 13, a convoy came from Edineţi—people beaten, barefoot, in a state that defied imagination. We gave them what we could and realized that [their fate] was what was awaiting us. Some lost their minds in Atachi (e.g., the widow of the attorney Dr. Stein). The sick and many elderly people died (e.g., Schaje, Langer, Golda Beiner, Scheindel Kraft, the widow of Dr. Feingold). There were corpses everywhere: in the streets, houses, cellars.
Then, with Dr. Abraham Reicher, a man endowed with tremendous energy, we began to get organized. We obtained a special permit for Dr. Reicher from Captain Popescu of the Third Regiment of Border Guards, so that he could go by himself to Moghilev to arrange better conditions for us. Indeed, Dr. Reicher returned with promises from Moghilev officials that we would not be interned there. Then a representative of the National Bank of Romania converted our lei at a rate of forty per ruble, which meant actually that four-fifths of their value was confiscated. . . . We decided that some of the deportees should take lei to Moghilev in order to safeguard their wealth in currency. We opted for this course of action, primarily because the representative of the National Bank had told us that he had no more rubles and that he was going to send us the rubles several days later in Moghilev, but we knew that this would never happen. After exchanging the lei there came the body searches and those of the luggage. During these searches two officers alternated, accompanied by military personnel and gendarmes, especially Second Lieutenant Marino, whom I knew quite well because he was the counselor of the Appeals Court of Cernăuţi, and Prosecutor Gorovei, son of Arthur Gorovei of Fălticeni.
Our group was searched by Marino, who converted the money that we had not yet exchanged. . . . He gave small change from his profits to the gendarmes. . . . He pocketed from me 12,000 lei, even though he knew me quite well, and took from my wife’s handbag loan titles and other effects worth about 25,000 [lei].
Following this search [we were] led to the banks of the Dniester and taken across on several rafts. The guard soldiers also did their share of stealing, and when many people begged [the troops] to leave them something, they threatened to throw [the Jews] into the water. . . . [One] joked that he’d like to see if these Jews could cross the Red Sea without being harmed. Later I learned that this “joke” had been put into practice several times.277
In 1947, the Bucharest court (in Decision No. 4501/947) confirmed the murders of the Jews from Suceava that Romanian gendarmes had committed at the Dniester. Many survivors of the first convoys were finally able to testify against torturers such as Vasile Mihailiuc:
Witness Aron Lazarovici states that the accused bloodied his head with his rifle butt and stole from him two suitcases packed with possessions. The same witness declares that . . . Vasile Mihailiuc took women and children from the convoy in order to intimidate those from whom he intended to steal. Witness Dora Hirschhorn declared that after her convoy had arrived in Atachi she and her husband were beaten by Vasile Mihailiuc until unconscious [and] their three suitcases robbed of 500,000 lei in addition to clothing. The accused threw Dora Hirschhorn’s mother into the Dniester, whence she was barely saved. [Rubin Hermann testified] that Vasile Mihailiuc stole money and jewelry from him and executed the Jews Goldhammer and Krakover. Another witness, Moses Summer, told how the accused had savagely abused his father, Berl Summer, who died from his injuries and whose belongings he stole. The Jews Chaim Gross and Avram Friedmann also were abused, the latter being threatened with execution. The accused took 17,000 lei and a gold watch from Chaim Gross and a 42,000-lei watch from Avram Friedmann after having intimidated him by firing a shot that almost hit him. Finally, Mina Gross, the last witness, said that on the convoy the accused shot a child, who died instantly.278
On October 22, approximately eight thousand Jews from villages surrounding Cernăuţi and from Rădăuţi District were concentrated in Cernăuţi and immediately deported to Transnistria by way of Mărculeşti.279 Like Atachi, Mărculeşti was an important transit point on the Dniester. Gendarmes and soldiers committed many instances of plunder there. Memoranda dated October 31 and November 11 describe in detail the depredations organized by Captain Titus Popescu of the Supreme General Staff and by Lieutenant Augustin Roşca of Police Company 60. During the searches many Jews lost their last remaining valuables.280
The deportation of the Dorohoi Jews began on November 7 (other sources give the twelfth and the thirteenth), before they had been robbed of their money and jewelry. At that time there were 12,238 deportees, half of whom had been brought from rural districts. A Dorohoi police report of October describes conditions there: “unhealthy houses; men, women, and children with miserable and inadequate food; watery soup and nothing else. Fifteen to twenty sleep in a single room with no light, naked and in rags.”281
The Jews of Dărăbani were deported on the same day. None were allowed to stay, “neither the aged, the sick, infants, lunatics, [World War I] heroes, invalids, war widows, reserve officers, physicians, attorneys, pharmacists, nor dentists,” in one victim’s words.282 The Dărăbani deportees were robbed again at the train station in that town before embarkation. “At the train station . . . they were loaded onto freight cars, piled in by groups of fifty or sixty, and then locked in. Since they had been originally evacuated from their rural homes in June, most of them had only the shirt and torn summer clothes they had then worn; infants and old people overcome by the cold offered a tragic sight that made people cry when they saw them.”283
The Jews of Săveni and Mihăileni were deported under the same circumstances on November 8. Some twelve hundred other Jews, who had been deported to the southern part of the country for hard labor in the summer of 1941 and then brought back, were also deported from Dorohoi. The deportation of the Jews from Dorohoi ended on November 14, 1941. According to the attorney Musat, sent to Dorohoi by the Union of Romanian Jewish Communities, about 12,238 Jews had been deported during those few days, leaving only 2,500. Some Jews froze to death on their way to Atachi; those who survived were robbed again.284
A new wave of deportations befell the Jewish population of Bukovina in 1942 (many of these victims had been able to remain in their homes in Cernăuţi as a result of the protection Mayor Popovici had initially been able to secure). During a meeting of the Council of Ministers on May 28, the governor, General Calotescu, announced that he had decided to deport four to five thousand Jews from Cernăuţi, after having discussed the matter with Governor Alexianu of Transnistria.285 In June some four thousand were indeed deported, along with several hundred others from Dorohoi. The expulsion was carried out in this fashion: on June 7, Calotescu put his chief of staff, Major Stere Marinescu, in charge of a new round of deportations from Cernăuţi. “It would appear as if this project envisioned the deportation of about four thousand people who had been given permits to remain in the city during the selection in November 1941 by the former mayor, Traian Popovici, who had since fallen out of favor,” says Carp.286 Thousands of Jews were brought to the Macabi sports field, rigorously searched (including body searches of the women), and deported in sealed cars to Transnistria, among them former Polish citizens who should have been protected by Chilean passports, sixty-six mental patients, and medical staff from the hospital.287 The first of these transports left Cernăuţi on June 7, 1942, with 1,781 Jews. Another 76 from Cîmpulung, Hotin, Storojineţ, Suceava, and Rădăuţi were deported on June 8;288 a group of 308 from Dorohoi on June 11;289 another 450 from Dorohoi on June 14 (most of them men from external labor detachments whose families had been deported in November 1941);290 1,151 from Cernăuţi and Hotin on June 15; and finally, 1,162 more from Cernăuţi on June 29. In all, between 4,100 and 4,300 Jews were deported from Cernăuţi in June 1942, 750 from Dorohoi.291
The story of the most defenseless victims highlights the character of Romania’s administration. Police Commissioner Ioan Albu’s mission was to deport the patients of the hospital. “He came into the hospital and ordered the men under his command to remove twenty-three Sisters of Mercy,” recalled one witness after the war, “and then [followed] all the patients, even the seriously ill,” a total of thirty; these were individuals whom the government had earlier reprieved. This operation proceeded with extreme brutality: patients were removed from their stretchers in the hospital courtyard, thrown onto trucks, and transported to the Macabi field.292 When one woman carrying a baby in her arms begged Major Marinescu not to send her to die in Transnistria, he shut her up with a kick.293 In contrast, when a soldier sent to arrest six Jewish women found four suicides inside the bedroom, along with a terrified elderly woman and a six-month-old baby, he broke down in tears: he too had children and an old mother. But his commander, the same Major Marinescu, punished him with ten days in the stockade.294
Lesner Herman, former administrator of a local asylum, later testified about the “arrest” of the old Jewish men there, previously exempted by the government of Transnistria, “now eighty to ninety-five years old, partly blind, and incapable of walking unaided.” Commissioner Albu led his policemen to forcibly remove the old men. Albu personally dragged an elderly dying man from his bed and threw him onto the floor of the morgue. Herman stated that, despite his admonitions, “Commissioner Albu behaved like a savage, striking the old men on the head as they pleaded for mercy.”295
In March 1943, another group of Polish Jews holding Chilean passports had crossed the border clandestinely, seeking refuge from Nazi-occupied Poland. In Cernăuţi they were handed over to the Gestapo by Police Commissioner Romulus Cojocaru; the Gestapo ordered their execution. “Romulus Cojocaru did not care that some of these Polish refugees were still recovering after operations and that others were seriously ill,” recalled one eyewitness. “Without exception, they were piled into trucks, like animals. . . . Sick people were piled into the truck with their hands and feet tied. . . . Some tried to commit suicide and were thrown into the trucks bleeding from their open veins.”296 Cojocaru confiscated all passports, but not all of his colleagues shared his zeal. Polish refugees who fell into the hands of Security Inspector Mihai Păun were not handed over to the Gestapo.297 On August 28, 1943, General Dragalina, governor of Bukovina, ordered the expulsion to Poland of 139 Jewish families holding Chilean passports, but their ultimate fate is not clear.298
Traian Popovici was perhaps the only high-ranking civil servant in the Antonescu regime to condemn directly and explicitly the deportation of the Jews. In a memorandum to Ion Antonescu on July 14, 1942, Popovici did shield himself from any possible accusation of philo-Semitism, conceding that it was necessary to settle the Jewish question; but this had to be done “legally and in a civilized manner,” relying on “European methods.” The problem, however, was that
we have stripped the Jews of their belongings and of many billions through highly questionable methods, property that was supposed to end up in the national patrimony but instead became the booty of those who carried out the deportations; because of those methods, useful and irreproachable people, who were known to be perfectly loyal, have been deported, women who were more than seventy years old, the sick, invalids, pregnant women, and the insane.299
After denouncing the corruption of the Cernăuţi officials and the conditions under which many Jews had died in Transnistria, Popovici continued:
Because of those cruelly barbarian principles that have guided the executioners of the order that the marshal handed down, the settlement of the Jewish question in Romania, this act of historical significance, the most important act of the current government, this act that was supposed to be the foundation of the resurrection of our national life, this act that could have become a source of national pride for centuries to come, has become one steeped in the basest felony, an act of eternal shame, which brings together all the elements that can expose us to the contempt and hatred of all humanity, perhaps forever.300
Realizing that many of Bukovina’s Jewish families had lived there for hundreds of years, long before Bukovina was incorporated into Austria, Popovici felt it unacceptable that they “should be decimated, collectively blamed without exception and without the faintest hint of an investigation or judgment, like herds of animals.”301
Since the deportations from Bessarabia and Bukovina amounted to a massive displacement of population, they could not escape the attention of diplomatic corps. Franklin Mott Gunther, American minister in Bucharest, wrote on November 4, 1941, to Secretary of State Cordell Hull: “I have it on good authority that Marshal Antonescu has stated to, or within the hearing of, the Spanish minister (who is particularly interested in the problem because of the Spanish Jews in Romania) that ‘this is wartime, and a good time to settle the Jewish problem once and for all.’ ”302 Gunther continued:
I have constantly and persistently held before the attention of the highest Romanian officials the inevitable reaction of my government and the American people to such inhumane treatment, and even outright slaughter, of innocent and defenseless people, citing at length the atrocities committed against the Jews of Romania. My observations have elicited from Marshal Antonescu, and from Acting Premier Mihai Antonescu, voluble protestations of regrets for past excesses committed “through error” or by “irresponsible elements.” . . . The program of systematic extermination is continuing nonetheless, and I see little hope for the Romanian Jews, as long as the present German-controlled regime continues in power. Its policy is admittedly to drive from the reconquered provinces of Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia, and perhaps also from Transylvania and the Old Kingdom [Regat] as well, every Jew, excepting, of course, those that are or may be useful to it, after taking from them practically all their worldly possessions.303
Jacques Truelle, Vichy France’s minister to Bucharest, provided a very accurate description of the deportations from Bessarabia and Bukovina.304 On November 10, 1941, he reported to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs:
On the set day the Jewish population of those regions was ordered by the local authorities to show up at the train station within four to six hours with supplies for several days. In some cities the highest amount of money that each person could take was set at two thousand lei, or about two hundred francs. No exceptions were made for the elderly, the sick, or children; during the departure the sick were carried on the backs of their coreligionists; some Jews, filled with despair, committed suicide; since the death sentence would be pronounced for anyone carrying gold or money exceeding two thousand lei, some tried to buy food in exchange for jewelry; others burned their banknotes. Those granted the exceptional permission to return home from the train station and retrieve a few items found their houses already looted. In Cernăuţi, the area that was made available to the Jews while they waited to leave was too small, and they were forced to sleep under the open air. Then they were loaded into cattle cars, sixty to eighty per car. The trains headed for Moghilev, which they reached after three or four days. There already were victims among those being deported, [some of] the sick who had died during transport or people [who] had died from exposure.
In Moghilev all the houses had been destroyed during the fighting, and the Jews were forced to sleep under the open air again. Then they were ordered to leave on foot, toward an unknown destination, [covering] close to two hundred kilometers, or about fifteen to twenty kilometers per day. They were not given any food, of course, and since they had no money left, they could not buy anything. Some officers forced young girls to become prostitutes in exchange for a piece of bread. The roads were lined with corpses, and only the strongest men and women could endure these travails.305
It is difficult to arrive at an accurate figure for the number of Jews murdered by the Romanian and German armies in Bessarabia and Bukovina because it is unclear how many were deported from the two provinces between July 1940 and June 1941 by the Soviets and how many of them had withdrawn with the Red Army or with the Soviet civilian authorities. The last Romanian census prior to World War II (1930) gave a figure of 756,930 Jews—at that time the third largest Jewish community in Europe. Of these, 205,958 lived in Bessarabia, 7.2 percent of the regional population; and 107,975 lived in Bukovina, 10.9 percent of that region’s population. Hence, approximately 315,000 Jews lived in Bessarabia and Bukovina in 1930. According to estimates from the Romanian Central Institute of Statistics, 278,943 Jews were included in the population of the USSR as a result of its occupation of Bessarabia and Bukovina.306 The difference of 36,000 may reflect the number of Jews who lived in Southern Bukovina (which remained Romanian), as well as certain demographic modifications (e.g., migrations, differences between births and deaths). In Dorohoi District, later incorporated in Bukovina, there still lived fifteen thousand Jews. Tens of thousands of Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina were killed during July and August 1941; on September 1, 1941, officials counted 126,634 still alive.307
According to the estimates of Matatias Carp and Jean Ancel, during July and August 1941, about 150,000 Romanian Jews were killed in Bessarabia, Bukovina, Herta, and Dorohoi.308 As Carp acknowledged:
We might object that those figures are not an accurate reflection of reality since they do not take into account the number of Jewish refugees during the beginning of the war. According to corroborated information, the number of those who tried to save themselves by fleeing was very small. There were several hundred in Cernăuti, several thousand in the region of Chişinău, and almost the same number in southern Bessarabia through the city of Cetatea Albă.”309
Carp cites in support of that assertion the swiftness of the advance of German-Romanian troops, as well as two Romanian documents attesting to the August 9–17 capture of about 14,500 Jews trying to escape the Soviet troops.310 On the other hand, for a postwar Romania heavily controlled by the Soviets, Carp was unable to publish any information on the number of Jews deported by the Soviet authorities. For instance, in early June 1941, wealthy Jews from Cernăuţi were deported to Siberia. Those known to have engaged in or were suspected of Zionist activities were arrested and deported.311 More precisely, during the night of June 12–13, 1941, approximately three thousand Jews were arrested and deported, among them the former presidents of various Jewish communities and many others who had been politically active. Even after the outset of war, on June 22, 1941, further arrests and deportations devastated the Jewish population: some ten thousand more fell into the hands of the Soviet police.312
Ancel’s examination of the evidence has led him to conclude that “the number of Jews deported by the Soviets before the outbreak of the war, mobilized into the Red Army, or otherwise escaping the German-Romanian armies did not exceed thirty to forty thousand.”313 Conversely, Raul Hilberg estimates that in 1941 more than 100,000 Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina were deported by the Soviet authorities, were incorporated into the Soviet army, or fled the advancing German and Romanian troops.314 Hilberg claims that more than 45,000 Romanian Jews were killed during the first months of the war: over 10,000 as part of the July killings; another 7,000 in the transit camps that summer; 10,000 who “disappeared” in Transnistria (i.e., those transferred to the rear by the Germans in August before the Hauffe-Tătăranu Convention defined the borders of Transnistria); and about 18,000 who died in the transit camps in September and October.315
A report from the U.S. embassy in Stockholm (one of America’s de facto listening posts) estimated that about 130,000 Jews from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina had been allowed by the Soviets to retreat with them in 1941. Therefore, when the Romanian army showed up, it found about 220,000 Jews in both provinces.316 An Office of Strategic Services (OSS) estimate based on a Canadian source says that “between 100,000 to 130,000 Jews fled from Bessarabia and Bukovina before the invaders.”317
It is now possible to estimate with greater accuracy how many Jews left one way or another with the Soviet authorities and thus how many were deported by the Romanians. During the spring of 1943, the gendarmerie station chiefs from the two districts of Bălţi and Soroca in Bessarabia reported the number of Jews who had been deported and the number who had voluntarily left Bălţi and Soroca with the Soviets in 1941:318
The 17,249 Jews deported by one party or the other constituted 28.3 percent of the Jewish population of Bălţi and Soroca, 8.3 percent of the total Jewish population of Bessarabia. This suggests in rough proportions that for every sixty Jews deported by the Romanians, forty had already left with or been deported by the Soviets (in the case of Bălţi 56 percent had been deported by the Romanians; in the case of Soroca, 73 percent). The Jews who had left Bălţi (i.e., those deported by either the Romanians or the Soviets or those who had left voluntarily with the latter) constituted 41 percent of the town’s Jewish population, those from Soroca just under 15 percent of that town’s. In 1940, there were seventy thousand Jewish residents in Cernăuţi, but Mayor Popovici stated that when Romanian troops retook the city from the Soviets in 1941, there were only fifty thousand, a deficit of 29 percent.319 (Popovici also estimated that Romanian troops found about 65,000–70,000 Jews in Northern Bukovina in 1941—that is, a considerable reduction from the prewar 100,000.)320
If we accept as fact that throughout all of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina 40 percent of the Jews left (willingly or not) with the Soviets, it would seem likely that (a) a total of 124,000 Jews (81,000 from Bessarabia, 43,000 from Bukovina) left with the Soviets; (b) about 190,000 Jews from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina found themselves under Romanian administration afterward; (c) at least 123,000 Jews were deported from Bessarabia and Bukovina to Transnistria (i.e., 118,000 during the fall of 1941 and 5,000 during the summer of 1942); and hence (d) about 65,000 Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina were killed during the first months of the war (in mass murders, at transit camps, during deportations). These estimates are very close to Eugen Kulisher’s with regard to the Jews who fled with the Soviets (a 5 percent difference) and fairly close to Hilberg’s estimate of the number of Jews killed in Bessarabia and Bukovina (before or during the deportations).
The report of the military committee that investigated the “irregularities” in the Chişinău ghetto indicated that the difference between the number of Bessarabian Jews who were interned (between 75,000 and 80,000) and those eventually “evacuated” (about 55,000) amounted to some 25,000 who had “died of natural causes, fled, or been killed.”321 The mortality rate during the subsequent deportations appears to have been 27 percent. Except for approximately sixteen thousand Jews remaining in Cernăuţi, the entire surviving Jewish population of Bessarabia and Bukovina was deported to Transnistria.
How many was this? Fortunately, we have numerous sources on the matter; unfortunately, these sources correspond only roughly. But a survey of the available estimates suggests not only the quantitative side of events but the complexity of documenting them that dogs any attempt to produce a precise picture. A report signed by General Calotescu on April 9, 1942, put the number of Jews deported from Bukovina to Transnistria at 91,845.322 Somewhat later, on September 7, the governor broke this down into 57,849 deported from rural areas in July and August 1941; 28,341 from Cernăuţi in October of that year; and another 4,094 from Cernăuţi in summer 1942.323 The total from this breakdown (90,284) was somewhat lower than that he provided in April, but it was reconfirmed in a final report by the governor dated December 12, 1942.324 Calotescu’s reports do not seem to take into account the Jews from Bukovina who died in the transit camps, but they probably include the thirty thousand deported from Dorohoi and Southern Bukovina. A Chişinău Gendarme Inspectorate report contemporary with Calotescu’s first estimate suggests that 55,687 Jews had been deported from Bessarabia;325 however, this figure equals only the number who reached Transnistria alive. An unsigned Ministry of Foreign Affairs report dated October 12, 1942—one quoted in the August 8, 1943, edition of the newspaper Bukarester Tageblatt—stated that 185,000 Jews had been deported to Transnistria by that date.326 The same source reported that 78,000 of these Jews now survived in Transnistria (25,000 men, 33,000 women, and 20,000 children).
These figures may well be too high: other official Romanian statistics range between 100,000 and 120,000. During his postwar trial Antonescu estimated that no more than 150,000–170,000 Jews had been deported.327 A December 9, 1941, report over the signature of General C. Z. Vasiliu indicates that 108,002 Jews had been deported from Bessarabia and Bukovina by then.328 A November 11, 1943, Ministry of Foreign Affairs report signed by the same general increased the total slightly to 110,033 (55,687 from Bessarabia, 43,798 from Bukovina, 10,368 from Dorohoi, and a few stray others), noting that another 2,200 had been sent from Moldavia and Walachia; as of that date 50,741 still survived.329 The committee that investigated the Chişinău ghetto concluded that 101,405 Jews had been deported from Bessarabia and Bukovina.330 The American OSS estimated 155,000,331 and more recently a Rand Corporation analysis gave a figure of over 110,000.332 Julius Fisher, the author of an early study of the matter, estimated 140,154 Jews deported (though this figure includes the 8,000 killed during the abortive deportations of summer 1941, which other studies do not).333
On November 26, 1941, Colonel Broşteanu, Transnistria’s gendarme inspector, reported that 110,002 Jews had been received, also indicating the points at which they had crossed: Moghilev, 45,545; Iampol, 30,891; Râbniţa, 27,113; Tiraspol, 163; and Iaska, 2,200.334 Later, in January 1942, Broşteanu gave an updated figure of 118,847. The crossing points were attributed numbers different from those in the previous report: Moghilev, 55,913; Iampol, 35,276; Râbniţa, 24,570; Tiraspol, 872; Iaska, 2,216.335 A September 9, 1942, report of the Transnistria Gendarme Inspectorate indicated that 119,065 Jews had been received: 55,913 at Moghilev; 35,276 at Iampol; 24,570 at Râbniţa; 2,216 at Ovidopol; and 1,090 at Tiraspol.336
On December 9, 1941, after all but a few thousand of the Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina had already been sent to Transnistria, General Vasiliu gave an early—and minimal—figure of 108,002.337 A more detailed accounting from the Civilian-Military Cabinet of the Administration of Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria (CBBT, i.e., Ion Antonescu’s office for these provinces) stated in 1943 that 90,334 Jews had ultimately been deported from Bukovina and 56,089 from Bessarabia, a total of 146,423.338 My own best estimate is that at least 125,000 Jews, possibly 145,000, reached Transnistria alive. Reliable official Romanian wartime statistics indicate that of these, only fifty thousand would survive to the end of 1943.
Romania never embarked, as did Germany, on a formal program of outright slaughter. But by enacting age-old anti-Semitic fantasies of “driving the Jews out,” by systematic depredation and expulsion, the Romanians nevertheless enacted one of the major chapters of the Holocaust of European Jewry. In one sense at least their program was crueler than that of the Germans: as opposed to the Nazis’ experiment in impersonal, bureaucratized, industrial killing, the Romanians made their Holocaust a “hands-on” experience. In part this reflects the relative backwardness of Romanian society and government, both hardly capable of organizing systematic extermination and even less capable of carrying them through properly. Indecision, contradictory orders, bureaucracy (in all the negative senses of the word), and the conflicting interests of a variety of instances and figures, as well as the personal motivations of thousands of individual perpetrators, all combined to bring an element of outright chaos to the Romanian Holocaust. In some senses events in Romania during World War II have more in common with the chaotic killing process in Cambodia under Pol Pot or the ethnic cleansing during the Yugoslav civil wars than with the industrial killing processes of the Third Reich.
Botched deportations across the Dniester River convinced Romania’s German allies of the Balkan country’s incompetence and doubled the suffering of the Jews; the same may be said of the de facto “planlessness” of many phases of the Romanian deportations. As we shall see in the next chapter, outlandish administrative incompetence considerably intensified the misery of Jews deported to Transnistria, causing tens of thousands to die who might otherwise have stood a chance of surviving an already cruel banishment. But the overall disorganization of the Romanian Holocaust also guaranteed a fighting chance for at least the most physically vigorous to survive until the second half of the war, when changed circumstances would bring renewed hope of an ultimate return home or emigration to the United States or Palestine.
