The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies Under the Antonescu Regime, 1940-1944 [Hardcover]

Radu Ioanid (Author), Elie Wiesel (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 28, 1999

Radu Ioanid's account of the destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the regime of Ion Antonescu, based upon privileged access to secret East European government archives, is an unprecedented analysis of heretofore purposely hidden materials. He builds an accurate perspective on Romanian policies of racism, anti-Semitism, and Jewish extermination during this extraordinary period in world history. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. With a Foreword by Elie Wiesel. Invaluable...monumental...no comparable work in any language has documented this important history with the thoroughness, skill, and analytical sophistication this book demonstrates. --Leo Spitzer, Dartmouth College

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Ioanid, who was born and raised in Bucharest, begins this definitive account of the Holocaust in Romania under the rule of Ion Antonescu by examining the roots of that nation's anti-Semitism. When Antonescu came to power in September 1940, living conditions worsened considerably, and Ioanid chronicles the fascist anti-Semitic legislation that followed. The eventual result was a series of deportations carried out under murderous conditions. The administrative and legal measures authorizing these deportations, as well as pogroms and the resettlement of Jews in ghettos, are described in detail. The author relies primarily on previously unpublished Romanian documents in the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National Archives in Washington, along with records from the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and testimonies of survivors. The Holocaust in Romania is a testament that such cruelty can and did take place in a modern civilized nation. George Cohen

From Kirkus Reviews

The director of the Benjamin and Vladka Meed Registry of Jewish Holocaust Survivors at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum documents the dimensions of anti-Semitic horror in Romania during WWII. Unlike Nazi Germany, Romania did not engage in the organized murder of its Jewish population; but through a brutal program of deportation and deprivation, the government managed to kill a quarter of a million Jews, leaving behind about 375,000. Ioanid comments mordantly that this relatively high rate of survival was due not to humanitarianism but to ``the inefficiency and corrupt nature of the Romanian administrative system. As might be expected in a volume of this nature, Ioanid presents anecdotes and details that shatter the heart. On a bitterly cold day gentile children hurled snowballs at a naked Jew chained to a post in a village square; two brothers were disemboweled, ``their intestines hung like neckties on other corpses'' and ``displayed on meat hooks and labeled Kosher meat; dogs raced through the streets with pieces of unburied Jews in their jaws; soldiers used Jewish blood to grease the axles of their carts; starving residents of Pociora, ``the most horrific site of the Jewish internment,'' survived by eating the flesh of dead prisoners. Amid these searing images are lists and charts that quantify the cruelty: numbers of victims, dates of deportations, populations of transit camps. Also included is powerful testimony from survivors, from trial transcripts (Romanian war-crimes trials were held between 194552) and from some of the myriad documents Ioanid consulted in archives all over the world. Perhaps his greatest service is to provide names for so many of the victims, personalizing the cruelty and rendering it all the more tragic. A seminal workpart narrative, part referencedestined to stand on the shelf alongside other classics of Holocaust history. (8 pages b&w photos) -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 381 pages
• Publisher: Ivan R Dee (December 28, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566632560
• ISBN-13: 978-1566632560
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #407,829 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #33 in Books > History > Europe > Romania

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34 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Compelling New History Based on New Documentation, May 26, 2000

By 

Michael Berenbaum (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies Under the Antonescu Regime, 1940-1944 (Hardcover)

Area studies may be the next area of creativity and productivity in Holocaust studies. Raul Hilberg has written on the whole -- masterfully, brilliantly and enduringly. Leni Yahil, Lucy Dawidowicz, Martin Gilbert and others have also written on the whole offering differing perspectives but attempting to grasp the whole. The next generation may, of necessity, be more restricted and more restrained in their writing. More documents are available and thus more can be known of each specific area of study, of victim groups, of regions. Many younger scholars do not have the mastery of languages that was common to their elders, most especially to the Eastern European Jews who mastered several languages before they left home.

Radu Ioanid is an excellent example of the promise of area studies. A Romanian native, he has written of the Holocaust in Romania. This work, originally written in French, is translated into English because of the generosity and commitment of the Holocaust Memorial Museum and its determination to make a study of Romanian Jewry available. It has assisted in the publication of two works on Hungarian Jewry including an important condensation of Randolph Braham masterful study of The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary.

Ioanid's work has many virtues. It is detailed and precise. His mastery of the material is evident throughout. His interpretations are sound, his methods are clear. Perhaps the two most important virtues of the work are that it is virtually without competition for Ioanid has reviewed and reported on new documentation that has hitherto been virtually unavailable for anyone to see. Too little has been published in the English language regarding the fate of Romanian Jewry. It is a story worth telling because it does not fit into the general pattern of destruction. Romania was allied with Germany. Some of its population and a large part of its Jewish population - the Jews of Northern Transnistria -- was given to Hungary by Germany in 1940, and thus its Jews remained relatively untouched by the "Final Solution" until the fateful days following the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944. Between May 15th and July 8th 437,402 Jews were transported to Auschwitz on 148 trains. Though originally Romanian - Elie Wiesel among them - their fate is regarded as an essential part of the Hungarian story, not the Romanian one.

The shape of Ioanid's chapters tell much of the Romanian story: Massacres at the Beginning of the War, Transit camps, Deportations and Other Mass Murders, Massacres in Transnistia, Life in Transnistria, the Survival of Romanian Jews. What scholars have long known but few non-professionals realize - and what Ioanid documents in precise detail -- is that for the most part Romania did not rely upon German assistance or initiatives to solve its own Jewish problem. They "took care" of their own Jews, mimicking some of the German formats, but in essence avoided the unique German creation of the death camps, instead transporting the Jews to Transnistria. Romania was not necessarily less ruthless to its Jews than the Germans, only significantly less disciplined and methodical, less technologically inventive. Those not murdered by Romanian troops, or those who did not die along the way, lived under such harsh conditions that their chances of survival were imperiled until Romanian adjusted its policy to the new reality that Germany was certain to lose the war. They then presumed that there was more value in living Jews than dead Jews. Living Jews could be exchanged for money or political advantage. Dead Jews were of little value, except for the fact that the land was Judenrein for unlike the Germans, Romania did not recycle Jewish bodies.

Along the way, the Romanians initiated pogroms, such as the one in Iasi. Romanian troops participated in the Einsatzgruppen murders along with SS troops, In Bessarabia, northern Bukovina and southern Ukraine - the most prominent murder sites were Bogdanovka, Dumanovka and Acmicetcka and of course Odessa.. They deported Jews from their homes in cattle cars, copying the German deportations of Jews from ghettos to death camps, but the Romanians did not have death camps at the end of the journey of these Jews. Thus, they were held captive in these trains without food or water in unlivable conditions until they died, and were then buried in mass graves along the railroad tracks. The majority of the Jews were deported to Transnistria, where they were held captive until they died. More than 150,000 Jews died there. And the Jews in old Romania were held for a ransom that was not forthcoming - until many years after the Holocaust when the Jews of Romania were ransomed from Communist rule, in a story that is still largely untold.

Ioanid is not only plowing fresh land, describing the fate of Romanian Jews that is little understood, but he is also relying on documents that have only recently become available. One of the major contributions of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and its recently retired chairman Miles Lerman has been international agreements to copy documents relating to the Holocaust in countries that were formerly behind the Iron Curtain. Ioanid and the director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Paul Shapiro were deeply involved in these efforts for almost a decade and the fruits of their impressive labor are to be seen in the collection of the Museum archives and in the benefit that scholars such as Ioanid reap, from this newly available material. Only two scholars, Radu Ioanid and Jean Ancel of Yad Vashem have spent the time reading this vast documentation and Ioanid's work shows the benefits of such detailed documentary research.

The timing of his work is also fortunate. There have been efforts by Romanian nationalists on the right, who were long silenced by Communist rule, to rehabilitate the reputation of Marshall Antonescu, the Romanian ruler during the Holocaust. Monuments have been erected and new words of praise have seen their way into print. Ioanid's work will ensure that the full record of Antonescu will be known in the West and the revisionist history will not be fueled by ignorance in the West.

The Holocaust in Romania is difficult to read emotionally as Elie Wiesel put it in his foreword because the behavior of the Romanians at their own initiative without relying on the Germans marks an anguished chapter in the history of the Holocaust. In Ioanid, the Jews of Romania have found a historian whose intellect matches his dedication to detail and his passion to tell the truth that he uncovers.

5.0 out of 5 stars Horror in a very small place, August 8, 2011

By 

M. Hoeber "wordphreak" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies Under the Antonescu Regime, 1940-1944 (Paperback)

World War II and its prelude in the Balkans was especially vicious. Yet the Balkan history of this conflict is not well-known even to many people well-read in World War II history. This excellent book is meticulously researched, which does make it a bit dry at times, but the author conscientiously names many of the victims so that the impact of the destruction of Balkan Jewry at a person by person level is immediately felt-- the dead are not merely numbers, but people with names, families, occupations. They were caught in an inescapable trap in most instances. To its eternal shame, the Catholic Church in Romania is all too complicit in the persecution; in fact, the antisemitic party was locally known as The Legion of St. Michael the Archangel and its members as "legionnaires," a ploy cynically designed to attract idealistic Romanian Catholic youth to its ranks.

Romania's history, especially the history of its vulnerable minority populations (mainly Jews and gypsies) is little known to American readers. Antisemitism in Romania was of long-standing prior to the Hitler era, but seemed to be something that resident Jews learned to manage to some degree until the end of the 19th century when antisemitism and violence toward Jews took a sharp upturn. Until the present day, Romanians have remained in ignorance of what really happened just prior to and during the war, although just recently the government seems to be making the beginning of a shift toward acknowledging real history instead of the usual cant that has been typically presented in Romanian schools and universities since the war. There aren't many good histories of what really went on in the Balkans during the Hitler era, so this book is a valuable addition to the library of any student of the war, of the Holocaust, and/or of the Balkans.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Holocaust in Romania., June 30, 2008

By 

Kevin M Quigg (Gettysburg, Pennsylvania United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies Under the Antonescu Regime, 1940-1944 (Hardcover)

I actually thought about giving this book a three star, not for any disbelief in what the author wrote but due to the dry nature of some parts of this book. The Antonescu regime in Romania was a murderous fascist dictatorship who killed 300,000 Romanian Jews and Gypsies. They helped invade Russia and killed Jews there as well. The author does a great job of reviewing Romania's relations with minorities such as Jews and the nature of anti-Semiticism in this country. However, the reading at times is so dry. The stories are depressingly familiar about the killing and famine of Jews.

One thing that really distinguishes the Holocaust in Romania from elsewhere is how the bumbling Romanians did not throughly organize the killings as the Germans did. Some Romanians plundered the Jews, others helped them, and many stood back. There was no organized factories of death. In fact, the Romanians deported many Jews beyond the River Bug so that the Germans did the dirty work. Thus, a quarter million Jews lived due the bureaucracy of the Romanian government. That was good. With the turn of events on the Eastern Front, Antonescu decided not to organize the final solution. He however shares the blame for 300,000 deaths of Romanian and Russian Jews.

This is a chilling book about man's treatment of his fellow human beings.
The author puts together a tragic story of the treatment of Romanian Jews by the fascist Romanian government.