Remembering Romania’s fascist past and the genocide it produced
This article was written as a follow-up project after my participation in the Elie Wiesel Study Tour 2020. This project is happening every year and aims to provide students with a clearer understanding of the Holocaust, as well as the political, social, and cultural context that enabled it.
In my home country, the end of December comes with two things: the Christmas holidays (for some an important religious celebration beyond the consumerist frenzy) and the commemoration of the events in ’89, a period of civil unrest that pushed our country out of the dictatorial regime. Unlike most of the Revolutions of 1989 happening in the ‘Eastern Bloc’, in Romania, this political shift has been marked by a significant number of casualties, victims of the violence of those days. So each year their memory is honored — as heroes of the Revolution, who died for the freedom of everyone.
After the fall of the regime, as people had gotten used to the fresh democratic air, various initiatives sprouted, concerned with remembering the injustices that took place during the communist dictatorship and the misery it provoked. The past was scrutinized, investigated, and reinterpreted as people were struggling to form a new identity. In politics, in the mainstream media as well as in our family’s oral historiographies, there was (and still is) a pervasive anti-communist undercurrent.
But as I was growing older, it seemed that this national memory was rather incomplete. Or evasive. It seemed that we didn’t talk much about the interwar period, marked by a fascist dictatorship and Romania’s significant ‘contribution’ to the Holocaust and Roma genocide.
So allow me to go back in time to paint the picture.
After the end of WWI, Romania incorporated three new territories — Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transylvania. “Greater Romania” — a project that aimed to unite the majority of Romanians under a nation-state — came into being. Its size and population doubled and it now included significant ethnic minorities whose numbers grew from 8% to 27% consisting of Magyars, Jews, Roma people, Ukrainians etc. But the following years, far from being about national unity, were infused with a lot of social upheaval prior to the Second World War.
A central role was played by the fascist movement that went under the name of “Legion of the Archangel Michael’’ that under Corneliu Zelea Codreanu’s leadership garnered heavy support from dissatisfied students and disenfranchised peasants. Ideologically, the movement was ultra-nationalist, antisemitic, anti-Roma, and was opposed to communism and capitalism. It also had a paramilitary political branch dubbed “the Iron Guard’’. Their struggle for political power was consistent and intricate. While in 1933 their movement was banned by King Carol II, in 1937, ‘the Legion’’ came in third in the parliamentary elections.
After the start of the Second World War, “Greater Romania’’ was losing its greatness — first losing Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to the Soviets and then Northern Transylvania to the Hungarians (backed by the Nazis), as well as the Dobruja territory Romania had conquered from Bulgaria in 1913. Finding himself in this awkward position, the king abdicated and was replaced by General Ion Antonescu, who unites with the Iron Guard (by then led by George Sima) and creates the National Legionary State. This collaboration didn’t last long because, even though both sides shared the same antisemitic views, the legionnaires were eager for more drastic measures against the Jewish population, faster.
In 1941 when they attempted a coup combined with a pogrom in Bucharest where they killed around 120 people and destroyed hundreds of Jewish shops and apartments, Antonescu, (backed by the Nazis with whom he formed an alliance), suppressed the Iron Guard and banished it from the government. However, that didn’t stifle at all the rampant antisemitism of those days — after all, it was part of the official agenda.
In the summer of the same year, the Iași pogrom took place, a planned massacre that extinguished more than 13,000 lives. Romanian and German soldiers, former members of the Iron Guard placed under the police command, as well as the local population, murdered Jews on the streets. The pretext was that the Jews had been supposedly helping the Soviet troops. (Fighting ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ was a very popular justification). Thousands more were arrested and forced into overcrowded trains which they sealed. The majority of them died of suffocation, dehydration, or starvation during the 8 days it went back and forth, with no destination.
As the Romanian and German troops were advancing on the front, they recaptured Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina and commenced the mission to “cleanse the ground” of Jews. Killing squads were deployed, ghettos were formed and death marches were claiming innocent lives. The troops conquered the territory dubbed Transnistria (between the Dniester and Southern Bug rivers), which was not among the territories on which Romania had any historical ‘claim’ — it was used solely as a place for mass extermination.
Together with Jewish communities, a lot of Roma people were deported to Transnistria too, a personal initiative of Antonescu. Very few people survived the dire living conditions there, with no water or electricity, starvation, exhaustion, typhus, and at the murderous whim of soldiers.
And there is also the Odessa massacre. After a two-month siege, the city of Odessa was captured and six days later, an explosion blasted a military headquarters killing around 67 people, most of them Romanian officials. This was used as an excuse to mercilessly murder the Jewish population of the city that was around 30% of it. People were shot, people were set on fire, people were hanged. In the meantime, marshal Antonescu was making sure the reprisals were ‘commensurate’ — “I said that for every dead Romanian, 200 Jews[should die] and that for every Romanian wounded 100 Jews [should die].” Who wasn’t killed was herded into two ghettoes outside the city — Dalnik and Slobodka — or deported in Transnistria.
In 2004, the Elie Wiesel commission presented a report about Romania’s participation in the Holocaust. Around 280,000–380,000 Jewish lives were lost and another 11,000 Romani were killed. The report states: “of all the allies of nazi Germany, Romania bears responsibility for the deaths of more Jews than any country other than Germany itself.”
Even though there is plenty of evidence to prove all these atrocities (maybe not even all of them in their detail), Antonescu seems to appear as an ambiguous figure. To redeem him from the posture of a war criminal who enabled ethnic cleansing, people bring up how he officially disavowed the Iron Guard or how he didn’t send the Jews within the borders of Romania to the extermination camps in occupied Poland (a decision he postponed until his military dictatorship was overthrown and Romania switched sides in the war). Not to mention how some are defending the members of the Iron Guard because they fought communists as if that could ever be an excuse for violence.
People still argue that the genocide resulted was more like a Nazi order Romania as an ally had to follow. But the truth we must face is that we were also perpetrators. Voluntarily and sometimes with excessive brutality.
By writing about these horrific events, my intention was to lay them there again before our eyes. All these bloody events, all so recent, are too often overlooked, they are too much on the fringes of our national memory. And that past needs to be reckoned with.
My intention was more of a reminder, to remember a past, to look in its ugly face. The politics of memory should not be evasive; to honor the people who were murdered, we have to commemorate these events, we are responsible to scrutinize discourses and fight negationism or relativism.
As there are fewer and fewer survivors of the Holocaust and of Porajmos (Romani genocide), and especially in the context of a rise in nationalism and far-right rhetoric, I believe it is essential to fight this irresponsible amnesia.
