Note: This is NOT an official website of the Department of State. The views expressed in this blog are my own and do not represent the views of the Fulbright Program or the Department of State.
The Jewish Press published an article written by Rachel Freeman,"Technology Connects the Community on YomHashoah," that includes an interview with me about my experience reading names of victims during the virtual commemoration -- all of whom were from Romania/Bessarabia/Moldova region. You can read the full text of the article here:
By RACHEL FREEMAN Jewish Press
Social distancing didn’t prevent the Florida Holocaust Museum’s annual Yom HaShoah commemoration from taking place this year.
One hundred fifteen people pre-recorded videos of themselves reading
names of those who perished in the Holocaust. Their work was compiled
into one live stream that the museum broadcast on Facebook Live from 10
a.m. to 4 p.m. on April 21.
“Reading the names of the Jewish men, women, and children killed
during the Holocaust is a symbolic yet deeply personal way of
remembering these individuals,” said Kristen Davis, director of
marketing and public relations at the museum, which closed weeks ago due
to the pandemic.
This year’s readers included members of the general public of various
religions and ethnicities as well as Holocaust survivors and their
children. Additionally readers included members of Congress – U.S. Sen.
Marco Rubio, U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist of St. Petersburg, and U.S. Rep Ted
Deutch of South Florida – a dozen Florida legislators from throughout
the state, Tampa Mayor Jane Castor and St. Petersburg Mayor Rick
Kriseman, five Pinellas County commissioners, both Jewish and Christian
clergy, law enforcement personnel, judges, and educators.
State Senator Jeff Brandes
In previous years, the commemoration has taken place in person, but
with the coronavirus prohibiting physical interactions, technology was
able to connect the community, near and far. One viewer even commented,
“Hello from Jerusalem.” Another sent greetings from Key West.
Yom HaShoah, which began at sundown on April 20, is a national
memorial day in Israel. Here in Tampa Bay, the Florida Holocaust Museum
has been commemorating the day with the reading aloud of victims’ names
since 2017.
“Most victims of the Holocaust don’t have graves,” Davis said.
“Reciting their names allows for them to be memorialized while reminding
us of their human dignity. Hearing their names offers us a chance to
reflect on their lives and the events of the Holocaust while renewing
our commitment to ensuring that such atrocities do not occur again.”
Eric Pastman, a Florida Holocaust Museum docent
Davis said she received extraordinary feedback from those who pre-recorded the name readings.
“Almost every person thanked us immensely for doing this, and so many
were emotionally moved by reading the names and ages of the victims,”
said Davis.
One of the readers for this year’s commemoration was Judithanne
Scourfield McLauchlan, a professor at the University of South Florida,
St. Petersburg.
“The list I received had victims all from Romania, which is where I
lived and worked, in Moldova,” said McLauchlan in a Jewish Press phone
interview. “I was a Fulbright Scholar in the areas where the victims
lived and perished. When I saw the list of names and where they were
from, I was like, ‘wow.’ It was very emotional for me.”
McLauchlan had never participated in previous Florida Holocaust
Museum Yom HaShoah commemorations, but she said she felt honored to be
included in this year’s livestream.
“It’s such an important event to remember those who were victims,”
she said. “I really appreciate the way the Florida Holocaust Museum made
it a virtual event, so we can still remember.”
I participated in the preparation of the Florida Holocaust Museum's Virtual Yom HaShoah Commemoration by reading a list of names -- which we recorded via Zoom.
The list included the victims' names, dates of birth, residence, dates of death, and place of death.
All of the victims on my list were from Romania, and many of them perished in what is now Moldova. (Bessarabia)
After Romania allied with Nazi Germany, Jews in Besarabia were rounded
up and sent to labor camps in Transnistria, and then to Auschwitz.
It was heart-wrenching to read the names, many of whom were children. I
tried as hard as I could, but could not fight back tears. I should have had a tissue handy.
You can watch the Yom HaShoah commemoration on Tuesday, April 21st from
10 AM to 4 PM via facebook live:
In remembering Holocaust victims and survivors from what is now Romania, I borrowed and re-read my daughter's copy of Elie Wiesel's Night. (Wiesel was from Sighet in Transylvania, see more about Sighet: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/sighet)
"NEVER SHALL I FORGET that night, the first night in the camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams into ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God himself.
Never."
It is a slim volume, and I re-read it this morning. Over coffee, on my porch, while the rest of my household was still asleep. Typically neighbors will be walking their dogs, and I wave and smile. This morning - cool and damp - I was alone with Wiesel and his horrific memories that get more dreadful as the pages turn -tears rolling down my cheek.
But this translation includes Wiesel's Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech (from 1986) as an appendix, which provides inspiration (and a call to action) for us today: "...I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices. And then I explain to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim, Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere....Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.... Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.... There is so much to be done, there is so much that can be done. One person -- a Raoul Wallenberg, an Albert Schweitzer, a Martin Luther King, Jr. --one person of integrity can make a difference, a difference of life and death. As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our life will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them.... Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately...."
"The Antonescu Paradox: Hitler’s Romanian ally led an utterly barbaric
regime — that while often protecting Jews inside Romania’s borders,
murdered them indiscriminately just outside those borders."
Here is part of Kaplan's description of the situation in Romania:
"Antonescu’s crimes against humanity are beyond adequate description.
Deletant breaks down the figures based on the latest evidence: between
12,000 and 20,000 Jews shot by Romanian and German soldiers in northern
Bukovina in July and August 1941; 15,000 to 20,000 Jews murdered in
Odessa in a similar manner by Romanian troops in October 1941; the
deaths of at least 90,000 Jews from typhus and starvation in the course
of deportation organized by Romanian troops eastward from Bukovina and
Bessarabia into Transnistria between 1941 and 1943; and the deaths of as
many as 170,000 local Ukrainian Jews inside Transnistria itself during
the same period of Romanian occupation. (There are, too, the thousands
of Jews killed within Romania’s legal borders: for example, the Jassy pogrom.)
“These figures,” Deletant writes, “give the Antonescu regime the
sinister distinction of being responsible for the largest number of
deaths of Jews after Hitler’s Germany.” (Keep in mind that the
deportation of a half-million Jews from Hungary and northern
Transylvania to death camps in Poland occurred after the March 1944
German occupation of those territories. Romania was never occupied by
Nazi Germany; it was an ally.)
Typhus, starvation, and shootings on the bleak and freezing steppe of
eastern Romania Mare (“Greater Romania”) and its shadow zones in
Bessarabia and Transnistria — these facts do not begin to capture what
the Jews actually experienced at the hands of Antonescu’s troops. The
victims’ valuables were confiscated and in many cases transferred to the
Romanian national bank. The victims were forcedly marched; brutally
bullied into trenches and ghettos filled with armies of rats and mice;
beaten mercilessly and left to die of their wounds; doused with gasoline
and burnt. Old men, women, and children were numerous among those who
suffered the worst atrocities. Young girls were regularly raped. The
Romanian soldiers killed vast numbers of Jews “from infants in swaddling
bands to old men with white beards,” writes Vladimir Solonari in his
2010 book, Purifying the Nation: Population Exchange and Ethnic Cleansing in Nazi-Allied Romania.
On one occasion in the Bessarabian capital of Chisinau in July 1941,
after 551 Jews had been rounded up, “[w]omen and children were shot
first, followed by the men who were forced to push the dead bodies into
the ditch,” Solonari goes on. In a 1996 memoir,
Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld calls Romania Mare and beyond, from
Bukovina to Transnistria, “the great cemetery of the Jews,” where, in
1941, mass death “was not yet industrialized and any means of killing
was used.”
To wit, the American-Romanian scholar Radu Ioanid’s study of this
geographic sector of the Holocaust is more than a book, but a document
from Hell: a dry, factual, nausea-inducing account of the most bestial
and intimate atrocities, committed in one village and town after another
against the elderly and the smallest children by Romanian soldiers and
civilians, with Antonescu’s bureaucratic fingerprints everywhere
apparent. Ioanid notes how Antonescu once confided to his Council of
Ministers on April 15, 1941, after sporadic atrocities in Romania
proper, and on the eve of the invasion of Bessarabia and Transnistria:
“I give the mob complete license to slaughter them [the Jews]. I
withdraw to my fortress, and after the slaughter I restore order.”"
When I was first living in Moldova, information and landmarks (or historic
markers) about the Holocaust were hard to come by. There was a monument
to Jews who perished in the pogrom in 1903, but when I asked about the
labor camps in Transnistria, not much was shared with me at the time. However,
it seems as if greater strides have been made in Holocaust education and
remembering the victims over the last decade, as new materials are accessible in archives.
For example, one of my former students sent me this link for more about
records of Jews who were killed in his home town in Transnistria: https://www.jewishgen.org/databases/holocaust/0250_Dubossary So, let us never forget. And join the virtual YomHaShoah commemoration with the Florida Holocaust Museum on April 21st.
