THE GYPSIES were another group of Romanian citizens deported to Transnistria during World War II, mostly from Regat, the Old Kingdom. Even before the war Legionnaire ideologues such as Constantin Papanace and Traian Herseni agitated for the elimination not only of the Jews but also of Gypsies and even Greeks.1 (During the eighteenth century the Ottomans had imposed Greek princes over Romania; right-wing intellectuals continued to perceive ethnic Greeks as vestiges of Turkish domination.) In any event, the Romanian fascists never undertook any serious anti-Greek actions. The Gypsies were another matter, however, and Nazi Germany paid great attention to Romania’s handling of “the Gypsy problem.” Professor Burgdöfer, president of the Bavarian Statistical Office, even went to Romania as an official “expert” to study the matter.2 Romanian experts, on the other hand, went further, coming up with concrete “solutions.” A book by a certain Professor Ion Chelcea, for example, demanded that certain categories of Gypsies should be locked up in “reservations” and sterilized.3 Nevertheless, only a small portion of Romania’s Gypsies—approximately 2.5 percent—were deported under the accusation of being “nomads” or “asocials”; yet those who were deported experienced sufferings identical to those of the Jews.
The fate of the Romanian Gypsies was all the more tragic because some of them had been fighting as members of the Romanian army on the eastern front even as the deportations got under way. Gypsy invalids of World War I were deported; indeed, even Romanians mistaken for Gypsies were swept up in the deportations.4 Some Gypsies still wearing Romanian military uniforms were seized and deported.5 The “legal” basis for the deportations was a May 1942 measure, Order No. 70S/1942 of the president of the Council of Ministers. This was supplemented a few days later by another measure, Order No. 33911, attributed to C. Z. Vasiliu of the Ministry of the Interior and distributed to the police prefectures: the police were to conduct a census of both the nomadic and the sedentary Gypsies and then deport the former and certain categories of the latter.6 The plan was rapidly implemented in actions such as the May 25 sweep of Gypsies in Bacău, an operation in which forty-five policemen blocked the town exits, drew up lists of all Gypsies, and deported them forthwith.7 Ultimately, approximately 25,000 Gypsies in all were deported.8
Looking further into the details of this matter, we find that the General Inspectorate of the Gendarmerie followed up on the order to deport all nomadic Gypsies in Romania plus those nonnomads “dangerous to public order” (as per Report No. 43249/1942). The deportation of the nomads ended on August 15, 1942; that of the others paused on September 16, but it resumed shortly thereafter:9 on September 22, 1,002 sedentary Gypsies were deported from Piteşti on train E4, which left at 9:20 A.M. in the direction of Tighina. Another eight cars bearing 570 Gypsies from Turnu Măgurele were soon added to this transport.10 Twelve thousand additional sedentary Gypsies were deported in five other trains; the property they had to leave behind, as well as other personal belongings, was sold at auction.11
During his trial General Vasiliu acknowledged his role in these deportations:
STOICAN (the public prosecutor): After receiving basic instructions for the deportation of Gypsies, did you organize these deportations in detail?
VASILIU: Sending 24,000 people from all over the country without organizing anything would have meant sending them to their death. I took all the necessary measures [i.e., to ensure their well-being]; I provided five complete trains on which the Gypsies were to board.
PRESIDENT [of the War Crimes Tribunal]: Why were you the one who organized the deportations?
VASILIU: If I received the order, what could I do?
STOICAN: Did you draw up instructions for each Gypsy to bring with him only a bundle for the trip to Transnistria?
VASILIU: If we had allowed every deportee to bring the contents of his house with him, the five trains at my disposal would not have sufficed.
STOICAN: Did you draw up instructions to deport them in the shortest possible time to prevent unrest?
VASILIU: The Gypsies traveled for more than forty days from Timişoara to Bucharest until they reached Transnistria. It was a difficult operation, and measures had to be taken to forestall any incident. [Vasiliu was probably referring in this last answer to the considerable number of nomadic Gypsies deported village by village in horse carts; he apparently wanted to emphasize that the operation was carried out slowly and under humane conditions.]12
Questioned after the war, Marshal Ion Antonescu confessed that the original decision to deport the Gypsies had been his. He sought to justify himself by citing “popular” demand for protection from armed robbers who entered people’s homes at night: “After much investigation we concluded that these were armed Gypsies, many with military weapons, organizing these attacks. All the Gypsies were moved out. Since Mr. Alexianu needed manpower in Transnistria, I said, ‘Let’s move them to Transnistria, that is my decision.’ ”13
The deportation of 25,000 Gypsies placed a considerable strain on rail transport, causing, among other things, serious problems for the Romanian military bureaucracy in particular. Most disturbing to the authorities, armed Gypsy soldiers on leave arrived in Transnistria to free their relatives. Some discharged Gypsy soldiers were allowed to go to Transnistria to rejoin their families. Other Gypsy soldiers from nomadic families were actually discharged and deported to Transnistria themselves. Eventually, the Supreme General Staff asked officers to explain to Gypsy soldiers that their families no longer would be deported. This course was in part the result of a September 29, 1942, meeting in which the matter came up for discussion by the Council of Ministers, which backed off from its earlier radical position:
MIHAI ANTONESCU (vice president of the Council): I would like to ask General Vasiliu to discuss this matter with Colonel Davidescu [chief of Ion Antonescu’s military cabinet] because we have problems at the national level. Please communicate and transmit a memorandum for [immediate] enforcement: “All [Gypsies] eligible for military service, their families, and [those] who hold a manual trade, smiths, skilled workers, and others [?], do not qualify as evacuees.”
VASILIU (secretary of state at the Ministry of the Interior): We brought 26,000. There were also some burglars.
ALEXIANU (governor of Transnistria): Please give me your approval [for repatriation] in case I find Gypsies [serving in the army], orphans, and invalids from the last war. . . .
VASILIU: They all have a police file. Are you sending me back all the thieves?
MIHAI ANTONESCU: The ones you arrested, may God protect them; we are not bringing them back.14
A month later (on October 31), as a result of the decision reached at this meeting, the Ministry of the Interior formally ended the deportation of Romanian Gypsies.15
Despite such examples of flexibility, one cannot help but note that nearly the entire Romanian political class—fascist and nonfascist alike—seems to have remained indifferent to the tragedy of the Gypsies. The only known exception among prominent political figures was Constantin I. C. Brătianu, head of the Liberal party. In the following letter of September 16, 1942, Brătianu begged Marshal Antonescu to show mercy:
Marshal:
Following the persecutions and expulsions of the Jews as reprisals against their coreligionists in Bukovina and Bessarabia, and influenced by German practice [in Jewish matters], we are now adopting very strict measures against the Gypsies, who are being forcibly removed and sent to Transnistria in sealed railroad cars, as in Piteşti.
No one understands the purpose underlying these expulsions.
As you know full well, these Romanian citizens were not subject to any special treatment in our state until now. They are Orthodox, just like Romanians, and they play an important economic role in our country because they are skilled artisans: blacksmiths, coppersmiths, masons, agricultural workers, construction workers. Many of them are small shopkeepers, small business owners, milkmen, and the like. Almost all the violinists in our country are Gypsies, and there is not one festival that can go on without their assistance.
In one fell swoop, the authorities are telling them to leave the country in which they were born and where their ancestors lived; the country where, as good Romanians, they shed their blood when fighting for our nation. On the eve of winter they are asked to liquidate in a matter of hours their homes, from which they can carry no more than twenty kilograms of belongings and clothing.
Old people, women, and children are thrown out of the country into regions that they do not know, where they are completely disoriented.
Why such cruelty?
What are these unfortunate people guilty of?
What will this expulsion accomplish?
Is our country, especially after the current war, overpopulated, and does it enjoy such an abundance of artisans and workers that it can sacrifice such a large number of its citizens?
I dare not imagine that such measures have been adopted upon the initiative or with the knowledge of the head of state, and that is why I am addressing myself to you to put an end to this persecution that will make us regress several centuries.16
The Gypsies were initially sent to the areas of Alexandrovka (Oceakov District), Karanika, Covaleovka (Berezovka District), Mancovca, Voitovka, and Stunovka (Balta District).17 Some of the Gypsies reached Transnistria with their horses and their carts, according to the statement of the prosecutor at one of the postwar trials, O. A. Bunaciu. One of the witnesses, Alexandru Blumenfeld, stated that “aside from the Jews, Gypsies also came to the district of Golta, where their belongings were looted. They were not given lodgings, and they died like flies.”18 A witness of events in neighboring Acmecetka wrote that “Antonescu’s” Gypsies, who had arrived in 1942, died there just as the Jews had:
They were told: “Since you are not Jews, you can bring your horses, your carts, and your belongings because there you will be colonists and we will give you land.” They were also brought into [Prefect] Isopescu’s empire [i.e., Golta Transnistria]. First, their carts and horses were taken away, and since Gypsies always carried their valuables with them, [such as] gold, they could therefore be completely despoiled. They lived in pigsties; they were not given any opportunity to work and earn a living. That is why thousands died. . . . The Gypsies suffered the same fate as the Jews; they died either by execution or because of the cold or hunger.19
Another witness, Virgil Nemeş, corroborated that the Romanian gendarmerie confiscated all horses and carts from the nomadic Gypsies,20 and indeed, we know that on July 29, 1942, Alexianu ordered this.21
It is also known that the number of Gypsies in Transnistria diminished rapidly due to executions, starvation, and epidemics. Though the information is incomplete, it is clear that as of March 21, 1943, 3,423 Gypsies remained alive in Covaleovka, spread out among four labor colonies,22 and that on November 28 of that same year 9,567 Gypsies still survived in the following important areas of resettlement: Golta, Crivoi Ozero, Vradievka, Liubaşevka, and Dumanovka.23 According to Mihail Hausner, a Jewish survivor of Transnistria, after 11,500 Gypsies had been killed by the SS at Triháti, the survivors were imprisoned in the ghetto of Covaleovka, where their carts and horses were expropriated. Behind the barbed wire, without food, they were forced to sell their clothes to survive. Typhus and hunger destroyed them. The hardiest were transferred from Covaleovka to Suha Balca and Mostovoi, where they were given clothes because they were totally naked.24 Indeed, on September 24, the prefect of Berezovka District, Colonel Leonida Pop, informed the labor administration of Transnistria that the Gypsies of Suha Balca and all the rest in his district were “without clothes, without shirts, barefoot.” Pop enclosed the request by the head of the Gypsies of Suha Balca, Ion Natale Stan, for clothes for the 499 Gypsies who had been deported from Ţăndărei (Ialomiţa District). Stan also asked that the Gypsies’ shelter for the winter be improved, stressing that some had sons at the front. On October 2, 1943, two freight cars of lumber were sent to the Gypsies of Suha Balca so that they could build huts for the winter. On October 3, fifty-one suits arrived at a cost of 150 reichsmarks each. On October 4, the labor administration gave its consent for 150 pairs of shoes to be sold to the “good workers.” But on October 29, Pop, who apparently had received fewer pairs than expected, complained that the number of shoes did not suffice since there were 2,620 Gypsies in Berezovka. Pop also reported that many were naked: the winter would mean certain death for them.
As of February 10, 1944, about 3,700 Gypsies survived in the Berezovka region; we have no exact figures for the other places at that time. Though the numbers had declined, the new year saw improvements for the surviving Gypsies, as for the surviving Jews. In late February changing times were signaled when the Gypsies of Suha Balca gained permission to correspond with their relatives in Romania by way of the Red Cross. Despite such concessions, we do not know whether Stan received official endorsement of his earlier request to establish a workshop to enable his community to survive by manufacturing and selling combs.25
On April 15, 1945, Lieutenant Colonel Vasile Gorsky, the former prefect of Oceakov, wrote at length of the Gypsy deportees in his district:
At a conference of prefects from Transnistria in the summer of 1942, Governor Alexianu told me that on orders of Marshal Antonescu, several thousand nomadic Gypsies who had had run-ins with the law would be transported to the district of Oceakov and that I must use them for agricultural projects and in those crafts with which they were familiar. . . . I replied that there were no buildings or sheds in which they might shelter [on the farms to which I planned to send them] and that no firewood was available to prepare their food and provide them with heat. I was told that wood would be shipped. . . . In late August 1942, the Gypsies began to arrive in Triháti. They were greeted by the commander of the gendarme legion, who strictly ordered them not to leave the designated areas. The Gypsies were distributed among state farms. . . . Fifteen thousand Gypsies arrived over the course of one week. The commander . . . told me after the first trains had arrived that they were in an unbelievably miserable condition. I went by car and met them heading for the farms on foot or by cart.
There were many old people, women, and lots of children. The carts bore cripples, people over seventy, the blind, and the grievously ill. Most were [almost] naked, wearing tatters. I spoke to them. They were incensed; they cried, they screamed, they cursed: why had they been arrested and sent to Transnistria? Many proved to me that they had sons at the front, husbands at the front, sons or husbands who had died at the front. Others had relatives lying wounded in [military] hospitals. In these cases I reported in writing and by telephone to the governor, who [demanded] information as to the motives for which they had been sent to Transnistria. . . . After a few weeks approvals for their return began to arrive, and we sent them to Odessa in trucks and carts. I also sent a telegram to the Office of the President of the Council of Ministers wherein I showed that in violation of the orders of the marshal to send nomadic Gypsies with judicial problems, many families had been sent whose heads or children were at the front, or had died at the front, or lay wounded in hospitals, or were honest people in good standing, business owners and artisans. Following that telegram a committee chaired by Colonels Sandu Moldoveanu, C. Moldoveanu, and Ivascu arrived on December 3 for an eight- to ten-day stay, checked each family’s situation, and compiled tables that broke down the population by category. (Because the Gypsies were infected with typhus, Colonel Ivascu was stricken, returned to Bucharest, and died in early January. . . . He had been appointed prefect of Oceakov, . . . but as a result of his death, I was forced to remain . . . even though my resignation had been accepted on October 1, 1942.)
After the selection in February [1943,] other approvals for return kept arriving. Meanwhile, many Gypsies in uniform came to Oceakov from Romania, from the front, or from hospitals—disabled veterans and even soldiers injured during the current war, missing a leg or a hand, in search of their wives, children, and parents. Their justifiable anger was terrible. During the winter they came from places as far away as Oltenia and Transylvania to Oceakov and other places to pick up their families. Some had arrived with permits from the Ministry of the Interior and the government [of Transnistria] for their safe return; others had come only with [military] papers, proof [considered insufficient], and had to go again to Odessa and Bucharest to obtain permits. I remember one of them who told me that he had to go three times to Bucharest to obtain such a permit: they kept asking him for [different] papers.26
The conditions of life for the Gypsies in Transnistria were all the more unbearable because of the humiliating circumstances under which deportation had been carried out. As Gorsky wrote, the Gypsies had been treated as convicts and felt themselves the victims of conscienceless robbers:
The Gypsies had been arrested in rural Romania by the gendarmes and by the policemen in the towns. Most of them were arrested [as they went about their affairs] and loaded directly onto trains without being allowed to retrieve from their house a winter coat, bedding, [or eating utensils]. Decent people were deported, people who owned houses, farms, or shops, well-to-do men: the owner of a hotel in Iaşi (near the train station); the owner of two clothing and shoe stores in Galaţi. . . . One Gypsy had three million in his possession, so the government [of Transnistria] forced him to deposit one and a half million at the National Bank of Tighina, the remainder to be exchanged for marks. . . . I allowed him to open a shop. A woman from Craiova showed me a postcard that she had received from the commander of a company belonging to the Thirty-fifth Infantry Regiment, in which he informed her that her son had died a hero’s death at the front and had done honor to his regiment and his country. Another woman told me that a gendarme had forced her to sell a cow worth forty thousand lei for ten thousand in return for not being sent to Transnistria but that several days later she had been arrested and deported anyway. Another very kind woman with three young girls in Craiova showed me a postcard from her sister, who had written, “You were stupid; I gave the [police] commissioner five thousand lei and I escaped.” A Gypsy woman from Transylvania was brought in with two Romanian children. She had been married to a Romanian, a widower with two children; he died, but since the woman was a Gypsy, she was deported with her two children (ten and twelve years old), whose mother was Romanian. I drafted a report [asking] the government [of Transnistria] to investigate this matter. The older child was placed in a windmill at Oceakov because the child said that he had worked in other mills, and the youngest was taken in by Deputy Prefect Dragomir. I believed that it was important to conduct research throughout the country, to know what orders the police and gendarmerie were acting on, how these orders were enforced, and the abuses that they perpetrated, because many Gypsy men and women told me that many acquaintances with police records had been left alone because they had paid money.27
Though treated as convicts, the Gypsies nevertheless officially remained exiles: despite the fact that this status was on the surface less humiliating, the Gypsies’ living conditions were infinitely worse than those of incarcerated criminals:
Difficulties related to housing and food for fifteen thousand Gypsies were very significant. They arrived . . . starved and in true poverty. They were sent to farms, by foot or cart, forty to fifty kilometers away. I [Gorsky] took measures to feed them along the way, [but] there was food just enough for the indigenous population. . . . The Gypsies . . . stole what they could, [and] it was easy to spot the places they had been by the poultry feathers covering the ground. . . . Several Gypsies were executed by the inhabitants of German villages and then burned (Schonfeld, for instance). Armed civilian sentinels did not allow anyone to get close or to cross through until the corpses had been thoroughly cremated. . . . [On] the farms the Gypsies stayed in the fields for several weeks without shelter. [Neighboring farmers were required to feed them.] They . . . did not want to work at all; they requested to be sent to Romania. Because I did not receive any lumber with which to build huts, I was ordered to settle them in the barracks at Alexandrodar and Balşaia Carinika, which had no doors or windows. They stayed there until early November. Because it was so cold at night, they burned the wood from the rooftops, the floors, the outhouses, trees, telegraph poles, and so on. . . . I requested that the Gypsies in the district of Oceakov be taken into custody and sent to a district where there were forests. But I was ordered to evacuate some local residents from several villages and settle the Gypsies there. The wood issue did not go away. I chose four villages close to the Bug; I personally conveyed to the local residents the order from the government [of Transnistria]. The obedient and submissive [Ukrainian] residents moved out in a week to neighboring villages. . . . The Gypsies were [under orders] not to leave the villages. Food was guaranteed by the military prosecutor of Varvarovca, Dan Anton, a man of initiative [and a former attorney from Galaţi]. It was very difficult to feed the Gypsies because the district had to feed Romanian troops heading for the front. . . . The most serious problem remained firewood. They gathered grass from the fields, far away from the villages; then they began to cut down fruit trees, fences, outhouses, even rooftops. They destroyed windows, doors, and floors and gradually moved into fewer rooms. By the spring of 1943, the villages were unrecognizable; everything lay in ruins. I photographed them and sent the collection to the government. . . . I kept copies for myself, but they were burned last year during the bombing raids. I got the government to supply wood to rebuild the villages and heard after my departure from the prefecture (on April 1, 1943) that part had been delivered and that the residents had been able to rebuild their homes.28
The Gypsies perished as victims of outright violence and also in consequence of their unbearable material circumstances. Cold and hunger so weakened them that they fell victim to disease—above all others, as Gorsky explained, typhus:
The Gypsies were infested with lice. A first attempt at disinfection took place upon their arrival in Tribak, but it was not thorough. . . . They began to die shortly after arrival. Doctors noted too late that the culprit was typhus. Since the Gypsies’ skin is darker, one could not detect the red spots. . . . Disinfection equipment was sent by the government, as well as lamp oil, soap, firewood, and doctors. . . . During the winter of 1942–1943, three to four thousand Gypsies died. Even though precise orders had been given to issue death certificates, no exact numbers could be determined; because of a shortage of gendarmes, some Gypsies were able to flee toward Odessa or Romania. These were arrested along the way, locked up in other towns, or died without identification papers. My resignation from the prefecture of Oceakov was dated September 1, 1942, and was not approved until April 1, 1943. After that date I do not know what happened to the Gypsies. The [deportations] were a colossal fiasco, both materially and morally. . . . The material outcome in Romania was immediately noticeable owing to the shortage of labor power. In Oceakov entire villages were destroyed, fruit groves were burned down, and four thousand Gypsies died, along with several hundred local civilians, gendarmes, and soldiers [swept away by typhus], not to mention the difficulties [for] the railroad system and the burden of policing [the deportees].29
Information about the numbers and locations of the survivors is sadly fragmentary. At the beginning of October 1942, 24,686 Gypsy deportees were in Transnistria. Of these, 11,441 were nomadic Gypsies, 13,176 non-nomads, and the other 69 former prison inmates.30 According to the prosecutor’s statement in the Antonescu trial, six to eight thousand Gypsies had been murdered in Golta on orders from the district prefect, Modest Isopescu.31 A handwritten postwar testimony stated that 11,500 Gypsies had been removed by the SS and executed in the train station of Triháti.32 Also according to that document, only 1,500 of the Gypsies who had been deported to Transnistria survived. In his testimony the Jewish deportee Mihail Hausner said that these Gypsies were sent to Triháti, where the Germans liquidated them. Hausner stated that initially there had been twenty thousand confined in Kovaleovka but that only a small fraction had survived.33 It is not really clear how many Gypsies perished in Transnistria. In any case, in May 1944, when the Romanian gendarmerie nominally registered all Gypsies who returned from Transnistria, the lists that were compiled did not contain more than six thousand names.34
The deportation of Romanian Gypsies to Transnistria was a much smaller operation than that of the Jews. Not only was the absolute number lower but so was the percentage of the Gypsies actually sent away. There had been no anti-Gypsy legislation (i.e., besides administrative orders), and this made the deportations even more arbitrary than those of the Jews. Finally, the fact that the deported Gypsies had relatives in the Romanian army created a very serious bureaucratic problem for the military authorities. It became clear after a few months that it was easier to stop the deportations than to face the problems triggered by their continuation.
Antonescu ordered the deportation of other minority groups too. Ukrainians were initially a target, but there were simply too many of them in Bukovina. However, Romanian officials did want to “solve” “the Ukrainian question” there, based on Antonescu’s advocacy of “forced migration of the entire Ukrainian element.”35 This intention was opposed by German officials, who wished to utilize Ukrainian nationalists for their own purposes, something that irked Romanian officials. After the Berlin encounter between Hitler and Mihai Antonescu on November 27, 1941, the Romanian dignitary complained: “I asked the Führer to clarify his stance on the Ukrainian question, because in Bukovina elements in the German army favored the Ukrainians, and the Romanian government would soon have to develop a position . . . opposed to the Ukrainian element. . . . The numerous, primitive mass of Slavs is . . . a serious biological problem with regard to European birthrates.”36 Though Hitler did agree to let the Romanians handle the Ukrainian issue on their own territory, anti-Ukrainian plans never got off the ground. Toward the end of the war the Romanian military authorities faced increasing problems with Ukrainian partisans, both nationalist (Bandera) and Soviet, as their German allies did.
Religious dissidents, particularly the Innocentists and others who refused to serve in the armed forces, were also targeted. As a result, two thousand Innocentists were imprisoned in camps during the summer of 1942, a measure later applied to Baptists and other sects.37
Though the persecution of Gypsies had barely gathered a full head of steam by the time Romanian policy makers began to worry about the possibility of postwar answerability for their crimes, the case of the Gypsies demonstrates that the Jews constituted an insufficient field of action for Romanian racists. If the Third Reich had prevailed in Europe, would fascist Romania have liquidated the rest of its Jews? And having thus solved “the Jewish question,” would the country have done the same to the Gypsies? The Greeks? The Ukrainians? Hungarians? Religious minorities? Others? We shall never know. But the horrors of the Holocaust in Romania suggest that the malice of its fascists would not easily have been spent. The fact that the Gypsy Holocaust gave every sign of repeating that of the Jews indicates that, given the opportunity, Romania’s fascists would indeed have continued to pursue their racist utopia. And if this had taken place, there is every reason to believe that continued “elimination” of other “elements” of discord would have proceeded not only on the grounds of race but also on those of religion, ideology, and politics.