Why my book is a top seller in Romanian history

When my new book jumped to number 1 in the “Romania History” category among new releases on Amazon, I was surprised.

The book is called “How My Grandfather Stole a Shoe and Survived the Holocaust in Ukraine.” I didn’t set out to write a serious work on Romanian history. The word “Romania” is not even in the title. I don’t speak Romanian. I didn’t do any research in the Romanian archives, I didn’t interview any Romanian history professors.

I just wanted to save my grandfather’s memories before he died. More specifically, the book describes how my grandfather, Shlomo Masis, survived the Holocaust during Romanian occupation of Moldova and Ukraine, and then immigrated to the United States, where lived to be 102 years old.

But for some reason, my book did particularly well in the History of Romania category. It held the top spot among new releases on Romanian History for the entire first month after it was released.

I was curious to find out why.

The first interview I gave about my book was organized by the director of the Jewish Museum in Moldova. My book had not been translated to either Russian or Romanian, but people in Moldova were already very interested in it. They invited me to come to Moldova on a book tour and to publish a Russian and a Romanian translation. Irina Shihova, the director of the museum, told me that my book is one of the first about what happened to the Jews of Moldova during the Holocaust, as told from the Jewish perspective – rather than from the perspective of a Romanian author.

“There is a huge lack of information of that kind in the Romanian-speaking community,” she told me. “A Romanian translation is absolutely necessary.”

Her words didn’t hit me until a few weeks later when I came across a recently published 300-page book about the small village where my father grew up in northern Moldova. This village, Zgurita, was a shtetl before WWII and now completely empty of Jews. My grandfather and my father both grew up there, and my father seems to have an endless number of stories about Zgurita (some of which are in my book.)

At first I was really impressed that someone went so far as to write a 300 page book about a little village that has a population of only 2,065 people. I am talking about Dinu Postarencu’s book “Zgurita: past and present” published in Moldova in 2015. It is a well researched, very detailed, informative book and I stayed up reading it until six in the morning.

But when I came to the part of the book that talks about the summer of 1941 – when the Soviet Union was invaded by Nazi forces – I was shocked.

There was no mention of the pogrom that took place on July 3, 1941, during which practically the village’s entire population (Zgurita’s population was 85 percent Jewish according to the census of 1940) was exiled. The Jews were robbed, even their clothes and shoes were taken from them. Survivors remembered that the thieves said, “I like your shoes, take them off!” or “I like your blouse, let me have it!” The Jews of Zgurita were left in their undergarments, barefoot and homeless. For three days, they slept outside with no food, drinking water from the little puddles that were left from the horse’s hooves. Terrible things happened. Women were raped. Someone had his stomach cut open. A man’s head was cut off. Then the homes were set ablaze and the Jews were forced, on foot, out of their village. For weeks, they had nothing to eat, except for the fruit they picked from trees that grew along the road. Those who could no longer walk were shot on the road. Most of them did not return. That’s the story I heard from my grandfather and other Jewish survivors from Zgurita.

Now, in the 300-page book about Zgurita, this pogrom – when almost all of the village’s residents were deported – is never mentioned. In the chapter entitled, “The return of Romanian rule” (that’s how the author refers to the joint invasion of German and Romanian Nazi forces into Soviet Moldova (also known as Bessarabia) in the summer of 1941), the author wrote the following:

“In his report dated August 7, 1941 about the situation in Bessarabia, which was presented to the commander of the Romanian army, Marshal Ion Antonescu, the chief administrator of Bessarabia Major-General Constantin Gh. Voiculescu noted that the population of the province decreased. Among the reasons for this decrease he notes the following: ‘The mobilization of the youth into the Soviet Army and the evacuation of a large number of civilians, Jews in particular, due to the departure of Soviet troops.’ In all likelihood, many Jews fled from Zgurita together with departing Soviet forces.”

The author of the book from 2015 does not explain that Voiculescu was arrested after the end of WWII and condemned to life in prison, and that Antonescu (who was friends with Adolf Hitler) was tried for war crimes and executed in 1946.

Then the book says: “Furthermore, General Voiculescu reported to Antonescu that ‘To determine the exact number of Jews who remain in the province, I ordered a head count, which is now being undertaken. The remaining Jews are currently being gathered into special centers, where they are kept under observation, so that not a single Jew remains in the villages.” In this fashion, the Romanian military moved the Jewish residents out of Zgurita.”

A few pages further, Dinu Postarencu writes that “in the beginning of March of 1942, Zguritsa had 260 homes, only 60 of which were in good condition. Out of the 60 homes, 40 were handed over to residents, six were put to use as community buildings (post office, police department, telephone office, church, primary school and veterinarian service), while 14 homes remained unoccupied.”

As I read about the 260 abandoned homes, it jumped out at me that the author does not explain that these 260 homes had belonged to the deported Jewish residents (who were in 1942 being murdered in the ghettos of Transnistria: dying from hunger and exposure in unheated barns that didn’t even have glass in the windows) – and that the reason that only 60 out of 260 homes were in good condition is because the village was burned down on the day of the “reestablishment of Romanian rule.”

It is sometimes said that Jews who were in regions controlled by Romania had a better chance to survive the Holocaust than those who were under German jurisdiction. Indeed, Romanian Jews were not sent into the gas chambers, and later on, when Romania realized that Germany was losing the war, the situation for Jews on Romanian-controlled territory improved. Yet having said this, the horrors of that my grandparents lived through in the camps of Transnistria (a region of Ukraine that was under Romanian control) during the winter of 1941-1942 are too terrible to imagine. In the first winter, approximately half of the inhabitants (half!) in the Obodovka ghetto, where my grandfather ended up with his family, died from disease, hunger and cold.

When my grandfather returned to his native Zgurita in 1944, only a few Jews (of the 3000 Jewish residents who were deported in 1941) were left. Jewish people became a minority in the village that they had built. Their old synagogue was converted into a grain storage facility. The Jewish school became a secular public school. The yiddish language disappeared. The Jewish cemetery of Zgurita is now all that remains of the village’s Jewish heritage – and it is being converted into a pasture.

This is why, even though 80 years have passed since the end of WWII, my grandfather’s memories of the Holocaust under Romanian occupation are so interesting to people who study Romanian history. Because if Moldovan history professor Dinu Postarencu, who has written dozens of books, doesn’t know about what happened in July of 1941, then the average person knows even less.

To read “How My Grandfather Stole a Shoe and Survived the Holocaust in Ukraine” go to amazon.com