(English version below)
Minoritatea Evreiască în România (II)
Cuprins
I. Studii
Evghenia Semionovna Ghinzburg (1904-1977) is, along with Varlam Shalamov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of the authors who laid the foundations of concentration camp literature in the Soviet Union. Being excluded from the party on February 7, 1937, the year when the Great Stalinist Terror began, as a result of her activity as head of the Culture Section of the regional publication „Krasnaia Tataria”, which was considered „peace-making with elements hostile to the party”, Evghenia Ghinzburg was arrested eight days later and was sentenced to ten years in prison on charges of „terrorism”, according to the provisions of art. 58 para. 8 of the Soviet Penal Code.
After a period in Yaroslavl Prison, at the end of May 1939, she was sent to the Kolima camp to work for political re-education. The memorialist was set free on February 15, 1947, with the mandatory residence in Kolima. The marriage with the doctor Anton Walter, the reunion of Vasia’s son and the adoption of Antonina brought her relief. After Stalin’s death, she was able to obtain legal and political rehabilitation and settled in Moscow. Evghenia Ghinzburg died on May 25, 1977. Her memoirs, particularly touching by describing her experiences, can be considered classics, if we compare them to the testimonies of other women who had to endure Stalinist terror: Nadezhda Mandelstam, Anna Larina Buharina or Antonina Babel. In 2009, her memoirs were screened, the title of the film being Within the Whirlwind, directed by Marleen Gorris, in the starring role being Emily Watson.
Keywords: communism, political processes, gulag, Stalinism, concentration camp literature
In the twentieth century, to ensure its cohesion, communist regimes always needed to proclaim the existence of a conspiracy directed against them, both from the inside and from the outside. An example of this is the outbreak of the Great Terror in the USSR. In addition to eliminating Stalin’s real or imaginary opponents, the processes had, as Annie Kriegel pointed out, a pedagogical role, being true mechanisms of social prophylaxis.
Political repression in Eastern Europe used the same procedures as in the Moscow trials: torture, suggestions and dialectical arguments, which led to the moral defeat of the defendants and to instilling a sense of „objective guilt” by amplifying minor mistakes and the sacrifice dedicated to the Party, to which the writer Arthur Koestler, one of the disappointed people by the communist idea, refers in his novel Darkness at Noon. These methods let them not lose confidence in the Party, even after they had become the victims of the most horrible slanders and when they saw death before their eyes.
An element of novelty in Rudolf Slánský’s trial is the anti-Semitic attacks on the defendants, Stalin being convinced of the existence of a vast „imperialist-Zionist conspiracy backed by Titoist elements against socialism”.Keywords: anti-Semitism, communism, purges, testomonies, show trials
Having the longest diplomatic mission among the representatives of the Holy See in Bucharest, between 1936–1947, the Apostolic Nuncio Andrea Cassulo integrated itself into the reality of this country, becoming one of the well-known actors of the Romanian society of that time. As a man of the Church, he was fully involved in the life of the Catholic Church of both rites in Romania, generously and responsibly putting the attributes of his hierarchical mission in the service of the community, if we were to remember only the consecration of two Latin bishops, Áron Márton and Marcu Glaser.
In addition, it must be said that his diplomatic mission was according with the efforts of the Catholic resistance against Nazi repression in Europe. The diplomat prelate fought firmly but skilfully, using the full range of means at his disposal: the anti-Jewish attitude of the authorities of the time. The quality of supporter of the Jewish population, massacred or severely persecuted then in that geographical area, according to the inhuman ideologies of that historical moment, was later recognized by being awarded the title of right between peoples by the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem.Keywords: Apostolic Nuncio/Nunciature, Holocaust, Bishop. Jews/Community, Diplomatic Representative/Representation Catholic Church from Romania, Roman-Catholic / Greek-Catholic
The „Jewish problem” during the Second World War or the topic of the Holocaust is another historiographical chapter that must be analysed objectively, starting from historical sources. In this research we intend to discuss this subject from a historical, theological and geopolitical perspective, a hitherto unique approach in this case.
We try to paint the facts and events from a theological perspective, in a political and geopolitical context, because we will see that the problem of the Christian Jew in Romania led by Ion Antonescu goes beyond the limits known until now.
We will approach a theological perspective in the strict sense, with the institutional church mechanisms and the Romanian jurisprudence of that time, taking into account both the Orthodox Church, national at that time, and the Catholic Church, which held a privileged position through concordat provisions, which will be used with the support of the Vatican, through diplomatic channels, in relations with the Romanian state.Keywords: Romanian Orthodox Church, Catholic Church, Holocaust, Christian Jew
The study concerns about the internal context and the real stages of the process of quasi-total removal from the Securitate of Jewish employees in 1960 and 1961.
Jewish officers and warrant officers were removed from the Securitate, being blamed for a wide range of problems: past „biographical spots”, past membership in a Zionist organization or attending their activities, the existence of relatives established in capitalist states, and behavioural and professional deviations. Many of these accusations were in fact mere pretexts, useful for achieving the goal desired by the political power and the leadership of the Securitate: the total purge of the Jewish staff from the Securitate.
For the process of purging the Jews would not be brutal and its anti-Semitic character would not be obvious, the Securitate leadership – at the indications of political power – carried it into effect during several stages, usually monthly or bimonthly, carried out between March 1960 and March. 1961.
Besides, the purge was achieved through several solutions: removal from the Securitate, the purpose being also to camouflage the anti-Semitic character of the process. Thus, Jewish employees were either transferred directly to the reserve, or retired at the age limit, retired in case of illness, transferred to other M.A.I. (quasi-majority in the Militia), from where they were then expelled after a maximum of two years.
At the end of this purge operation, there was still a tiny number of Jews in the Securitate, we think that of a sub-decimal order. The quasi-total removal of the Jews from the Securitate, followed, in just one year, by the removal from the M.A.I. of the Securitate personnel who had been transferred to other units in the ministry, denotes that the political power and the leadership of the Securitate applied an anti-Semitic administrative measure.Keywords: Zionism, emigration, „inappropriate relatives”, anti-Semitism
A successful lawyer, Moise Nachman had also practiced law in the interwar period. He was expelled from the legal profession for ethnic reasons, but continued to practice his profession after the war, in communist Romania, until 1973, when he emigrated to Israel.
The surrender of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina surprised him in Chernivtsi, so that during the war he was enlisted in the Soviet army, having office work. The communist regime could only be beneficial for his career, and when he returned to the country in 1946, he was a privileged lawyer for a while.
„Very well prepared from a professional point of view”, Moise Nachman was a lawyer by vocation, who could not get rid of the temptation to defend political defendants or to use procedural tricks to release or reduce the punishments of some accused of economic crimes, which would disturb the Securitate.
To make him more malleable, the Securitate had set up an aggressive recruitment, as a form of intimidation and control of a lawyer uncomfortable for its criminal investigation methods.Keywords: Moses Nachman, lawyer, recruitment, informant, emigration
The study concerns about the extrajudicial executions from the beginning of the communist regime in Romania, starting from the investigation of a corpus of documents written in those years by the communist torturers, in order to provide the justifications for the perpetrators of those years. The biographies of the main Securitate officers involved in these assassinations, Mihai Patriciu and Mihail Kovács, are also reconstructed, based on archival documents. The study is structured in three main parts. The first one consists of an analyse of the context and conditions that led to the crimes committed by Mihai Patriciu and Mihail Kovács, more precisely the murder of the „kulaks” Viorel Bihoreanu and Remus Leluţ, on August 3, 1950.
The second section concerns about their assassination and the reasons put forward by the Securitate to justify their physical elimination. The last part reconstructs the biographies of the two Securitate officers, based on the sources (archive documents and specialized literature).Keywords: torturers, extrajudicial executions, anti-communist resistance, peasants, Security
The study is based on the analysis of the archive documentation provided by the C.N.S.A.S., especially of the criminal files of the six analysed trials, insisting on the Romanoexport case. I analysed several stages of the criminal procedure: the pursuit of persons under the Securitate’s surveillance long before they are declared defendants, the presentation of the stages of the criminal procedure when the defendants were already under arrest, the preparation of the accusation conclusions in order to send the defendants in front of the Regional Military Tribunal of Bucharest, then, the description of their appearance in front of the court, with the presentation of their testimonies, the resumption of the testimony of the prosecution witnesses and the defence sustained by the lawyers for each defendant and, finally, the presentation of the trial conclusions.
The punishments were fixed based on the articles of the Penal Code of the time, the Penal Code published in 1960 based on the first communist Penal Code of 1948, which, through various additions and amendments, had exacerbated the punishments by turning misdeeds into crimes (crimes understood as the most serious forms of crimes in the Romanian legal system), the death sentence instead of the maximum forced labour of 25 years, the consideration of the attempted murder as serious as the murder itself, all these being forms through which the Romanian legal structure sought to impose its harshness and control upon Romanian citizens.
Among the acts of which Foreign Trade officials have been accused, we mention those written in the famous Article 209 which blamed the crime of undermining the national economy and counter-revolutionary sabotage, as well as crimes of conspiracy against the social order.
The methods of repression used by the Securitate to intimidate and destroy any nucleus of resistance of the defendants, also aimed to shed light on some imaginary realities, devised with the predetermined goal of gradual elimination of ethnic groups from the Romanian economy and culture in a time when the policy of national-communism, developed by Gheorghiu-Dej, had reached the peak of its manifestation. These can be considered as one of the most brutal methods of terror applied in the totalitarian countries of Eastern Europe.Keywords: anti-Semitism, communism, purges, testimonies, spectacle trials
After the war years between 1940-1944, when it was forbidden to Jews to have positions in the Romanian state (that was under the influence of Nazi Germany), they held government positions, especially after Gh. Tatarescu’s party withdrawal from Groza government in November 1947. The short presentation of the biography of a few representatives of the Romanian’s foreign trade, by including documents from C.N.S.A.S. Archive, also reveals a historical period of racial dismissals, camp internments, party exclusions, Cold War, investigations, emigrations, class struggle principle. However, the professionalism of some people was appreciated abroad, such as Joseph Berkowitz, Eugen Porn, Octav Burstin, Toma Aldea, Andrei Sebastian, was also noticeable.
Keywords: foreign trade, Petru Groza government, Romanian People’s Republic, Economic Agencies, Jewish origin
In September 1942, Traian Robu (born in 1919, in Vânători Village, Botoşani County), as assistant commandant of Iași Legion of Gendarmes received the order of escorting a train with gypsies and Jews from Moldova to Tighina. At the end of the war, in the need to adapt to new realities, Robu made efforts both within professional as well as political field, succeeding even in being proposed for being recompensated on the occasion of celebrating the day of 23rd August. But he could not enjoy it, as the check of his past revealed his involvement in the repressive actions committed against Jews and Roma ethnics in the autumn of the year 1942. He was subject of investigation, was arrested and convicted to 6 years of prison under difficult conditions for war crimes. On 20th of February 1951, Traian Robu was admitted into Peninsula labour colony, from where, in the summer of the year 1953, he was transferred to Gherla Prison, continuing his periplus in prisons and labour colonies: Cavnic, Dej, Alba Iulia and Făgăraș. From here, Traian Robu was set free on 8th of October 1955 as his punishment came to an end.
Under informative monitoring for several years after his release from prison, Robu has lived until the end of his life with the impression that he was the victim of a setup, as he had any bit of remorse for what he did to those people he „accompanied” to be deported in Transnistria.Keywords: Jews, Roma, war crimes, deportation, Transnistria
II. Amintiri, Istorie Orală și Documente ale Securității
In 2014 I had the opportunity to receive a scanned document containing the memories of a survivor of the Holocaust, Dora, who in her youth was deported to Transnistria along with her parents. There, she lost her father, killed in the Odessa massacre from 23 October, 1941. She and her mother managed to return in Romania in 1944. Later, in the 50s, Dora made aliya to Israel with her mother, her husband, and their daughter. She wrote her memories in Israel, when she was already retired, in what it seems an exercise of healing and remembrance. The original papers are now at the Yad Vashem Memorial of Holocaust, but they have not been translated in English or Hebrew. This paper contains the full text of Dora’s life memories.
Keywords: Holocaust, Transnistria, Odessa massacre, memories, life in Israel
Between two worlds in succession and yet so different, Sașa Pană’s destiny would take unexpected meanders. Born on August 8, 1902, Alexandru Binder (the real name of the poet) made his debut in the famous Rampa magazine, with an ‘anti-romantic parody’, in 1922. He was the one who certified and supported the first avant-garde movement with a surrealist direction in Romania, for whom he also founded the „Unu” Publishing House. Here he printed its books and some volumes of the promoters of avant-garde creation (Tristan Tzara, Stephan Roll, Ilarie Voronca, etc.).He was the first editor of Urmuz’s writings, as well as of Tristan Tzara’s wonderful ‘first poems’; hence, the new orientation of the writer toward setting up a literary work subject to the communist power in Romania, adopting in the various forms of its literature produced by the proletcult formula (For freedom, 1945; Unanchored departures, 1946; Poems without imagination, 1947), surprised. Sașa Pană’s leap, from one extreme to another is shocking, from the formula of a new literature outside politics to the thesis of proletcult creation, a roller that crushed all art, painting, sculpture, classical music, literature, criticism, and the literary history.
The purpose of this study is to reconstruct the life and activity of the important writer (disregarding the wooden language of documents and the inherent mistakes, not taking into account those informative reports made for the benefit of political power in Romania at that time), the search for truth and removal, as much as possible, of the ambiguities. These resulted in some conclusions and notes necessary for recent history, as well as literary history, with data and information unpublished until 1989, revealed by documents from the Securitate archives.Keywords: vocation, enslavement, proletcult, Romanian Communist Party, Securitate
The purpose of this interview is to bring more understanding, knowledge about the Jews in Romania before the Second World War, about their relations with the Romanian population, especially with those from rural areas, about the Holocaust that took place during the Second World War.
Reading this interview, anyone will be able to see, on the one hand, the support offered by civil society to Jews during the Holocaust and, on the other hand, the monstrosities made by Romanian soldiers towards Jews, caused by the policy embraced by the Romanian army through field marshal Ion Antonescu.Keywords: Jews, legionaries, penitents, Bible
The erosion of state institutions, economic nationalization, nationalization and seizure of property accompanied the ethnic restructuring unfolded by authoritarian or dictatorial regimes in the spirit of Nazi racism, long before the institutionalization of communism.
Memoir on the Legal Status of christian baptized Jews regarding the Urban Expropriation Laws, drafted by Hurmuz Aznavorian is exemplary for the arbitrariness of the expropriation of goods on ethnical criteria. The memoir we publish is one of those testimonies for the detrimental effects generated both by the application of anti-Jewish legislation and by the abuse of law that accompanied it in many situations.Keywords: expropriations, ethnic criteria, anti-Jewish legislation, abuse of law, Hurmuz Aznavorian
Being a disciple of Gheorghe Marinescu and the founder of the Romanian School of Neurology, Oscar Sager was a researcher, professor and clinician in the field of neurophysiology. He started his career in the interwar period, and by means of scholarships offered by the Romanian state or international foundations, he studied in laboratories within the country and abroad, publishing the results in prestigious journals and attending scientific meetings.
His career was negatively influenced by political decisions made in the 1940s (racial laws which categorized him as a „Jewish doctor”), 1950s and 1960s (not being a member of the Communist Party, he was, for a time, marginalized and banned from participating in international scientific conferences). The Securitate has opened verification files for him and his wife Bertha, for the reason that he was spying for Israel. It was, in fact, about receiving and sending scientific and family correspondence, which did not contain anything political. The note of the informant „Teofil”, one of Oscar Sager’s collaborators, is a kind of „characterization” of the professor’s scientific activity, with emphasis on his lack of interest in politics.
Through persevering work, regardless the political changes after the Second World War, Sager managed to work freely in the experimental laboratory of the Neurological Clinic of the Colentina Hospital in Bucharest and to become the founder of a research school.Keywords: Romanian School of Neurology, racial laws, „Jewish doctor”, espionage suspect, traveling abroad banning, senator of the Romanian Academy
III. Recenzii. Note de lectură
***
Jewish Minority in Romania (II)
SUMMARY
I. Studies
Alina ILINCA (Senior Counsellor, The National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives, Bucharest), Liviu Marius BEJENARU (Senior Counsellor, The National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives, Bucharest), Evghenia Ghinzburg, „the girl from Kolima” (pag. 9-56)
Evghenia Semionovna Ghinzburg (1904-1977) is, along with Varlam Shalamov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of the authors who laid the foundations of concentration camp literature in the Soviet Union. Being excluded from the party on February 7, 1937, the year when the Great Stalinist Terror began, as a result of her activity as head of the Culture Section of the regional publication „Krasnaia Tataria”, which was considered „peace-making with elements hostile to the party”, Evghenia Ghinzburg was arrested eight days later and was sentenced to ten years in prison on charges of „terrorism”, according to the provisions of art. 58 para. 8 of the Soviet Penal Code.
After a period in Yaroslavl Prison, at the end of May 1939, she was sent to the Kolima camp to work for political re-education. The memorialist was set free on February 15, 1947, with the mandatory residence in Kolima. The marriage with the doctor Anton Walter, the reunion of Vasia’s son and the adoption of Antonina brought her relief. After Stalin’s death, she was able to obtain legal and political rehabilitation and settled in Moscow. Evghenia Ghinzburg died on May 25, 1977. Her memoirs, particularly touching by describing her experiences, can be considered classics, if we compare them to the testimonies of other women who had to endure Stalinist terror: Nadezhda Mandelstam, Anna Larina Buharina or Antonina Babel. In 2009, her memoirs were screened, the title of the film being Within the Whirlwind, directed by Marleen Gorris, in the starring role being Emily Watson.
Keywords: communism, political processes, gulag, Stalinism, concentration camp literature
In the twentieth century, to ensure its cohesion, communist regimes always needed to proclaim the existence of a conspiracy directed against them, both from the inside and from the outside. An example of this is the outbreak of the Great Terror in the USSR. In addition to eliminating Stalin’s real or imaginary opponents, the processes had, as Annie Kriegel pointed out, a pedagogical role, being true mechanisms of social prophylaxis.
Political repression in Eastern Europe used the same procedures as in the Moscow trials: torture, suggestions and dialectical arguments, which led to the moral defeat of the defendants and to instilling a sense of „objective guilt” by amplifying minor mistakes and the sacrifice dedicated to the Party, to which the writer Arthur Koestler, one of the disappointed people by the communist idea, refers in his novel Darkness at Noon. These methods let them not lose confidence in the Party, even after they had become the victims of the most horrible slanders and when they saw death before their eyes.
An element of novelty in Rudolf Slánský’s trial is the anti-Semitic attacks on the defendants, Stalin being convinced of the existence of a vast „imperialist-Zionist conspiracy backed by Titoist elements against socialism”.Keywords: anti-Semitism, communism, purges, testomonies, show trials
Having the longest diplomatic mission among the representatives of the Holy See in Bucharest, between 1936–1947, the Apostolic Nuncio Andrea Cassulo integrated itself into the reality of this country, becoming one of the well-known actors of the Romanian society of that time. As a man of the Church, he was fully involved in the life of the Catholic Church of both rites in Romania, generously and responsibly putting the attributes of his hierarchical mission in the service of the community, if we were to remember only the consecration of two Latin bishops, Áron Márton and Marcu Glaser.
In addition, it must be said that his diplomatic mission was according with the efforts of the Catholic resistance against Nazi repression in Europe. The diplomat prelate fought firmly but skilfully, using the full range of means at his disposal: the anti-Jewish attitude of the authorities of the time. The quality of supporter of the Jewish population, massacred or severely persecuted then in that geographical area, according to the inhuman ideologies of that historical moment, was later recognized by being awarded the title of right between peoples by the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem.Keywords: Apostolic Nuncio/Nunciature, Holocaust, Bishop. Jews/Community, Diplomatic Representative/Representation Catholic Church from Romania, Roman-Catholic / Greek-Catholic
The „Jewish problem” during the Second World War or the topic of the Holocaust is another historiographical chapter that must be analysed objectively, starting from historical sources. In this research we intend to discuss this subject from a historical, theological and geopolitical perspective, a hitherto unique approach in this case.
We try to paint the facts and events from a theological perspective, in a political and geopolitical context, because we will see that the problem of the Christian Jew in Romania led by Ion Antonescu goes beyond the limits known until now.
We will approach a theological perspective in the strict sense, with the institutional church mechanisms and the Romanian jurisprudence of that time, taking into account both the Orthodox Church, national at that time, and the Catholic Church, which held a privileged position through concordat provisions, which will be used with the support of the Vatican, through diplomatic channels, in relations with the Romanian state.Keywords: Romanian Orthodox Church, Catholic Church, Holocaust, Christian Jew
The study concerns about the internal context and the real stages of the process of quasi-total removal from the Securitate of Jewish employees in 1960 and 1961.
Jewish officers and warrant officers were removed from the Securitate, being blamed for a wide range of problems: past „biographical spots”, past membership in a Zionist organization or attending their activities, the existence of relatives established in capitalist states, and behavioural and professional deviations. Many of these accusations were in fact mere pretexts, useful for achieving the goal desired by the political power and the leadership of the Securitate: the total purge of the Jewish staff from the Securitate.
For the process of purging the Jews would not be brutal and its anti-Semitic character would not be obvious, the Securitate leadership – at the indications of political power – carried it into effect during several stages, usually monthly or bimonthly, carried out between March 1960 and March. 1961.
Besides, the purge was achieved through several solutions: removal from the Securitate, the purpose being also to camouflage the anti-Semitic character of the process. Thus, Jewish employees were either transferred directly to the reserve, or retired at the age limit, retired in case of illness, transferred to other M.A.I. (quasi-majority in the Militia), from where they were then expelled after a maximum of two years.
At the end of this purge operation, there was still a tiny number of Jews in the Securitate, we think that of a sub-decimal order. The quasi-total removal of the Jews from the Securitate, followed, in just one year, by the removal from the M.A.I. of the Securitate personnel who had been transferred to other units in the ministry, denotes that the political power and the leadership of the Securitate applied an anti-Semitic administrative measure.Keywords: Zionism, emigration, „inappropriate relatives”, anti-Semitism
A successful lawyer, Moise Nachman had also practiced law in the interwar period. He was expelled from the legal profession for ethnic reasons, but continued to practice his profession after the war, in communist Romania, until 1973, when he emigrated to Israel.
The surrender of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina surprised him in Chernivtsi, so that during the war he was enlisted in the Soviet army, having office work. The communist regime could only be beneficial for his career, and when he returned to the country in 1946, he was a privileged lawyer for a while.
„Very well prepared from a professional point of view”, Moise Nachman was a lawyer by vocation, who could not get rid of the temptation to defend political defendants or to use procedural tricks to release or reduce the punishments of some accused of economic crimes, which would disturb the Securitate.
To make him more malleable, the Securitate had set up an aggressive recruitment, as a form of intimidation and control of a lawyer uncomfortable for its criminal investigation methods.Keywords: Moses Nachman, lawyer, recruitment, informant, emigration
Dumitru LĂCĂTUȘU (independent researcher, Historical Consulting Center), The Securitate officers: Mihai Patriciu and Mihail Kovács (pag. 275-304)
The study concerns about the extrajudicial executions from the beginning of the communist regime in Romania, starting from the investigation of a corpus of documents written in those years by the communist torturers, in order to provide the justifications for the perpetrators of those years. The biographies of the main Securitate officers involved in these assassinations, Mihai Patriciu and Mihail Kovács, are also reconstructed, based on archival documents. The study is structured in three main parts. The first one consists of an analyse of the context and conditions that led to the crimes committed by Mihai Patriciu and Mihail Kovács, more precisely the murder of the „kulaks” Viorel Bihoreanu and Remus Leluţ, on August 3, 1950.
The second section concerns about their assassination and the reasons put forward by the Securitate to justify their physical elimination. The last part reconstructs the biographies of the two Securitate officers, based on the sources (archive documents and specialized literature).Keywords: torturers, extrajudicial executions, anti-communist resistance, peasants, Security
The study is based on the analysis of the archive documentation provided by the C.N.S.A.S., especially of the criminal files of the six analysed trials, insisting on the Romanoexport case. I analysed several stages of the criminal procedure: the pursuit of persons under the Securitate’s surveillance long before they are declared defendants, the presentation of the stages of the criminal procedure when the defendants were already under arrest, the preparation of the accusation conclusions in order to send the defendants in front of the Regional Military Tribunal of Bucharest, then, the description of their appearance in front of the court, with the presentation of their testimonies, the resumption of the testimony of the prosecution witnesses and the defence sustained by the lawyers for each defendant and, finally, the presentation of the trial conclusions.
The punishments were fixed based on the articles of the Penal Code of the time, the Penal Code published in 1960 based on the first communist Penal Code of 1948, which, through various additions and amendments, had exacerbated the punishments by turning misdeeds into crimes (crimes understood as the most serious forms of crimes in the Romanian legal system), the death sentence instead of the maximum forced labour of 25 years, the consideration of the attempted murder as serious as the murder itself, all these being forms through which the Romanian legal structure sought to impose its harshness and control upon Romanian citizens.
Among the acts of which Foreign Trade officials have been accused, we mention those written in the famous Article 209 which blamed the crime of undermining the national economy and counter-revolutionary sabotage, as well as crimes of conspiracy against the social order.
The methods of repression used by the Securitate to intimidate and destroy any nucleus of resistance of the defendants, also aimed to shed light on some imaginary realities, devised with the predetermined goal of gradual elimination of ethnic groups from the Romanian economy and culture in a time when the policy of national-communism, developed by Gheorghiu-Dej, had reached the peak of its manifestation. These can be considered as one of the most brutal methods of terror applied in the totalitarian countries of Eastern Europe.Keywords: anti-Semitism, communism, purges, testimonies, spectacle trials
After the war years between 1940-1944, when it was forbidden to Jews to have positions in the Romanian state (that was under the influence of Nazi Germany), they held government positions, especially after Gh. Tatarescu’s party withdrawal from Groza government in November 1947. The short presentation of the biography of a few representatives of the Romanian’s foreign trade, by including documents from C.N.S.A.S. Archive, also reveals a historical period of racial dismissals, camp internments, party exclusions, Cold War, investigations, emigrations, class struggle principle. However, the professionalism of some people was appreciated abroad, such as Joseph Berkowitz, Eugen Porn, Octav Burstin, Toma Aldea, Andrei Sebastian, was also noticeable.
Keywords: foreign trade, Petru Groza government, Romanian People’s Republic, Economic Agencies, Jewish origin
In September 1942, Traian Robu (born in 1919, in Vânători Village, Botoşani County), as assistant commandant of Iași Legion of Gendarmes received the order of escorting a train with gypsies and Jews from Moldova to Tighina. At the end of the war, in the need to adapt to new realities, Robu made efforts both within professional as well as political field, succeeding even in being proposed for being recompensated on the occasion of celebrating the day of 23rd August. But he could not enjoy it, as the check of his past revealed his involvement in the repressive actions committed against Jews and Roma ethnics in the autumn of the year 1942. He was subject of investigation, was arrested and convicted to 6 years of prison under difficult conditions for war crimes. On 20th of February 1951, Traian Robu was admitted into Peninsula labour colony, from where, in the summer of the year 1953, he was transferred to Gherla Prison, continuing his periplus in prisons and labour colonies: Cavnic, Dej, Alba Iulia and Făgăraș. From here, Traian Robu was set free on 8th of October 1955 as his punishment came to an end.
Under informative monitoring for several years after his release from prison, Robu has lived until the end of his life with the impression that he was the victim of a setup, as he had any bit of remorse for what he did to those people he „accompanied” to be deported in Transnistria.Keywords: Jews, Roma, war crimes, deportation, Transnistria
II. Memories, Oral History and Securitate Documents
Florenţa POPESCU-SIMION (scientific researcher 3rd grade, Institute of Ethnography and Folklore „C. Brăiloiu”), The Life of Dora, from Odessa through Galaţi to Israel. Memories of a Survivor of the Odessa Massacre (pag. 421-444)
In 2014 I had the opportunity to receive a scanned document containing the memories of a survivor of the Holocaust, Dora, who in her youth was deported to Transnistria along with her parents. There, she lost her father, killed in the Odessa massacre from 23 October, 1941. She and her mother managed to return in Romania in 1944. Later, in the 50s, Dora made aliya to Israel with her mother, her husband, and their daughter. She wrote her memories in Israel, when she was already retired, in what it seems an exercise of healing and remembrance. The original papers are now at the Yad Vashem Memorial of Holocaust, but they have not been translated in English or Hebrew. This paper contains the full text of Dora’s life memories.
Keywords: Holocaust, Transnistria, Odessa massacre, memories, life in Israel
Between two worlds in succession and yet so different, Sașa Pană’s destiny would take unexpected meanders. Born on August 8, 1902, Alexandru Binder (the real name of the poet) made his debut in the famous Rampa magazine, with an ‘anti-romantic parody’, in 1922. He was the one who certified and supported the first avant-garde movement with a surrealist direction in Romania, for whom he also founded the „Unu” Publishing House. Here he printed its books and some volumes of the promoters of avant-garde creation (Tristan Tzara, Stephan Roll, Ilarie Voronca, etc.).He was the first editor of Urmuz’s writings, as well as of Tristan Tzara’s wonderful ‘first poems’; hence, the new orientation of the writer toward setting up a literary work subject to the communist power in Romania, adopting in the various forms of its literature produced by the proletcult formula (For freedom, 1945; Unanchored departures, 1946; Poems without imagination, 1947), surprised. Sașa Pană’s leap, from one extreme to another is shocking, from the formula of a new literature outside politics to the thesis of proletcult creation, a roller that crushed all art, painting, sculpture, classical music, literature, criticism, and the literary history.
The purpose of this study is to reconstruct the life and activity of the important writer (disregarding the wooden language of documents and the inherent mistakes, not taking into account those informative reports made for the benefit of political power in Romania at that time), the search for truth and removal, as much as possible, of the ambiguities. These resulted in some conclusions and notes necessary for recent history, as well as literary history, with data and information unpublished until 1989, revealed by documents from the Securitate archives.Keywords: vocation, enslavement, proletcult, Romanian Communist Party, Securitate
The purpose of this interview is to bring more understanding, knowledge about the Jews in Romania before the Second World War, about their relations with the Romanian population, especially with those from rural areas, about the Holocaust that took place during the Second World War.
Reading this interview, anyone will be able to see, on the one hand, the support offered by civil society to Jews during the Holocaust and, on the other hand, the monstrosities made by Romanian soldiers towards Jews, caused by the policy embraced by the Romanian army through field marshal Ion Antonescu.Keywords: Jews, legionaries, penitents, Bible
The erosion of state institutions, economic nationalization, nationalization and seizure of property accompanied the ethnic restructuring unfolded by authoritarian or dictatorial regimes in the spirit of Nazi racism, long before the institutionalization of communism.
Memoir on the Legal Status of christian baptized Jews regarding the Urban Expropriation Laws, drafted by Hurmuz Aznavorian is exemplary for the arbitrariness of the expropriation of goods on ethnical criteria. The memoir we publish is one of those testimonies for the detrimental effects generated both by the application of anti-Jewish legislation and by the abuse of law that accompanied it in many situations.Keywords: expropriations, ethnic criteria, anti-Jewish legislation, abuse of law, Hurmuz Aznavorian
Being a disciple of Gheorghe Marinescu and the founder of the Romanian School of Neurology, Oscar Sager was a researcher, professor and clinician in the field of neurophysiology. He started his career in the interwar period, and by means of scholarships offered by the Romanian state or international foundations, he studied in laboratories within the country and abroad, publishing the results in prestigious journals and attending scientific meetings.
His career was negatively influenced by political decisions made in the 1940s (racial laws which categorized him as a „Jewish doctor”), 1950s and 1960s (not being a member of the Communist Party, he was, for a time, marginalized and banned from participating in international scientific conferences). The Securitate has opened verification files for him and his wife Bertha, for the reason that he was spying for Israel. It was, in fact, about receiving and sending scientific and family correspondence, which did not contain anything political. The note of the informant „Teofil”, one of Oscar Sager’s collaborators, is a kind of „characterization” of the professor’s scientific activity, with emphasis on his lack of interest in politics.
Through persevering work, regardless the political changes after the Second World War, Sager managed to work freely in the experimental laboratory of the Neurological Clinic of the Colentina Hospital in Bucharest and to become the founder of a research school.Keywords: Romanian School of Neurology, racial laws, „Jewish doctor”, espionage suspect, traveling abroad banning, senator of the Romanian Academy
III. Reviews. Reading Notes