I DO NOT hesitate to say it: Radu Ioanid merits the recognition of all those who are interested in that history which has so lamely become known as the Holocaust. His work treats an unfortunately little-known subject: the tragic fate of the Jewish communities in Romania. Only a few historians, such as the great Raul Hilberg or Dora Litani, among others, have addressed it in their works. In fact, Radu Ioanid often leans upon them, but his work explores more fully the Evil which reigned in Transnistria, between the Bug and Dniester, the two great rivers in Ukraine. His work, based as it is on material from unpublished archives, thus constitutes a new contribution to this field.
Of Romanian origin, the author brings a special sensitivity to this subject. He knows the enemy. He follows him step by step in his hunt for the Jews from town to town, from decree to decree, from spontaneous pogroms to organized persecutions, from the traditional hatred to the physical liquidation; he shows the victims first in their homes, then in the ghettos, and finally, in death. One might say that his goal is to confront the enemy with its own crimes which, in a sense, were “more cruel” but more savage for being less structured in their brutality than those of the Germans.
While there were no gas chambers in Transnistria, everything else was there: not one community was spared; all were decimated. Two hundred fifty thousand Jews perished there in thousands and thousands of ways. There was the terror, the threats, the nocturnal death marches, the sealed wagons, the starvation, the plagues, the humiliations, the public executions, the fires: from time to time, the reader, his heart broken and exhausted, will stop in the midst of a page, incapable of absorbing one more image, or one more scream.
The orders came from on high, from Marshal Ion Antonescu himself. All, or almost all, were executed with more or less enthusiasm. Romanians, Germans, and Ukrainians outdid one another in cruelty. Everywhere it was the same. In the towns as in the villages, summer as in winter, being Jewish meant subjection to torment and torture. How can one read the official report of the Romanian General Constantin Trestioreanu without shuddering from horror and disgust? “I hanged (or had hanged) around five thousand people, mostly Jews, in the public squares of Odessa”? You read well: 5,000 gallows, 5,000 human beings swayed by the wind, before the eyes of the whole population. Or the testimonies of the thousands of Jews locked up in furnaces set on fire by Romanian soldiers? “Some Jews appeared at the windows and, to escape the flames, begged the arsonists to shoot them, pointing at their heads and hearts.” According to a survivor or a soldier, about 35,000 Jews were burned alive or hanged in the city of Odessa alone. Another source cites a more “charitable” figure: only 25,000 in Odessa and Dalnic.
How to explain so much cruelty, manifested on so many levels, by Romanian society? Why were there so few interventions (there were, but they were rare and weak) on behalf of the victims? From the simple soldier to the most powerful officer, from the anonymous employee to the bureaucrat invested with the superior and implacable authority of the State, the Jews—and later the Gypsies—could not expect any measure of pity or humanity.
To understand the process which led to the paroxysmal violence toward the Romanian Jews during the war, Ioanid supplies us with documented details of the day-to-day anti-Semitism that preceded it. Ancestral religious influences, absurd accusations of deicide, the need for a scapegoat, economic factors, everything is there. But the author does not content himself with an evocation of the past; he insists also on revealing the present in all its ugly and confusing ambiguity. How to understand the popularity of Antonescu after the fall of the Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu? Streets bearing his name, statues erected, elected officials observing a moment of silence to honor his memory: has the nation then so quickly forgotten his bloody misdeeds, the atrocities he ordered, his crimes against humanity, and his death sentence?
It takes tremendous force to read this book from cover to cover. But the author had still more to write it. Yes, indeed, Radu Ioanid merits our gratitude.