The History of the Holocaust in Romania

The History of the Holocaust in Romania PDF Author: Jean Ancel
Publisher: Comprehensive History of the H
ISBN: 9780803290617
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Drawing from an exhaustive collection of original Jewish accounts and sources not available until the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu in the late 1980s, Jean Ancel provides a detailed analysis of the path of antisemitism that led to the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust in Romania. The Romanians and other nations inside and outside the Balkans related differently to "their Jews" and "other Jews," that is, those living in districts annexed to Romania after the First World War and those in areas occupied and annexed to the Romanian military administration after the Soviet invasion in June 1941. The Jews of the Regat, the core Romanian principality, suffered pogroms, decrees, and degradation, but on the whole they survived the Holocaust. Although more Jews survived in Romania than in any other non-occupied country allied with Germany, contemporary Romanian sources show that the Antonescu regime and Romania itself killed at least 400,000 Jews, including 180,000 Ukranian Jews. Among Nazi Germany's allies, Romania contributed most to the extermination of the Jewish people. Jean Ancel (1940-2008) was a Romanian-born Israeli independent historian and a research associate of Yad Vashem's International Institute for Holocaust Research. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including The Economic Destruction of Romanian Jewry (Yad Vashem, 2007), Prelude to Mass Murder: The Pogrom in Iisi, Romania, June 28 and Thereafter (Yad Vashem, 2014), and Resisting the Storm: Romania, 1940-1947: Memoirs.

The Holocaust in Romania

The Holocaust in Romania PDF Author: Radu Ioanid
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
ISBN: 1461694906
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Book Description
In 1930, 757,000 Jews lived in Romania; they constituted the third largest Jewish community in Europe. Today not more than 14,000 Jews live in Romania, most of them elderly. The record of the Holocaust in Romania includes many curious chapters of support and betrayal, but they have been largely unavailable until now. Radu Ioanid’s account based upon privileged access to secret East European government archives, is an unprecedented analysis of heretofore purposely hidden materials. Archival records, published and unpublished reports, memoirs of survivors, letters—Mr. Ioanid uses all these elements to build an accurate perspective on Romanian policies of racism, anti-Semitism, and Jewish extermination during the regime of Ion Antonescu. The publication of The Holocaust in Romania is timely as well as important, for there is now in Romania a growing effort to deny the government’s role in the tragedy. Mr. Ioanid sheds light on the reality of the persecutions, the cruelty of the perpetrators, their blatant opportunism and endless cynicism. The story is one of destruction and survival; of German dissatisfaction with Romanian ad hoc violence; of an elusive national policy and the strategies of Romanian authorities that allowed 300,000 Romanian Jews to survive the war. "Invaluable...monumental...no comparable work in any language has documented this important history with the thoroughness, skill, and analytical sophistication this book demonstrates.”—Leo Spitzer, Dartmouth College. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. With 8 pages of photographs.

The Romanian Orthodox Church and the Holocaust

The Romanian Orthodox Church and the Holocaust PDF Author: Ion Popa
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253029899
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description
“An important book” that delves into the role of religious authorities in Romania during the Holocaust, and the continuing effects today (Antisemitism Studies). In 1930, about 750,000 Jews called Romania home. At the end of World War II, approximately half of them survived. Only recently, after the fall of Communism, are details of the history of the Holocaust in Romania coming to light. Ion Popa explores this history by scrutinizing the role of the Romanian Orthodox Church from 1938 to the present day. Popa unveils and questions whitewashing myths that covered up the role of the church in supporting official antisemitic policies of the Romanian government. He analyzes the church’s relationship with the Jewish community in Romania, with Judaism, and with the state of Israel, as well as the extent to which the church recognizes its part in the persecution and destruction of Romanian Jews. Popa’s highly original analysis illuminates how the church responded to accusations regarding its involvement in the Holocaust, the part it played in buttressing the wall of Holocaust denial, and how Holocaust memory has been shaped in Romania today.

Romania's Holy War

Romania's Holy War PDF Author: Grant T. Harward
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501759973
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 359

Book Description
Romania's Holy War rights the widespread myth that Romania was a reluctant member of the Axis during World War II. In correcting this fallacy, Grant T. Harward shows that, of an estimated 300,000 Jews who perished in Romania and Romanian-occupied Ukraine, more than 64,000 were, in fact, killed by Romanian soldiers. Moreover, the Romanian Army conducted a brutal campaign in German-occupied Ukraine, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war, partisans, and civilians. Investigating why Romanian soldiers fought and committed such atrocities, Harward argues that strong ideology—a cocktail of nationalism, religion, antisemitism, and anticommunism—undergirded their motivation. Romania's Holy War draws on official military records, wartime periodicals, soldiers' diaries and memoirs, subsequent war crimes investigations, and recent interviews with veterans to tell the full story. Harward integrates the Holocaust into the narrative of military operations to show that most soldiers fully supported the wartime dictator, General Ion Antonescu, and his regime's holy war against "Judeo-Bolshevism." The army perpetrated mass reprisals, targeting Jews in liberated Romanian territory; supported the deportation and concentration of Jews in camps or ghettos in Romanian-occupied Soviet territory; and played a key supporting role in SS efforts to exterminate Jews in German-occupied Soviet territory. Harward proves that Romania became Nazi Germany's most important ally in the war against the USSR because its soldiers were highly motivated, thus overturning much of what we thought we knew about this theater of war. Romania's Holy War provides the first complete history of why Romanian soldiers fought on the Eastern Front.

Holocaust Public Memory in Postcommunist Romania

Holocaust Public Memory in Postcommunist Romania PDF Author: Alexandru Florian
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253032741
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Book Description
How is the Holocaust remembered in Romania since the fall of communism? Alexandru Florian and an international group of contributors unveil how and why Romania, a place where large segments of the Jewish and Roma populations perished, still fails to address its recent past. These essays focus on the roles of government and public actors that choose to promote, construct, defend, or contest the memory of the Holocaust, as well as the tools—the press, the media, monuments, and commemorations—that create public memory. Coming from a variety of perspectives, these essays provide a compelling view of what memories exist, how they are sustained, how they can be distorted, and how public remembrance of the Holocaust can be encouraged in Romanian society today.

The Ransom of the Jews

The Ransom of the Jews PDF Author: Radu Ioanid
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538140756
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Book Description
After 1948, the 370,000 Jews of Romania who survived the Holocaust became one of the main sources of immigration for the new state of Israel as almost all left their homeland to settle in Palestine and Israel. Romania's decision to allow its Jews to leave was baldly practical: Israel paid for them, and Romania wanted influence in the Middle East. For its part, Israel was rescuing a community threatened by economic and cultural extinction and at the same time strengthening itself with a massive infusion of new immigrants. Radu Ioanid traces the secret history of the longest and most expensive ransom arrangement in recent times, a hidden exchange that lasted until the fall of the Communist regime. Including a wealth of recently declassified documents from the archives of the Romanian secret police, this updated edition follows Israel’s long and expensive ransom arrangement with Communist Romania. Ioanid uncovers the elaborate mechanisms that made it successful for decades, the shadowy figures responsible, and the secret channels of communication and payment. As suspenseful as a Cold-War thriller, his book tells the full, startling story of an unprecedented slave trade.

So They Remember

So They Remember PDF Author: Maksim Goldenshteyn
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806190582
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Book Description
When we think of Nazi camps, names such as Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau come instantly to mind. Yet the history of the Holocaust extends beyond those notorious sites. In the former territory of Transnistria, located in occupied Soviet Ukraine and governed by Nazi Germany’s Romanian allies, many Jews perished due to disease, starvation, and other horrific conditions. Through an intimate blending of memoir, history, and reportage, So They Remember illuminates this oft-overlooked chapter of the Holocaust. In December 1941, with the German-led invasion of the Soviet Union in its sixth month, a twelve-year-old Jewish boy named Motl Braverman, along with family members, was uprooted from his Ukrainian hometown and herded to the remote village of Pechera, the site of a Romanian death camp. Author Maksim Goldenshteyn, the grandson of Motl, first learned of his family’s wartime experiences in 2012. Through tireless research, Goldenshteyn spent years unraveling the story of Motl, his family members, and their fellow prisoners. The author here renders their story through the eyes of Motl and other children, who decades later would bear witness to the traumas they suffered. Until now, Romanian historians and survivors have served as almost the only chroniclers of the Holocaust in Transnistria. Goldenshteyn’s account, based on interviews with Soviet-born relatives and other survivors, archival documents, and memoirs, is among the first full-length books to spotlight the Pechera camp, ominously known by its prisoners as Mertvaya Petlya, or the “Death Noose.” Unfortunately, as the author explains, the Pechera camp was only one of some two hundred concentration sites spread across Transnistria, where local Ukrainian policemen often conspired with Romanian guards to brutalize the prisoners. In March 1944, the Red Army liberated Motl’s family and fellow captives. Yet for decades, according to the author, they were silenced by Soviet policies enacted to erase all memory of Jewish wartime suffering. So They Remember gives voice to this long-repressed history and documents how the events at Pechera and other surrounding camps and ghettos would continue to shape remaining survivors and their descendants.

The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust

The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust PDF Author: Diana Dumitru
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107131960
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Book Description
This book explores regional variations in civilians' attitudes toward the Jewish population in Romania and the occupied Soviet Union.

Jewish Forced Labor in Romania, 1940–1944

Jewish Forced Labor in Romania, 1940–1944 PDF Author: Dallas Michelbacher
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253047447
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
This study of the Antonescu regime’s forced-labor system “offers precious insights to historians and social scientists alike” (Dennis Deletant, author of Ion Antonescu: Hitler’s Forgotten Ally). Between Romania’s entry into World War II in 1941 and the ouster of dictator Ion Antonescu three years later, over 105,000 Jews were forced to work in internment and labor camps, labor battalions, government institutions, and private industry. Particularly for those in the labor battalions, this period was characterized by extraordinary physical and psychological suffering, hunger, inadequate shelter, and dangerous or even deadly working conditions. And yet the situation that arose from the combination of Antonescu’s paranoias and the peculiarities of the Romanian system of forced-labor organization meant that most Jewish laborers survived. Jewish Forced Labor in Romania explores the ideological and legal background of this system of forced labor, its purpose, and its evolution. Author Dallas Michelbacher examines the relationship between the system of forced labor and the Romanian government’s plans for the “solution to the Jewish question.” In doing so, Michelbacher highlights the key differences between the Romanian system of forced labor and the well-documented use of forced labor in Nazi Germany and neighboring Hungary. Jewish Forced Labor in Romania explores the internal logic of the Antonescu regime and how it balanced its ideological imperative for antisemitic persecution with the economic needs of a state engaged in total war whose economy was still heavily dependent on the skills of its Jewish population.

Historical Implications of Jewish Surnames in the Old Kingdom of Romania

Historical Implications of Jewish Surnames in the Old Kingdom of Romania PDF Author: Alexander Avram
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271091940
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Book Description
Linguistic and semantic features in names—and surnames in particular—reveal evidence of historical phenomena, such as migrations, occupational structure, and acculturation. In this book, Alexander Avram assembles and analyzes a corpus of more than 28,000 surnames, including phonetic and graphic variants, used by Jews in Romanian-speaking lands from the sixteenth century until 1944, the end of World War II in Romania. Mining published and unpublished sources, including Holocaust-period material in the Yad Vashem Archives and the Pages of Testimony collection, Avram makes the case that through a careful analysis of the surnames used by Jews in the Old Kingdom of Romania, we can better understand and corroborate different sociohistorical trends and even help resolve disputed historical and historiographical issues. Using onomastic methodology to substantiate and complement historical research, Avram examines the historical development of these surnames, their geographic patterns, and the ways in which they reflect Romanian Jews’ interactions with their surroundings. The resulting surnames dictionary brings to light a lesser-known chapter of Jewish onomastics. It documents and preserves local naming patterns and specific surnames, many of which disappeared in the Holocaust along with their bearers. Historical Implications of Jewish Surnames in the Old Kingdom of Romania is the third volume in a series that includes Pleasant Are Their Names: Jewish Names in the Sephardi Diaspora and The Names of Yemenite Jewry: A Social and Cultural History, both of which are available from Penn State University Press. This installment will be especially welcomed by scholars working in Holocaust studies.