The (Largely Unknown) Holocaust in Romania

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. ― Elie Wiesel

Seen on a Bucharest tram. 2024

On a cold Bucharest night in January 2024, a film is being screened inside a cavernous cinema. The film – more like a three-hour slideshow – depicts Holocaust victims, each one accompanied by a caption describing how this individuals’ life was snuffed out. One such caption reads:

On Sunday, June 29, 1941, my husband and son were taken from our home to the police station and shot. My father. My son. My brother. Beaten up. Robbed. Tortured. Shot. Killed by a German soldier. On June 30, 1941, my son was shot outside our home, in front of my eyes. Forced to watch. Dragged away. Slaughtered. Taken to the police courtyard and murdered. Put on the Death Train. I never saw my husband and son again.

These men, like all of those portrayed, were murdered in the Shoah – but not in Germany, Poland, Austria, Hungary, France or Italy. Rather, all were victims of the large-scale pogrom that took place in Iași – a city that was once home to a thriving and prosperous Jewish community – before being obliterated during World War II. The shooting rampage lasted just two days. Those who escaped the murderous riot faced near-certain death nonetheless, when they were deported by train (to Transnistria) – with the help of German soldiers. Still today, mass graves outside Iași bear testament to these atrocities. Sound familiar? Not likely.

After Germany, Romania’s Jewish community suffered the heaviest losses during the Shoah. From a prewar population of over 750,000 Jews throughout Romania, the community had dwindled to approximately half that size by the end of WWII. According to Yad Vashem, 380,000–400,000 Jews were murdered in Romanian-controlled areas such as Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transnistria under the dictatorship of Marshal Ion Antonescu. Did you know? Probably not. But you should. And so should I.

This mass carnage in Iași was preceded by the smaller but no less vicious massacre of January 1941 in Bucharest, when over 125 Jews were killed and butchered, some of their corpses left dangling from hooks in the Străulești slaughterhouse.

Until recently, I knew close to nothing about these crimes against humanity that took place in Iași, and across Romania. But, for so many reasons, I should have known.

I should have known because I grew up in a vibrant Jewish community in Canada where a sizable population of Holocaust survivors found safe haven — and where they continue to live to this day, though their numbers continue to dwindle.

And I should have known because I have twelve years of private Jewish schooling under my belt. In all those years of Holocaust education, replete with films, Anne Frank, Auschwitz, and first-person survivor testimonies, Romania was not mentioned a single time.

I should have known because my father fled Romania with his parents as a child. But when you hear “we moved to Palestine (Israel)” rather than “we escaped” why would you think to prod further?

And I should have known because my paternal grandparents lived well into their late 80s and 90s, which afforded them plenty of time to share stories from that period of time, but like many other survivors, they chose not to — or, more precisely, they only spoke of their wonderful lives in interwar Bucharest, before their world fell apart.

But I knew as close to nothing as possible – and the rest of my family, even less. As time passed and the pandemic changed the course of my life, I could no longer feign ignorance about an unknown chapter in my family’s and Romania’s history.

My first step was to sift through the personal possessions left behind by my grandfather, Iuliu Iancu (Jules Janco); original documents that migrated with him from Romania to Israel and on to Canada. I found enough strands of evidence to build a case that I presented to the Claims Conference, requesting a determination of my father’s status: A short time later, at nearly ninety years old, he was granted the rightful (but long overdue) designation of Holocaust survivor.

Even then, I still couldn’t fathom the magnitude of the Shoah in Romania, together with the decades of antisemitic persecution against its Jews, leading up to my father’s family’s sudden departure from their beloved native country. I would return again and again to Iuliu’s papers, snugly stored in his antique leather suitcase, each time spotting another paper, trying to untangle a clue.

One day, I made an effort to translate a signed attestation from 1964, in which Iuliu recounts the beatings he endured (in late 1940) at the hands of the Legionary movement — a short-lived extremist faction of the Nazi-aligned Iron Guard. When they broke into his office, a group of Legionnaires threatened and kicked him, called him “jidan” (Jew), and beat him up. One of the Legionnaires ripped a photo off the wall — of Iuliu alongside King Carol II  —  saying (as my grandfather reported) that the time had come for all the Jews to be annihilated as Hitler had done in Germany.

The Legionnaires then threw Iuliu into jail for four days with his friend and business partner, Nicholas Creţulescu, the non-Jewish scion of an esteemed noble family of Romanian heritage. Both men were also forced to sign over ownership rights to their property, which essentially amounted to an outright expropriation. My grandfather then took refuge in Moldavia where he suffered further before deciding to flee the country with his wife and son.

Only after arriving in Romania did I begin to learn about the country’s proactive involvement in the Shoah and for decades preceding it; well-documented, it turns out. I doubled down on my efforts to learn about the origins and results of widespread Jew-hatred in Romania, and how it came to impact my grandfather’s life.

After my early readings revealed that Romania had aligned itself with Nazi Germany between 1940 and 1944, I unearthed a photocopied booklet published in 1942 by the United Romanian Jews of America. Blood Bath in Rumania depicts horrific images of corpses that had been grotesquely mutilated, bludgeoned, hung from posts; it also goes into great detail about specific instances of mass murders and deportations.

This publication, issued after the Holocaust had begun and (eerily!) while it was still in progress, and stored at the Center for the Study of Romanian Jewish History (CSIER), states the following: “.. the blood bath that continues even now in Roumania — an orgy unparalleled in modern history in which the Nazis and their Roumanian disciples share equally. The victims of this savage collaboration are Roumanian Gentiles as well as Jews but for the greatest part Jews.” Among its pages were accounts of “bestial and systematic suppression of Jews,” and statements confirming that the Romanian Orthodox Church “was from the beginning a staunch supporter of the Iron Guard and advocated Nazi ties with Rumania.”

There were accounts of men being ripped from their beds or offices and sent to Jilava prison, in the southern outskirts of the capital, where many were ‘liquidated.’ One photo shows rows of corpses of Jewish men and children massacred by the Iron Guard in the notorious prison on the outskirts of the capital, while another depicts Jewish corpses at the morgue in Bucharest.

The Nazis, who had entered Romania under the guise of “Instructionary Forces,” were complicit in the activities of the Legionary movement – the very same Nazis who confiscated my grandfather’s business property, which they soon forcefully turned into their own.

In 1942, marking the first anniversary of Romania’s entry into the war on Germany’s side, the military leader Marshal Ion Antonescu celebrated his country’s murderous achievements thus: “Rumania fulfills today the dreams and the ideals of A.C. Cuza and Octavian Goga to solve the Jewish Question after the Nazi program.” Cuza and Goga were virulently antisemitic leaders that King Carol II appointed to govern the country in 1937; the same royal who less than a decade earlier, had appeared by my grandfather’s side at the inauguration of the Strandul Kiseleff.

Long before the massacres that began in early 1941, the civil rights of Romanian Jews were already being eroded. In 1923, Jewish students, trying to enter the University of Bucharest were prevented from doing so, booed, pushed and kicked out. Over subsequent years, numerous draft laws sought to significantly reduce if not outright extinguish rights for members of the Jewish communities around Romania. Between 1925 and 1930, acts of antisemitism – such as attacks by the Legion of the Archangel Michael (later called Iron Guard) occurring against Jews across Transylvania – were being reported. The first acknowledged ‘numeris clausus’ law came into effect in 1934, when 80% of employees and 50% of board members had to be of ethnic Romanian origin (i.e. non-Jewish).

In early 1938, the Goga-Cuza government promulgated a law (Decree-law no. 169) with the view to rescinding the Romanian citizenship of Jews, who were faced with an impossibly high burden of proof, and given little time to document their right to citizenship, effectively stripping 250,000 Jews (one-third of the Jewish population at the time) of their Romanian citizenship. Jews began to be barred from practicing many professions, and were forced to shut down their businesses. In this same year, Iuliu lost a highly lucrative architectural commission because he was a Jew; as documented by his friend Creţulescu, this project was instead granted to two renowned ethnically-Romanian architects, George Matei Cantacuzino and Diuliu Marcu. While their sizeable edifice remains intact today, along Bucharest’s historic artery and a stone’s throw from the royal palace, my grandfather’s career lay in ruins.

Essential for an escape, January 1941.

By August 1940, with the passage of Decree-law no. 2650 (aka “Statute of Jews”), a majority of Jews living in Romania became second-class citizens. The brutal acts that were leveled against Iuliu (as described above) took place, to the best of my knowledge and time-line, between September — December 1940. By the end of that year, my grandfather’s passport had apparently been confiscated. However, just days before the Bucharest pogrom of late January 1941, Iuliu somehow gathered enough resources and paperwork  to expedite his family’s quick escape, by land and sea, to British Mandate Palestine.

Although my young father and his parents were neither slaughtered nor deported to concentration camps like so many others during Romania’s Holocaust, the unimaginable horrors, persecutions and losses that they did endure have, like forgotten relics, been buried under layers and decades of silence. The time has come to dust off the fossils.

Nu se mai niciodată (Never Again)