IN JUNE 1991, fifty years after Romanian military forces joined those of Hitler’s Third Reich in Operation Barbarossa, driving deep into the Soviet Union, and just eighteen months after the fall of the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, I traveled with Radu Ioanid to Bucharest. Our job was to begin the process of identifying Romanian archival materials relevant for study of the Holocaust. The trip was an early step in the systematic effort undertaken by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to identify and collect, generally on microfilm, Holocaust-related archives from all countries. Although the Museum itself would not open for another two years, even then its plan was to facilitate further study of the Holocaust and encourage a more complete and profound understanding of the most unspeakable crime and greatest tragedy of the twentieth century.
The director general of the Romanian National Archives was not encouraging. Romania had been a “haven for Jews,” he proclaimed, even if a “few wild men on the periphery” had committed atrocities. Whatever real losses the Jewish community of Romania and Romanian-administered Transnistria had suffered had been “at the hands of the Germans,” so we would do better to seek out German archival records.
That director general, his successor, and an “acting successor to the successor” all seemed to do their best to impede access to the wartime holdings of the Romanian National Archives. But Radu Ioanid outdid them, pressing systematically and relentlessly for access to records hidden from view for half a century. Slowly, over succeeding years, important collections were pried into the open and microfilmed for this museum’s archives, usually after heated discussions in Bucharest regarding the availability for study, state of organization, and very existence of the respective archival fonds. Here, to cite just a few examples, were recorded the actions of the Romanian police and gendarmerie; the Romanization (“aryanization”) of enterprise personnel rolls, professions, and property; the organization and imposition of forced labor on both Jews and Gypsies; and the deliberations and decisions of the presidency of the Council of Ministers aimed at the destruction of the Romanian Jewish community.
Other Romanian institutions, either less wed to preserving the myths and secrets of the wartime period or motivated by other reasons, were more forthcoming. Opening their archives, they often discovered together with Dr. Ioanid and other researchers from the Museum the full extent of what transpired in their own country between 1940 and 1944. The Ministry of National Defense, the Romanian Information Service (successor to the dreaded Communist-era Securitate), the Foreign Ministry, and other institutions eventually provided a treasure trove of materials relating to military command and operational units, the Iron Guard, surveillance of “suspect” individuals, postwar trials, diplomatic fine points, and, tragically, planned and implemented deportations of Jews and Gypsies, mass starvation and killing, and crude political calculations made at the expense of innocent victims.
The effort to identify and retrieve archival materials in Romania itself was paralleled by similar efforts in territories under Romanian administration during World War II but in independent Moldova and Ukraine today. There, in the archives of Chişinău, Cernăuţi, Mikolaev, Vinnytsya, Ismail, Odessa, and other localities where Romanian forces operated, where Romania’s governor of Transnistria issued orders, and where Romanian and German occupation zones met, additional collections contributed to the completion of a remarkable picture, more detailed than any I have encountered for any other country. It is a picture of Romania’s wartime regime, its bureaucratic and military structures, and its vicious actions to dispossess and deport, concentrate in camps and ghettoes, and in every way imaginable visit death upon Romanian and Ukrainian Jewry, as well as Roma communities. The archival resources on the Holocaust in Romania that are currently in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a result of this effort total not hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousands of pages of material, but hundreds of thousands of pages.
The Holocaust in Romania is the first book based on these new archival resources that treats the entirety of Romania’s role in the Holocaust. Dr. Ioanid extracts from this mass of new documentation a well-defined picture of the workings of the system of victimization and destruction, clarity about who was responsible for the fate of Jews and Gypsies on Romanian-controlled territory, and a measured but still overwhelming analysis of the cost in human lives and human dignity. All flowed from a clear policy, implemented step by step and on a priority basis, directed and monitored carefully by wartime dictator Ion Antonescu, and aimed at the elimination of Jews and Gypsies from the Romanian lands.
The system is revealed, the responsibility of the Antonescu regime and of Ion Antonescu personally is clear, and the victims are counted. Yet The Holocaust in Romania invites future scholars to plumb the archives still further to build on the foundation Dr. Ioanid has provided. There is so much detail in those hundreds of thousands of pages. How to understand the careful consideration given to who would be allowed to remain in the ghetto during mass deportations from Cernăuţi? Or the remarkably detailed planning of deportations from the ghetto of Chişinău, planning that included a count of the orphans and mentally impaired, and the special arrangements made for each of them, including the babies? Or the intensity of denunciations made by “normal citizens” targeting Jews spotted outside the ghetto after curfew? Or the razor-sharp economic analysis of the value of Jewish possessions and the lease-value of their homes? Or the fine distinctions of lineage and rights made at times, and not at others, when the fates of Roma were in the balance? Or the ferocity of mass killings in Odessa, violent death in the transit camps and ghettoes of Transnistria, or forced labor and starvation in places like Şargorod, Djurin, Vapniarca, and Kopaigorod? Radu Ioanid’s synthesis stimulates the reader to ask such questions, and provides a framework within which to seek answers.
The Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum encourages research and publication projects that shed new light on Holocaust-related subjects and facilitate access to research materials that provide a basis for further study. The Holocaust in Romania succeeds admirably on both counts.
Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum