IN 1930, Romania had been home to 756,000 Jews. At the end of World War II about 375,000 of them had survived. As a consequence of the wartime changes in borders, 150,000 of the original population ended up under Hungarian sovereignty in northern Transylvania, deported in 1944 to concentration camps and extermination centers in the Greater Reich; nearly all of these—130,000—perished before the war’s end.
We may never have a full statistical picture of the human carnage caused by the Holocaust in Romania. More than 45,000 Jews—probably closer to 60,000—were killed in Bessarabia and Bukovina by Romanian and German troops in 1941. At least 75,000 of the deported Romanian Jews died as a result of the expulsions to Transnistria. During the postwar trial of Romanian war criminals, Wilhelm Filderman declared that at least 150,000 Bessarabian and Bukovinan Jews, both those deported and those who remained, died under the Antonescu regime; Mişu Benvenisti estimated 270,000,1 a number also reached by Raul Hilberg.2 In Transnistria at least 130,000 indigenous Jews were liquidated (especially in Odessa and in the districts of Golta and Berezovka). In all, at least 250,000 Jews under Romanian jurisdiction died, either on the explicit orders of Romanian officials or as a result of their criminal barbarity. As shown throughout, sometimes Romanian officials worked with German help, but more often they required no outside guidance. Those Gypsies who were deported seem to have suffered a higher proportion of deaths than did the deported Jews: of 25,000 sent to Transnistria, only 6,000 ever returned; but these 25,000 were indeed a tiny portion of the original population of 1,000,000 Gypsies living in Romania.
The story of Romanian Jewry’s near destruction during World War II is filled with paradoxes. The victims of the Legionnaire pogroms of January 1941 amounted to a numerically small portion of those against whom crimes were committed by the Romanian army and gendarmerie later. But mass murder represented an ideological victory for the Legionnaires and resulted in considerable part from long years of Legionnaire propaganda, the realization of Iron Guard dreams. The irony was that the Guard had been banned by the time most of the killing took place. It would nonetheless have rejoiced to learn that a nonpareil historian like Hilberg would one day write that “no country, besides Germany, was involved in massacres of Jews on such a scale.”3
As in Hungary in 1941 and Bulgaria in 1942, so in Romania was anti-Jewish discrimination compounded by geography. Jews were killed first and foremost in territories over which neighbors fought. In Hungary Jews who were viewed as non-Hungarian were killed (e.g., in occupied Yugoslavian territory and in Ukraine); and in Bulgaria Jews from Thrace and Macedonia were deported to German camps. In Romania deported and murdered Jews were from Bukovina and Bessarabia, territories once lost to, and then regained from, the USSR. Paradoxically, in Bucharest, even at moments of near utter despair, a strange dialogue between Romanian officials and leaders of the Jewish community went forward. Branded enemies of the Romanian nation along with the rest of their kinsmen by an ugly official propaganda, those leaders nevertheless proved able to maintain channels of communication with Romanian officials. The Romanian bureaucracy, theoretically united with Germany’s in the desire to liquidate the Jews, coordinated its efforts with the latter only in spite of serious difficulties and only for brief periods: irreconcilable differences over matters of style, timing, and methodology triggered negative reactions from the Germans, too often ired by the Romanians’ inefficient pogrom “techniques,” by the improvised nature of the “death marches,” by the haste of Romanian officials in pressing huge groups of deportees across the Dniester River in 1941 and the Bug River in 1942, and by the fact that the Romanians did this so often with little clear plan as to what to do with the Jews once they were there. Perhaps they even expected the Germans to handle the problem for them.
In the fall of 1942, those very same Romanian officials refused German pressure to deport their country’s Jews to camps in Poland, where certain death clearly awaited them. Romania had indeed initially approved the Germans’ deportation of Romanian Jews from Germany and the territories Germany occupied; about 4,500 Romanian citizens had died as a result. But when the shifting tides of war changed minds in Bucharest, thousands of Romanian Jews living abroad gained the chance to survive thanks to renewed Romanian diplomatic protection. Romanian Jews may have been deported en masse to Transnistria, but thousands were subsequently (if selectively) repatriated. And as the vast German camp system actualized its horrific potential, the number of murders committed by the Romanians decreased, as did the determination with which they enforced their country’s anti-Semitic laws. Such contradictions go a long way toward explaining the survival of at least half of Romania’s Jews.
Historians and journalists writing under Ceausescu sometimes maintained that the country’s humanitarianism thwarted the very undertaking of the Holocaust in Romania. Disciples of the official version often tried to dilute or completely deny the responsibility of Romanians in the slaughter of the Jews, placing all blame on the Germans. The documents do record numerous instances of Romanians—both civilian and military—rescuing Jewish co-citizens. During the Iaşi pogrom, for instance, the owner of the Dacia windmill saved dozens. Lieutenant Colonel Alexandru Constantinescu, the first commander of the Vertujeni camp, refused to be involved in systematic cruelty, successfully requesting transfer to other duties. Romanian civilian and military officials were condemned by wartime courts-martial for attempting to bring into Romania letters on behalf of Jews deported to Transnistria. Traian Popovici, the mayor of Cernăuţi, resisted the deportations and saved thousands. Romanian military doctors struggled selflessly against the typhus epidemic in Moghilev. Colonel Sabin Motora, the last commander of Vapniarka, arranged under difficult circumstances to repatriate Jews sent there under accusations of communism. Innumerable other instances of civilian or military assistance and rescue were lost to history amid the chaos of war and revolution. But these initiatives were isolated cases—in the final analysis exceptions to the general rule. And the rule was terror, plunder, rape, deportation, and murder. The survival of more Jews resulted from the inefficient and corrupt nature of the Romanian administrative system or from Ion Antonescu’s decision to postpone and then abandon plans to deport the Jews from Regat, rather than from the kindness and courage of the few.
The treatment meted the Jews from Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria triggered a series of external and internal appeals that influenced Ion Antonescu’s decision to cancel deportations from Moldavia, Walachia, and southern Transylvania. Clergymen, diplomats from Switzerland and Sweden, representatives of American agencies (especially the War Refugee Board in Istanbul), the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the Vatican itself all helped. Indeed, German pressure to hand over the Jews of Regat produced a countereffect: no foreign power was going to tell Romanian nationalists what to do with their Jews. And indeed, various liberal, or simply decent, Romanian politicians and public figures intervened on behalf of the Jews; those who would not simply stand by included Iuliu Maniu, Constantin I. C. Brătianu, Nicolae Lupu, and the Queen Mother herself.
Iuliu Maniu, head of the National Peasant party, interceded; in his meeting with James Webb Benton, first secretary of the American legation, Maniu ascribed the license originally granted for anti-Semitic atrocities in Romania to the fact that “the marshal did not have total control of his mental faculties.” Maniu felt that “the Germans, and especially the German army, were responsible” for manipulating the Conducator.4 Maniu of course was attempting to foster a positive image of Romania abroad by blaming Germany, but he himself harbored resentments toward the Jews of Transylvania, whom he viewed as pro-Hungarian. Nevertheless, Maniu remained committed to the idea that moral limits should restrain ethnic resentments.5 As late as 1946, Maniu (whose party had been in a de facto alliance with the Legionnaires in 1937) told a group of Jewish interlocutors: “for now the state has more important problems than the Jewish question. . . . Remember that generals are working in the government, and they work slowly. And anyway, how serious are your problems? You have been able to manage [so far] with your money and your brains.”6 Not really an anti-Semite, Maniu nonetheless reflected the prejudices of his society and generation.
One must also remember that not only voices of moderation clamored for Ion Antonescu’s intervention: the Conducator also received numerous pleas to proceed still more vigorously against Romanian Jewry. In a memorandum of October 1943, the so-called 1922 Generation (former Legionnaires and Cuzists) demanded that “all the assets” of the Jews be “transferred to the state” in order that they might “be placed in the hands of pure-blooded Romanians.” These diehards continued to demand “the mandatory wearing of a distinctive insignia by all Jews” and their prohibition from numerous professions. “The radical and final solution of the Jewish question,” they wrote, as if the recent course of the war had been completely lost on them, “must be carried out in conjunction with [the plan for] the future Europe.”7 When the repatriation of Jews from Transnistria began, Gheorghe Cuza, son of Alexandru C. Cuza of the National Christian party, and Colonel Barcan, prefect of Dorohoi, publicly protested.8
Romania under Antonescu was a fascist dictatorship and a totalitarian state. The dictator’s orders could seal the fate of the Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina, just as they might decide the survival of most Jews from Moldavia and Walachia. The courageous but isolated behavior of some Romanians unfortunately weighed too little on the scale of life and death. The entire repressive military, police, and judicial apparatus became the instrument with which Antonescu carried out his anti-Semitic fantasies during the first half of the war. And under a militaristic dictatorship protests on behalf of the Jews would have been difficult to organize. In any case, official propaganda successfully continued to present the Jews as the most important domestic enemy, as Moscow’s or London’s agents, and as the main cause of Romania’s economic difficulties; widespread belief weighed more heavily than fear as the explanation for the lack of protest.
The Antonescu regime mixed the ideology of the fascist Iron Guard and that of the profascist National Christian party. Basic propaganda by both parties found its way into Antonescu’s stances. Many civil servants in midlevel positions were former members of the National Christian party, and the regime’s anti-Semitic legislation was typically fascist, sometimes overtly inspired by Nazi racial laws.9 The idea of forced emigration had found widespread support among fascists and nonfascist anti-Semites in many European countries during the interwar period. The Nazis had seriously promoted such a solution before 1939. In Romania the Legion of the Archangel Michael and the National Christian party had propounded this doctrine, which Antonescu wholeheartedly assimilated. Many Romanian historians have sought to absolve the Antonescu regime of responsibility for the abuses the Jews suffered at the hands of this government; these scholars argue that emigration had been the intent of its program, a goal that was basically humane.10 And indeed, sometimes emigration was permitted (more for financial considerations, it would seem, than anything else), but the main tools employed by Antonescu and his regime in their plan to eliminate the Jews from Romania were executions, deportations, forced labor, and starvation.
If the anti-Semitic policies and practices of the Antonescu regime were inspired by hatred, the behavior of its bureaucrats was guided for the most part by petty, pragmatic criteria; this sometimes lent its practice a distinct, opportunistic flavor. The result was tragedy for innumerable Romanian Jews, but it also left open the door to salvation for many. When it became evident, for example, that “Romanization” was having a negative effect on the economy, Antonescu put a halt to this extraeconomic process. To take one other instance, as long as developments in the war seemed to favor Romania, official anti-Semitism went unchallenged, and it was anticipated that any survivors of mass slaughter, pogroms, and other measures would be deported beyond the Urals; but the opposite side of the equation was that such plans were dropped after Stalingrad. Bureaucracy helped: the haste to destroy the Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina was equaled only by the chaos and the improvisation that this process revealed, translating into delays that could spell opportunities for Jews to improvise means of surviving the process. It seemed as if it was only a matter of time before the government would deport the Jews of Walachia and Moldavia, these deemed less “treasonous” according to the official line than those from Bessarabia and Bukovina but nevertheless deserving only of dispatch to the German camps in occupied Poland; by that time, however, the opportunists had begun deserting a sinking ship.
However, internal and external appeals; misunderstandings in relations with Germany; Mihai Antonescu’s early realization—even before the outcome of Stalingrad had become fully clear—that the situation on the eastern front was not what had been envisioned; and perhaps Antonescu’s pride (dictators do not like to be dictated to) all impeded overall plans for extermination. In the fall of 1942, a second phase, one offering meaningful chances for Jewish survival, arrived. Ion Antonescu remained a violent anti-Semite, but as the war dragged on, ideological criteria ceased to inspire policy.
Three factors, then, weighed heaviest in the death and the survival of Romanian Jews: malice, greed, and opportunism. Raul Hilberg captured the essence perhaps better than anyone when he wrote:
Opportunism was practiced in Romania not only on a national basis but also in personal relations. Romania was a corrupt country. It was the only Axis state in which officials as high as minister and mayor of the capital city had to be dismissed for “dark” transactions with expropriated Jewish property.
The search for personal gain in Romania was so intensive that it must have enabled many Jews to buy relief from persecution. . . .
In examining the Romanian bureaucratic apparatus, one is therefore left with the impression of an unreliable machine that did not properly respond to command and that acted in unpredictable ways, sometimes balking, sometimes running away with itself. That spurting action, unplanned and uneven, sporadic and erratic, was the outcome of an opportunism that was mixed with destructiveness, a lethargy periodically interrupted by outbursts of violence. The product of this mixture was a record of anti-Jewish actions that is decidedly unique.11