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Mihail Sebastian and the Holocaust in Romania
Recently, the Jewish community of Romania has been witnessing a resurgence of admiration for, and allegiance to, the Legionary movement, along with other expressions of extremism and fascism that we believed had been extinguished with the end of World War II. We may have thought that incidents of anti-Semitism and intolerance could not, in our lifetime, resurface. But for those of us naïve enough to entertain such hopeful thoughts – even after the genocidal massacres of October 7, 2023, at least one creative initiative now offers us a bleak reminder that we are not so far removed from the country’s tainted past.
Last October, a Romanian-German new-media co-production was launched online. Called Mihail Sebastian: Si Tirenii cu Sufletul de Crin (Young People with Lily Souls), this bilingual webcomic, https://mihailsebastian.ro, comprises animations and drawings about the emotional turmoil that Mihail Sebastian endured, alongside the horrors of the Shoah in Romania, all strikingly portrayed in black and white.

Mihail Sebastian. Illustrations by Liviu Barbulescu, Lu Pop & Razvan Petre.
Mihail Sebastian, a Romanian-Jewish author, was the pen name of Iosif Mendel Hechter. Sebastian was renowned for his prolific writings during the interwar period – about the political and social changes in Bucharest, as much as the impact on his personal and professional life. Born in Braila in 1907, he spent most of his adult life in Bucharest. After surviving the oppressive climate that heavily impacted the lives of Jews at the time, Sebastian was killed in a car accident in 1945.
Despite his abbreviated life nearly a century ago, Sebastian’s writings continued to echo over the decades. They were an inspiration for this webcomic, a project that goes back a decade, when Liviu Barbulescu, a Romanian animator and activist read Sebastian’s Diary, 1935-1944 and was captivated by the author’s personality and the turbulent times during which he lived. “I didn’t start off with planning a project about him, but I started to collect not only info but photos from the period. It started like something that caught my interest, and I wanted to find out more.”

Illustrations by Liviu Barbulescu, Lu Pop & Razvan Petre.
Barbulescu’s initial concept was to develop a film project about Sebastian. But, upon realizing that the scope of such an undertaking was too large and complicated, he scaled it down to what has become a new media format – a webcomic. Early on, Barbulescu invited his friends Lu Pop and Razvan Petre – fellow animators whom he had met at a workshop – to join him and develop the visual storytelling. Historian Vlad Pasca came onboard as a consultant, tasked with verifying dates and facts. Then, as the team looked to amplify the online animation experience with a soundtrack (Mozart and Chopin figure, among other tunes), friends in the music and songwriting business were recruited.
Meanwhile, Barbulescu applied for funding from Romania’s National Fund for Culture (AFCN), and also received backing from a civic-minded organization in Germany focused on promoting democratic values. Diaspora Civica Berlin (DCB), founded by Romanian expats living in the German capital, also supported Barbulescu’s team by hosting the project’s first in—person exhibit in October.
According to Pop, the initial webcomic idea revolved around Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the far-right politician and Legionary leader whose infamy remains etched in the consciousness of Romanians. But after Codreanu proved to be too harsh a protagonist for the creative team, they turned their lens on Sebastian. “We needed a central character, and we needed emotion. The most important character was Sebastian. We started to do the story around him and the journal that he wrote, which is an important piece of writing. In the end, Sebastian was our muse.”
The creative process involved everyone on the team. The animators picked out paragraphs from Sebastian’s journal, combining them with the information that Vlad provided. Liviu, meanwhile, sought out images from the pogroms in Iasi and Bucharest. Only once all those elements had been compiled did the illustrations and animations begin to take shape.

Illustrations by Liviu Barbulescu, Lu Pop & Razvan Petre.
Pop says that Sebastian’s emotional state was a central factor in setting the visual tone for the webcomic: “He felt anxiety throughout his life, and that’s what we wanted to convey in the story.”
Pop and Petre were also inspired by the German Expressionist movement. As Pop recalls: “I’m specifically thinking of Kathe Kollwitz and her woodcuts. She knew a lot about suffering. We wanted to have that black and white feeling. It was also a challenge for us to see if we can show the emotion only in black and white.”
Pivotal to this project was the team-members’ common concern about the proliferation of extremism: “One of the many things that inspired us to do this project was when the extreme-right party in Romania scored very high, which was a wake-up call,” says Barbulescu. Pop concurs: “During the Communist era, the history of the Holocaust was well-hidden from the population. They didn’t learn about it in school. That’s why this is happening today here, because not everyone knows about those times.”
The animators were determined to convey lessons from history utilizing the power of visual images. “We wanted to reach a lot of people,” says Pop, “to tell them something about Romania because we have this streak of nationalism in our bones. We think we are great… but maybe in some ways, we are not so great.”

Illustrations by Liviu Barbulescu, Lu Pop & Razvan Petre.
Barbulescu and his colleagues posted the webcomic on social media groups, and then shared it more broadly to high school teachers and university professors – some of whom were very receptive and agreed to present it to their students. The ministry of education has also been receptive to the project, although it is not known if and when it will be circulated to educational institutions.
Public response to their initiative has mostly been favourable, but at least online, mixed. Asked about the animosity, Barbulescu sounds stoic but determined: “We got a lot of praise. But we also had some hate comments that we unfortunately expected, especially on social media. Whenever we mentioned the Iron Guard movement or Antonescu, the right-wing dictator, we would get messages that were antisemitic, or tried to excuse them.” The team convened to strategize a response: “With a project like this, with an educational purpose,” says Barbulescu, “there’s no place for people promoting hateful ideas so if someone tries to provoke, we delete their comment and block them.”
Despite the online confrontations, or maybe because of them, Barbulescu firmly believes that the webcomic is a particularly useful tool in communicating the perils of a renascent fascism to their students. In fact, he says, the overarching goal of this webcomic is to “help people know more about history, and understand the challenges of changing societies, with our democratic values coming under threat.”
Curiously, given the central character and content, none of the group’s members are of Jewish descent – a fact that Barbulescu glosses over. “For me, this is really a big part of Romanian history that was not spoken about. Even in-depth historical analyses only started after the fall of Communism on this topic, so there was a break from the war until the 90s in which very little was done and investigated. So it’s hard to have a correct image of Romanian history without talking about the participation of Romania in the Holocaust. You don’t need to be Jewish or have something personal with the Jewish community in order to be informed about such a big event.”

Illustrations by Liviu Barbulescu, Lu Pop & Razvan Petre.
Last November, a two-day exhibit was organized by the webcomic team, bringing to life and up close all that had been captured so powerfully online, in image and sound. Amidst the spotlights, flowers, wrinkled white wallpaper splayed across the even starker white walls of the exhibit venue (Random House), bold black and white images depicted various scenes illustrating Romania’s role in the Holocaust and its effects on Jews. A table displayed a typewriter, stickers and postcards with images of Sebastian and assorted figures that featured during his short but turbulent life, and in his writings. While guests mingled and drank wine, a loop of animated clips screened on a wall, highlighting snippets of Sebastian’s life, with all the persecutions and mental anguish that he suffered as a young, secular Jew in Bucharest of the 1930s and 1940s
Given the accolades that Barbulescu and his team have received in the wake of this project, he looks ahead with many ideas: “My wish in the future is also to do an animated documentary, either about Sebastian or the period in general. I’m very interested also in how peaceful societies are gradually taken over by hate, and how you can prevent it and what are the signs. I’m interested in the history of the right wing movements, to learn from there what went wrong and how it can be prevented in the future.”
In the current climate, “where a politician who allegedly admires Putin and Codreanu (initially) succeeded in the elections,” says Pop, her voice cracking, “those who voted for him are going to start being more courageous about commenting. They feel they now have the perfect platform to express themselves.” But Pop, who mostly works as a compositor on commercial projects, has no regrets about her involvement on the Sebastian project. On the contrary, she has been deeply affected: “When I’m done with a work project, I don’t want to ever see it again. But it’s not the same with this webcomic, because it’s really close to our heart and we’re really proud of creating it.”
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To mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day (and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz), this exhibit re-opens tomorrow, January 27, at the Romanian Cultural Institute (Institutul Cultural Romana, https://www.icr.ro/)
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