Georges Marion, former Le Monde correspondent (in Algiers—where I first met him, in the early ’90s—, Johannesburg, Jerusalem, and Berlin) and editor, has launched a blog (en français), Transylvania Tsoures, inspired by his research into the history of two half-brothers of his who were deported (with their mother) to Auschwitz from Romania during WWII, and whose story was hardly ever spoken about in his family. He thus explained in his first blog entry
J’avais déjà 15 ans lorsqu’au détour d’une photo traînant dans un tiroir, j’appris par hasard que j’avais eu deux frères nés bien avant ma naissance, d’une mère qui n’était pas la mienne. Les deux enfants, Hermann et Marcel, nés respectivement en 1928 et 1931, avaient été déportés en 1944 de Transylvanie vers Auschwitz en compagnie de leur mère. Personne n’en revint.
Personne n’en parla guère non plus. Jusqu’à ce que je trouve cette photo et demandai quelques explications. Ma mère rosit en admettant qu’elle était au courant de l’épisode puis se détourna. Mon père fut aussi bref, mais il contint son émotion. Et moi je me le tins pour dit.
Cinquante ans plus tard, mes parents morts depuis bien longtemps, j’ai déterré cette vieille histoire qui, discrètement, sans m’empêcher de vivre, avait laissé sa trace. J’ai examiné les rares documents que mon père avait laissés, ai scruté et fait agrandir les photos trouvées ici ou là, suis parti en tâtonnant à la recherche de témoins éventuels, en France, aux Etats-Unis, en Israël, en Allemagne, en Belgique, en Roumanie enfin.
C’est dans ce dernier pays que je suis revenu en cette fin d’été, à la recherche de documents susceptibles de répondre aux questions soulevées au cours d’une enquête qui touche maintenant à sa fin. Je recherche également d’éventuels témoins mais, compte tenu du temps écoulé, je suis nettement plus sceptique sur mes chances d’y parvenir.
C’est cette dernière étape roumaine qui fait le sujet de ce blog.
BTW, the above photo, “The Last Jews of Rădăuți,” by Laurence Salzmann, has nothing to do with Marion’s blog (and Rădăuți, while in Romania, is not in Transylvania but in neighboring Bukovina). I find it haunting—I’ve had it up in my study for years—and it is related to the blog in a sense, in that most of Rădăuți’s Jews were deported to a death camp in Transnistria during the war. It isn’t too well known but Romania had the largest Jewish population in Europe after the Soviet Union and Poland, close to half of which was exterminated, mainly by the Romanians themselves, not the Germans (unlike France, where the state enacted anti-Semitic laws and zealously executed German requisition orders to round up Jews for deportation, but didn’t do the actual killing). Romanians were the worst perpetrators of the Holocaust after the Germans, and where responsibility was minimized during the communist era and the history covered up. Good luck to Georges Marion in his research.
I find it merely impossible to abstain myself from not properly reacting. You write: “Romanians were the worst perpetrators of the Holocaust after the Germans, and where responsibility was minimized during the communist era and the history covered up”. I react: The Romanian Pro-German Government at that period of time might have been the worst perpetrator of the Holocaust after the German and Austrian Pro-Nazi Governments. Even putted this way, the statement is astronomically far way from being historically honest. A government-backed report, subsequent to 1989, uncertainly asserts that the Romanian Pro-German Government is responsible for the death of 280.000 – 380.000 Jews. Yet, there is not enough data for calculating the number of those who had been taken by the Hungarian troops, as it happened to Marion’s family (e.g. enacted laws were serving that purpose). Nazi murders had not been restrictively centralized, Nazis neither. The finger behind the trigger remains for now a historical mystery.
It is equally important to react to a second firm affirmation your post unveils: “the Romanians themselves (…) (unlike France, where the state enacted anti-Semitic laws and zealously executed German requisition orders to round up Jews for deportation, but didn’t do the actual killing)”. I’m not completely sure that the French Government hadn’t organized in the South-West of the country some far-away-from-the-history’s-eyes-organized murderers. I do not remember clearly, but my cultural fond tells me that it was so (I shall reverify). Yet, this is not essential. It is essential to draw some distinctive boundaries between people and military powers, between countries and citizens, between humans and human-like robots. It is essential to continuously state – beyond the idiosyncratic social constructions – that it is not the brain, the weapon or the bear hand that abruptly ends the dawns, but the murder itself.
Alexandru, thank you for your comment. I wasn’t implying that Romanians as a people were responsible for what happened to the Jews. I should have specified Romania, or the pro-German regime of Ion Antonescu, instead of Romanians, to remove any ambiguity. It was indeed the case that many Jews were rounded up by Hungarian troops, Hungary having annexed northern Transylvania during the war. I am hardly an expert on Romania or what happened there during those years – and will defer to those more knowledgeable on the subject than I – but it is a fact that the murder of at least 280,000 Romanian Jews was the doing of the Romanian state and in the absence of a German occupation, just as it was the case that the crime was minimized by the postwar communist regime. I know that there has been an historical reckoning since 1989, though the extent to which Romania has engaged in a “devoir du mémoire” is not something I can speak about.
As for the situation in France, which I am rather more knowledgeable about, I have read of no killings of Jews carried out by the French state during Vichy. There may have been individual crimes committed by thugs in the Milice but nothing systematic. The role of the French state at the time was to round up Jews at the request of the German occupation authorities, intern them in transit camps, and then put them on trains to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other camps (which was of course a crime against humanity in itself). It took the French some three decades after the war to face up to what had happened – and another two for the French state to accept responsibility in its name – but the devoir du mémoire has been accomplished. Also, many Frenchmen passively or actively protected Jews during the occupation – Le-Chambon-sur-Lignon being the best known instance – without which many more would have been deported to the camps. I don’t know what happened in Romania on this score. Perhaps you can enlighten me.
First off, one of the best accounts of the Holocaust in Romania is by Radu Ioanid, a Romanian-born historian who completed his doctorate in France and has been working as director of the International Archives Program at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC for over a decade. His book is:The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies Under the Antonescu Regime, 1940-1944 which can be found on amazon.com:
Secondly, let’s set the record straight here to some extent. The worst thing that one can do with regards to the Holocaust is to engage in body counts. depending on the criteria that one uses, different countries can vie for worst perpetrator. So what?
In the case of Romania, the Iron Cross movement came into the power with the support of the Army. Its crass anti-semitism was one of the most vulgar forms of anti-Jewish propaganda in Axis-occupied Europe. That’s for sure. The ghettos of Romania were on par with those of the General Gouvernement and German-occupied Soviet lands–starvation, beatings, mass disease, suicides, random executions, unabashed plunder of individuals by Romanian policemen, and subsequent deportations, mostly to Transnistria, which can only be compared to the kingdom of Hell on Earth–open-air camps turned into mass slaughter sites, scenes of outright cannibalism, torture, rape, you name it. While the German Army stood to guard access to Transnistria, the Romanian Army engaged in an unprecedented orgy of killing and plunder.
The Hungarians can be blamed for their fair share of murder in their territories that they occupied, but don’t get caught up with who massacred more. The point is: the massacres occurred. Period.
as far as postwar justice is concerned, Arun is right. There was so little retribution against former Iron guardists, policemen, soldiers and officers, that one can honestly say that wartime crimes against humanity were absorbed into the postwar governments of Romania.
Regarding France, there again, Arun is correct to point out that Vichy did not engage in mass slaughter of civilians in the unoccupied zone. However, Vichy did oversee and administer close to 1000 camps, prisons, and other holding facilities for foreign-born Jews, black marketeers, political opponents, Gypsies, and any other so-called ‘undesirables.’
Last but not least, the Antonescu government perfected the Nazi notion of extermination through labor by forcing into mobile labor battalions all Jewish men from their late teens to 45 or 50.
I hope that this answers in part your concerns and questions.
Marc
Marc, thanks. Most interesting.