Florida Holocaust Museum - virtual Yom HaShoah 2020 - April 21st from 10:00 to 6:00; and the Holocaust in Romania

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:  

https://www.facebook.com/events/266629424470860/


https://www.flholocaustmuseum.org/event/virtual-yom-hashoah/


And here is the Florida Holocaust Museum's facebook page:https://www.facebook.com/TheFHM

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...."

(See also  https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1986/wiesel/facts/)

Wiesel also headed a commission that explored Romania's role in the Holocaust.  You can see the full report here (completed in 2004):

http://www.inshr-ew.ro/ro/files/Raport%20Final/Final_Report.pdf

A few months ago, it was announced that Romania will be establishing a Holocaust Museum in Bucharest:  

 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-romania-holocaust/romania-gives-green-light-for-holocaust-museum-idUSKBN1WN1R4

Before the war there were an estimated 750,000 Jews in Romania; today there are 8,000-10,000.

Also relevant to the victims from my list --  this article in Foreign Policy by Robert Kaplan (5 February 2016):

Full text:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/05/the-antonescu-paradox-romania-world-war-ii-hitler/


"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.”"

Also -- Iulia Pdeanu's thesis on the Boston College website:"The Holocaust in Romania: Uncovering a Dark Chapter"
https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/research_sites/cjl/pdf/IuliaPadeanu_The%20Holocaust%20in%20Romania.pdf

provides background on this topic as well.


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.