(Studies in European Culture and History) Valentina Glajar, Jeanine Teodorescu (Eds.) - Local History, Transnational Memory in The Romanian Holocaust-Palgrave Macmillan US (2011)

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Local History, Transnational Memory in the Romanian Holocaust

edited by Valentina Glajar and Jeanine Teodorescu
Local History, Transnational Memory
in the Romanian Holocaust
Edited by
Valentina Glajar
and
Jeanine Teodorescu
LOCAL HISTORY, TRANSNATIONAL MEMORY IN THE ROMANIAN HOLOCAUST
Copyright © Valentina Glajar and Jeanine Teodorescu, 2011.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011
All rights reserved.
First published in 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-29451-0 ISBN 978-0-230-11841-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-0-230-11841-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Local history, transnational memory in the Romanian Holocaust /
edited by Valentina Glajar and Jeanine Teodorescu.
p. cm.—(Studies in European culture and history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Romania—Influence.
2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Romania—Historiography.
3. Jews—Romania—History—20th century. 4. Jews—Romania—
History—21st century. 5. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945), in literature.
6. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945), in motion pictures. 7. Romania—
Ethnic relations. I. Glajar, Valentina. II. Teodorescu, Jeanine, 1958–
DS135.R7L63 2011
940.53⬘1809498—dc22 2010035728
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: March 2011
For Irineu and Sergio (VG)
To my dear friends Francisca,

Eliav, and Saul; my parents, Venera and Basile;
Anca and my husband, William (JT)
Con t e n t s
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Valentina Glajar
Part I Local History, Bearing Witness

One The Perception of the Holocaust in Historiography
and in the Romanian Media 19
Alexandru Florian
Two The Iai Pogrom in Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt:
Between History and Fiction 47
Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu
Three The Cernăuţi Ghetto, the Deportations,
and the Decent Mayor 57
Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer
Four “Bottles in the Sea”: Letters of Deported Jews in
Moghilev (Transnistria), November–December 1941 77
Florence Heymann
Five Survival and Memory: Arnold Daghani’s Verbal and
Visual Diaries 91
Deborah Schultz
Six Mihail Sebastian and Mircea Eliade:
Chronicle of a Broken Friendship 119
Andrei Oişteanu
Part II Transnational Memory in Literature and Film

Seven Paul Celan’s Aesthetics of Transnational Remembrance 137
Iulia-Karin Patrut
viii / contents
Eight Homescapes of Childhood: Aharon Appelfeld’s

Life Stories of Czernowitz 157
Emily Miller Budick
Nine Norman Manea: “I am not a Writer of the Holocaust” 175
Jeanine Teodorescu
Ten Elie Wiesel’s Night: The Death of Hope and
Romania’s Problematic Moral Stand in Relation
to the Holocaust 195
Domnica Radulescu
Eleven “The People of Israel Lives!” Performing the
Shoah on Post-War Bucharest’s Yiddish Stages 209
Corina L. Petrescu
Twelve Framing the Silence: The Romanian Jewish and
Romani Holocaust in Filmic Representations 225
Valentina Glajar
Selected Bibliography 251

List of Contributors 259
Index 263
Illust r at ions
3.1 Temple Burned by the Nazis, 1941 59

3.2 Map of 1941 Cernăuţi Ghetto 63
3.3 Traian Popovici 65
5.1 Arnold Daghani, On the way to work on the road (1974)
in 1942 1943 And Thereafter (Sproadic records till 1977)
(1942–1977) 93
5.2 Arnold Daghani, New Year flowers for Nanino (1943) in
1942 1943 And Thereafter (Sporadic records till 1977)
(1942–1977) 95
5.3 Arnold Daghani, Untitled (woman with baskets and
diary entry) (1963) in What a Nice World (1943–1977) 103
5.4 Arnold Daghani, What a Nice World (1943–1977) 104
5.5 Arnold Daghani, Camp interior (1943) in 1942 1943
And Thereafter (Sporadic records till 1977) (1942–1977) 109
5.6 Arnold Daghani, Sunday morning (1972) in 1942 1943
And Thereafter (Sporadic records till 1977) (1942–1977) 110
5.7 Arnold Daghani, Nanino at the window (1942) in
1942 1943 And Thereafter (Sporadic records till 1977)
(1942–1977) 111
5.8 Arnold Daghani, Images after the encounter with a
world of phantoms keep rushing on . . . (1973)
in What a Nice World (1943–1977) 115
6.1 Mihail Sebastian, Mircea Eliade, and their group
of friends during a summer vacation in the
Bucegi Mountains (July 1932) 120
6.2 Mihail Sebastian and Mircea Eliade 121
Ac k now l ed gm e n t s
We would like to express our appreciation to the following for their con-
tribution: Radu Ioanid (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum) and Raphael
Vago (Tel Aviv University) for their invaluable comments and excellent sug-
gestions; William Ford (University of Illinois at Chicago) for his detailed
editorial assistance and Elizabeth Welch (Texas State University—San
Marcos) for her meticulous proofreading; Randolph Braham, Alexandru
Florian, Robert Fischer, Marianne Hirsch, Leo Spitzer, and Carmen Marino
for their support and enthusiasm; Brigitte Shull for believing in this project;
our families and friends for their unlimited patience and love.
Earlier versions of chapters 2, 5, and 6 have been previously pub-
lished and we would like to thank Routledge (Taylor and Francis Books),
Polirom Iai, and the journal Studia Hebraica for allowing the authors to
revise and reprint their work. We would also like to thank the University of
Sussex and the Arnold Daghani Trust for allowing us to reproduce several
of Daghani’s drawings; and the National Museum of Romanian Literature
for the permission to reproduce two photographs of Mircea Eliade and
Mihail Sebastian.
.
I n t roduc t ion
Valentina Glajar
To whom shall we entrust the custody of the public memory of the Holocaust? To
the historian? To the survivor? To the critic? To the poet, novelist, dramatist? All
of them re-create the details and images of the event through written texts, and
in so doing remind us that we are dealing with represented rather than unmedi-
ated reality.
—Lawrence Langer
On January 27, 2009, sixty-four years after the end of World War II,
Ruth Glasberg Gold was the first survivor of Transnistria to talk on the
International Day of Commemoration of the Holocaust organized by the
United Nations. Her emotional testimony is an affirmation for the hun-
dreds of thousands of victims of the Holocaust in Romania. Most impor-
tantly, she remembers her mother who, before perishing in Transnistria,
had advised Gold to “bear witness!”
My Holocaust experience is different from others. I have no tattoo, because

I am a survivor of a less organized and methodical plan of annihilation.
The Romanian methods were primitive and barbaric, but not less lethal
than those of Nazi Germany. They did not bother with tattooing, filming
and photographing their inhuman acts. They threw themselves into action
without restraint and with such ferocity that appalled even the Germans.1
Gold’s story illustrates a larger issue: the dynamic between the insistence on
local memory and specificity and the transnational and transcultural rec-
ollection of the Romanian events in the wider context of Holocaust stud-
ies. On the local level, Gold’s testimony points to several particular aspects
of the Transnistrian Holocaust and its rightful place within Holocaust
studies. For example, local practices differed from the German systematic
extermination process. Hannah Arendt’s assessment of Romanians, which
also speaks of the cruelty Romanians exhibited in their treatment of Jews,
comes to mind. In her seminal study Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on
2 / valentina glajar
the Banality of Evil (1963),2 Arendt states that “Romania was the most
anti-Semitic country of pre-war Europe” (1963, 190) and goes on to say
that it was also “a country with an inordinately high percentage of plain
murderers” (1963, 193). Historian Raul Hilberg mentions that during the
Romanian and German operations, Germans were appalled at the disor-
ganized way the Romanians were killing and, at times, “had to step in to
restrain and slow down the pace of Romanian measures.” He adds that
“[w]hat is significant in the case of the Romanians is not only how fast they
were going but also how far” (809).3
The primitive and barbaric methods Gold points out in her speech refer
to various episodes during what Jean Ancel called the “Balkan manual
Holocaust” (2005, 339).4 Whether it was slaughtering Jews and labeling
them “kosher meat” during the Bucharest pogrom in January 1941; exe-
cuting thousands during the Iaşi pogrom in June 1941; asphyxiating thou-
sands in sealed trains (the “death trains” from Iaşi to Călăraşi and Podul
Iloaiei); or allowing the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Transnistria,
whether by execution or due to typhus, lack of food and medication, or
poor living conditions, Romanians may have contributed to the Holocaust
in a less organized manner than the Germans, but they certainly did so
with the same resolve and determination.
While scholars now discuss the globalization of the Holocaust, and
how the Holocaust has become a “universal trope” of suffering and per-
secution—a metaphor to explain hatred and genocide in other times and
places—as Andreas Huyssen contends in Present Pasts (14),5 Romanians
are still in the beginning stages of coming to terms with their country’s
role in the historical Holocaust. The Romanian experience shows that the
Holocaust cannot become decontextualized quite yet, since genocide and
violence in the East—at the fringes—require still more research. On the
other hand, as Jeffrey Alexander explains, “Now free-floating rather than
situated—universal rather than particular—this traumatic event vividly
‘lives’ in the memories of contemporaries whose parents and grandpar-
ents never felt themselves even remotely related to it” (2009, 3).6 Recently,
several U.S. scholars, most notably Omer Bartov, Marianne Hirsch, and
Leo Spitzer, have “returned” to the East with renewed interest, for both
scholarly and personal reasons, and have revealed the complex layers of
conflicting and competing memories about World War II in Eastern
Europe.7 Eastern scholars who relocated to the West have also contributed
greatly to a better understanding of the Holocaust in the East and the
ramifications of ethnic cleansing. One example is former Moldovan politi-
cian Vladimir Solonari’s publications on Antonescu’s plans to create model
colonies, purely Romanian, in Bessarabia and Bukovina.8 Maria Bucur’s
work has drawn attention to the Romanian context in the discussions of
introduction / 3
gender and genocide, eugenics and modernization.9 In her most recent

book, Heroes and Victims, Bucur addresses the culture of memorialization
in individual, local, and national discourses of remembrance in twentieth-
century Romania. However, very few scholars have studied the memory of
the Romani Holocaust, in part due to the still overwhelming distrust of the
Romanian Roma community towards gadjé (non-Roma), and also because
of a hierarchization of Holocaust victims that reflects the contemporary
(and historical) attitude of ethnic Romanians toward Romanies.
Cultural remembrance, as Mieke Bal defines it, is a process that links the
past to the present and the future, while cultural memorization is “an activ-
ity occurring in the present, in which the past is continually modified and
redescribed, even as it continues to shape the future” (1999, vii).10 Astrid
Erll and Vera Nünning also see a society’s cultural memory as subject to
historical change and as a reflection of how a society deals with its past
(2005, 262).11 How about a society that did not deal with its past for more
than fifty years and is even now reluctant to cope with it? Is the shame-
ful silence promoted by the Romanian Communist regime a reflection of
the society as a whole? More importantly, what does the continued denial
and trivialization of the Holocaust after 1989 reflect about a Romanian
society that has now begun, only very hesitantly and under pressure, to
face its past? On the other hand, Romanian-born emigrees and exiles have
contributed greatly to create countermemories—or in Paul Connerton’s
words, “oppositional histories” (1989, 15)12 —and a parallel discourse to
the official silence the Romanian totalitarian regime imposed behind the
Iron Curtain.
Many Romanians who lived in Communist Romania have very few
memories and only scarce knowledge about the Holocaust, primarily
because of a campaign of silence and misinformation during the Communist
years, as well as the silence of survivors and witnesses. Matatias Carp’s book
Cartea neagră: Suferinţele evreilor din România 1940-1944, first published
in 1946 and banned shortly after, was certainly not available to the average
Romanian, nor was it used as an educational tool for the generations of
Romanians who never learned about the Holocaust in schools. Survivors,
on the other hand, rarely spoke about the ordeals of Transnistria since
they had to deal with physical and psychological trauma and everyday eco-
nomic and political problems in post-war Romania. Survivors witnessed
the Jewish tragedy being minimized in public discourse after the war,
while at the same time they had to cope with economic hardship because
they were not granted any reparations (Rotman 2003, 205–216).13
In 1969, Julius Fisher published what was considered the first English-
language study about Transnistria under the evocative title Transnistria:
The Forgotten Cemetery. However, the American public became aware
of the treatment of the Jews in Romania long before 1969. In July and
August 1942, the United Rumanian Jews of America published the first
authentic account based upon official documents, a 59-page summary of
the events between 1938 and 1942 in The Record (News Bulletin). Under
the title Blood Bath in Rumania: “. . . an orgy unparalleled in modern his-
tory,” this issue of The Record presented alarming news about the fate of the
Romanian Jews under Antonescu’s regime, the pogrom of Bucharest, the
executions during the Iaşi pogrom, the deportations to Transnistria and
the inhuman conditions in the camps. The text is accompanied by graphic
photographs that document the murders, the looting, the humiliation, and
the terror.
Romanian historians have tackled this topic primarily after the fall
of Communism since the Holocaust and the extermination of Jews was
rarely a topic in communist Romania. As Radu Ioanid explains in his
study, The Holocaust in Romania, Communist historical writing empha-
sized Romania’s fight against Fascism alongside the victorious Russian
Army—after Romania, originally an ally of Nazi Germany, changed sides
on August 23, 1944 and joined the anti-Hitler coalition. The discussion
of the Holocaust was primarily reduced to referencing the extermination
of the Jews from Hungarian-occupied Transylvania. However, in the rare
instances when the fate of the Romanian Jews was discussed (the term
Holocaust was barely used), historical facts were distorted and the tragic
events diminished or even denied.14
Since 1989, however, Romanians have had plenty of opportunities to
educate themselves about the role their country played in the Holocaust,
as several historical studies and collections of testimonies by Jewish and
Roma survivors have now been published.15 In 2004, the International
Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania (also known as
the Wiesel Commission) published its 378-page Final Report that elucidates
the role Romania played during the Holocaust. In 2005, at the recommen-
dation of the Wiesel Commission, the Romanian government founded the
Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust, which has
also published a series of books since its inception.16 The commission also
recommended that the events of the Holocaust now be taught in schools.
On October 8, 2009, on the Romanian Holocaust Remembrance Day, the
Holocaust Memorial in Bucharest was unveiled.17
In spite of the important steps taken by the Romanian government and
better documentation of the Romanian Holocaust in historical studies,
the memory work in film and literature is still lagging in Romania. Very
few Romanian writers and filmmakers living in Romania have confronted
the Holocaust, mostly because it is still such a controversial topic and
because Romanians still grapple with the consequences of the more recent
introduction / 5
communist dictatorship. Minimalization, trivialization, and flat-out denial

have hindered an honest confrontation with the role Romania played dur-
ing the Holocaust in the 1990s (Shafir 2004).18 Although the Romanian
government assumed responsibility for Romania’s role in the Holocaust in
2004, some far-right politicians and even historians (both Romanian and
American) have continued to deny the Holocaust in Romania and to praise
Ion Antonescu’s leadership.19 Furthermore, it is common on a popular level
to deflect responsibility onto the Nazis, the fascist Romanian organization
Iron Guard (Garda de Fier), or even onto the Jewish victims themselves;
the phenomenon of “anti-Semitism without Jews” is still widespread.20
Local History, Transnational Memory explores the memory of the
Romanian Holocaust in cultural representations that have long tran-
scended the limitations set by national literatures or cultures, but are also
strongly rooted in a Romanian past. While the specifically Romanian
chapter of the Holocaust deserves further exploration, it still must be
investigated in the larger European context as well. The events that took
place in Romania and Transnistria contribute to the discussions of anti-
Semitism, genocide, and violence, as well as to the recent debate in Der
Spiegel about Hitler’s accomplices and the collaboration of locals in other
countries.21 At the same time, the testimonies of Transnistria survivors and
the works by Romanian-born writers and artists who address the specific
events that took place in northern and southern Transylvania, Bukovina,
Moldova, southern Romania, and Transnistria require specific contextual
knowledge that allows for a better and more nuanced understanding of
their work, which fills a gap in Holocaust literature by addressing an often
overlooked chapter of the Holocaust. The essays in this volume discuss
various depictions that range from survivor testimonial accounts, letters,
journals, and drawings to literature and films. They address the tragedy
of the Romanian Jews in an effort to expound the silence promoted by the
communist regime, and most importantly, the continual attempts to deny
the existence of the Holocaust in Romania.
The first part of the volume, “Local History: Bearing Witness,” addresses
mostly first-hand accounts of the years from 1938 to 1945 and points to
various paradoxes in the attitude of Antonescu’s regime toward Romania’s
Jews: on the one hand, deporting the Bukovinian Jews to Transnistria,
while on the other hand, sparing most of the Jewish population from
southern Romania. Bribery and corruption accounted for more saved
lives in Transnistria on the Romanian side of the Bug River, while on the
German side of the Bug death was almost certain. Human integrity also
saved many lives in Cernăuţi/Czernowitz, the former capital of Bukovina,
where Mayor Traian Popovici—basically unknown compared to Oskar
Schindler or even Siegfried Jagendorf 22 —was able to save approximately
twenty thousand Cernăuţi Jews from deportation, earning a special place

as “Righteous among the Nations.”23 However, letters, diaries, and draw-
ings from both the Romanian and German camps present the desperation
of the deportees who had no food and barely any shelter, and who were
executed or died from starvation, typhus, or exhaustion. While Romanian
Jews from southern Romania were not deported, they were still deprived
of civil rights after the implementation of the Romanian version of the
racial laws.
Drawing on theories by Michael Shafir, Michel Wieviorka, and Pierre-
André Taguieff, Alexandru Florian’s study addresses these paradoxes and
peculiarities of the Romanian Holocaust and analyzes its reception in the
Romanian media by examining three distinct periods: 1944–1947, 1948–
1989, and 1990–2008. As Florian shows, during the immediate post-war
years, the media presented the Jewish tragedy scantily, although the trials of
Antonescu and the perpetrators of the Iaşi pogrom took place and Matatias
Carp’s book was published during this period. During Communism, the
extermination of the Romanian Jews was avoided as a research topic or
media message, while various revisionist historians either denied the exis-
tence of the Holocaust or deflected responsibility to the Germans. In
the transition period toward democracy (1989–2008), Florian’s analysis
abounds with Romanian intellectuals, historians, and politicians who con-
tinued to deny or trivialize the Holocaust although the Romanian govern-
ment accepted responsibility for the role the country played during the
Holocaust. On the other hand, Florian points out that various works now
reconsider and acknowledge the tragedy of the Romanian Jews during
World War II within larger historical projects.
While Florian’s article maps the historiography of the Holocaust,
the following essays address specific events and periods. Mihai Dinu
Gheorghiu, for example, distinguishes between facts and fiction in the
first account of the Iaşi Pogrom in Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt by draw-
ing on testimonies of the time and historical studies, especially the work
of the Romanian historian Dimitrie Sturdza, whose grandmother is an
unsympathetic character in Malaparte’s book. Kaputt represents an impor-
tant document for Romania’s history because in two chapters Malaparte
focuses on the pogrom of Iaşi, which he witnessed during his visit to Iaşi
in June 1941. However, as Gheorghiu contends, the reticent reception of
the novel in Romania and the presentation of the Iaşi Pogrom in the most
recent Romanian translation by Eugen Uricaru show that Romanians have
failed to assume responsibility for the tragic events of 1941.
Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s essay examines how ambivalence
and ambiguity shape memory and memorialization in the Bukovinian
city of Cernăuţi, which lends itself as a pointed example for analyzing the
introduction / 7
contradictions that drove Romania’s Holocaust. Through memoirs, oral

accounts, and little-known documents such as the testimony of Cernăuţi
mayor Traian Popovici, this article scrutinizes the conflicting evidence
and the ambivalent memory many Romanian survivors carry with them.
The authors point to two elements that enabled many Romanian Jews
to survive: first, a mixture of corruption, opportunism, and disorganiza-
tion, and second, some plain decency as well as a partial responsiveness
to rescue efforts undertaken on behalf of Romanian Jewry in Romania
and abroad.
Florence Heymann’s article takes the reader to the camps of Transnistria,
primarily that of Moghilev. Heymann examines a corpus of 138 letters
(most of them written in German, some in Romanian, and one in Yiddish)
found in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
in Washington, DC. These letters allow Heymann to trace the deport-
ees’ desperate calls for help and present the urgency of their situation
in the camp. As she explains, these letters were originally not meant as
testimonies, but they acquire this status for researchers and—one might
add—subsequent generations of survivors who can analyze the living con-
ditions of the deportees, their worries, and their priorities. Drawing on
Paul Ricœur’s theoretical work, Heymann’s article illustrates the neces-
sity of reconsidering the debate between memory and history. Heymann
claims that memory is always carried by living groups, and, for this reason,
it undergoes a continuous evolution, while history is less prone to fluc-
tuations. However, as her analysis shows, the conjunction of these two
approaches is necessary for a better understanding of the value and impor-
tance of these documents.
On the other side of the Bug River in the German-controlled area, Arnold
Daghani, a German-speaking Jew from Suceava, Romanian Bukovina,
documented in word and image his experiences in the Mikhailowka camp
and later in the Romanian-controlled camp of Bershad. His work, as
Deborah Schultz contends, deserves to be widely known, both for its artis-
tic quality and as testimonial accounts of this still understudied region of
the Holocaust. Her article attempts to capture the fascination of Daghani’s
work, which in Schultz’s view arises from the tension between the two
modes of representation: “The verbal accounts,” as Schultz explains, “enact
the role of witness historian, telling as directly as possible of the events in
the camp, while the visual images achieve a certain aesthetic distance.”
Daghani, like other survivors, was committed to bearing witness and to
keeping the memories of the other inmates alive. His habit of writing and
rewriting memories, of reinscribing pictures, and employing a prolifera-
tion of voices might complicate the issue of historical authenticity but, in
Schultz’s interpretation, Daghani aimed to commemorate his experiences
and to enrich our understanding of the events in the camps, while realizing
that none of the media could recapture the past.
Turning to the experience of Romanian Jews from the Old Kingdom,
Andrei Oişteanu focuses on life in Bucharest during the 1930s and 1940s
as documented in Mihail Sebastian’s Journal. In his article Oişteanu chron-
icles the friendship between Mircea Eliade, the historian of religions and
former professor at the University of Chicago, and the Romanian writer
Sebastian (born Iosef Hechter). Eliade’s pro-Iron Guard past has been now
scrutinized in several studies and met with fierce criticism in Romania.24
As Oişteanu shows in his essay, Sebastian and Eliade’s friendship is symp-
tomatic of the cultural, moral, and political life in interwar Romania,
especially among Romanian intellectuals. Drawing on Sebastian’s Journal
and Eliade’s Portugal Journal, Oişteanu points to the political changes
in Romania and Eliade’s sympathizing with the far-right Legionary
Movement as crucial elements in the evolution—or rather, involution—of
this friendship.
The essays in the second part of this volume turn to transnational
and transcultural literary and filmic representations of the Romanian
Holocaust. The Romanian, French, German, and Israeli cultural repre-
sentations in works by writers and filmmakers of Romanian descent are
important contributions to both the Romanian and the overall European
Holocaust memory. As James Young argues in his seminal study Writing
and Rewriting the Holocaust, fictional portrayals of this overwhelming
event have to be studied against the historical background of pogroms,
anti-Semitism, deportations, and extermination. While fictional accounts
will never have the impact of testimonies, as Inga Clendinnen explains in
Reading the Holocaust, both challenge the boundaries of representation.
However, studies on well-known Bukovinian authors such as Celan and
Appelfeld, for example, have rarely addressed these writers’ reflections on
the specific events of the Romanian Holocaust. On the contrary, some
Western scholars have struggled with the lack of translations of Romanian
sources. Celan’s continued contact with his friends in Romania while in
France, especially with Petre Solomon and Alfred Margul-Sperber, still
requires further research. Certainly, an English translation of Solomon’s
Paul Celan: Dimensiunea românească (Paul Celan: The Romanian
Dimension) is necessary.25 Also, while Wiesel has become an icon in
Holocaust literature, very few scholars have yet studied Maramureş, a
region in northwestern Transylvania, Romania, that was once home to the
Wiesel family and to a flourishing Jewish community.26 Tourists can now
visit the Elie Wiesel Memorial House, which opened to the public in the
Romanian town of Sighet (Sighetul Marmaţiei) in 2002, and learn more
about the erasure of this Jewish presence.27
introduction / 9
In her article on Celan, Iulia-Karin Patrut focuses on the poet’s relation-

ship to the Romanian language and culture within the transnational char-
acter of his writings. Very few studies have examined Celan’s poems and
other texts written in Romanian during the Holocaust although, as Patrut
shows, these texts have a twofold importance: they are testimonies but also
aesthetic documents that reflect Celan’s search for a literary strategy to
confront the brute violence he experienced. The fact that he wrote many
texts in Romanian in his early literary phase reflects his engagement with
Romanian poets such as Lucian Blaga and Tudor Arghezi during and after
his Romanian high-school education. As Patrut’s analysis reveals, Celan’s
letters from Paris attest to an intense examination of the Holocaust and its
cultural representations in Romania. Interestingly enough, however, Celan
never held the Romanians responsible for the Romanian chapter of the
Holocaust though he had to perform forced labor in the Romanian camp
of Tăbăreşti in July 1942. In Patrut’s interpretation, Celan’s unquestioned
acceptance of the Romanian “innocence” discourse from the post-1948
period apparently allowed Celan, and other Jewish Romanian writers, to
find a consensus with the non-Jewish population on the depravity of the
crimes committed against the Jews by Nazi Germany.
Emily Budick’s article turns to another famous Bukovinian-born
author, Aharon Appelfeld. In her discussion of geographical space and
home in Appelfeld’s fiction, Budick uses the landscape and the often
unidentified places as central protagonists. Her analysis focuses particu-
larly on the landscapes of the writer’s past in his native Bukovina and then
in the devastated Transnistria, which Budick insightfully calls “homes-
capes of childhood”—a term she coined herself. These homescapes silently
witnessed the vanishing of East European Jews. Yet, as Budick shows,
these landscapes of devastation and death are not only associated with cat-
astrophic suffering and disappearance; they are also scenes of fond memo-
ries, as they evoke Appelfeld’s childhood with his parents in Czernowitz
(Cernăuţi), and his strong connection to his mother.
Jeanine Teodorescu’s article examines the Bukovinian-born writer,
Norman Manea, who, unlike Celan and Appelfeld, was born in southern
Bukovina and whose mother tongue and literary language is Romanian.
Teodorescu analyzes Manea’s memoir The Hooligan’s Return within the
context of the writer’s own Holocaust experience in Transnistria and also
in reference to Mircea Eliade’s The Hooligans and Mihail Sebastian’s How I
Became a Hooligan. As Teodorescu shows, Fascism and Communism have
been two crucial components that shaped both Manea’s life and writing.
Although Manea does not consider himself a “writer of the Holocaust,”
his memoir is an attempt to come to terms with his traumatic Holocaust
memories and his problematic relationship with his native country.
Turning west, to the Hungarian-occupied northern Transylvania 28 and

the deportations to Auschwitz, Domnica Radulescu reads Wiesel’s widely
read autobiographical text, Night, as a constant awakening of the memory
of evil, focusing on the one hand on what she calls the “perfection of suf-
fering,” and on the other hand on the death of God, man, and ultimately
the values of Western humanism. As Radulescu shows in her comparison
of Wiesel’s Night and Dante’s Inferno, keeping alive the memory of the
Holocaust and the testimonies of the survivors is crucial. When it comes to
genocide and the Holocaust, words and language become inadequate. Yet
Wiesel himself remarks that to note the inadequacy of speech, one must
use speech. Radulescu reminds us that speak we must, because silence and
forgetfulness are direct and immediate accomplices of genocide.
Finally, in their contributions to this volume, Corina Petrescu and
Valentina Glajar explore representations in plays and films. Petrescu’s arti-
cle explores the Yiddish language theaters of Bucharest that attempted to
bring the experience of the Shoah onto the stage as early as 1945 and 1949.
Petrescu focuses on two performances: Ikh leb [I Live], written by the Soviet-
Jewish author Moshe Pinchevski and performed by the Idisher Kultur
Farband Teater; and Nahtshiht [The Night Shift], the first autochthonous
Yiddish play written after World War II, written by Ludovic Bruckstein
and staged by the Teatrul Evreiesc de Stat (Jewish State Theater). Not
surprisingly, both performances were products of their time in that they
displayed ideological markers of the mid- to late-1940s in Romania. But,
as Petrescu emphasizes in her article, they were also pathbreaking in their
attempts to thematize the Shoah as early as they did.
In her article on Jewish and Roma victims in filmic representations,
Glajar reviews several Romanian and Israeli documentaries and discusses
three feature films: Manole Marcus’s Actorul şi sălbaticii (The Actor and
the Savages), 1974; Radu Mihaileanu’s award-winning film Train de vie
(Train of Life), 1998: and Radu Gabrea’s movie Călătoria lui Gruber
(Gruber’s Journey), 2008. Produced during the more liberal years of the
Ceauşescu era, Actorul şi sălbaticii concentrates on the Romanian Fascist
organization called the Iron Guard, which was responsible for the pogrom
of Bucharest and whose members became part of Antonescu’s government
in 1940. Train of Life is the first Holocaust film directed by a filmmaker
of Romanian descent, while Gruber’s Journey comes closest to breaking the
silence as it most specifically confronts the pogrom of Iaşi. Whether due
to critical distance or eye-opening perspective, Mihaileanu and Gabrea
produced two unique movies that contribute to the Romanian cultural
memory in unprecedented ways.
Many of the now well-known authors, artists, and filmmakers dis-
cussed in this volume left Romania at different stages of their lives for
introduction / 11
various destinations; their work literally and figuratively transcends

national, linguistic, and cultural borders. Elie Wiesel went to France
and then America; Aharon Appelfeld to Israel; Paul Celan to France via
Austria; Arnold Daghani to Israel, Switzerland, France, and England;
Norman Manea to America; Radu Mihaileanu to France via Israel; and
Radu Gabrea to Germany. Celan and Daghani never returned to Romania
since they both died before 1989. These writers, artists, and filmmakers
count at least eight languages among themselves: Celan spoke German,
Romanian, French, and Russian; wrote in German and Romanian; and
translated numerous Russian texts. In Israel, Appelfeld learned a new
language, Hebrew, which became his literary language as well, although
the languages of his childhood were German, Romanian, and Ukrainian.
Manea continues to write in his native Romanian although living in an
English-language context. Mihaileanu produces movies in French but has
strong ties to his native country—although he is fond of saying that his
children are his homeland. Gabrea directs movies in German, Romanian,
and Italian in Romania.
What the presentations of the survivors, writers, artists, and film
directors in this volume have in common are not just their Romanian
heritage and their complicated relationship with Romania, past and
present, but also an intense preoccupation with the memory of the
Holocaust, which some experienced personally and others vicariously
(Young 2002, 71-87). Their work is a testimony to the hundreds of thou-
sands of Romanian Jewish and Roma victims who perished during the
Romanian chapter of the Holocaust, a testimony against those “who dare
to deny the horror and reality of the Holocaust, laying a foundation for
this kind of inhumanity to be repeated, whether in Cambodia, Bosnia,
or Darfur” (Gold).29
Notes
1. Gold, Ruth Glasberg. Statement. http://www.un.org/holocaustremembrance/2009/
statements09_gold.shtml.
2. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
3. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 809.
4. Jean Ancel, Preludiu la asasinat, 339.
5. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts, 14.
6. Jeffrey Alexander, Remembering the Holocaust, 3.
7. See especially Omer Bartov’s Erased and Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s
latest book, Ghosts of Home. In the German context, the work of Mariana
Hausleitner and Brigitte Mihok deserves special mention, as they were among
the first scholars to tackle the topic of Transnistria after 1990. Recently,
Mihok edited another important volume with Wolfgang Benz, Holocaust an
der Peripherie [Holocaust at the Periphery], 2009.
8. See, for example, Solonari’s article, “ ‘Model province’: Explaining the

Holocaust of Bessarabian and Bukovinian Jewry,” and his latest book,
Purifying the Nation, 2009.
9. See especially Bucur’s Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania.
10. Mieke Bal, Introduction, Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, vii.
11. Astrid Erll and Vera Nünning, “Where Literature and Memory Meet: Towards
a Systematic Approach to the Concepts of Memory Used in Literary Studies,”
262.
12. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, 15.
13. Liviu Rotman, “Memory of the Holocaust in Communist Romania,” The
Holocaust and Romania: History and Contemporary Significance, 205-216.
14. See, for example, Mihail Roller’s history of Romania and Aurel Kareţki’s and
Maria Covaci’s study on the Iaşi Pogrom. For a discussion of these texts, see
Florian’s essay in this volume.
15. See, for example, Jean Ancel’s three-volume study Transnistria (1998); Ancel’s
study on the Iaşi Pogrom, Preludiu la asasinat (2005); a volume of testimonies,
Holocaustul evreilor romani (2004); Viorel Achim’s two-volume collection
of documents relating to the Romani Holocaust, Documente privind depor-
tarea ţiganilor în Transnistria [Documents Pertaining to the Deportations of
Gypsies to Transnistria] (2004); most recently, the collection of Roma testimo-
nies edited by Radu Ioanid, Michelle Kelso, and Luminiţa Cioabă, Tragedia
romilor deportaţi în Transnistria 1942-1945. Mărturii şi documente [The
Tragedy of the Romanies Deported to Transnistria 1942-1945: Testimonies
and Documents] (2009).
16. Al III-lea Reich şi Holocaustul din România. 1940–1944. Documente din arhivele
germane [The Third Reich and the Holocaust in Romania: Documents from
the German Archives] (2007); Cum a fost posibil? Evreii din România în
perioada Holocaustului [How Was it Possible? The Romanian Jews during
the Holocaust] (2007); Holocaust Memory and Anti- Semitism in Central and
Eastern Europe (2008).
17. See the New York Times, “Romania Dedicates Memorial to Victims of the
Holocaust.” Unfortunately, the anonymous writer got some facts wrong, espe-
cially the number of victims on the “trains of death.” He mentions that 120
were on the train, of which 24 survived. According to the Final Report of
the Elie Wiesel Commission, 1,011 out of 5,000 survived in the first train to
Călăraşi, and in the second train to Podul Iloaiei, 700 out of 2700 survived
(124). I would like to thank Christopher Clark for bringing this article to my
attention.
18. Michael Shafir, “Between Denial and ‘Comparative Trivialization,’ ” The
Treatment of the Holocaust in Hungary and Romania during the Post- Communist
Era, 43-136.
19. Most notably, the populist leader of the extreme nationalist party Greater
Romania (România Mare), Corneliu Vadim Tudor, and Gheorghe Buzatu,
former senator and presently history professor at the University of Craiova,
have led a campaign of rehabilitation for Ion Antonescu. Kurt Treptow, an
American historian who worked closely with Buzatu at the University of Iaşi,
has expressed similar ideas. Interestingly enough, Tudor was awarded Romania’s
highest distinction, The Star of Romania, in 2004, the same honor conferred
introduction / 13
on Elie Wiesel in 2002. Upon this news, Wiesel returned his medal award in
protest. Several journalists of Radio Free Europe, the mayor of Timişoara, and
Holocaust historian Randolph Braham also returned their distinctions.
20. Ignorance and anti-Semitism have led to serious incidents in recent years. In
2006, for example, the synagogue of Oradea was set on fire—news which
the Romanian media mostly ignored. In October 2008, Romanian teenagers
destroyed more than 130 graves and monuments in one of the Jewish cem-
eteries in Bucharest while allegedly recording a hip-hop video. In July 2009,
vandals desecrated another Jewish cemetery in Ploieşti, which raised ques-
tions about the previous investigation regarding the cemetery in Bucharest.
In the same month, the very popular mayor of Constanţa, Radu Mazăre,
provoked the indignation of both the Jewish and Romanian communities
when he paraded together with his sixteen-year-old son in Nazi uniforms at a
fashion show in Mamaia.
21. See the Spiegel issue number 21 (2009), “Die Komplizen–Hitlers europäische
Helfer beim Judenmord.” See also Dennis Deletant’s study Hitler’s Forgotten
Ally: Antonescu and His Regime, Romania 1940–1944 (2006). In the Ukrainian
context, see studies by Martin Dean, John-Paul Himka, and Karel Berkhoff.
22. Siegfried “Sami” Jagendorf (1885–1970) was a Jewish engineer from Bukovina
who persuaded Romanian gendarmes and military to allow him to set up a
foundry run by Jewish workers and engineers. He is known to have saved
an estimated fifteen thousand Romanian Jews from death. His memoir,
Jagendorf ’s Foundry, was published in 1991 with an introduction and com-
ments by Aron Hirt-Manheimer.
23. For Popovici’s extraordinary actions, see his testimony published in Romanian
and English translation in 2001. See also “My Testimony” in Richard Levy’s
Antisemitism in the Modern World: An Anthology of Texts (1991).
24. See especially Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine’s study Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco.
L’oubli du fascisme: trois intellectuels roumains dans la tourmente du siècle (2002),
which focuses on Emil Cioran’s and Mircea Eliade’s desire and attempt not to
reveal their Fascist past. See also earlier studies on this topic: Leon Volovici’s
Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism—The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in
the 1930s (1991), which discusses the works of numerous writers who were
members or sympathizers of the Romanian Iron Guard during the 1930s, and
Zigu Ornea’s Anii 30: Extrema dreaptă românească [The 30s: The Romanian
Extreme Right] (1995), which focuses more on the anti-Semitic journalistic
media of the time and partially on Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran.
25. Felstiner has a few fragments from Solomon’s book translated into English in
his study, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew.
26. For more information on Jewish life in Maramureş, see also the book
by Rudolph Tessler, Letter to My Children: From Romania to America via
Auschwitz, especially the chapter “A Way of Life,” 1–29.
27. Wiesel returned several times to Sighet and two movies document these
returns: Sighet, Sighet and Elie Wiesel Goes Home. He was also present, along
with then Romanian President Iliescu and other officials, at the inauguration
of the Elie Wiesel Memorial House.
28. In the United States, historian Randolph Braham has written extensively on
the Holocaust in Hungary, northern Transylvania, and Romania. For his
contribution to the study of the Holocaust in Romania, President Băsescu con-

ferred on him Romania’s high distinction of “Meritul Cultural” on October 8,
2009.
29. Gold, Ruth Glasberg. Statement. http://www.un.org/holocaustremembrance/
2009/statements09_gold.shtml.
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Pa rt I
Loc a l H istory, Be a r i ng Wi t n e ss
Ch a p t e r O n e
Th e Pe rc e p t ion of t h e Holoc aust
i n H istor io g r a ph y a n d i n
t h e Rom a n i a n M edi a
Alexandru Florian
The historiography and the memory of the Holocaust, of the Romanians,

and of Romanian Jews can be understood only through knowledge of the
peculiarities of the Holocaust in Romania within the wider context of
Holocaust Studies. Certain characteristic features of the history of the mod-
ernization of Romania in the twentieth century turned the “Jewish problem”
into an ideologically active element, present on a large scale in the public
sphere. Unquestionably, the tragedy of the Romanian Jewry was bound up
with the European context, but it also had its own manifestations because
of the political regime in Romania from 1938 to 1944. Six decades ago,
Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu accurately remarked that “anti-Semitism in Romania
still remains a Romanian phenomenon, which should be examined in its
specific nature, and not only in what it imitates” (1944, 171). Romanians
never embraced this research project; instead, they explained the Romanian
Holocaust by blaming it on imported Fascism. One of the most frequently
invoked reasons for this neglect is the ideology of national Communism;
in this view, everything Romanian was good, while the origin of evil was
always from outside. According to this preconception, risen to the rank of a
“theory” of history, atrocities either did not occur in Romania from 1938 to
1944 or, if they happened, were caused by external forces.
This cultural-ideological context has remained influential even today
in the revision of recent history. Since 1990, the implosion of Communism
has freed the constraints on the nationalist discourse and completed this
revisionism through the myth of Marshal Antonescu as “savior” of the
Romanian nation.1 Thus, Holocaust denial in Romania has become
a manifest and expressive voice, finding strong resonance in the public
20 / alexandru florian
space. Another important theory neglected by the nationalist historiog-

raphy, or any historiography that interprets history through the canon of
ethnicity, is the simple and common-sense idea that the tragedy of the
Romanian Jews is part of the history of the Romanian state. Many intel-
lectuals see the situation of Romania in World War II as a simple duality:
on the one hand, the country mobilized alongside Nazi Germany in order
to reacquire the territories lost in the summer of 19402 and on the other
hand, the Jews found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As a result, the collective memory and its priorities are different for ethnic
Romanians and for Romanian Jews. On some occasions, the reasoning
goes even further as the historiography of genocide varies according to the
ethnicity of the researcher.
Lucian Boia, a well-known Romanian historian of twentieth-century
myths and mentalities, acknowledges the tragedy of the Jews and the
responsibility of the Romanian state, but at the same time he considers
that Antonescu’s government also had some accomplishments.
The Antonescu regime exterminated rather more than 100,000 Romanian

Jews and “saved” 300,000; in strictly arithmetical terms, the merit would
thus be three times greater than the guilt! But killing is a crime, while
there is no merit in not killing . . . There is no doubt that Romanians
regard Antonescu differently from the way Jews see him. The Marshal led
the Romanians into war to re-unite the country again and fell victim to
Communism.3
In other words, for Romanian historians there are at least two aspects that
could contribute to the rehabilitation of Marshal Antonescu in Romanian
culture or mythology. But historian Boia does not tell us if a leader who
became a war criminal still deserves to be recognized by the culture of that
nation. It would have been far more instructive if the author had exposed the
difference between the mythical “Antonescu who unified the country and
fought against Bolshevism” and the historical Antonescu as war criminal.
At the opposite pole is the attempt of Michael Shafir to ameliorate pos-
sible inter-ethnic tensions between memories and so-called parallel histo-
ries. This kind of “dialogue of the deaf,” (Shafir 2007, 100) penetrates the
false competition between Holocaust and Gulag.4 After delineating the
main mechanisms of subjectivity that influence the different memoriza-
tions of the same event, Shafir pleads for the norm of “recognizing the
other” (2007, 100) as a premise for the dialogue of memories. In order to
achieve this goal, one has to deconstruct some prejudices or preconceptions
in the interpretation of history. In rewriting the history of recent Romania,
“a start could be the elucidation of some concepts. Otherwise,” as Shafir
explains, “I’m afraid we remain in the mythological and legendary space”
perception of the holocaust / 21
(2007, 101). In this context, the intellectual dispute of Holocaust versus

Gulag is stuck in the mythology of competition, lacking the perspective
of a rational-comparative analysis. Therefore, the baggy discourse on the
Holocaust in Romania should be analyzed according to its expressiveness
and motivation and through references to specific historical aspects of this
tragedy from 1938 to 1944.
In order to describe the public discourse about the Holocaust, the
interpretative template Shafir proposes in his study, “Between Denial
and Comparative Trivialization,” provides an important starting point.
According to Shafir, the negationist discourse can be classified as: integral
denial, deflective negation (holding the Germans guilty, placing culpabil-
ity on peripherals or obliviating the main parties responsible, or blam-
ing the Jews themselves), or selective negation or trivialization through
comparison. Similarly, in my analysis, I also explore communicational and
sociological criteria, such as notoriety and affiliation of the author to a
certain social space (political, civic, media, and so on), the frequency of the
negationist messages, and the channel used for this communication. From
this perspective, it is important to differentiate between the opinion of the
leaders who use any kind of medium to disseminate negationist messages
and particular sources of communication with public impact that dissemi-
nate all types of negationist or anti-Semitic messages. Thus, the reception
of a message is conditioned by the author, by the channel of communica-
tion, or by both. Identifying the source of the message and the means of
communication is particularly important to understand how the reception
is being influenced and often manipulated.
Particularities of the Holocaust in Romania

The belated capitalist modernization of Romania was an unfulfilled pro-
cess compared to that of Western European countries. The national state
ended its process of unification at the end of World War I, on December 1,
1918. The founding of Greater Romania was an opportunity to reform the
structures of the market economy and a democratic political regime. The
country’s territory and population doubled, stimulating an extended eco-
nomic market. At the same time, the proportion of ethnic minorities grew
accordingly.5 In order to reduce the influence of the Bolshevik Revolution,
the political class implemented some stabilizing changes. For instance, the
agrarian reform of 1921 aimed at eliminating the pre-capitalist remnants
from agriculture and encouraged the formation of a rural middle class.
The Constitution of 1923 consolidated the modern state as a monarchy
with democratic institutions in which the king held important political
prerogatives. The new law acknowledged the civil and political rights of all
citizens, regardless of their ethnic affiliation.6 However, the slow rhythm

of the agrarian reform, the weak local capital, the social effects of the eco-
nomic crisis at the end of the 1920s, and the rising European Fascist cli-
mate favored doctrines and political movements of Fascist inspiration in
Romania.
Paradoxically, although the country emerged as a winner from World
War I, with potential to renew itself, an insufficiently reformed economy
and a limited democracy, along with a corrupted state bureaucracy, led
to the orientation toward dictatorial political regimes and rapprochement
with Hitler’s Germany. In this historical context, anti-Semitism became
very visible both among extremists and in the discourse of some groups
of intellectuals.7 The biggest electoral score the extremist parties received
was achieved in December 1937, when the Legionary Movement and the
League of National Christian Defense obtained 25 percent of the total
votes. Beginning in 1938, the Romanian political system abandoned
democracy and moved toward totalitarian policies.8
State anti-Semitism was a common feature of all political regimes that
came to power in Romania after 1937. Racial legislation, “Romanianization”
of the economy, pogroms, deportations, and extermination of Jews
in Transnistria are all stages of the Jewish tragedy. According to Raul
Hilberg, who referred to the drama of the Jews in Nazi Germany, it can be
asserted that the Holocaust of the Romanian Jews did not “correspond to a
pre-established plan” (2003, 49). But, on the other hand, the marginaliza-
tion of the Jews, the pogroms in Bucharest (January 21–23, 1941) and Iaşi
(June 28–July 6, 1941), and the rejection of the “Final Solution” projected
for the Jews from the Old Kingdom (winter of 1942–1943) all demonstrate
that the Holocaust in Romania “was an operation that was carried out step
by step” (Hilberg 2003, 49) in a logical, gradual succession determined by
such factors as the ideology of extremist nationalism, the ethno-national
state, anti-Semitism, and the influence of the war developments.
Similar to the Nazi policy in Germany, the Holocaust in Romania had
as its base the legal identification of the “enemy.” All the Romanian govern-
ments from December 1937 to August 23, 1944 promulgated anti-Semitic
legislation. The foundations were laid well before Antonescu’s government.
The anti-Jewish legislation defined a Jew by affiliation to the Mosaic reli-
gion and by blood. From this point of view, the Romanian racial legis-
lation did not introduce innovations, but employed the same criteria of
the Nuremberg laws (Rotman 2004, 27). After a comparative analysis of
the German and Romanian racial legislation, Radu Ioanid states that “the
definition of the Jew in Romania was made upon more severe criteria than
those used by the anti-Semitic legislation in Nazi Germany” (Ioanid 2000,
27). The Romanian racial legislation of the time defined “Jews” as persons
who, according to similar racial laws in Nazi Germany, were considered

only Mischlinge (half-breed). As Ioanid argues, for example, persons of
Christian faith with both a Christian parent and a Jewish one were con-
sidered Jews by the Romanian racial law, while under German law they
were defined as second-degree Mischlinge. This meant that more people
were subject to discrimination and persecution under the Romanian racial
laws.
Another particular aspect that grounded anti-Semitism and promoted
anti-Semitic policies was the role the Christian Orthodox religion played.
The Orthodoxy constituted a weighty component of the ideology of the
Legionary Movement, as a significant number of priests, especially in the
rural areas, became members or sympathizers of this Fascist movement.
Likewise, the Patriarch Miron Cristea led the government that revised and
applied the new citizenship requirements.9 Dozens of decree-laws, resolu-
tions, or governmental decisions of anti-Semitic inspiration were issued
between 1938 and 1944,10 resulting in the removal of Jews from the eco-
nomic, social, cultural, and political life.
In 1940 and 1941, pogroms took place in Dorohoi, Galaţi, Bucharest,
Iaşi and Chişinău—actions that led to loss of human lives and destruction
of property. In the summer of 1941, the deportation and extermination of
the Jews from Southern Bukovina and Bessarabia began. The Final Report
of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania states that
“between 280,000 and 380,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews were mur-
dered or died during the Holocaust in Romania and the territories under its
control . . . as did some 5,000 Romanian Jews in other countries . . . A high
proportion of those Roma who were deported also died. Of the 25,000
Roma (half of them children) sent to Transnistria, approximately 11,000
perished.” For all these, “Romanian authorities hold the main responsibil-
ity” (Final Report, 381–382).
It is also important to note that in the autumn of 1942, when Germany
accelerated the application of the Final Solution, the Romanian authori-
ties, due to considerations of the international situation and the war’s evo-
lution, gave up on the initial plan of sending Jews from the Old Kingdom
to the Belzec camp.11 Thus, the extermination of Romanian Jews by the
Antonescu regime was not synchronized with the extermination carried
out in Nazi Germany. Antonescu’s regime started the extermination ear-
lier and stopped it while the Final Solution was only in its first stages in
Germany. On several occasions, officials of the German Army criticized
the lack of organization that characterized the extermination of the Jews
under the administration of the Romanian authorities.12
The Romanian governments from December 1937 to August 1944
did not consistently implement anti-Semitic policy. Nevertheless, it is
undeniable that Antonescu’s regime holds responsibility for the final stage
of the Holocaust, the extermination of the Jewish population.13
The Antonescu regime, which was rife with ideological contradictions and
was considerably different from other fascist regimes in Europe, remains dif-
ficult to classify. It was a fascist regime that dissolved the Parliament, joined
the Axis Powers, enacted anti-semitic and racial legislation, and adopted the
Final Solution in parts of its territory. At the same time, however, Antonescu
brutally crushed the Romanian Legionary movement and denounced their
terrorist methods. Moreover, some of Romania’s anti-semitic laws, includ-
ing the Organic Law, which was the basis for Antonescu’s anti-semitic leg-
islation, were in force before Antonescu assumed power. And, the regime
did succeed in sparing half of the Jews under its rule during the Holocaust
(Final Report, 115).
In spite of these contradictory aspects that distinguish the Holocaust of the

Romanian Jews, Hilberg’s statement that “no country, besides Germany,
was involved in massacres of Jews on such a scale” (2003, 809) as Romania
is a significant characterization.
The Reception of the Holocaust: A Problem of

National Consciousness
The Holocaust carried out by Nazi Germany has never been denied in
Romanian historiography, public discourse, or mass media. Unlike
Western historical revisionism, the negationist distortions are linked to
the specific tragedy suffered by the Romanian Jewish population. There are
three distinct stages concerning the “reading” of the Holocaust in Romania
after World War II: (1) the historiography centered on the noxiousness of
Fascism (1944–1947), (2) the unique ideology and monolithic discourse
about history14 (1948–1989), and (3) the pluralism dominated by nega-
tionism (1990 to the present). The characteristics of the historiographical
discourse and the attitude of the political class toward the tragedy of the
Jews under Romanian jurisdiction have heavily influenced these phases.
Concerning the interpretation of history, there is only one similarity
between the Western perspective and the Romanian one. According to
Michel Wieviorka and Peter Novick, the historiography of World War II,
the ability of civil society to acknowledge the genocide of the Jews, and the
willingness of the survivors to bear witness are inscribed in a timeline char-
acterized by three moments. Wieviorka indentifies three public attitudes
toward the Holocaust in the United States: (1) deficit of representation or
seeing the Jewish tragedy as another reality next to similar or even more
relevant ones; (2) extra-representation, acceptation, and acknowledgment of
Holocaust uniqueness; and (3) failure in banality and the attempt to put the
Holocaust inside brackets against other genocides or to use it as a political
instrument (1998, 81–93). Only the first post-war years in Romania seem
to coincide with the manifestations of some reactions in the United States
and elsewhere toward the six million Jewish victims. Indeed, the attitude
of the surviving Jews was mainly one of silence or reticence, not one of wit-
ness. In the West, just as in the East, the predominant temptation was to
promote the image of the political actors and portray the Allies as winners
who had also suffered the biggest losses. This political slant prevailed in
historical interpretation, as a context in which the Jews were viewed as sec-
ondary victims. By the beginning of the 1950s, the comparative attitudes
of the two geopolitical spaces were radically different because of the politi-
cal impact of the Cold War, the attitude toward the state of Israel, and the
Communist ideological monopoly in the Eastern Bloc.
While the Western countries were well aware of the extermination of
the Jews and referred to it under the terms of Holocaust or Shoah, the coun-
tries from Eastern Europe adopted a silence that evolved into a negationist
distortion during the Cold War. Since 1989, Holocaust denial has taken
more radical shape in Romania than in other Eastern Bloc countries, due
to the nationalist ideology of the Ceauşescu era.15
Fascism as the Absolute Evil (1944–1947)

The fall of Ion Antonescu’s totalitarian regime on August 23, 1944 was fol-
lowed by a period of transition to the re-institutionalization of the interwar
democracy. This period was dominated by the struggle for power among
Communists, sustained by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)
on the one hand, and the National Peasant Party and National Liberal Party,
representing the interwar bourgeoisie and segments of the middle class, on
the other hand. The political fight took place in the context of cleansing the
country of Fascism. In 1946, the trial of Antonescu and his closest collabo-
rators took place. Other trials followed, including the trials of those respon-
sible for the Iaşi pogrom and the ghettos and deportations from northern
Transylvania.16 During this time, the public space was open to discussion
of topics that incriminated Fascism and the far-right political regimes, but
the Jewish question was scantily reflected in the mass media.
In 1946, for example, Matatias Carp published his Black Book in
three volumes.17 Carp, a Jewish lawyer, general secretary for the Jewish
federation, and a top Jewish leader, presented statistics, documents,
and testimonies related to decisive moments in the destruction of the
Romanian Jewry: the pogrom in Bucharest, the pogrom in Iaşi, and
the deportation and extermination of the Jews from Bessarabia and
Northern and Southern Bukovina between 1941 and 1943. After a short
period, the book was withdrawn from the bookshops and remained
available solely in libraries, in special archives, for the use of researchers
only. In the spring of 1947, a political debate took place in the Assembly
of Deputies concerning the delay in preparing the trial of those guilty
of organizing and carrying out the Iaşi pogrom. Representatives of par-
liamentarian parties and Jewish communities participated in the discus-
sions, which actually influenced the politicians’ attitudes toward the
victims of Fascism.18 In the same period, Mihail Roller, one of the ideo-
logues of the Communist Party—the one who enforced the official ver-
sion of history until the beginning of the 1960s—published the History
of Romania. The volume, a high school textbook, presents, in fact, an
amalgamated view of the tragedy of the Romanian Jewish population.
The author acknowledges some anti- Semitic policies (legislation and
economic measures) of the Romanian state. For instance, during the
authoritarian regime of King Carol II, various anti-Jewish measures
were taken:
[T]he sequestration of the political parties’ properties, the verification

of the political adversaries’ wealth, as well as the persecution of the Jews
and the confiscation of the non-Romanians’ commercial enterprises. By
covering itself with a nationalist phraseology and using papers for taking
over the fortune of the political adversaries, the royal dictatorship extended
the expropriation of the non-Romanian bourgeoisie to elements of the
Romanian bourgeoisie (Roller 1956, 736).
But there is no further description, nothing about pogroms or Transnistria

at the height of the Holocaust. The book presents the Jewish problem as a
secondary one, while class antagonism determines the historical evolution.
The textbook mentions that during the royal dictatorship, “anti-Semitism
was proclaimed state-policy and the measures taken tend to eliminate
the Jews not only from the political life, but also from the economical
one” (Roller 1956, 738). The 1956 edition of the textbook subordinates
the Jewish problem to the irreconcilable opposition between Communism
and Fascism, that is, it defines the Communist Party as the political actor
that militated for the solving of the “Jewish problem,” which in turn is
presented as a consequence of the extremism of the bourgeois class policy.
According to Roller’s textbook, the Romanian Communist Party opposed
Hitler’s Vienna Diktat on Transylvania and favored liberating the peoples
of Transylvania. It also called for stopping the butchery and despoliation of
the Jewish population from Bessarabia and Bukovina; for stopping the bar-
barian persecution of the Jews from Romania, Bessarabia and Bukovina
(Roller 1956, 688).
This kind of historiography was not necessarily an exception in the

1950s. As Novick and Wieviorka state, the priorities then were anti-Fascism,
the Cold War, and redefining international relations and the newly created
power centers. Neither the Jews nor the Allies were motivated to com-
prehend the full meaning of the concentration and extermination camps.
After 1960, Holocaust denial through ideology and historiography became
the rule in Romania.
The Unique Ideology and the Monolithic

Discourse (1948–1989)
The monopoly of the Communist ideology entailed a single view of his-
tory. Until nearly the end of the 1960s, class struggle and proletarian
internationalism were the top issues which were turned into themes for
the adulation of Stalin and the USSR and of rejection of Fascism and the
capitalist West. Depending on propagandistic needs, the latter was often
identified with Fascism.
With the Ceauşescu regime, the internationalist trend gave way to
the nationalist ideology. This doctrinal compound was characterized by
nationalism, the legitimization of Communism through the Romanian
people’s centenarian struggle for freedom, belief in the exceptional and
humane character of Romanians throughout history, and, last but not
least, the long-lasting friendship between the Romanian ethnic majority
and other ethnic groups (Hungarians, Germans, Jews, and others).
The heroism of Communists against the Nazis and Antonescu’s dicta-
torship was the absolute top issue for interpreting Romania’s actions dur-
ing World War II. As for the Holocaust, “ideological oblivion” was the key
phrase.19 In this context, references to the fate of the Romanian Jews are
scarce and distorted. These references of deflective negation never focused
on the responsible parties. Likewise, references to the Jews as specific vic-
tims were always obscure. The anti-Fascist Communists were considered
the exclusive victims of Fascism. Historian Aurică Simion, for example,
considers that during the legionary government those “most affected by
the legionnaires’ excesses were the Jewish citizens, but the Romanian ones
were not exempted either” (1976, 85). In the pages dedicated to the legion-
ary rebellion from January 1941, Simion fails to mention the pogrom
of Bucharest. Surprisingly, we find out that Jews were victims alongside
other citizens. “According to a statistic drawn up by authorities during the
rebellion, in Bucharest only 236 citizens lost their lives, among them 118
Jews executed by Legionnaires, while 254 people were wounded” (Simion
253). The responsibility for the aggressive and extremely quick process of
Romanianization, and for the discrimination and violence against Jews, is
always placed on the Legionary Movement. Marshal Antonescu appears

as a dictator who governed on the basis of law, concerned with tempering
any excess.
Aurel Kareţki’s and Maria Covaci’s book about the Iaşi pogrom, Zile
însângerate la Iaşi (Bloody Days in Iaşi), is representative of both deflective
negationism, in all its variants, and of selective negationism. The authors
allege that the people mainly responsible for the fate of the Romanian
Jews until January 1941 were the Legionnaires. After that date, the Nazis
bore sole responsibility. “For Jews, the removal of the legionnaires from
power meant their immediate salvation from extermination, while the
Antonescu regime continued to apply an anti-Semitic economic, social,
and cultural program” (Kareţki and Covaci 1978, 35). Similarly, those
responsible for the pogrom in Iaşi were the German troops in town, as
well as isolated Romanian soldiers who were former Legionnaires. There
is not a word about the responsibility of Antonescu, the army and the
police, or the railway transportation. Although the authors fail to address
the deportation and extermination of the Jews in Transnistria, by the end
of the book, readers find out that the repatriation of two thousand orphans
from Transnistria began in 1943 under the Antonescu regime (Kareţki
and Covaci 117). Kareţki and Covaci do not mention the fact that these
orphans were Jews and do not explain how they got to Transnistria in the
first place. The authors are, however, very eager to inform us that more
Jews were massacred in Hungary than in Romania.
The foreword of this book is purely selectively negationist. Written by
historian Ion Minei, it stirred up discontent in the late 1970s for many rea-
sons, including the fact that Minei was Jewish. This historian asserts that:
[T]he holocaust (sic) did not take place in Romania [one of the very rare
occasions during the Communist era when the term Holocaust is used],
precisely because of the fact that, with very few and unimportant excep-
tions, the executioners wearing the swastika did not receive any help freely
offered. On the contrary, they faced rebuff in their attempts to find accom-
plices for organizing deportations or other genocidal actions (1978, 21).
In a flagrant discrepancy with history, Minei denies the deportations and

the genocide perpetrated in Transnistria, as well as the responsibility of
Antonescu’s government. As for the Iaşi pogrom, he merely acknowledges
that it took place, minimizing the number of victims and mentioning as
perpetrators of the massacre only those Romanians of second rank, Nazis,
and former Legionnaires.
Finally, the narrative Minei offers about the fate of the Romanian Jews
is, with one exception, the opposite of what actually happened. Among
Nazi-occupied countries, Minei claims, Romania distinguished herself
through some unique features. According to Minei, Romania was the

only country that offered shelter to Jews from abroad and did not experi-
ence ghettos, extermination camps, or deportations to the Auschwitz or
Majdanek furnaces (24–25). In fact, the Romanian and Ukrainian Jews
under Romanian administration from 1941 to 1944 did experience ghettos,
deportations, camps, and mass extermination. However, Minei is right in
one respect: Jews from the Old Kingdom and southern Transylvania were
indeed not deported to the Nazi camp of Belzec, as initially planned.20
Oliver Lustig, an Auschwitz survivor and historian, builds up his
discourse according to the same coordinates (plotted by Minei) of the
Romanian people’s kindness and heroism.21 The central point of his study
is the fact that Romanian authorities did not deport Jews to the Belzec
camp in the fall of 1942. But the discourse tries to minimize and dilute the
responsibility of the Romanian authorities for the destruction of the Jews
up until this political decision. Therefore, Lustig claims that in May 1944,
from northern Transylvania under Hungarian Administration, “more than
166,000 Jews have been sent to extermination, only 15–16 percent of them
surviving the war,” a situation far worse than anything that happened in
the Romanian territory of southern Transylvania (1988, 27).
The killing of the Jews in the Romanian territories was supposedly
caused by “specialized units of Hitler’s Army, and by the excesses of some
different declassed, brutal elements, from Antonescu’s gendarmerie . . .”
(Lustig 25). The author takes some precautions in his assertions by not-
ing the lack of documentary sources. In regards to the pogrom in Iaşi,
Lustig is the only historian who mentions the number of victims as rang-
ing from 3,200 up to 12,000. But in his view, the responsibility for the
pogrom lies with the Nazis, not Antonescu and the Romanian institu-
tions. However, Lustig is the only historian during the Communist Era
who acknowledges—if only partially—Antonescu’s responsibility for the
Romanian Holocaust:
Without minimizing at all Antonescu’s responsibility for the fact that

almost 80,000 Jews from Transylvania have perished, it must be said that,
under Romanian administration, the Final Solution was not carried out
within the territory that remained part of Romania after the Vienna Diktat;
therefore the Jews from Muntenia, Oltenia, Dobrogea, Moldova, Banat,
and Southern Transylvania were saved massively from the Holocaust (26).
According to Lustig and other Communist-era historians, the suffering

of the Jews from Romania or Romanian territories consists of, at worst,
enduring discriminating economic and social legislation. The casualties, if
they are ever mentioned, were caused by Hitler’s Germany and, perhaps,
by some isolated Romanian employees with Nazi sympathies who operated
on their own. The salvation of the Jews from extermination is, accord-
ing to Lustig, of Antonescu’s doing: “In a Europe brought to its knees
by Hitler, Romania was the country where the largest number of Jews
remained alive” (25).
The Post-Communist Negationism (1990–2008)

Since 1990, the negationist public discourse has spread rapidly. The violent
tones have combined with moderate ones.22 A discussion of the last twenty
years of negationism would be far too extensive;23 therefore, we will pres-
ent only those attitudes or reactions that illustrate one category of negation
or another. Likewise, we will discuss only those reactions that, at impor-
tant moments in the public debate on the Holocaust, represent avoidance
of a rational examination of the recent history. Finally, we limit our study
to academic papers and articles published in the mass media.
Important intellectuals and opinion leaders (some of whom are cited
below), embarrassed by the post- Communist historiography asserting the
uniqueness of the Holocaust, often resort to trivialization and obviously
exaggerated comparisons when approaching the Romanian chapter of the
Holocaust. These intellectuals often diminish the Jewish tragedy, in part
because they are obsessively preoccupied with Romania’s Communist
past, and also because they fear that the gravity of the Holocaust and
the responsibility of the Romanian state could overshadow the discourse
on the crimes of the Communist state. This trivialization through com-
parison has been even easier to accomplish, under either the claim that
the Holocaust is not of present interest for Romanians or that the Jews
are to blame for bringing Communism to Romania. At the publica-
tion of Mihail Sebastian’s Journal, 1935 to 1944, for example, Gabriel
Liiceanu, philosopher and head of the prestigious Romanian publishing
house Humanitas, wrote an article in which he compared the suffering of
Romanians during the Communist regime with that of the Jews during
the Holocaust.24
Similar opinions, formulated after hasty comparisons and based on
an ambiguous and misleading premise, were also expressed when the
Romanian Ministry for Education launched the educational project on the
Holocaust for high school students. In the summer of 2004, the Ministry
announced the publication of an optional textbook for high schools
titled Istoria evreilor. Holocaustul (The History of Jews: The Holocaust).
The mainstream media received this announcement with reactions and
attitudes of rejection. On July 8, 2004, Gabriel Andreescu, an opinion
leader and defender of human rights, stated in the newspaper Ziua that
“the Holocaust as textbook is an excess” and that teenagers should not
be exposed to experiments that could abash their consciousness with

shocking information such as that about the gas chambers.25 Moreover,
Academician and liberal politician Alexandru Paleologu finds the term
Holocaust as applied to the Romanian context totally radical and exces-
sive.26 Academician Ioan Scurtu, one of the historians who approved the
curricula for this textbook, also transfers the responsibility for the suffering
of the Jews during Antonescu’s regime to Germany. According to Scurtu,
“[T]he Antonescu period is an accident in Romania’s history. Until then,
the relations between Romanians and Jews were peaceful and good.” 27
As a significant part of the historiography and the media discourse has
been oscillating between selective negation and minimization, the myth of
Antonescu has become more and more predominant and controversial in
Romanian historiography since 1990. For instance, historian Alex Mihai
Stoenescu, mobilized by extremist reactions of some so-called Romanian
and Jewish clusters, wrote a book about Jews during the Antonescu era
titled Armata, mareşalul si evreii (The Army, the Marshal, and the Jews).
In his study, Stoenescu tries to strike a balance in interpreting Antonescu’s
role in the destruction of the Romanian Jewry.28 He acknowledges the
responsibility of Antonescu for the pogrom in Iaşi, yet suggests that the
“sorting out” of the Jews for the death trains was realized on “the criterion
of presumable adhesion to Communism” (Stoenescu 1998, 280). However,
the author ends up trapped in his own selective reasoning. On a single page
he stitches together contradictory allegations: He asserts that “the saving of
the Romanian Jews was a real miracle”; that “Marshal Antonescu remained
a war criminal” (Stoenescu 495); and “the attitude of the Romanian Army
and State toward Jews was not part of a terror campaign organized on
racist, criminal principles, planned before the war and then accurately put
in practice, according to a project drawn up or subsequently imagined, as
in the case of Nazi Germany. The reaction toward Jews manifested itself
within the frame of demagogical anti-Semitism and in concordance with
their association to Communism” (Stoenescu 496).
Judeo-Bolshevism is also a main point of contention in the work of
Florin Constantiniu, a member of the Romanian Academy. In his book,
O istorie sinceră a poporului român (A Sincere History of the Romanian
People), Constantiniu presents World War II Romania as a land of pros-
perity in which Jews were free to perform in Jewish theatres and enjoyed
their own Jewish schools (which, in fact, was a clear sign of ethnic segrega-
tion and discrimination, since they were no longer admitted to Romanian
theaters or schools), and where the American POWs enjoyed a comfortable
detention. The tragedy of the Jews deported to Transnistria does not fit in
this “history,” which combines minimization by omission with the myth
of Judeo-Bolshevism.
Another type of negationism is deflective negationism. An extremely

vocal example of this kind of negationism, with modulations of symbolic
aggressiveness, is displayed in Paul Goma’s writings, which blame the Jews
themselves for the Holocaust. Since 1990, Goma, a political dissident and
writer expelled by Ceauşescu’s regime, has attempted to explain the reasons
for the Holocaust in Romania. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is
his favorite expression, which he uses to defend Antonescu’s crimes against
Jews. In June 1940, during the Romanian Army’s withdrawal, Goma
argues that Jews harassed and attacked Romanian soldiers and the admin-
istration. A year later, when Romania entered the war on Nazi Germany’s
side, Antonescu got the opportunity for revenge.29 Goma’s prestige as an
anti-communist dissident contributed to the dissemination of his texts by
the most important daily newspapers.30 In a text published by the news-
paper România liberă, Goma threatened to sue the Wiesel Commission.
Among other reasons to do so, he mentions the following:
Ion Iliescu [president of Romania] has agreed with the set of “recommen-
dations” made by the commission: “the establishing of a National Day
to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, on 9 October—although
we Romanians don’t have a national day to commemorate the victims
of Bolshevism starting with 28 June 1940, when the biggest part of
Romanians’ executioners from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina occu-
pied by Bolsheviks were Jews! The same Iliescu didn’t say a word about
“recuperations,” billions of dollars we’ll have to pay to the Jews. But Jews
don’t accept to talk about reciprocity of “recuperations,” namely: they
shall pay first for the Romanian goods they plundered and destroyed in
Bessarabia and Bukovina between 28 June 1940 and 22 June 1941, one year
before Romanians persecuted, deported, killed them.31
As the quote above shows, Goma employs deflective negationism and

trivialization through comparison. All these tactics, as William Totok sug-
gests, are the effect of a visceral anti-Communism and of some personal
frustrations—Goma was born in Bessarabia and had personal resentment
toward the Jews.32 Because Goma also promotes the image of Antonescu as
a national hero, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, the leader of the far-right Partidul
România Mare (Greater Romania Party), published some of his writings in
the magazine România Mare.33
For nationalists like Tudor, Ion Antonescu became the symbol of
the authoritarian political leader and country founder, the rebuilder of
the Greater Romanian national state. During the fragile transition from
Communism to democracy, Antonescu came to represent a political leader
who took power in order to save the country from destruction. Antonescu
thus turns into the symbol of the national ideal of reconstructing Greater
Romania, of authority, and of the removal of Judeo-Communism and

corruption. Although Romania overthrew a totalitarian political regime
in the 1989 revolution, this image of Antonescu plants the idea of the
providential leader in the collective consciousness. All those who, in one
way or another, have contributed to the construction and dissemination
of Antonescu’s myth have expressed a form of negationism. Those who
have injected, directly or indirectly, the image of the marshal as a political
symbol, have ignored the fact that the “hero” is actually a war criminal,
responsible for the extermination of a part of the Jewish population of
Romania, Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria.34
Teşu Solomovici, a journalist and Romanian-born Jew, also falls into
the trap of extolling Antonescu by exaggerating his role in saving Jews
after the winter of 1942–1943. In Ziua, he published a number of arti-
cles about Romanian Jews during World War II, centered on the main
idea that the marshal was “a providential leader” since he eliminated the
Legionnaires who otherwise would have massacred the majority of the
Jewish population (Solomovici 2006). In Romania, unlike in Germany, an
“asymmetrical Holocaust” took place during Antonescu’s regime, accord-
ing to Solomovici and Miruna Munteanu.35 This new term, launched by
Solomovici, suggests that, while the Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina
were exterminated, those from the Old Kingdom survived, protected by
Antonescu. This is a very serious error of historical interpretation, with
deflective negationist effects, which leads Solomovici—like Constantiniu
and Stoenescu—to over-emphasize Antonescu’s good will, sometimes
offering examples such as allowing performances in the Barasheum Jewish
Theatre in Bucharest. The mythology surrounding the Fascist leader of
Romania has been celebrated, after 1990, through statues in public spaces,
in names of streets, and on TV shows. Likewise, the myth of Antonescu
inspired negationist narratives in historiography and mass media.
The Greater Romania Party and its leader, Tudor, played a special role in
exonerating Antonescu. For example, Tudor, along with Gheorghe Buzatu
and Iosif Constantin Drăgan, was instrumental in erecting the statue of
Antonescu in Bucharest in June 2001. Furthermore, he gathered people
willing to write articles in the România Mare magazine and the Tricolorul
newspaper in the 1990s praising Antonescu or minimizing the Holocaust
of the Jews. In 1994, Tudor further exposed his anti-Semitic character
when he stated that the Holocaust “was nothing else but a Zionist strata-
gem to extort, for 40 years, about 100 billion marks from Germany, and
to keep under terror anyone who does not agree with the Jewish yoke.”36 In
2001, he trivialized the term Holocaust itself, announcing that Romanians
“are awaiting the time when the Holocaust perpetrated against Romanians,
by no means a lesser one than the Holocaust perpetrated against the Jews,
will be officially acknowledged” (Final Report, 374). Finally in 2008, dur-

ing a TV show, the same Greater Romania Party leader explicitly stated
that there “was not any Holocaust in Romania . . . Marshal Antonescu did
not allow the expulsion of Jews . . . and the Jews robbed us until they pulled
out our eyes.”37 In spite of his anti-Semitic rhetoric and his repeated denial
of the Holocaust, Tudor received Romania’s highest honor, The Star of
Romania Award, in 2004—the same distinction President Ion Iliescu had
conferred on Elie Wiesel in 2002. Elie Wiesel returned his medal a few days
after receiving the news that he and Tudor shared the same distinction.38
One of Tudor’s closest allies, Buzatu, former vice-president of the
Greater Romania Party, senator, and a member of the Marshal Antonescu
Foundation, has also invested a lot of energy since 1990 to rehabilitate
Antonescu and to convince Romanians that the Jews themselves are
responsible for the Holocaust.39 However, Buzatu backslid in 2008 in the
foreword he wrote to the ninth volume of the History of Romanians, edited
by the Romanian Academy. In his text Buzatu starts from the premise
that Western historiography authoritatively provides scientific proof for
Antonescu’s exoneration. He claims that Andreas Hilgruber and other
Western historians have shown that Antonescu’s government acted out of
tactical and economic considerations and was not anti-Semitic (Buzatu
2008, XLIX). He invokes the positive opinions that some Romanian and
foreign historians have of Antonescu and the protection he supposedly
extended to the Jews. The logic of his pro-Antonescu discourse prompts
him to discredit the Wiesel Commission and to question the findings
of this commission presented in the “so-called Final Report” (Buzatu
LXIX).
History of Romanians, a historical treatise published four years after the
Final Report, represents an incomplete revision of the Communist-era con-
ception of the Holocaust, even though the sections dedicated to the trag-
edy of the Romanian Jews use an adequate bibliography, in consonance
with the historical events. It was also the first historical treatise intended
to be representative for Romanian historiography that actually published
photos about the Holocaust period in Romania. However, there is not
a separate chapter on the Holocaust, but rather a dispersal of the topic
throughout two chapters.40 Likewise, the book employs the usual mini-
mizing expressions. The authors use the word Holocaust scarcely; the most
frequent euphemisms are words like massacre, repression, or executions.
According to the Romanian academician Dinu C. Giurescu, Antonescu
is responsible only for crimes and massacres perpetrated in Bessarabia and
Bukovina. Giurescu states that Antonescu’s regime was anti-Semitic. As
Giurescu claims, Antonescu was indeed responsible for ethnic cleansing,
as he ordered the deportation of Bessarabian and Bukovinian Jews to the
camps of Transnistria and also sent the Jews living between the Dniestr
and Bug rivers to camps. In addition, he barred the Jews from economic,
administrative, and cultural life, as well as from schools and hospitals,
striving to isolate them from the rest of the population. But, as Giurescu
emphasizes, Antonescu did refuse to send the Jews from the Romanian
territories (up to the Prut River) to the Nazi death camps, dissenting from
the German Final Solution. Thus, the lives of almost 300,000 Jews were
spared (Giurescu 2008, 133).
While Giurescu’s assessment of Antonescu’s role during the Holocaust
appears in chapter two of his book, readers have to turn to chapter five to
fully understand the historical events. This chapter presents statistics on
the number of victims according to regions and localities and in accor-
dance with the results of research conducted by various specialists in the
field. The author employs a style that makes the question of the number
of victims (which I personally consider of a lesser importance compared
to other aspects of the Holocaust) seem to an uninformed reader as an
incomprehensible issue, overly debatable and simply boring. It is also in
this chapter that Giurescu narrates the succession of criminal events of
the Holocaust and gives credit to Marshal Antonescu several times when
the question comes up about the renunciation of the Final Solution for the
Romanian Jews in the fall of 1942. Giurescu also claims that the respon-
sibility for mass crimes is shared among units of the Romanian Army and
Gendarmerie, German squads, and Ukrainian militia. He also presents a
diminished number of victims (those of the pogroms in Iaşi, Odessa, and
Chişinău, those deported to Transnistria, those executed in Bessarabia and
Bukovina, and so on).
Although welcome, this attempt at scientific accuracy to determine
local responsibility seems to diminish the responsibility of Antonescu’s
government, which administered these territories.41 Published four years
after the Final Report of the Wiesel Commission, the pages dedicated to
the Holocaust were intended to be, if indirectly, a reply to the conclusions
of the Final Report, attenuating their effects. This message, combined with
that of Buzatu’s introduction, adds a new controversial interpretation of
the Holocaust to Romanian historiography.
Compared to other forms of negationism, however, this can be considered
mild. One of the most vocal negationists, Ion Coja, a professor of linguistics
at the University of Bucharest, not only refuses to accept any argument
relating to the Holocaust, he also published a number of extremely anti-
Semitic papers and newspaper articles. He uses militant symbols in order
to not only negate the Holocaust but also incite action against Jews. For
example, in an “Open Letter to the President of the United States, Mr.
George W. Bush, to the Senate, the Congress and to the State Department
of the United States,” published in the magazine Puncte Cardinale (Cardinal

Points) in February 2005, Coja states that, “We maintain that in Romania
a Jewish genocide did not occur.” He seems to be waging a crusade against
all the people who acknowledge, commemorate, or study the Holocaust
of Romanian Jews. Coja’s discourse is extremely easy to see through and
reflects a bitter attitude toward any public events that bring the tragedy of
the Romanian Jews up for discussion, best exemplified in his reaction to the
construction of the Holocaust Memorial in Bucharest.42 His case proves the
impotence of the law when faced with extremist manifestations.43
Conclusions
Western studies establish a direct link between anti-Semitism and
Holocaust denial as manifestations of hatred toward Jews. For Wieviorka
and Pierre-Andre Taguieff, Holocaust denial represents one of the facets
of post-war anti-Semitism or Judeophobia. As Wieviorka explains, the first
glimpses of the resurrection of anti-Semitism can be seen in the encounter
between the far right, which has turned again into a political force, and
negationism, which has asserted the non-existence of the gas chambers
(1998, 19). As far as the Romanian space is concerned, Shafir is right to
assert that “Holocaust denial is a reflection of a self-defensive mechanism
that is by no means confined to anti-Semites or to those striving to use
negation as a political instrument” (Shafir 2003, 25–26). Very often, radi-
cal nationalism informs the deflective or selective negationism expressed
in historiography or mass-media. This ideology is much more visible in
many of the texts that have circulated since 1990, with the goal of promot-
ing the image of an immaculate, strong Romania whose shortcomings are
always caused by foreigners. Therefore, current anti-Semitism in Romania
cannot be characterized as a new form of anti-Semitism or Judeophobia. It
is rather a contemporary way of expressing an extreme nationalism, rooted
in Romania’s interwar culture and politics.
Agressive forms of Holocaust denial, together with actions and dis-
courses aimed at rehabilitating Marshal Antonescu as a positive histori-
cal figure, have led to the conservation of an atmosphere in the public
space that is ripe for right-wing extremism. They are an expression of anti-
Semitism and extreme nationalism. Negationism is not only a part of the
cultural space and media, but it also permeates political space and dis-
course. However, it is important to note that the Final Report of the Wiesel
Commission has influenced the Romanian cultural sphere decisively. One
can easily notice a reduced number of examples of minimalization, and
radical negationism has lost some of its supporters, although repetetive
arguments are still aired on several media channels.
Notes
1. Ion Antonescu (1882–1946) was the leader of the Romanian state from
September 1940 to August 1944. He participated in World War II on the side
of Nazi Germany and its allies. In 1946 he was sentenced to death and executed
for war crimes.
2. The transfer of Bessarabia and Bukovina to the USSR, as an outcome of the
secret annexes of the Ribentrop-Molotov Pact, and the transfer of northern
Transylvania to Hungary following the Vienna Diktat, arbitrated by Germany
and Italy, took place in 1940.
3. Lucian Boia, Romania: Borderland of Europe, 210.
4. For an interesting debate on Gulag and the Holocaust in Romania, see Caietele
Echinox, vol. 13, Cluj, Romania, 2007, edition entirely dedicated to this issue.
M. Shafir, “Nuremberg II-mitul denazificării şi utilizarea acestuia în martiro-
logia competitivă Holocaust-Gulag,” 87–104.
5. Compared to the Old Kingdom, the signs of economic potential included
population growth of 220 percent, expansion of the total area of the country
by 215 percent, 215 percent increase in agricultural land, growth of 250 per-
cent in the railway network, and the main industry, according to the propel-
ling force used, by 235 percent. The growth of the general population meant
also the growth of the Jewish population, from 239,967 Jews (in 1912, in the
Old Kingdom) to 756,930 Jews (as registered in the 1930 census). These fig-
ures denote the increase of the Jewish population by more than 300 percent.
Considering the historical regions, the proportion of the Jews in the total
number of the local population was the highest in Bucovina (10.8 percent)
and Bessarabia (7.2 percent). In the Old Kingdom and Transylvania, 3.1 and
3.3 percent, respectively, of the population was Jewish—under the 4.2 percent
average country level. For a more detailed analysis, see my study, România şi
capcanele tranziţiei, 105.
6. As I discuss in “Treatment of the Holocaust in Romanian Textbooks,” 239,
after World War I, in 1923, Romania secured its first democratic constitution,
which recognized the existence of ethnic minorities and granted them specific
rights. In addition to the economic, social, political, and cultural rights that
they shared with the Romanians, the ethnic minorities were now allowed to
form ethnic political parties (the Magyar Party, the German Party, and the
Jewish Party) and had access to educational and religious institutions using
their own language. Also, they had the right to organize their cultural life in
their tongue.
7. On radical nationalism and cultural or doctrinaire anti-Semitism at the end of
the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, see Leon
Volovici, Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism; Radu Ioanid, The Sword of the
Archangel; and Zigu Ornea, Anii treizeci. Extrema dreaptă românească.
8. The path was opened by the royal dictatorship of Carol the Second. On
February 11, 1938, the decree-law for introducing the siege limited the freedom
of speech by giving the military authorities the right to censor the media (art.
IV lit. c). By the end of the same month, the newly promulgated Constitution
strengthened the power of the king and encouraged the Fascist-type corporat-
ism in important state institutions. Likewise, the political parties were banned
(decree-law for dissolution of associations, groups and political parties,
March 30, 1938), while the political organization led by Carol the Second,
the Front of the National Rebirth, was to become the “unique and totalitarian
party” under the name of “Party of the Nation” (June, 1940). The Jews were
not allowed to be members of this party. On September 14, 1940, the National
Legionary State replaced the royal dictatorship: General Ion Antonescu was
the leader of the Legionary State and the chief of the Legionary regime,
while Horia Sima was the leader of the Legionary Movement, the only state-
recognized movement. The alliance between the Legionnaires and Antonescu
ended in January 1941. After the legionary rebellion, general Antonescu rein-
forced his power and led a government of military and civil members. Without
the support of the political parties, the government declared its intention to
continue the ideological program of the Legionnaires. The February 1941
royal decree no. 314/14 abrogated the National Legionary State and forbade
any political action. In the Cabinet Council of February 1941, Antonescu
declared: “. . . the main lines for government, as you very well know, have been
set out during these 5 months of government . . . Since I was in prison [from
July to September, he was put under house arrest by King Carol the Second],
I’ve discussed with the Germans the whole program of government and all the
basic principles of the future Romanian State . . .” See Lya Benjamin, Legislaţia
antievreiască, 61, 291–294.
9. About the role of Orthodoxy in the Legionary ideology, see also Volovici,
Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism; Ioanid, The Sword of the Archangel; and
Ornea, The Thirties. In 1940s Romania, regulations were issued to forbid the
conversion of Jews to Christianity in order to hinder their alleged salvation
through religion.
10. See Benjamin, Evreii din România între anii 1940–1944.
11. See Jean Ancel, Contribuţii la istoria României. Problema evreiască, vol. II,
125–275; and Final Report, 168–172.
12. In Evreii sub regimul Antonescu, Ioanid notes that “the methods used during
the pogroms, the violently improvised assassinations during marches, the rush
of the Romanian authorities to push the masses of deported Jews across the
Dniester in 1941 and across the Bug in 1942, provoked protests and unfavor-
able reactions among Germans in the autumn of 1942,” 400.
13. For a discussion of Antonescu’s primitive and aggressive anti-Semitism, see
Benjamin, Prigoană si rezistenţă, 127–151.
14. This stage is characterized by the political and ideological domination of the
Romanian Communist Party as an unique ideology; and in terms of historical
research, by the narrow approach to events, limited by the Communist ideol-
ogy dogma, which defines the monolithic discourse.
15. On the reception of Holocaust in historiography, see Victor Eskenasy, “The
Holocaust and Romanian Historiography: Communist and Neo-Communist
Revisionism.”
16. See Final Report, “The Trials of the Criminals of War,” 313–332.
17. Matatias Carp, Cartea neagră. Suferinţele evreilor din România 1940–1944
(Bucharest: SOCEC Publishing House, 1946; Dacia Traiană Publishing House,
1947–1948). In 1996, Diogene Publishing House in Bucharest published the
second edition, while in 2009, Delanoe Editions in Paris published the French
edition with footnotes and a foreword by Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine.
18. See Benjamin, “Procesul masacrului de la Iaşi. Note pe marginea unor

interpelări în Cameră.”
19. See Shafir, “Between Denial and Comparative Trivialization,” especially his
discussion on organized forgetting, 45–54.
20. Six years later, Mihai Fătu acknowledges the racial and anti-Semitic poli-
cies in Anonescu’s Romania. He wrote a 350-page book about Antonescu’s
political regime, in which the apogee of the Holocaust, the anti-Jewish geno-
cide, is “forgotten” again. “Pogrom,” “deportation,” and “extermination in
Transnistria” are key phrases missing from this study, whose hypothesis is that
the political regime imported Fascism, which, combined with the “Romanian
specific,” resulted in the protection of Jewish lives.
21. Oliver Lustig, “În România ‘soluţia finală’ hitleristă nu a putut fi aplicată.”
22. Although the Final Report of the Wiesel Commission, published by the
Romanian state in November 2004, was not intensively discussed by the
media and did not generate debates, it remains noteworthy that since its pub-
lication, the negationist manifestations have diminished. See also Totok.
23. For the negationist message in post-Communist Romania, see detailed
analyses in the following studies: Michael Shafir, 2004; George Voicu, Teme
anitsemite în discursul public; and Alexandru Florian and Cosmina Guşu,
“Manifestări de antisemitism şi negare a Holocaustului în mass media din
România.”
24. In “Sebastian, mon frère,” published in the cultural magazine 22 in 1997,
Liiceanu traces a parallel between the nuisances (minor persecution, never-
theless!) he suffered under the Communists and Sebastian’s ordeal during
Antonescu’s regime. “The fraternization” of philosopher Liiceanu suggests
that Jews are collectively to be blamed for making Romania Communist, a
fact that eliminates the singularity of the Holocaust forever (Shafir, 2004,
114–115).
25. The reader may also be referred to other journals published in that timeframe
such as: Tribuna învăţământului, (nr. 756–757, July 26–August 8; 758–759,
August 9–22; 760–761, August 23–September 5, 2004), a magazine for high
school education published seventeen opinions on the present interest of a
textbook on the Holocaust. Most of them were negative. Academician and
liberal politician Alexandru Paleologu argued that the term Holocaust should
not be used. Academician, historian, and Minister of Culture and Religion,
social-democrat senator Răzvan Theodorescu doubted the necessity of such
a course. “If the facts are cut up from the history of Romanians, the course
could have the effect of a boomerang” (756–757). Professor Ileana Cazan,
PhD, considers simply that “the study of the Holocaust in Romania, as a
singular course, is exaggerated, since the historical truth has to be respected,
and the truth shows that, in spite of the political propaganda, extermina-
tion camps did not exist in Romania and the anti-Jewish actions had an iso-
lated and non-systematic character” (758–759). Ultimately, the textbook was
published in 2005.
26. “I don’t think there is a point to talk about the Holocaust, an injustice
throughout Europe, not only in fascist countries; we had Antonescu’s gov-
ernment, more or less devoted to Germany . . . I don’t want to encourage the
idea of the Holocaust. This term is totally radical, it’s excessive . . . the course
is unreasonable . . . I think that, if we push things, the attitude towards Jews

could turn worse, not better” (Paleologu, Tribuna învăţământului 760–761).
27. “What happened in Romania actually occurred in the entire space dominated
by Germany. The initiative for the extermination of the Romanian Jews does
not belong to the Romanian Government but to Germany” (Scurtu, Tribuna
învăţămîntului, 758–759).
28. From the very beginning, Stoenescu wants to clarify what the two historio-
graphical “factions” are that he intends to reconcile. On the one hand, the
Romanian extremists “who are looking for a guilty party or an accomplice
for the critical situation we are crossing, and, on the other hand, the Jewish
extremists who benefit . . . in order to impose the image of Romania as a par-
ticipant in the Holocaust,” Stoenescu, 7–8.
29. See Paul Goma, “Basarabia şi ‘problema’ ” and Săptămâna roşie 28 iunie–3
iulie 1940 sau Basarabia şi evreii. Goma argues for “the falsity, the stupidity
of the term ‘anti-Semite,’ since Arabs, Maltese, and Berbers are also Semites
and, who would believe today, in Israel: the Palestinians!” (35). Concerning
the destruction of the Romanian Jewry between 1941 and 1944, the writer
asks a rhetorical question: “What would have happened if, during only one
week, 28 June to 2 July 1940, Romanians grew mad, asking, promising—the
Romanians themselves—to get revenge on the Jews, according to the law of
Talion: ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ Which was the first-eye
(in time)?” (34). Of course, Goma suggests that Jews physically harassed the
Romanian Army and clerks during their withdrawal from Bessarabia and
Bukovina. His anti-Semitism takes on the most varied expressions. In his
opinion, Marshal Antonescu is a “liberator hero,” while the Jews are those
who brought Communism.
30. For instance, in 2003–2004, the cultural supplement “Aldine” of the Romania
Liberă newspaper published the book Săptămâna roşie [The Reed Week] as a
serial. The newspaper Ziua published Goma’s article “Să învăţăm de la evrei”
[Let’s learn from the Jews], February 24, 2005. This article was taken over
by Corneliu Vadim Tudor’s extremist magazine Romănia Mare (nr. 766, 767,
768, 769/2005). Likewise, some newspapers published reactions of support
for Goma’s anti-Semitic messages. In 2005, the Charta 2005–in defense of the
writer Paul Goma was created, in which intellectuals from Romania and the
Republic of Moldova defended Goma against allegations that he was an anti-
Semite.
31. “Penal complaint to the Prosecutor’s Office of the High Tribunal, in atten-
tion of Mr. Ilie Botos, General Prosecutor of Romania,” in Aldine în România
Liberă, December 3, 2004. For more on Goma’s negationism, see Ioanid’s
“Haïr à Belleville” and Final Report, 375–379.
32. See Totok, “The reception of the Final Report of the Wiesel Commission in
the Romanian and German Press.”
33. Until 1989, Tudor was one of Ceauşescu’s court poets. Thus, what until yes-
terday seemed impossible, today has become reality: a Ceauşescu opponent
and a fervent Ceauşescu supporter have met in the extreme anti-Semitic
message.
34. For instance, see Ioan Scurtu and Constantin Hlihor, Anul 1940. Drama
românilor dintre Prut şi Nistru, [The Year 1940. The Tragedy of Romanians
between the Prut and Dniestr]. Scurtu and Hlihor assert the idea of the collec-
tive responsibility of Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina for the violent attacks
suffered by the Romanian Army during its withdrawal from the territories
surrendered to the USSR in 1940. Likewise, in Ioan Scurtu and Constantin
Hlihor’s study Complot împotriva României [Plot against Romania], nega-
tionism reinvents history. Transnistria, space of extermination of the Jews
by Romanian authorities, becomes in this book the place in which “those
who carried out hostile actions against the Romanian state or perturbed the
administration of the liberated territories were placed in camps, irrespective
of their nationality,” 82. The genocide of Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina
was caused by Nazi Germany, in the view of those historians who perpetuate
the Communist mythology: “The problem of the Jews from Bessarabia and
Northern Bukovina cannot be evaded. This was circumscribed on the whole
Romanian state policy and international situation, as well as on the pres-
sures the German Reich put on Antonescu’s regime,” 93. The authors do not
address the German irritation vis-à-vis the chaotic and extremely aggressive
way the Romanian authorities reacted, as discussed by Raul Hilberg, among
others.
35. In the May 21, 2005 issue of Ziua, in the “Files” column, Miruna Munteanu
explains: “What is the asymmetrical Holocaust? It’s a concept through which
the writer and journalist Teşu Solomovici tries to describe what happened to
the Jews from Romania in the dark years of World War II. Why Holocaust?
Because of the pogroms and deportations from Bessarabia, Transnistria,
Northern Bukovina—territories under the authority of the Romanian govern-
ment. Why asymmetrical? Because in the Old Kingdom the situation of the
Jews was incomparably more lenient, since an overwhelming majority survived
the war. Contrary to his declared anti-Semitic convictions, Marshal Antonescu
had a double standard in dealing with ethnic purification.” This statement
is followed by some excerpts selected by the author from Teşu Solomovici’s
book Istoria Holocaustului din România [The History of the Holocaust in
Romania]: “Marginalized, excluded from the official life of the country, men
were forced to dig ditches and build pill boxes, to clear the snow, the children
were excluded from Romanian schools but they continued to learn in Jewish
schools, there were even ‘Jewish universities.’ Moreover, Antonescu allowed the
Jewish Theatre, Barasheum, to continue to function. Jewish life was not devoid
of privations and fears, but it was a life, a curtailed life, which still cannot be
compared to what happened in Transnistria. Asymmetrical Holocaust!” The
authors omit the fact that the pogroms of Iaşi or Southern Bukovina, from
which the Jews were deported to Transnistria, belonged to Romania. Also,
they forget to mention that the diplomas issued by the Jewish schools were not
recognized by the state.
36. România Mare, March 4, 1994. For the role of the Greater Romania Party
publications in promoting the image of Antonescu and of negationism, see
Final Report, 351–352.
37. Television program, Dan Diaconescu în direct, OTV [Dan Diaconescu Live],
October 27, 2008.
38. Elie Wiesel declared: “With disappointment and sadness, I read that the
president who created the International Commission of the Holocaust in
Romania has decided to decorate two persons whose ideas oppose the great
mission of the Commission . . . Corneliu Vadim Tudor and Gheorghe Buzatu
are known as anti-Semites and deniers of the Holocaust. Corneliu Vadim
Tudor publishes outrageous and libelous articles against the Jewish people.”
(Interview published in the Romanian newspaper Ad evărul on December
16, 2004).
39. On Buzatu’s denial of the Holocaust and Antonescu’s rehabilitation, see Final
Report, 355–356; Victor Eskenasy, 173–236; and Shafir (2004).
40. See Giurescu, 2008, Chapter 2: “Ion Antonescu’s Regime (September, 6,
1940–August, 23, 1944),” “The National Legionary State” (Florin Muller
67–97), “The Internal Political Regime” (Giurescu 98–132); and chapter 5:
“The National Minorities during World War II” especially “The Jews from
Romania between 1940 and 1944” (Giurescu 378–455), “The Deportation
of Roma People to Transnistria” (Giurescu 499–508).
41. Concerning the bearing between politics and orders emanating from center to
territory, Giurescu uses the following expression, which suggests that people from
the field could act on their free initiative: “It was not searched and published the
way these “directions” were transmitted in the State mechanisms: army and espe-
cially gendarmerie and police. Though, the effects are known,” 409.
42. See, for example, his warning expressed in his article, “The idea of erecting
a monument for Jews and Gypsies, victims of the Antonescu ‘genocide.’ ” “A
special mention for the Mayor of Bucharest: you have promised to the electors
that you would govern Bucharest by consulting the population on the most
important issues. Now you have the opportunity, and the obligation, too, to
organize a referendum on the Holocaust Memorial, with the following ques-
tion: Is Bucharest indeed a proper place to build a Holocaust Memorial dedi-
cated to the memory of Jews and Gypsies persecuted by Antonescu? On the
other hand, the new memorial wouldn’t be the first monument fraudulently
erected in Bucharest. The fate of the other ones is known to us: they disap-
peared one by one from the landscape of Bucharest. We have no doubt that
the fate of this memorial will be the same, since its intention is to inscribe in
stone and copper the biggest lie and offense ever addressed to the Romanian
people. This warning is accompanied by an explanation: you’ll be judged,
gentlemen, for this injustice.”
43. See also Coja’s open letter to the President of Romania; negation is expressed
in similar terms, but the tone is more radical: “In Romania, enjoy the word we
bring to you, there wasn’t any Holocaust! Not even on a visit. No Holocaust,
no genocide, no pogrom! Not during Antonescu’s era or on any other occa-
sion! We missed them all! But who knows, maybe some other time we’ll do the
Holocaust, and we’ll do it right, with proper documentation!” in the newspa-
per România Mare, December 1, 2006.
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Ch a p t e r Two
Th e I a  i Po g rom i n Cu r z io
M a l a pa rt e’s K A P U T T : Be t w e e n
History a n d Fic t ion
Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu
Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957), one of the most important Italian writers

of the twentieth century, particularly owes his fame to his novels written
during and immediately after World War II, namely Kaputt (1944) and The
Skin (1949). Kaputt is especially significant with respect to Malaparte’s biog-
raphy and bibliography: the novel presents the collapse of Europe during
the war and has been considered one of the first literary testimonies on the
Holocaust, but it also marks Malaparte’s emergence from a period of ideo-
logical ambiguity. Furthermore, Kaputt stands as an important document
attesting to the twentieth-century history of the Romanians and of the Jews
in Romania: one entire chapter is dedicated to the Iaşi pogrom, which took
place at the end of June 1941. Although the international fame of the author,
and this novel in particular, made the tragic event and place known world-
wide, such has not been the case in Romania. Malaparte is not, however,
unknown to Romanian readers: Kaputt was translated into Romanian in
1999, and other translations of the author’s books preceded and followed this
work. Whereas the Jewish community of Iaşi1 can still remember Malaparte’s
passage through their city, his novel does not appear to have helped the city’s
other inhabitants know their own history much better. Nor does the “edu-
cated” Romanian audience seem to have drawn any lesson from reading the
novel, as indicated by the Romanian translation of Kaputt.
The Pogrom of Iaşi: Chapter of a Novel

Like most of Malaparte’s novels, Kaputt is autobiographical. The main
character is a captain of the Italian army, who is also a war correspondent
for Corriere della Serra and travels throughout Europe, from west to east
48 / mihai dinu gheorghiu
and from north to south, advancing with the invading troops along the
front lines. He variously attends receptions of high officials, is granted
private audiences with them, or talks to ordinary soldiers—all against the
background of a Europe “gone to pieces” (one of the meanings of the word
kaputt that Malaparte uses in his preface) because of war and Nazism.
Malaparte’s passage through Romania, on his way to the Eastern front (the
German-Romanian front advancing on the USSR), brings onto the stage
Romanian soldiers and inhabitants of the city of Iaşi, as well as political
figures, many of whom portray real people. The author frequently employs
Romanian words and actual places, especially from the city of Iaşi, in the
novel. Romanians are first mentioned in a scene from the front. Some
peasants, who are barely familiar with the industrial world and distrust the
Soviet propaganda, humiliate a prisoner. But, they reject the accusation
of having mistreated civilians—unlike the Germans—with the exception
of Jews, whom they pursue whenever the opportunity arises: “We only
have it in for the Jews” (Malaparte 2005, 43).2 Romanian anti-Semitism
is therefore an early presence in the book, since such scenes introduce the
central theme: the pogrom. This emerges fully when the narrator/character
recounts events at a reception given by Herr Frank, the Nazi governor of
Poland. The German officials present criticize the “uncivilized method”
used to exterminate Jews, in contrast to their own methods. The chapter
entitled “The Rats of Jassy,” and part of the following chapter, “Cricket in
Poland” contain the main scenes depicting the pogrom in Iaşi. The first
assessment of casualties is given: five hundred dead have been included
in the official communiqué, though Colonel Lupu later confirms seven
thousand people dead (Malaparte, 102).
The chapter “The Rats of Jassy”3 has a Baroque structure, as does most
of the book: Against the background of a torrid night, the writer recalls his
experiences in Paris and Italy, during which a curfew patrol interrupts and
brings him back to reality. He hears rumours about “Russian parachutists”
who might be in the city and sets out to find something to eat. He enters
the shop of Kane, a Jewish merchant who knows him and who supplies
food that is hard to find elsewhere. Princess Sturdza, a “great name of
Moldova,” enters the scene and makes Grigori, the emasculated coach-
man, beat Kane for not giving her the long-desired tea box, which had
been previously offered to the Italian officer. Malaparte is a well-known
figure in the city of Iaşi; he flirts with a pharmacist and a waitress, but his
love affairs fail because of the Soviet bombardment of the city. A delega-
tion of important Jewish people later come to ask him to use his influ-
ence with the German military authority, General von Schobert, to have
the pogrom, prepared by the Romanian authorities, stopped. The Italian
declares himself unable to act: “Perhaps you want me to sacrifice myself
iaŞi pogrom in curzio malaparte’s KAPUTT / 49
uselessly for you? Should I have myself shot in Unirii Square defending
the Jews of Jassy?” (Malaparte 2005, 124). The only thing he could have
done was flatter Antonescu in the hope of gaining his goodwill. The scene
becomes ambiguous; reality mixes with reverie, Malaparte’s strolling with
his dreams. In the description of the pogrom, the SS soldiers appear to be
the protagonists of the public executions. The Italian consul, Sartori (an
actual person), who had succeeded in providing sanctuary for several Jews,
narrates the scene. This man was indeed Malaparte’s main source of infor-
mation. The last scene of the chapter depicts the plundering of the dead
bodies by the madding crowd, which the desperate, heroic protests of the
Italian captain are unable to stop. At the same time, the princely couple
Sturdza make an entrance and are greeted by the crowd.
Part of the next chapter takes place in Podu Iloaiei,4 where one of the
“death trains” has stopped. Together with a young Italian war correspon-
dent, Pellegrini (based on an actual person and described as a “stupid
Fascist”), and the consul Sartori, Malaparte sets out in search of the body
of a Jewish lawyer who had been protected by the Italians. Despite their
caricature-like appearance, the three Italians are sincere in their defense of
the Jews when they face the assassins, personified by the representatives of
the Romanian authorities:
Then Pellegrini, the “stupid Fascist,” stood up and, clenching his fists,
said to the Chief of Police: “You are a low-down murderer and a cowardly
bastard.”
I looked at him in amazement . . . He was a stupid Fascist, but during the
night of the great Jassy pogrom he had several times risked his life to save
a handful of unfortunate Jews, and now . . . he was risking his skin for the
sake of a corpse of a Jew (Malaparte 2005, 168–169).
In one of the most noteworthy scenes of the novel, Malaparte joins the
other two Italians in their attempt to save the Jews locked in train cars, but
when the doors are forced open, the “liberated” dead people collapse over
Sartori, almost burying him under them. At the end, in a sort of epilogue
to the chapter, Malaparte contradicts the Nazi leaders, who, filled with dis-
gust, remark that the Romanian people are “lacking in culture.” Malaparte
blames the real culprits and evokes the previous pogrom in Bucharest:
“You are mistaken,” I replied. “Romanians are a generous and kind people.
I am very fond of Romanians. Among all the Latin races the Romanians
alone have given evidence of a noble sense of duty and a great generosity
in shedding their blood for their Christ and their King. They are a simple
people—a people of primitive, kind peasants. They cannot be blamed if the
upper classes, the families and the men who should be an example to them,
have rotten souls, rotten minds and rotten bones. The Romanian people
are not responsible for the slaughter of the Jews. In Romania pogroms are
organized and inspired by order or with the connivance of the authorities.
The people are not at fault if corpses of Jews, quartered and hung on hooks
like beef, have been on display for days in many Bucharest butcher shops for
the entertainment of the Iron Guard” (Malaparte 2005, 174–175).
The Historic Value of Malaparte’s Testimony

The 1999 Romanian translation of this work is surprising because it inten-
tionally minimizes the literary testimony on the pogrom in Iaşi, ignores a
historical subject (in Eugen Uricaru’s Afterword), and systematically deni-
grates the author (in historian M.D. Sturdza’s Addendum). The translator,
novelist, and a scholar of Italian studies Eugen Uricaru, former president of
the Writers’ Union of Romania, not only ignores the existence of a previous
translation, but improperly includes Malaparte among the “so-called writ-
ers who look disdainfully at us” (Malaparte, Uricaru, 1999, 301–302). The
passage from Kaputt quoted above easily suffices to convince the reader that
Malaparte does not “look disdainfully” at the Romanians, since the writer
assigns responsibility for crimes to former ruling classes. Uricaru, however,
wants to wipe out these distinctions. While he presents his translation as a
contribution to the dispersal of the “long-lasting penumbra of [Malaparte’s]
presence over the Romanian cultural space” and to the overcoming of
this “Malaparte complex,” Uricaru invites the historian M.D. Sturdza to
join him in discrediting the Italian writer. Sturdza is partly motivated by
his desire to rehabilitate his grandparents, whom the historian recognizes
among the characters acting in the scenes of Iaşi. Sturdza’s main evidence
is Malaparte’s July 5, 1941 article in the Corriere della Serra in which the
Italian describes, while making a series of digressions, the massacre of Jews
in Iaşi a week after war broke out against the Soviet Union. To Sturdza,
the differences between the reportage and the novel testify to the “lack of
character” of this “charlatan of genius” and “despicable dandy.” The 1941
article is not included in the front correspondence collected under the title
Il Volga nasce in Europa (The Volga Rises in Europe), which Malaparte
had first published in 1943. Some of his articles had undergone, according
to Malaparte himself, pro-Soviet changes, as biographer Guerri noticed.
However, Sturdza gave only a truncated quotation, basically falsifying the
text. The Romanian critic considers Malaparte “an anti-Semite and pro-
Nazi” and even labels him “anti-Romanian” in the later novel (1943–44).
The historian denies that Malaparte has any competent knowledge of
Romanian history and complains about a first version of Kaputt that had
been temporarily entitled “God Shave the King,”5 which, in his opin-
ion, had a “pro-Nazi, anti-British and anti-Semitic” orientation (Sturdza
308). Yet here is what Guerri says about Malaparte’s reports from the Soviet
front:
If the war reports having been sent up to that time were excellent, those sent
from the Soviet Union are exemplary: they are masterpieces of genuine art-
istry worthy of leaders of a school. This is easily explainable: plunged into a
very convenient situation as a writer, a tragedy, he was not required to talk
about events directly related to Italy, he was closely involved with people
in distress and he was changing locations—his writing becomes profound,
passionate and extremely endearing (Guerri 1981, 180).6
Malaparte’s war accounts strongly emphasize the social aspect of war, a

trait that led the Fascists to censor the first title of his anthology (The War and
the Strike). In his writing about the siege of Leningrad, Malaparte’s sympathy
for soldier-workers is barely dissimulated. In fact, any differences between the
initial correspondence and the anthology version, presented in two columns
by Guerri for comparison (1981, 181–82), do not reveal any “pro-Nazi” or
“anti-Semitic” orientation, claimed by Sturdza. Guerri concludes:
Apparently these changes do not refer to any important points either. If

Malaparte had selected his articles as such without changing them, his
merits wouldn’t have been practically diminished at all; nevertheless, we
should admit that he was the most objective, the most moderate and the
most perceptive among the Italian war correspondents. But Malaparte,
often pathetic and always exasperating with his will to be the first in the
class, is not pleased with his being graded with straight As but, in order to
be congratulated on it, he is willing—we have to say it—to mark the cards.
And to change one of the most beautiful, interesting and honest works he
had ever written [it’s his reportage!] into an imbroglio somewhat mean and,
in the end, ridiculous (1981, 182).
Malaparte’s modifications to the report have nothing to do with his ideo-

logical orientation or his feelings toward the victims and the moral and politi-
cal authors of this war tragedy; they are only the expression of his exacerbated
narcissism. Something similar can be said about the way in which he puts
himself on stage as a witness of the pogrom in Iaşi, especially when he pres-
ents himself as a savior of the Jews locked in the “death trains.” According to
Guerri, Malaparte had not actually been in Iaşi during the pogrom days:
He did not witness the massacre in Jassy where several thousands of Jews
had been killed, but he would later dedicate to it a whole chapter of Kaputt,
while writing on the spot an article about the same topic for the Corriere,
in which he succeeded in skillfully concealing his compassion for the victims
while asserting the “social danger” represented by their misery (1981, 179).
In fact, if Malaparte the novelist had wanted to annul the distance between
each of the scenes—real, not invented—of the pogrom of Iaşi through his
appearance as an unrealistic character who is a savior, it does not obscure
the full empathy of Malaparte the war reporter for the victims. This is
also Pierre Pachet’s interpretation of Malaparte’s testimony regarding the
pogrom of Iaşi.
Pachet, a French writer who has been ignored by the translator and
commentator of the Romanian edition of Kaputt, would also address
Malaparte’s testimony of the pogrom of Iaşi in Conversations à Jassy . This
book, the outcome of a journey that the author made upon the invitation
of the University of Iaşi, belongs to those works published after 1990 in
which the Western intellectuals “discovered” a devastated Eastern Europe
after the fall of the Berlin Wall.7 To Pachet, Jassy is first and foremost a
city marked by the stigma of the past; his father (a Jew from Bessarabia)
and Malaparte’s novel (read early in his life) are the two sources for his
knowledge of the massacre. Although the author makes visible efforts to
avoid mistaking the past for the present and to listen to other points of
view or representations of the local history, he does not always differentiate
between past and present. He dedicates several chapters to the history of
and testimonies on the Holocaust and two central chapters to Malaparte’s
novel. After returning to Paris, Pachet undertook his own investigation.
He read Guerri, Malaparte’s biographer, and discovered Malaparte’s 1941
article on the pogrom, which he would later reproduce in facsimile in the
book and translate into French. One of his chapters makes a title out of
the question of whether Malaparte was in the city of Iaşi during the time
of the pogrom; Pachet concludes—supported by Guerri’s biography—
that Malaparte likely had not been there, since he had joined the further
advancement of the front and gone forward to the East. Pachet’s arguments
also rely on a subtle analysis of “The Rats of Jassy” in which dreams play
a leading part, since the character/narrator was more present elsewhere
(in Italy and in France) than in Iaşi. In this respect, Malaparte’s descrip-
tions of the events are more sketchy. Thanks to Guerri, Pachet is aware of
the re-writing of some of Malaparte’s correspondence from the front that
lent them a pro-Soviet and anti-Fascist orientation, but he finds that the
comparison between the journalistic version and the novel chapter is not
detrimental to Malaparte. On the contrary, the newspaper coverage of July
1941 brought to light both the social causes of the conflict and the large
number of executions regardless of any lie imposed by the Romanian and
Nazi propaganda machines. The fact that Malaparte did not reprint this
article in his anthology of 1943, using it instead as raw material for his
novel, could indicate the predominantly “fictitious” nature of the text as
well. Pachet pays tribute to the art of the novelist, who knew how to detach
himself from the immediate history of the pogrom and his perception of
being different from the victims (a feeling he might have had while writing
the article), in order to draw out the symbolic significance of the collective
catastrophe. Pachet concludes that Malaparte has succeeded in “putting
his experience of a liar in the service of truth” (Pachet 1907, 102).
Latest Testimonies, Historiographic Record

One of Malaparte’s undeniable merits is his being the first to testify on
the Iaşi pogrom, in 1944. The other testimonies on the pogrom have been
scattered through time and space; those published in Romania date back to
the early post-war period (Mircu, 1945; Ludo, 1947; Carp, 1948) and they
have been followed by others in Israel (Rubin, 1965; Luca, 1989) and the
United States (Butnaru, 1992). The latest testimonies belong to some well-
known intellectuals and have been released in Romania (Florian, 1997) and
France (Moscovici, 1997; Chiva, 1993, 2003; Tertulian). Major historical
studies have also now been produced (Hausleitner, 1995, 2000; Ioanid,
2000; Ancel, 2005) as scholars have had access to the archives since the fall
of Communism in Romania. Mention should be made here, however, of
the appearance of negationist literature in Romania after 1990, based upon
testimonies of those who had been in charge of the anti-Semitic policy
(Lecca, 1994; Buzatu, 1995). Mariana Hausleitner has noticed deficiencies
concerning the presentation of the history of the Holocaust in Romania
after 1990. Since then, publications have been overwhelmingly written by
revisionist writers promoting a heroic representation of the Eastern front.
Even the most honorable of the Romanian historians have revealed their
moderate nationalism by their willingness to minimize the culpability of
the Romanian authorities.
Re-reading Malaparte’s novel after examining all the historical studies
and testimonies, leaving aside all political and egocentric qualms, one is
struck by the quality of the author’s ethnographic and sociological obser-
vation in Kaputt. Despite some transcription errors, Malaparte was very
familiar with the city’s topography, which gave him the ability to establish
the setting of the action and to specify its dominant characteristics: the cen-
tral position of the Jockey Club; the general aspect of the city with its green
gardens; and the social polarization (already mentioned in the Corriere
della Serra in 1941) between the aristocracy and the mostly Jewish prole-
tariat, separated by the fragile layer of the local bourgeoisie—this constel-
lation makes up a largely lost world. Secondly, Malaparte clearly attributed
responsibility for the pogrom to the Romanian—not the German—
officials, which reveals that he had not fallen victim to the falsification of
the historical truth promoted immediately after the events (Ancel 2005).
As it follows from the novel, even the Nazis, who used to boast of their
“rational” genocidal methods, felt repugnance at the barbarity committed
by the Romanians. Pachet has echoed Malaparte’s behavioral description
of a segment of the population—and some soldiers—during the massacre
in Iaşi (and throughout the war against the USSR) and the scenes related
to ominous rumors regarding the fate of the Jews of Iaşi, testifying to
the truthfulness of Malaparte’s representation. The very vague reference
to the history of the Jewish massacre in Iaşi in the Addendum of the lat-
est Romanian translation of Kaputt 8 and Sturdza’s attempt to discredit
Malaparte’s having witnessed it demonstrate that some Romanian intel-
lectuals have not yet overcome this “Malaparte complex.”
In terms of Romanian history, it would have been more useful to com-
pare Malaparte’s trajectory to the path of some Romanian writers and
actors of the same epoch who were placed in more or less comparable posi-
tions. Although several cases could be quoted here, I have only chosen
two of them, both of whom I find comparable due to their international
fame: Mircea Eliade and Virgil Gheorghiu. Both had Fascist backgrounds
that they tried to deny or to hide. Both wrote autobiographical novels in
which they revised their biographies. Gheorghiu, I would argue, is most
similar to Malaparte, since in his novel The 25th Hour he builds his profile
as a victim of multiple persecutions in a Europe ruined by nationalist con-
flicts. Less alike is Mircea Eliade, who, both in his recently published The
Portugal Journal and in The Forbidden Forest, built a duplicate self to dis-
tance himself from his former companions without denying their beliefs.
Eliade never practiced the “prostitution of beliefs,” as Sturdza claimed
about Malaparte, but he preferred to remain under the sign of mendac-
ity until the end of his life, while Malaparte, “the liar,” redeemed himself
through a testimony that deserves our gratitude.
Notes
1. See also the conversation with the historian Silviu Sanie in Pachet, Conversations
à Jassy, 74–77.
2. Although I conducted my research using the Romanian translation (1999), all
the quotations are taken from the English translation (2005).
3. The French and English translations are “Les rats de Jassy” and “The Rats of
Jassy”—not “The Mice of Jassy”—“Şoarecii din Iaşi,”—as in the Romanian
translation. The word used in Italian is topi, which can be translated both
as “mice” and as “rats.” Because of the tragic content of the story, the correct
translation in Romanian (in this context) should be şobolani (rats), instead of
şoareci (mice).
4. Erroneously located at the “frontier with Bessarabia” in the novel, this small
locality lies some twenty-five kilometers west of Iaşi.
5. In the Romanian translation of Kaputt, “God Shave the King” has been pre-
served only as title of a chapter (64–86).
6. My translation from the French edition.
7. A well-known French intellectual, François Maspero, had his Balkans Transit
published the same year (1997). However, it was not translated into Romanian,
like Pachet’s book.
8. “What was known after the war as the Pogrom in Jassy, pogrom about which
there have been many controversies in the recent historiography,” (Malaparte,
Uricariu, 1999, 307).
Works Cited
Ancel, Jean. 2005. Preludiu la asasinat. Pogromul de la Iaşi, 29 iunie 1941. Trans.
Butnaru, Ion C. 1992. The Silent Holocaust: Romania and Its Jews. Foreword Elie
Wiesel. New York; London: Greenwood Press.
Buzatu, Gheorghe. 1995. Aşa a început holocaustul împotriva poporului român.
Bucharest.
Carp, Matatias. 1948. Cartea neagră: Suferinţele evreilor din România în timpul
dictaturii fasciste, 1940-1944, vol. II-A, Pogromul de la Iaşi. Bucharest: Dacia
Traiană.
Chiva, Isac. April 2003. Le Pogrom de Iaşi de juin 1941. Les Temps Modernes.
7–20.
———. Fall 1992–Winter 1993. À propos de Mircea Eliade. Un témoignage. Le
genre humain. 89–102.
Eliade, Mircea. 2006. Jurnal portughez si alte scrieri. Bucharest: Humanitas.
———. 1978. The Forbidden Forest. Trans. Mac Linscott Ricketts and Mary Park
Stevenson. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Florian, Radu. 1997. Masacrul de la Iaşi din 29–30 iunie 1941, un prim act al
genocidului evreilor. Controversele secolului XX. Bucharest: Diogene. 45–68.
Gheorghiu, Constantin Virgil. 1950. The 25th Hour. Trans. Rita Eldon. New
York: Knopf.
Guerri, Giordano Bruno. 1981. Malaparte. Trans. Valeria Tosca. Paris: Denoël.
———. 1980. L’Arcitaliano, Vita di Curzio Malaparte. Milan: Bompiani.
Hausleitner, Mariana. 1995. Antisemitismus in Rumänien and seine Leugnung
durch die rumänische Öffentlichkeit. Juden und Antisemitismus im östlichen
Europa. Ed. Mariana Hausleitner and Monika Katz. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
50–72.
———, Brigitte Mihok, and Juliane Wetzel, eds. 2000. Rumänien und der
Holocaust. Zu den Massenverbrechen in Transnistrien 1941–1944. Berlin:
Metropol.
Ioanid, Radu. 2000. The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies
under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.
Lecca, Radu. 1994. Eu i-am salvat pe evreii din România. Bucharest: Roza
Vânturilor.
Luca, Eugen. 1989. Pogrom: Iaşi, duminică, 29 iunie 1941. Tel-Aviv.
Ludo, Isac. 1947. Din ordinul cui? Bucharest: Raspîntia.
Malaparte, Curzio. 1999. Kaputt. Trans. Eugen Uricaru. Addendum Mihail

Dimitrie Sturdza. Bucharest: Univers.
———. 2005. Kaputt. Trans. Cesare Foligno. Evanston: Northwestern University
Press.
Mircu, M. 1945. Pogromul de la Iaşi (29 iunie 1941). Bucharest: Glob.
Moscovici, Serge. 1997. Chronique des années égarées: récit autobiographique. Paris:
Stock.
Pachet, Pierre. 1907. Conversations à Jassy. Paris: Maurice Nadeau.
Rubin, Iţic. 1965. Aşa a fost masacrul de la Iaşi. Tel Aviv: Virgil Montaureanu.
Sturdza, Mihail Dimitrie. 1999. Malaparte—Martor ocular la ceea ce nu a văzut
[Malaparte—Witness to What He Did Not See]. Kaputt. Bucharest: Univers.
307–310.
Tertulian, Nicolae. Pourquois Lukacs? Unpublished manuscript.
Uricaru, Eugen. 1999. Complexul Malaparte. Kaputt. Bucharest: Univers.
301–302.
Ch a p t e r Th r e e
Th e Ce r n Ă u Ţ i Gh e t to, t h e
D e portat ions, a n d t h e
D ec e n t M ayor
Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer
I
The zeal with which Romanian authorities began deporting Jews in
the summer of 1941 into German-occupied territories in the Ukraine,
without express orders or requests from the Nazis, has become legend-
ary. Unprepared for the masses of deportees, the Germans sent thou-
sands of them back to Bessarabia and Bukovina, and even blocked several
bridges on the Dniester to stop the floods that were streaming in from
the Bessarabian region of the country. “German National Socialism was
schooled in Romania!” wrote Dr. Nathan Getzler in his wartime diary
of Cernăuţi1 and Transnistria (Getzler 1962, 55). The Romanian Fascist
newspaper Porunca Vremii presented the Romanian efforts to get rid of
Jews as a model to the rest of Europe as early as the summer 1941: “The die
has been cast . . . The liquidation of the Jews in Romania has entered a final,
decisive phase . . . To the joy of our emancipation must be added the pride
of [pioneering] the solution to the Jewish problem in Europe . . . Present-
day Romania is prefiguring the decisions to be made by the Europe of
tomorrow” (Quoted in Ioanid 2000, 122, 123). In a July 8, 1941 address
to the Romanian government, the interim president of the parliament and
acting prime minister, Mihai Antonescu, outlined and justified the plan:
“With the risk of not being understood by some traditionalists who may
still be among you, I am in favor of the forced relocation of the entire
Jewish element in Bessarabia and Bukovina, which must be hurled across
the border . . . It is indifferent to me whether we enter history as barbarians.
The Roman Empire committed some acts of barbarism and it nevertheless
became the vastest and most important political entity of its time . . . There
58 / marianne hirsch and leo spitzer
has never been a more propitious moment in our history . . . Shoot with
machine guns, if necessary”(Carp 1946, 96).
And yet, despite these “pioneering” efforts, despite an elaborate plan
announced in Bucharest in August 1942 to make Romania entirely “juden-
rein” by sending all Jews to Belzec, and despite a longstanding history of
virulent Romanian anti-Semitism, a majority of Jews who inhabited the
Romanian Regat—the heartland core—survived the war.
The Jews in the border regions, on the other hand, especially in those
regions like Bessarabia and northern Bukovina that had been annexed by
the Soviet Union under the Hitler/Stalin pact in 1940–1941, suffered a
much harsher fate. The Red Army, retreating from Cernăuţi in late June
of 1941, had left the northern Bukovina to Romanian troops and the rav-
ages of the German Einsatzgruppe D. In spite of the fact that, only a few
weeks earlier, approximately three thousand Jews had been deported to
Siberia by the Soviets as “capitalists” and “social/political undesirables,”
returning Romanians, inflamed by anti-Semitic propaganda, blamed Jews
here especially for facilitating and sustaining the Communist regime that
had not long ago ignominiously stripped Romania of its territory and
national glory. Many of them viewed Jews living in this region as poten-
tial, if not active, “Communist enemies of the Romanian state” and lashed
out against them.
Matatias Carp describes the night of July 6, shortly after Romanians
re-took the provincial capital:
In Chernovitz, individual soldiers and patrols continued to kill Jews at

random throughout the night . . . In less than twenty-four hours more than
2,000 Jews were killed in the streets, yards, houses, cellars or attics, where
the unfortunate were seeking refuge.
The corpses were transported in rubbish carts to the Jewish cemetery,
and buried in four enormous common graves (Carp 1946, 251–252).
While these murders were carried out, German and Romanian troops
set Chernovtsy’s imposing Jewish Temple on fire, destroying its cupola.
Units of gendarmes also scoured houses throughout the city and took
some three thousand Jewish men, women, and children to the central
police station under arrest. Approximately three hundred from this group,
including Dr. Avraham Mark—the chief rabbi of the city—and other
Jewish community leaders, were then transported to the banks of the Prut
River and shot.
Hedy and Gottfried Brenner, as well as Gottfried’s mother Paula, were
among those who were arrested during the first days of Romanian rule
in July 1941. They recalled how their entire street was closed off and all
Jews were marched off to the courtyard of the town’s army barracks, where
cernĂuŢi ghetto, deportations, and decent mayor / 59
Figure 3.1 Temple Burned by the Nazis, 1941.
the men and women were separated. The men were kept there for several
days; some were beaten and humiliated. All were then moved to the central
police station where they were held overnight with no food or water, sur-
rounded by “hungry cockroaches.” The women were freed in the middle
of the first night, but not until after they were undressed and thoroughly
searched and robbed of any valuables that could be found on them. In
the process, some of them, including Hedy herself, were sexually groped
and molested. Nevertheless, many women, Hedy recalled, came back the
next day with jewelry and cash to bribe police and gain the men’s release.
Matatias Carp provides a more specific account of this bribery: “Police
commissioner Teodorescu began by taking 60–70 dollars per released pris-
oner. But later, the price went down to 50 and 40 dollars, and those who
had no foreign currency could buy their freedom with various objects of
value, a carpet, a clock, a cigarette case, a vacuum cleaner, etc (Carp 1946,
35; Brenner 2006, 173–176).
“Despite everything,” Lotte Hirsch remembers, “we had to walk out
into the streets during those first days after the Romanians came back
because both the water and the electricity were off and we had to try to
find some kerosene and something to drink and wash with. One of those
times, Carl and I were going to get water from a well, and a non-Jew saw
us and warned us that hostages were being taken, so we went right home.
There was always danger and it was a kind of lottery.”
Gottfried Brenner was arrested again, not long after his initial release,
along with three hundred other Jewish men from three centrally located
streets. “As we were being walked through the city that second time,” he
told us, “we met a unit of Romanian soldiers. ‘Where are you taking these
Jews?’ they asked our guards. ‘We can kill them for you right here, and save
you the trouble.’ We feared the worst since we had already heard about the
killings on the Prut when they shot Rabbi Mark and so many others.” In
her memoir, Hedy describes the persistence with which she and a group of
other wives pursued the men’s release from the Romanian Culture Palace
on the theater square where they were being held by a German contingent
under Obersturmbannführer Finger. In an act of daring, she approached a
German lieutenant in the street and asked his intervention on behalf of her
husband. Serendipitously in this instance, it turned out that that officer,
Klaus Geppert, had studied electrical engineering in the same Prague uni-
versity as Gottfried Brenner and, even though he had not known him there
personally, agreed to help him and a few of his friends gain their release
(Brenner 2006, 77–88).
Not long after the Romanian return, an official notice was published
in the local newspapers:
ORDINANCE Nr. 1344 of July 30, 1941:

. . . ART.6. Jews of every age and sex are obliged to wear a distinctive sign,
in the shape of two equilateral triangles with 6 cm. bases, superimposed in
such a way as to form the Jewish star, made out of yellow fabric, on the left
side of the chest, in a visible manner.
ART.7. Any disregard of the present ordinance will be sanctioned with
internment in a lager; graver sanctions matching ordinary and special penal
codes may be applied.
ART.8. . . . article . . . 6 will be enforced three days from the time it is
posted (Carp 1946, 98–99).
From the beginning of August, therefore, Cernăuţi Jews were com-

pelled to wear a Yellow Star. In addition to this requirement, Romanian
police enforced a series of severe restrictions on the city’s Jewish inhabit-
ants: Jews were only allowed to circulate in groups smaller than three,
and only between the hours of 6:00 am and 8:00 pm; they could only do
their marketing between 9:30 am and 11:00 am; they could not buy bread
before 6:00 pm; they were strictly forbidden to display flags, including the
Romanian national flag or the German and Italian flags; all Jewish-owned
businesses were outlawed and professional Jews were required to post a
visible sign bearing the word “Jew” on the front of the buildings where
they practiced and displayed their names, professions, and office hours. All
Jewish children, moreover, were dismissed from existing schools.
“I remember how we made the stars out of yellow fabric,” Lotte told us.
“It was a really powerful experience the first time we had to put it on. I had
to overcome a strong resistance to go outside with it on. We were marked
as pariahs.”2
Carl Hirsch added, “Interestingly, the first time Lotte and I walked
outside wearing it, a Romanian priest lifted his hat and bowed to us, out of
respect to human suffering.”
“But,” Lotte specified, “on that same day two young rowdies saw us
walking down the street and they spat—on us, or on the star, I don’t
know.”
In spite of these hardships and humiliations, the situation in the city
calmed down much more quickly than in the countryside. There, local
Romanians, Ukrainians, and members of German Einsatzgruppen car-
ried out massive killings among the rural Jewish population. Those who
survived were then slated for deportation to Transnistria in the early fall
of 1941. In neighboring Bessarabia, deportations began at the end of
September. News of these killings and deportations spread into Cernăuţi.
But, despite rumors and warnings about the possible return and spread of
violence to the city, for the most part the urban Jewish population contin-
ued to live and work, trying as best they could to adjust to the increasingly
draconian restrictions on their freedom. Nathan Getzler characterized
their attitude: “We waited for a miracle that would save us” (1962, 55).
But no miracle came. Instead, on October 11, 1941, Cernăuţi Jews
were ordered to abandon their homes and congregate in a ghetto. The new
words whispered about were “deportation” and “resettlement.”
II
“In those days I worked at the railroad administration office from eight to
one and from four to seven,” Carl Hirsch told us, as we walked through
the streets of Chernivtsi with him and Lotte in 1998, during their first
return trip to the city of their birth since they had fled from it in 1945.
“Before work, on that Saturday, the 11th of October, I stopped at Lotte’s
house to say hello like I often did since we began going out together (they
were later married, in the ghetto). As I was walking along, a neighbor
stopped me and said, ‘Read this,’ and showed me an ordinance that was
posted on a near-by building. It said: ‘Anyone who harbors Jews or other
undesirables, anyone who owns firearms, etc. will immediately be put to
death.’ I told her I didn’t think that that concerned us, and I went to
work. What was I supposed to do? At 1:00 pm, when I come home for a
meal, I see that everyone is carrying knapsacks and bundles. What’s that,
I thought? When I came home to my mother’s they were all packed to go.
Lotte’s family had arranged for us all to go to their cousin Blanka Engler’s
apartment in the Steingasse (Rom.: Şt. O. Iosif), which was located within
the newly established ghetto. We were eleven: my mother, two sisters, my
brother, Lotte and I, her father and mother, her sister, her sister’s fiancé
and his mother.”
“The ghetto was formed and our part of the street was outside of it,”
Lotte added, “and we had to be inside the area that would be closed off
as the ghetto by six in the afternoon. Since Blanka’s place was already ter-
ribly overcrowded, Carl’s sisters arranged to go with their mother and their
brother to a friend’s apartment. But when it was time for us to be deported,
we all eleven of us left together.”
“How did you know to go—was there any order in writing, any ordi-
nance?” we asked.
“The members of the Jewish Council went from house to house and said,
by 6:00 pm you have to be within this perimeter—between the St. O. Iosif,
which was the former Steingasse [Uk.: Pereyaslavska], and the St. Mărăşeşti,
the Neuweltgasse [Uk.: Shevchenka], extending north and east and includ-
ing the Judengasse [Uk.: Shalom Alejhema] and poorer Jewish neighbor-
hood nearer to the train station,” Carl responded. “They said we should
bring warm coats, other clothing, food for a few days, as much as we could
carry. Nothing was posted. They told us to place the apartment keys in
an envelope with our names on it and that we would have to hand those
envelopes to the authorities when we arrived in the ghetto. I said, ‘We’re
leaving—we must set the house on fire.’ Do you remember, Lotte?”
“My father said, ‘This cannot be possible!’ ” Lotte Hirsch added, smil-
ing pleasurably as she recalled her father–a lawyer–and his sense of justice.
“ ‘This violates the Declaration of the Rights of Man.’ ”
We had been slowly walking a few blocks now, talking, videotaping.
“Come here, look,” Carl suddenly called to us, pointing. “Here they made
a fence and soldiers stood here. Here was the edge of the ghetto. And here,
now we are inside the ghetto.” He stepped inside the boundary he had
drawn for us in the air. “And here we moved into Blanka’s apartment, there
on the second floor.” The three-story apartment building looked neglected
and in need of refurbishing and painting, but otherwise, externally, it
had probably not changed significantly over the decades since 1941. But
the tree-lined street on which we walked was quiet as we walked there in
mid-morning September 1998—surely quite different from that fateful
cold afternoon in October so many years ago. Carl continued his narra-
tive: “The next morning we went out to talk to everyone. We could move
around freely inside the ghetto; everyone was dressed casually, in sweaters,
for the trip—to the ghetto and beyond. Word is out that the ghetto is only
temporary and that we would be taken eastwards, somewhere across the
Figure 3.2 Map of 1941 Cernăuţi Ghetto.

Notes: The darker markings on this map show the Cernăuţi ghetto in its first configuration when it was
created on October 11, 1941. The markings are based on official information about the ghetto in
Cernăuţi, published in the Romanian newspaper Bucovina on Saturday, October 11, 1941, the day the
ghetto was officially established. The map on which the ghetto is marked is the “Stadplan von Czernowitz
(Cernăuţi)” that was published by the German Military in 1941 using a Romanian period base map
(which explains the Romanian street names together with German language identifications of some sites
(i.e., Juden-Friedhof; Schlachthof; Güterbahnhof, etc.). A high-resolution version of the BASE map (1.4
megabytes) can be found on the internet.3
Dniester. We knew that, for us, now start the ‘Forty Days of Musa Dagh,’
(you know, that novel by Franz Werfel about the Armenians chased out of
their homes and into the desert by the Turks in World War I).
We’re on a Sunday. We’re here Monday, Tuesday. On Wednesday
[October 15] everyone living on the Steingasse (where we were staying) and
surrounding streets was supposed to go to the train station for deportation.
We had known that this was coming and, of course, we were packed to
go. It’s how we had come there to Blanka’s; we never unpacked. We met
up with my mother, brother, and sisters and we all went outside and saw
a lot of peasants with horse-drawn carts waiting for customers to trans-
port to the depot, and Lotte’s father said, ‘It’s a sunny day, a good day for
traveling.’ So we loaded all our things, for eleven people, onto one of these
carts and waited our turn to go.”
Lotte, gesturing, had something to add: “This is something, Carl,
which you don’t totally admit. They said, now the Steingasse is on, and we
put everything on that wagon. Everything. We had pillows, bedding, pots,
all our elderly sick relatives on foot, everyone carrying something. What
you won’t admit is that a Romanian soldier came to our door and said,
‘Ok, now you have to go.’ ”
Carl was impatient: “There’s no point. Everyone was already outside,
we all knew. We have to tell the same story. The soldier is beside the point.
The Jewish Council said, get ready.”
“Yes, the Jewish Council worked with them; they hoped perhaps to
save at least a few people.” She was ready to agree, “Yes, we knew we had
to leave.”
We were on what used to be the Steingasse, standing on the street where
they stood with hundreds of others, with carts and belongings. Did a sol-
dier come to the door to summon them to get out, or were they already
prepared to do so anyway? Did it really matter? Several others whom we
subsequently interviewed mention that some newly ghettoized Jews rushed
to leave on the trains during the first days of deportations, convinced that
they would get better lodging in Transnistria if they arrived there sooner
rather than later. Max Gottfried’s comment that “this is a sunny day, a
good day for traveling,” certainly indicated a certain resignation, at least
on his part, if not an actual willingness to recognize and accept what the
authorities had mandated.
Carl continued his narrative: “While we were standing there on the
street, a neighbor came by and pulled me aside, ‘I hear that some profes-
sionals will be allowed to stay in Czernowitz,’ she said. ‘Some waivers will
be granted.’ I asked around. My sister had heard the same thing from
another source but had not dared to believe it. About a half hour later—we
were still on that street, there were lots of carts ahead of us, and everything
was moving really slowly—a Romanian major walked by and I said to
him, ‘Domnule maior, I hear that professionals will be allowed to stay. I am
an engineer.’ He looked at me quickly and said, ‘Stay.’ That’s all.
Imagine, I was on my way to the station with eleven people: my old
mother, Lotte’s old parents, her sick sister, the old mother of my brother-
in-law. All were scared. Lotte and I had to act. So we took the carriage
and . . .”
“But wait,” Leo interrupted. “You had nothing in writing, and that
Romanian major was gone. How could you . . . ?”
“He had said only three words,” Lotte pointed to the ground. “ ‘Rămâi
pe loc. Stay right here!’ ”
Figure 3.3 Traian Popovici.
Following a quick decision, Carl Hirsch directed the carriage and the
group of his and Lotte’s relatives back into the ghetto, bribing a young sol-
dier manning the entrance, and re-entered it. Once back inside, the group
sought refuge in the house of distant cousins, the Lehrs, whose street had
not yet been scheduled for evacuation.
“We went on to the Lehrs. There were already about thirty to thirty-
five people there, but they took us in, eleven more. My siblings slept in the
laundry room behind the house, and for the rest of us they found some
floor space somewhere. This was on a Wednesday. On that evening, in
the Jewish Hospital, which was the seat of the Jewish Council at the time,
the Romanian mayor of Cernăuţi, Traian Popovici, came by and made an

announcement.”
“He spoke in a mixture of German and Yiddish,” Carl specified. “He
said, ‘Ich hob fir euch eine gute Bashere.’ I have good news for you. You are
staying here. You see, he had to arrange for professionals with technical
skills to stay. He couldn’t run the city otherwise. Only later, he changed it
to say that only part of the Jewish population will be able to stay.”
Traian Popovici, who would later be recognized by Yad Vashem as a
“Righteous Gentile” for his role in saving thousands of Cernăuţi Jews from
deportation to Transnistria, provided his own account of those dramatic days
in October 1941. We quote from his little known testimony at some length:
On that 10 October, I was summoned to the governor’s office. General

Calotescu instructed me to see that the bakeries baked more bread than
usual to supply the Jewish population that was going into the ghetto and
hand them out four loaves per head as they embarked on the trains.
It is in the governor’s office that I found out the deportation of the Jews
from Cernăuţi had been decided. At the same time, I learned about the
other measures concerning their internment in the ghetto—the goods they
left behind at home were to be collected and handed over to the state for
safekeeping . . .
I was petrified and could barely utter a few words. “How could you come
to this, Mr. Governor?” “What could I do?” he said. “It is the Marshal’s
order and here are the envoys of the general staff.”
I first warned him about the historical responsibility he was taking
upon himself; about the international consequences we will have to bear;
about the difficulties we will face at the final peace conference where civi-
lized nations will call Romania to account . . . I spoke about mankind and
humaneness, of the traditional kindheartedness of Romanians, [of] sav-
agery, cruelty, murder and disgrace . . . I mentioned the disgrace of Spain
that had never managed to clear its history of the stain of Torquemada’s
anti-Jewish persecution of 1492. I said, and I quote: ‘Domnule guvernator,
the French Revolution that gave mankind the gift of justice and freedom
took a toll of 11,800 while with the winter coming soon, you are sending
50,000 to their death.’
The colonel Petrescu suddenly said: ‘Who’s going to write history, Mr.
Mayor, the yids? I’m coming here to weed your garden and you won’t let
me do it?’
On the morning of October 11, a cold wet day, as gloomy as the hearts
of so many wretched people, I looked out the bedroom window attracted by
the first flakes of an early snow and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Out there,
a great convoy were going into exile: Old men leaning on children, women
with babies in their arms, cripples dragging their mangled bodies, all bags in
hand, the healthy ones pushing barrows or carts, or were carrying on their
back coffers hastily packed and tied, blankets, bed sheets, clothes, odds and
ends, all of them heading for the city’s vale of tears, the ghetto . . .
Anyone who was familiar with the topography of Cernăuţi would have
grasped from the limits provided in the “notification” what a small area
had been reserved for the ghetto. The neighborhood, to which the Jewish
population was “invited” to move before 6 PM, or face the death penalty,
could not have sheltered more than 10,000 people pressed together like in
a bazaar. It had to house 50,000, not to mention the Christian population
that was living there . . .
The accommodation capacity was minimal. Even by huddling up to
30 people or more in what rooms were available, the great majority had to
take shelter in corridors, lofts, cellars, barns, or any other shed that would
protect them from rain or snow. There were no hygienic conditions to speak
about. Drinking water was scant and doubtful; the number of wells was
insufficient. Actually, the city had water problems, as two out of three water
works had been destroyed. Almost immediately, a combined stench of rank
sweat, urine, feces, and mildew extended over the neighborhood, making it
distinct from the rest of town. It was exactly the same concentrated smell as
that emerging from a pen of sheep in a green pasture . . .
On the next morning, Sunday, October 12, I was invited to a meeting
of all public authorities at the governor’s office. We were 18 . . . I was the
only one who . . . stood up and spoke at length about the Jewish question in
our time and in that climate of racial hatred in which I said we Romanians,
were a nation too small to engage. I stressed the merits of the Jews, their
worthy contributions to the economic development of the country, their
achievements in every area of work and culture, and, in my capacity as
mayor of the city, I protested against this act . . .
I asked that those who had devoted their lives to profound culture and
fine arts be spared. I asked for the reward of the pensioners, officers, inva-
lids who had earned the gratitude of our nation. I asked if we might keep
here professionals in all branches of industry. I asked that foremen in every
branch of industry should be allowed to stay. I asked, for the sake of human-
ity, that doctors be exempted. I argued for keeping back the engineers and
architects that would be needed for the work of reconstruction. I pleaded
for exempting magistrates and lawyers, showing we owed that much to
intellect and civilization . . . The fact is that the governor partly endorsed
my views and publicly authorized me to make a list of who, according to
my arguments, were entitled to the gratitude of our nation. I was asked not
to exceed a maximum of 100 to 120 . . .
On Wednesday afternoon, October 15, Marshal Antonescu talked with
the governor on the phone and agreed to mitigate the deportation measure.
Consequently he ordered that up to 20,000 Jews should be exempted, com-
prising the categories I had mentioned . . . That’s how about 20,000 Jews
were allowed to remain in Cernăuţi.
On the evening of that very day, October 15, once General Ionescu
and I set our schedule for the next day, I took a ride to the Jewish hos-
pital, which was located on a border of the ghetto, on the main street to
the station. I had been informed earlier in the day about the outbreak
of a typhus epidemic which required some preventative measures that
involved the municipality. Besides, I wanted to convey to the community
leaders the message that the Marshal intended to spare part of the local
Jewry . . .
The dramatic moments when I broke the hopeful news to them I think
have been the most solemn and moving in my life so far . . . (Popovici 2001,
76–90)
How did Jews remaining in the ghetto receive the autorizaţie (authoriza-
tions) to escape deportation? The oral and written accounts of this dis-
tressing time are replete with ambiguities and contradictions. According
to Carl Hirsch:
The leaders of the Jewish community prepared lists of the Jewish population
arranged by professions and the Government issued to part of the popula-
tion authorizations to remain in the city. I got two, one as a civil engineer
from the lists of the Jewish community and one as a railway employee.
My brother got one as a mining engineer and one from his employment,
which having been issued without a first name on it, was used by another
Hirsch family . . . Many were not that fortunate and were put into trains
to Transnistria, two aunts of ours with their families, my friend Lulziu
[Israel] Chalfen who, though a doctor, did not have the right connections,
and many others . . . Approx. 12 days after we left our homes we returned
(Hirsch, 76–78).
Pearl Fichman writes:
Since the Jewish community could not figure out what was intended or who
was needed, they started registration of specialists . . . Everyone was desper-
ate and lists were made of any kind of specialty. I registered wherever they
would accept my name. You did not have to show a document that would
come up later. I was on a students list (who needed students?), on a chemists
list, nurse, anywhere. I put Father’s name on all kinds of lists . . .
In the meantime, October neared its end, the weather got colder, rains
made it very hard to stand for hours and listen for the names of people who
received the permit to return. I went daily to that military station where the
lucky ones received the reprieve from concentration camp. Those returned
to their apartments in town and those who remained behind felt more and
more desperate (Fichman 2005, 75–76).
Bribery, however, was certainly also a factor in receiving the autorizaţie.

Its pervasiveness explains how many Jews who were not professionally
essential to the city’s functioning and not directly related to such persons—
retired lawyers, businessmen, unemployed school teachers, or unemployed
pharmacists, for example—were exempted from deportation. Carl spoke of
authorizations that were gotten with bribes that were given to the heads of
departments in the provincial government. Lotte elaborated on this. “You
will remember, Carl,” she noted, “that my uncle Kubi Rubel [who owned
the large house to which they retreated after turning back to the ghetto,
avoiding their scheduled deportation] one day took out pencil and paper
and made his own list of those who would need autorizaţie. Without blink-
ing, he said he would ‘take care of’ everything.” Beate Schwammenthal,
a cousin of Lotte’s, and a child in 1941, also remembers that Onkel Kubi
“took care of everything.” “I was only 21 years old, but with money you
could do a great deal at the time,” Rita Pistiner, another unemployed
Cernăuţi resident who managed to avoid being deported, confirmed.4
And yet, who took the bribes, how members of the Jewish Council might
have been involved, how the system actually worked, why some doctors
and other active professionals were deported while many without “useful
professions” were able to be exempted, remains veiled in obscurity and
suspicion.
By November 15, 1941, the deportations from Cernăuţi to Transnistria
stopped. At that point, according to Matatias Carp’s Cartea neagră, about
30,000 Jews from Cernăuţi had been deported, about 15,600 received offi-
cial exemptions from the selection committee, and the remaining 4000 or
so were given temporary permits to remain in the city by the mayor (1946,
285). The latter were referred to as “Popovici authorizations.” According to
Popovici’s account (based on a census carried out for the ministry of agricul-
ture), there had been forty-nine thousand Jews in the city in August 1941.
On December 16, 1941, 19, 521 Jews remained in Cernăuţi, while 28,391
had been deported. In total, including persons from northern Bukovina
camps and various towns in the southern Bukovina, over ninety thousand
were shipped off to Transnistria.5 Why did the deportations stop? Why
was the ghetto dissolved? How did such a significant number of Cernăuţi
Jews earn the unbelievable good fortune of being spared when in the entire
remainder of the Bukovina, only 182 Jews were exempted from deportation?
These are some of the questions surrounding the Holocaust in Romania.
The Cernăuţi Jews’ worries were not over with the halt of these deporta-
tions, however. “We had barely settled in,” Pearl Fichman writes, “when,
by the end of November, the governor issued a decree, summoning all
permit holders to have them reviewed by a military commission, to have
everything documented. That threw a new scare into everybody” (2005,
78). This commission had a great deal of power, and its work must have
been the source of the numerous categories that can be found on the iden-
tification and registration cards issued in 1941 and then reviewed again in
1943 and 1944.
Each card was marked with a large yellow star and a stamp reading
evreu (Jew), as well as with numerous signatures and numbers. “[We were
registered] in a large hall with a lot of different tables,” Carl told us, “and,
listen, this is a good story. I went together with my brother, but it got
late and his review was interrupted; he would have to go back the next
day to complete his documentation. He came home dejected, in despair.
‘Carl, I have to pack for Transnistria,’ he told me. What happened? When
he was about fifteen years old, he had been arrested one night for pass-
ing out Communist leaflets. Consequently, on his authorization, which
he brought home that night, it said, provine din liste de siguranţă (appears
on the lists of the secret police). This was serious. He was ready to throw
in the towel. So you know what I did?” Carl laughed when he told this
story. “I just took an eraser, and I rubbed out that sentence. Just like that.
We were lucky it had been entered in pencil. The next day he went back
and—no problem.”
When the remaining Jews returned from the ghetto, their num-
bers were severely diminished, since so many friends and neighbors had
been deported. Some of their apartments had been plundered and their
remaining belongings slowly had to be sold off or traded in exchange for
food. Gottfried Brenner had a well-known stamp collection. “One day a
Romanian knocked on our door and asked to see the collection. ‘Aren’t
you going to sell it?’ he asked me. ‘Why would I want to sell it?’ I said.
‘Well, you aren’t going to be here long; you’ll be sent off sooner or later.’
‘Thank you very much for your kind concern,’ I said, ‘but I’m not selling
right now.’ And I didn’t sell that collection!” Isaak Ehrlich tells of his high
school teacher, Professor Mandiuc, who met him on the street one day
and told him he was looking for an overcoat: “You will all be deported
to the Ukraine and you will not survive. You must give me your coat; I
was your professor.”6 Even Traian Popovici describes the Romanians who
bought, plundered, or simply offered to “take care of” the Jews’ possessions
as “sharks” (2001, 83). Nevertheless, Carl was eager to note the friendship
and respect he enjoyed at his place of work, and how much this meant
to him: “I just have to say this, that the day I returned to work from the
ghetto, the assistant manager of the office kissed me. His name was Boris
Gretzov and, years later, in Timişoara, I was able to be helpful to him as
well. Some of them were very nice to us.”
After the dissolution of the ghetto, the city’s Jewish population tried
to return to some semblance of normalcy. The authorities remunerated
some of the work (in December, 1941, the Jewish engineers even received
back pay from August), but considered most labor as the equivalent of
military service (from which Jews were, of course, excluded) or of the
agricultural or construction labor that others were forced to carry out. For
the most, however, pay was simply arbitrarily withheld. Some Jews con-
tinued to work as employees in the businesses they had previously owned.
Others were able to find occasional work for which they were paid small
amounts: Lotte gave English lessons to a Romanian officer in return for

food items that he was able to provide.
III
The close calls, the split-second decisions, the narrow escapes recalled in
the narratives of persons who survived the war years in Cernăuţi can lead
to the impression that the situation for Jews in the Bukovina, where they
lived under Romanian and not strictly Nazi, administration, was relatively
“easier” than in other places in German-occupied Europe. Unlike what
had taken place in Jewish ghettos in Poland or during the Holocaust years
in other parts of Eastern Europe, in Cernăuţi, personal ingenuity, presence
of mind, the use of bribery—alone or in combination—actually did save
lives. “What was important was that this was not a personal tragedy,” Lotte
told us, “but that we were all in the same boat. We were in it together.
There were also good times, intense moments of friendship. There was a
curfew, so when we got together we had to sleep at each other’s houses. We
sometimes played bridge or other card games, talked, made little snacks.
One egg, one can of sardines, could feed an entire group for many hours.”
Friendship and community enabled them to brave danger and risk: hid-
ing out in the apartment of a Romanian acquaintance away on business,
for instance, to listen to and be cheered by radio news on BBC or Europa
Liberă of German losses. Despite moments of extreme danger, need, and
uncertainty in the midst of war, something of the positive quality of their
lives together in the city they continued to call Czernowitz—their close-
ness, the thrill of living on the edge—sustained them.
It is important to emphasize, however, that the thousands upon thou-
sands of Jewish victims from Romanian-controlled territories could
hardly be viewed as fortunate, and that the impression we gain from the
situation and possibilities of the Jews remaining in wartime Cernăuţi
needs to be adjusted in this light. Indeed, in June 1942, after a seven-
month hiatus, deportations from Cernăuţi to Transnistria resumed. For
those Jews who had been exempted in 1941, a new period of terror began.
Carl and Lotte Hirsch—now living in Carl’s mother’s small second-
floor apartment on the former Franzensgasse (Rom.: 11 Noiembrie;
Ukr.: 28 Tchervnia) together with Carl’s siblings and Rosa’s husband,
Moritz Gelber—were eyewitnesses to selections that were made in the
street below. “Each Sunday, in June, several hundred Jews were gath-
ered here, right in front of the house, and they waited to be sent to the
Maccabi-Platz, and from there to the train station to board the trains for
Transnistria,” Lotte told us.
“You asked me once for my most powerful memory of those years,” said
Carl. “There are several, but the first that comes to mind is of our landlord
in this house. He was originally from a village near Czernowitz and in the
summer of 1942, when the second set of deportations happened, he was
taken away as we were watching. Others stood quietly, but this man cried
bitterly and screamed in Yiddish, ‘What are they doing to us? Where are
they taking us?’ I’ll never forget that; he cried so bitterly.”
Word spread quickly that the so-called Popovici authorizations issued
by the mayor in November of 1941 were no longer recognized as valid by
the governor of the Bukovina. Popovici, now out of favor for his outspoken
opposition to the earlier deportations and for his intervention, had been
replaced. Similarly, some who were considered “politicals,” like Lotte’s cousin
Dr. Arthur Kessler (who had been the head of a hospital under the Soviets),
were deported to Transnistria in early summer of 1942. Carl describes his
recollections of those fateful Sundays of June 1942 in his memoir:
The procedure was to pick up the people on Sunday early morning (on 3
consecutive June Sundays), to bring them to an open sports stadium where
they were checked in the presence of the Jewish community, release some
who were either needed, or taken by mistake, and ship them Sunday night
to Transnistria . . . The leaders of the Community used their influence to
get the release of some people who had to support their family, and prob-
ably for some of their friends who asked to be protected. On the last day
too many people were released and in order to fill the quota, the military
in charge took a number of people from two streets out of their apartments
indiscriminately . . . Interestingly, some people who knew that they were in
danger of being deported went into hiding during these days and after
the deportations were over they came back into the open without being
bothered (Hirsch, 80).
One name that comes up quite often in connection to Cernăuţi in

this period is that of Lieutenant Stere Marinescu, head of the Office of
Jewish Affairs II. This man and his co-workers worked under the gover-
nor and took massive bribes both locally from individual Jews and from
Jewish organizations in Bucharest, always promising not to organize fur-
ther deportations and assuring the safety of Jews remaining of Cernăuţi.
Many of those who bribed him individually were deported so as not to
be able to testify to his corruption. It has been suggested that Marinescu
himself, not a directive from Bucharest, ordered the June 1942 depor-
tations of those four thousand Jews who only had “Popovici authoriza-
tions,” but this seems unlikely, given this official’s relatively low rank
within the ruling hierarchy. The actual deportation orders were signed
by the governor, but Marinescu himself carried out the evacuations with
great brutality. Matatias Carp cites the war crimes trial records of chief
prosecutor A. Bunaciu, regarding the deportations in Cernăuţi on June 7,

14, and 28, 1942:
Marinescu appears in all his inhumanity on the occasion of the deporta-

tions of the summer of 1942. At that time Marinescu became the head of
the Office of Jewish Affairs II, the one that was in charge of carrying out
the deportations . . . We have a series of witnesses who describe the proce-
dure Marinescu used . . . The scenes were horrendous. When the inhabit-
ants heard the knock on the door they already knew what was awaiting
them. If one had a valid document or authorization exempting him from
deportation . . . Marinescu or his people said, “No documents matter here,
only money does.” Only money had value for him. This is how we can
explain . . . the deportation of Polish citizens, of sick people, old people and
war invalids (Carp 1946, 251, 252).
In a report dated September 7, 1942 and confirmed in a second report

of December 12, 1942, Governor Calotescu states that 4,094 Jews were
deported from Cernăuţi during the previous summer (Ioanid 2000, 173).
Among them were the parents of Paul Antschel (Celan); Celan himself had
gone into hiding during the night that his parents were taken and his biog-
raphers concur that he was never able to get over his guilt at having aban-
doned them. Both parents died in the Mihaelovka camp in Transnistria
during the following winter.
In immediate effect, these 1942 deportations were even more deadly
than the deportations of 1941 because the majority of deportees were sent
to the border of Transnistria adjoining the Bug River or directly across
the Bug into German-controlled territory, to Nazi slave labor and almost
certain death.
The brutality of people like Marinescu contrasts with the decency
of Mayor Popovici, but the fact that local officials had such significant
impact on government policy is one of the peculiarities of the Romanian
Holocaust. Indeed, throughout the summer of 1942, at the very same
time that the Cernăuţi deportations were happening, efforts in Bucharest
to stop the plan to deport all the Romanian Jews to Belzec (as Marshal
Ion Antonescu had been urged to do by his Nazi allies in Berlin) were also
under way. The bishop of Transylvania, the Queen Mother Elena (who
threatened to leave Romania if her son, the King, went along with the
plan), the Papal Nuncio, the ambassadors of Switzerland and Sweden, and
even—indirectly—the U.S. government all made efforts to intervene and
prevent implementation of the plan. Did Antonescu listen to these pleas
and arguments? Which made the decisive impact on him? For reasons
that remain unclear to this day, in October of 1942, he formed a com-
mission to find a different “solution to the Jewish problem.” Meanwhile,
of course, the Wehrmacht, together with Romanian forces, had already

suffered significant defeats on the Eastern front and the outcome of the
war was less certain than it had previously been. In the aftermath of
these defeats and the enormous losses suffered by the Romanian mili-
tary, Romanian authorities in Bucharest began to ease up somewhat on
Jews within their territorial control (Ioanid 2000, 238–248; Hausleitner
2001, 402–403). These attitudinal modifications had profound conse-
quences for the possibilities of Jewish survival in Cernăuţi.
Notes
This essay is based on a chapter in Hirsch and Spitzer, Ghosts of Home. For another
account of this period in Cernăuţi, see Heymann, 2003.
1. The political history of this city is complex. Until 1918, as capital of the
Bukovina province under Austrian-Habsburg rule, it was called Czernowitz.
Under subsequent Romanian rule, from 1918–1940, it was renamed Cernăuţi.
From 1940–1941 and from 1945–1991, under Russian rule, it was called
Chernovtsi. During World War II, from 1942–1945, when the Romanians
regained control of the city with Nazi German assistance, it was again Cernăuţi.
When Ukraine became an independent Republic in 1991, the city acquired its
current name, Chernivtsi.
2. For more on the Yellow Star in Cernăuţi, see Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania,
141–142.
3. See http://czernowitz.ehpes.com.
4. Rita Pistiner, cited in Gaby Coldewey, 43.
5. Popovici, Spovedania Testimony, 87–97. In all probability, of course, the num-
ber of Jews in the city after the 1941 deportations was higher. He writes: “By
my own estimates, their [the Jews’] number must have . . . topped 20,000. It is
a noted fact that many Jews, for reasons that are not hard to figure, eschewed
both the census and the sorting process and preferred never to ask for ration
tickets”
6. Isaak Erlich, cited in Gaby Coldewey, 42.
Works Cited
Brenner, Hedwig. 2006. Mein 20. Jahrhundert. Brugg, Switzerland: Munda.
Carp, Matatias. 1996. Cartea neagră: Suferinţele evreilor din România. Vol. 3
Transnistria. Bucharest: Editura Diogene.
Carp, Matatias. 2001. Holocaust in Romania: Facts and Documents on the
Annihilation of Romania’s Jews. Trans. Sean Murphy. Safety Harbor, FL: Simon
Publications.
Carp, Matatias. 2010. Cartea neagră: Le Livre noir de la destruction des Juif de
Roumanie, 1940–1944. Ed. Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine. Paris: Denoël.
Coldewey, Gaby, et al., eds.2003. Zwischen Pruth und Jordan: Lebenserinnerungen
Czernowitzer Juden. Cologne: Böhlau.
Fichman, Pearl. 2005. Before Memories Fade. N.p.: Booksurge Publishing.

Getzler, Nathan. 1962. Tagebuchblätter aus Czernowitz und Transnistrien (1941–
1942). Ed. Hugo Gold. Geschichte der Juden in der Bukowina, vol. II. Tel Aviv:
Olamenu.
Hausleitner, Mariana. 2001. Die Rumänisierung der Bukowina. Munich:
Oldenbourg.
Heymann, Florence. 2003. Le Crépuscule des lieux: Identités juives de Czernowitz.
Paris: Stock.
Hirsch, Carl. A Life in the Twentieth Century: A Memoir, unpublished manuscript.
New York: Leo Baeck Institute.
Hirsch, Marianne and Leo Spitzer. 2010. Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz
in Jewish Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ioanid, Radu. 2000. The Holocaust in Romania: The Fate of Jews and Gypsies in
Fascist Romania, 1940–1944. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.
Popovici, Traian. 2001. Spovedania Testimony. Ed. Th. Wexler. Trans. Viviane
Prager. Bucharest: Fundaţia Dr. W. Filderman.
Ch a p t e r Fou r
“Bo t t l e s i n t h e Se a”: L e t t e r s of
D e port e d Je ws i n Mo g h i le v
(Tr a nsn i st r i a),
Nov e m be r–D ec em be r 1941
Florence Heymann
After I finished my doctoral thesis in 2001 on the Jewish identities of

Bukovina and Czernowitz, and published a book (Heymann 2003) on the
same subject, I continued my research on the history of the Holocaust in
the region and in Transnistria. It is in this context that I spent a month in
2004 in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
in Washington, DC,1 where I found a corpus of more than one hundred
letters, most of them from Moghilev.2 I was immediately interested; per-
sonal testimonies often speak to me better than arid archival documents.
They express “the human dimension of an event which could differently
remain too abstract” (Hoffmann 2004, 161). Why were these letters from
Transnistria gathered together in a file of the “Directorate-General of the
Post, Telegraph and Telephone of Romania”? Had the recipients replied
to these letters? Where were the replies? To these questions, and a number
of others, I did not then have the least answers, but I was very intrigued.
Before I left Washington for Jerusalem, where I live, I mailed myself pho-
tocopies of all the archival documents I had perused during my stay, par-
ticularly these letters, hoping to find them waiting at home when I arrived.
But I had to wait anxiously—it took three months to get them.
I decided to translate this correspondence into French and requested
the assistance of Mrs. Rachel Ampel, a native of Czernowitz 3 who had
lived there during the Holocaust. Week after week, we worked together
with a magnifying glass to decipher these resistant writings, the spidery
scrawl, and the half- erased documents written in a regional German
marked by the sociocultural level of the authors. Once a week, I went
78 / florence heymann
to Mrs. Ampel’s house. She translated into Hebrew; I made notes in

French; and then I returned to my office and compared this double
translation with the original.4 Most of the letters (111 out of 138) were
in German; twenty-six were in Romanian; one was in Yiddish.5 The
replies, which the writers obviously hoped for and expected, were lost:
Did these missives ever reach their intended recipients? Had they been
censored? And why were all these messages dated from the same weeks
of November and December 1941? Obviously, at this stage, I could not
know if these letters were ever delivered and, consequently, if the replies
were even written.
Witnesses and People

Initially, I treated the letters as testimonies gathered together only by
chance. But what was their nature? And why were they different from
other kinds of archival documents? In general, testimonies differ according
to the period in which they were produced, and also according to whether
they were spontaneous productions or answers to an external request.6
They could be life stories, for example, intended to be transmitted to
children—more often, to grandchildren—or traumatic experiences never
mentioned before. Or, they could be written down because justice requires
them, as in the case of the Eichmann trial, the first great trial of a Nazi war
criminal based on witnesses.7
These letters, although testimonies, were not produced with that inten-
tion. In that respect, they differ from similar documents found in the ghet-
tos of Poland and from individual chronicles.8 However, they are like other
types of testimonies in that they contribute to our awareness of “the imprint
of dehumanizing situations on the individual sensitivity and the efforts to
preserve both a physical and a spiritual personality” (Hoffman 2004, 161).
They are desperate calls for help, and they sketch raw images of urgency
and necessity. They do not rearrange reality to make it conform to the
story that one thinks one has to transmit. They attend first to the most
painful, the most urgent sentiments; in short, they show a poignant will
to survive.
What value can such a group of documents have for the Holocaust
researchers? Contrary to Matatias Carp’s Black Book, written at the
very end of the war, or to the testimonies of Yad Vashem,9 gathered
later (contrary to the autobiographies and memoirs), these letters were
not written consciously as testimonies. They acquire this status only
for the historians or the anthropologists who use them to analyze the
life conditions of the deportees, their worries, and their priorities. On
the other hand, the contemporaneity of the writings confers a value of
“bottles in the sea” / 79
informative convergence: the agreement of the testimonies reinforces

the data of individual ones. Lastly, this type of document escapes from
the risk of distance that can occur for those sources that Eva Hoffman
calls the “professional witnesses” (Hoffmann 2004, 169).
This “emergency analysis,” this “historical section” (in the sense of a
“geological section”) lets us know how each member of a particular eth-
nic group, having lived through the same traumatic events, might have
reacted, what is common among them and what is different. For such
an analysis, it is necessary to first define this group, its origin, and the
experiences of the people in it, while considering the variations revealed by
the writing—the individual stories, the use of particular language, or the
various registers in the same language. We will thus find words that can
be understood only by the local speakers or expressions used to thwart the
censors. For example, I didn’t find the word Bokantschen in the dictionar-
ies, but Rachel Ampel knew that it meant a sort of boots (Correspondence,
13). In one letter, we read “We often envy Sali” (Correspondence, 39). I
knew from other interviews that these words were a way of saying that
Sali had died. In another letter, we found “zehn alufim.” Rachel assured
me that this was the language of the ghetto, alufim meaning “thousand”
in Hebrew-Yiddish, and in context it was probably a question of lei, the
Romanian currency (Correspondence, 42).
Trauma Competition
Perhaps, the most appropriate word to describe the Shoah in Transnistria is
“paradox.” I remember having been very astonished by the fact that in the
first interviews conducted in the beginning of my research (1977–1980),
when the interviewees spoke about the war, they often mixed the trauma
of the German period with that of the Soviet period—the deportations to
Transnistria with those to Siberia—without speaking of the cases in which
someone had been deported two or three times, by the Romanians or the
Germans and by the Soviets.
Another paradox (and not the slightest) is that the deportees who stayed
in Moghilev at the end of 1941 were the “lucky ones.” They were “lucky”
even on triple accounts. First, they had the “good fortune” to have been
in the ghetto of Czernowitz and not in the small surrounding villages
of North Bukovina. Second, they had the “good fortune” to have been
deported with the first waves and not with those of 1942, who were sent to
Cariera de piatră (Stone Quarry), to this place “which has a name which
does not have any,” according to the words of Paul Celan in Strette (1990,
26).10 These second-wave deportees were later transferred to camps under
German rule, places whence almost no one returned. Third, those who
remained in Moghilev were not driven out further. Of course, one has to
understand that this “good fortune” must be expressed within quotation
marks, considering its relative nature, not to mention its participation in
the paradox.11
The majority of those who wrote our letters were deported from the
ghetto of Czernowitz. Why did I say that they had three instances of
“good fortune”? First, because in the semi-rural and rural regions of
Bukovina, during the interregnum phase between the retreat of the
Soviet army and the arrival of the Romanian and German troops, a large
number of Jews were killed with knives, hay forks, or axes by the local
peasants. The worst aspect of this was perhaps that these spontaneous
massacres took place in localities that, before the war, knew a relatively
peaceful coexistence between the various minorities, not without tension,
but basically a “normal life.” This could explain why, in these places, the
Jews did not try to flee.12
The beginning of the war against the Soviet Union, June 22, 1941,
seems to have been a much-dreamed- of occasion for the Romanian
army to avenge the retreat of the previous year. Rumors were propa-
gated that the Jews had helped the Russians. The conclusion drawn was
simple: the “Jewish- Communists” were to be regarded as “destroyers of
civilization.” The Romanian leaders, convinced of the future German
victory, transmitted to the civil administration their plans concern-
ing the Jewish population of the two “lost provinces” (Bukovina and
Bessarabia). A few days before the start of Operation Barbarossa, battal-
ions of gendarmes received “special orders.” “To clear the ground” was
the euphemism used for the operation, which comprised three points:
the extermination of all the Jews of the rural areas, the seclusion in
ghettos of the Jews from the urban centers, and the arrest of suspects
described as Soviet activists.
The Romanian armies arrived in Czernowitz on July 5, 1941, followed
by the first German units and the Einsatzkommando Zehn B, belonging to
Einsatzgruppe D (Reitlinger 1953, 398). During the first days, there were
several thousand Jewish victims, until the new governor of the province,
General Calotescu, ordered the establishment of the ghetto on October 11,
1941. A perimeter of four or five streets, which had until then been home
to ten thousand people, was surrounded by a wall built in a few hours, and
forty-five thousand others were forced to move in.
On October 14, 1941, a first convoy of deportees was organized from
the ghetto. Five thousand people left on foot toward the train station and
were piled into livestock wagons, forty to fifty per coach (Avneri 1971,
39). They were sent to the north of Transnistria. Many passed through
Ataki, one of the “gates of hell.” The conditions were terrible but, despite
everything, each one hoped to remain there, because it was rumored that
to cross the Dniester meant certain death.
Surrounded by anonymous people, by men squatting on their bundles, by

young children who are tightly crammed together, we see the night falling
on destroyed houses, without windows. And the following morning when
the sun rises, we were forced to go further. Hell that Dante described is only
a pale reflection of what is happening around us (Correspondence, 1).
The journal of Meir Teich, a deportee of Suceava, reports what occurred

in this place. The Jews were humiliated in every possible way. They had
to pass through so-called customs, which consisted of a body search and
confiscation by the authorities of any valuables still in possession of the
deportees (Shachan 1996, 142). However, many succeeded in thwarting
the cupidity of the guards, and in keeping sums of money or other objects
that later enabled them to survive. From Ataki, the road led to a bridge
over the Dniester. On the other bank, Moghilev was the chief town of the
district.
Moghilev
An agglomeration of twenty-two thousand inhabitants living under the
Soviets, Moghilev was partially destroyed during the war. Some of the
local Jews, who numbered almost ten thousand in 1926, were killed by
the Einsatzkommando Zehn B. Those men of age were enlisted in the
Soviet Forces. Only 3,733 Jews remained there when the Romanians
took possession of the territory, mainly women, children, and old men.
Many Jewish houses were in ruins. The result was that these local Jews
could not help the deportees who flooded into their city by the tens of
thousands.13
Among the Jews of Czernowitz, who arrived with those from the south
of Bukovina and Dorohoi, some still had a few possessions—in particular,
clothing—especially because they arrived by train, without having spent
months on the roads. These were the writers of the correspondence we
analyzed. The letters were intended for fathers and mothers, children, or
more distant family; Jewish or non-Jewish acquaintances; former employ-
ers; or people who were thought to have the capacity to intercede in favor
of the exiles. The period during which the letters were written corresponds
to what Avigdor Shachan called “the period of the shock” (1996, 192).
During this time, Moghilev seemed to be “a death trap and a massive
graveyard, with huge common graves” (Shachan 1996, 194). This period
was followed by one of “recovery,” thanks to self-organization, under the
command of a very effective leadership.
The first shock was being wrenched from what the deportees named the
“homeland”: their city, their house. Spoliations were a common refrain.
The deportees were anxious about their properties left behind, because
they realized that they were victims of swindlers, who sometimes pre-
sented themselves as protectors: “[T]he companion of Carmi remained
in the apartment as occupant. I recognize now that the proposal to
occupy our apartment was a premeditated swindle” (Correspondence, 2).
“How is it at the house which was once mine? Does anybody live there?”
(Correspondence, 114) “My dear friend Oskar . . . please tell me who lives
in my house, and also don’t forget to help me” (Correspondence, 74). The
extortion of funds was another wound:
I personally gave to Mr. Vasilcu for my evacuation 1,000 dollars and also
500,000 lei, in a packet which was then sealed. In Dorneşti, I then per-
sonally gave him, from the train . . . the sum of 80,000 lei. Moreover, [he]
received from the clothes factory objects equaling a value of 200–250,000
lei, a gold wristwatch, a silver cigarette box and also several valuable articles
of the house which he was supposed to guard.14 Since I understand from
[his] silence . . . that he has bad intentions, please make all efforts . . . that I
can obtain the refunding of the money (Correspondence, 182).
No deportee considered that Moghilev was a place where a man worthy

of the name could live, but all were afraid to leave on foot for unknown
places (Ancel 2003, 68). Thus, we found in a letter of November 30,
1941: “Our situation here is a little bit better, because we have a little
hope to remain at this place . . . and not to be again driven out. People
who do not have this hope . . . are completely thrown into a panic”
(Correspondence, 1). Those people managed to remain piled up in
ruined houses without doors, windows, or even roofs. Several families
shared these poor wretched spaces: “We are three families in the same
place and our misery is indescribable. Our number decreases every-
day” (Correspondence, 85). People slept on the bare ground, wrapped
in the clothes that they wore during the day: “We did not change our
clothes one month and we sleep on the bare ground or on straw mat-
tresses” (Correspondence, 129). “We were here completely stripped. You
know that we sleep on the floor of our room. And in spite of our big
reserves, today we can only beg for food products, could you imagine
something like that. We still wonder why we are so much in distress”
(Correspondence, 32).
Underfed, the deportees sold their clothes as long as they had some to
sell for a piece of bread, some potatoes, or an onion: “People want from me
clothing, linen, shoes, soap, etc., but where to take all that? For a packet,
we obtain bread” (Correspondence, 17).15 “Very honored, Mrs. Doctor. For
fourteen days, I have not received a single piece of bread, or mămăligă for
my child. First of all, here nothing is received and, then, I don’t have money
to buy anything. I already sold all the clothing I had to buy something for
my child. Now, nothing remains to me any more” (Correspondence, 75).16
Misery grew from day to day. Some thought that it could be still worse;
for others the situation was completely desperate: “[T]he situation in which
we are, we cannot describe it with words. We are at the edge of despair.
Help us to leave from here” (Correspondence, 39). “Each day and each
hour counts, we are desperate, even if there remains to me still some food.17
With these lines, understand our terrible situation” (Correspondence, 47).
“We are completely depressed and I feel humiliated at an inexpressible
point owing to the fact that you did not write to me even some lines.
When somebody is depressed as I am and in our unbearable situation,
a word of consolation is very important and a little hope plays a great
role” (Correspondence, 58).18 “We are in a really critical situation, near to
despair” (Correspondence, 74). “In such a situation, we will not be able to
live a long time” (Correspondence, 35).
The hunger is the first of the leitmotifs. Thirty letters refer to it
specifically: “We die of hunger. We have neither money, nor food”
(Correspondence, 8). The hunger was caused by the lack of food avail-
able, the price of food, and the lack of money in general. But even money
could not buy things at a certain point; only barter could suffice. But
one had to have something to exchange: “We are in a very bad condi-
tion because we cannot obtain food even for a lot of money, we can only
make exchanges. So I write to you in the greatest urgency to ask you to
send 15 kg of Chromckolin by a messenger. This will enable me to remain
alive” (Correspondence, 66). “If they [the peasants] sell something it’s
only by barter, especially with soap” (Correspondence, 29).19 “We do not
exaggerate when we say that soon we will have nothing to eat. We are
hungry and the peasants bring absolutely nothing from the outside and
if they bring something, they want only to barter” (Correspondence, 48).
“The rubles are without any value, and the result is that the peasants don’t
want to sell anything and we already don’t have anything to exchange”
To the hunger was added great cold. Indeed, the winter of 1941–1942
was extremely severe, with temperatures of -30° to - 40° Celsius: “Currently,
things do not go so badly yet, but I do not know how it will be when the
true cold of - 40° and more and the snowstorms, as the local people describe
them, will start” (Correspondence, 1).
The deportees attempted to preserve their dignity and to fight against
the egregious lack of hygiene. In the lists of precious products that they
ask correspondents to send them, soap and toilet paper are perhaps the
most important: “Two rolls of toilet paper (don’t laugh, it is not a lack of
modesty, but since we left the homeland, we don’t have any more newspa-
pers, and we are not used to the practices of the natives, it is thus a vital
question)” (Correspondence, 5). The dirtiness, the lack of heating, and the
lack of drinking water caused epidemics, including typhus, which spread
from mid-December among the deportees weakened by hunger and cold
(Ancel 2003, 68). “Unfortunately, I am very sick, it hurts me that my child
is famished, I can deprive myself, but the child is already as green as a
lemon” (Correspondence, 9). “The children are sick, Anna is not recogniz-
able” (Correspondence, 46). “My father is very sick, he does not have any
more strength and I do not have any possibility of taking care of him”
Diseases and epidemics that threatened the weakened bodies
explain why drugs became some of the most invaluable products: “Did
Carmi request all the drugs? Also the agathosan and the karillen?”
(Correspondence, 2).20 “Some drugs as follows: a) a large bottle of valer-
ian tincture, which I need for Toucia; b) a large portion of charcoal; c) a
small bottle of Laktobyl for Toucia; d) a good sleeping pill; e) a hot-water
bottle for the cold feet of Toucia and Herta” (Correspondence, 3). “For
the drugs: hydrogen peroxide, permanganate, pills against biliary pains,
vaccines against typhus, drops for the heart” (Correspondence, 13). “For
the drugs: morphine, Kaprofter, mentholated petroleum cream, Rubiasol
[antiseptic]. But send the packages only when I tell you because the pack-
ages are lost” (Correspondence, 27).
The hygienic conditions were deplorable. The houses, most made of
clay, did not have toilets. There were no public baths, no soaps; the bodies
were swarming with vermin: “We are full of lice, like almost everybody
here” (Correspondence, 10). In fact, “The lice were the second wound after
the Germans,” as reported recently by Mrs. Yehudit Terris Yerushalmi.21
The end was most of the time inescapable. The bodies of the dead, col-
lected daily, accumulated in the cemeteries until spring, when graves could
finally be dug: “People die of hunger in the streets and, each day, there are
20 to 30 deaths” (Correspondence, 42).
In addition to the epidemics, the conditions in the ghetto involved
another phenomenon: rumors (Wieviorka 1998, 29)—for example, rumors
about special treatments that must be granted to specialists like industrial-
ists, doctors, and so on. “The rumors of Ippa, I do not believe a word of
them. Each time one says something or something else, but I do not believe
anything, until I see concrete things” (Correspondence, 154).
The rumors came from the deportees. But the Romanians, the Germans,
or the Ukrainians often disseminated other ones, and their effects were
sometimes more perverse: “The Romanian officers tell . . . that South
Bukovinians will return to their houses on the 26th. But, once again, I do
not believe anything” (Correspondence, 154). The rumors did not have
only negative impact, however. The rumors mitigate “the feeling of being
out of the world, abandoned by all” (Wieviorka 1998, 31). These rumors
were based on the single wish, which supported a number of deportees,
of being able to return home: “It is said here that we will return home.
But perhaps that is only a mirage” (Correspondence, 43). “If they don’t
authorize us quickly to return to our house, then we are finished, because
of the lack of food, the hunger and our nostalgia to be at home. We can
live in a hole, but at home” (Correspondence, 59). “Write to me as much
as possible and even lies, by saying to us for example that we will return
soon to our house. For me, that gives me the effect of a shot of anesthetic”
Once again, we must speak of a paradox. Indeed, in spite of this litany
of tragedies, the town remained a relative haven compared with the other
camps of Transnistria. For example, a Jewish committee, whose most
remarkable personality was Siegfried Jagendorf, managed the ghetto. It
succeeded in setting up a network of institutions and providing for mutual
assistance (Fisher 1969, 103–104).22 But again, this relative peace lasted
only for a time. In February 1942, less than two months after the letters
were written, Colonel Constantin Năsturaş, prefect of Moghilev, ordered
the Jewish committee to prepare a plan for the evacuation of four thousand
Jews. The committee tried in vain to prevent it. Between May and June,
3,500 Jews would be sent to Scazinetz, which would become the cemetery
for most of the evacuated (Fisher 1969, 88). In October 1942, three thou-
sand other Jews would leave for Peciora (Fisher 1969, 90).23 In May 1943,
one thousand workers would be sent on their way to another death camp,
Trihatz (Trichati). Finally, another thousand would be sent to Tulcin to
extract peat. Very few of these evacuees would return.
Dialectics of Memory and History

So far, we have seen that such testimonies have historical value. But many
questions remain, and it is now up to the historians to ask them. The
research of Jean Ancel has brought us many answers.
In several letters, a trustworthy person capable of transmitting mail was
mentioned. His name, Twers, often cropped up: “Dr. Albert Twers is here.
I must take advantage of the opportunity to forward to you some lines”
(Correspondence, 33). “The deliverer of this letter is an acquaintance of
Radautz, the lawyer Twers” (Correspondence, 40). “According to the infor-
mation of the attorney Albert Twers, all the pensioners will return soon
to their home” (Correspondence, 94). “On the way to the lawyer Twers,
I met him in the street” (Correspondence, 107). In Jean Ancel’s book,

Transnistria 1941-1942, there are two index entries for “Twers.” On pages
584–585, document number 315, dated January 3, 1942, comes from the
investigative branch of the military police. The military police inform the
administration that Dr. Albert Twers, lawyer, domiciled in Rădăuţi, trans-
ported letters from Moghilev to families remaining in Czernowitz and
Rădăuţi. He was caught with 139 letters and notes from Jewish deportees
intended for their parents in Romania, which violated the instruction pro-
hibiting such correspondences.24 His apartment was searched. The note
signed by Emil Velciu, lieutenant colonel magistrate, reports:
The lawyer Twers Albert, of German ethnic origin, works in the firm of
import-export “Heinz Hellman” from Bucharest, Calea Victoriei, 208. In
this capacity, on 12 December 1941, he went with the director of the firm
to Moghilev-Transnistria, to study the possibility of opening a branch in
Transnistria. Many Jews of Moghilev asked him to take letters and to trans-
mit them to people in Rădăuţi or Cernăuţi . . . The investigator could not
establish if he received money for this service; it follows that this mode of
correspondence, which is practiced in this area, contravenes thus the mea-
sures of the postal laws in force, the measures referring to the mandatory
censorship of such correspondence.
Now we can answer most questions we have asked in the beginning : why
these letters were gathered in a file, where the replies were, and why all
the messages dated from the same weeks–, but a mystery remains: What
had pushed Albert Twers, a German, to put himself at risk and assist the
deportees? Mercy? Philosemitism? Interest?
The second document, number 616, dated April 14, 1942 and published
by Jean Ancel (2003, 709), answers this question.25 Twers’s father-in-law,
Naftali Alpern, was a Jew. Alpern had been deported from Czernowitz.
Twers tried to obtain his release, explaining the journeys to Moghilev and
Shargorod and his contacts with the Jewish community. It seems that he
succeeded in his quest. Indeed, a telegram from Alexianu, the civil gover-
nor of Transnistria, instructed the prefect of Moghilev to release Naftali
Alpern and his wife, at the request of Antonescu himself. The justifica-
tion for the release was the fact that Alpern was a retired Romanian civil
servant.
To conclude, this analysis illustrates the necessity not simply to oppose
memory to history. Our documents present the concerns of memory rather
than those of history. One might think a priori that the two terms are
entirely opposed or mutually exclusive. Memory is always carried by liv-
ing groups and, for this reason, it constantly evolves. History is on the
side of science and should thus be less prone to fluctuation. But following
the analyses of Paul Ricœur, this old debate may be undergoing a pro-
cess of reconciliation (Ricœur 1993, 35–36). On the one hand, we are less
inclined to put so much faith in the “scientism” of history. On the other
hand, we recognize that there is history in memory. For me, as this article
perhaps confirms, it is the conjunction of these two approaches that proves
most productive for conducting our research. In combining memory and
history, our ambition remains (to quote Paul Ricœur again) “to follow the
traces of the Other” (Ricoeur 2000, 258). It is a great one.
Notes
1. I was received there by Dr. Radu Ioanid and Mrs. Michlean Amir. I thank
them for their invaluable assistance. This research has been supported by a
grant from the Fondation de la Mémoire de la Shoah, in Paris.
2. Under the reference: “Fonds 1061. Opis 1 #2. RG–31.006M Cernivtsi
Regional Archive.”
3. In this article, I use the German name of the city, although at the time it was
called Cernăuţi, and was Romanian. However, most of the Jews from the
region have continued until now to use almost exclusively the Austro-German
name. Rachel (Mitzi in Czernowitz) Ampel, is ninety-three years old. She
lives in an old people’s home in Jerusalem.
4. I once again translated passages of the letters into English for this article.
5. To facilitate the consultation, I paginated the letters, from 1 to 227. I use this
pagination in references.
6. See, for example, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies
of Yale University’s Department of Manuscripts and Archives, or the Steven
Spielberg Film and Video Archive at the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum [later USHMM].
7. Or, see more recently, in France, the trials of Paul Touvier, Klaus Barbie, or
Maurice Papon.
8. See, for example, the systematic collection of testimonies, gathered by
Emmanuel Ringelblum in the Warsaw ghetto, or the chronicle of the Lodz
ghetto. For a discussion about archives and testimonies, see Annette Wieviorka,
L’Ère du témoin, particularly pages 17–48. For the individual chronicles, cf.
Simha Guterman, Le Livre retrouvé. This last work is another type of “bottles
in the sea,” according to the title of our article.
9. The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem.
10. “Der Ort, wo sie lagen, er hat einen Namen–er hat keinen.”
11. This article is dedicated to my paternal grandparents, Paulina and Isak
Herschmann. They had only one of these three instances of “good fortune”:
They were in the ghetto of Czernowitz. But they were deported, with Paul
Celan’s parents, in 1942. They were in the same places and the same camps,
and they knew the same fate. My grandfather was shot dead on the 26th
of April, 1943, in the camp of Mikhailowka. My grandmother was assassi-
nated by a bullet in the head on the 10th of December, 1943, in the camp of
Tarassiwka (cited in Schultz and Timms, 220).
12. On this problematic issue, see the book of Jan Tomasz Gross, Neighbors:
The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne (cited in Hoffmann,
210–15).
13. During the autumn and the winter of 1941, 55,913 deportees, of which almost
half were from Bessarabia and Bukovina, passed through Moghilev. See bul-
letin issued by gendarmerie headquarters in Transnistria regarding the period
from December 15, 1941 to January 15, 1942 (Carp 319–20, cited in Jean
Ancel, Transnistria, 1941–1942, 65).
14. Underlined in the original.
15. Letter of December 14, 1941.
16. Letter of December 15, 1941.
17. Underlined in the original.
18. Letter to Frieda Weinbach, December 16, 1941.
19. December 15, 1941.
20. December 6, 1941.
21. During the Annual Meeting of the World Association of Bukovinians, Tel-
Aviv, April 2007. Among the most traumatic experiences Yehudit Terris
Yerushalmi underwent was being shaved. She remembers with horror the oil
that was poured regularly on her body to avoid lice.
22. See also, “Transnistria,” in Hugo Gold, ed., Geschichte der Juden in der
Bukovina, 77–79.
23. Decree no. 28937, July 3, 1942.
24. Odessa Archives, 2242–4c–29 (20–20b).
25. Odessa Archives, 2242–1–1489, 15–17.
Works Cited
Ancel, Jean. 2003. Transnistria, 1941–1942. Vol. 1. History and Document
Summaries. Tel-Aviv: Tel-Aviv University.
Avneri, Arieh. 1971. Czernowitz, kehilot Israel bagola [Czernowitz, Jewish
Communities in the Diaspora]. Tel-Aviv: Beit Lohamei Hagettaot.
Carp, Matatias. 1946–1948 Cartea Neagră. Bucharest: Diogene.
Celan, Paul. 1990. Strette & Autres Poèmes. Paris: Mercure de France.
Fisher, Julius S. 1969. Transnistria: The Forgotten Cemetery. New York, South
Brunswick, London: Yoseloff.
Gold, Hugo, ed. 1962. Geschichte der Juden in der Bukovina. Vol II. Moghilew.
Tel-Aviv: Olamenu.
Gross, Jan Tomasz. 2002. Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in
Jedwabne, Poland. London: Penguin Books.
Guterman, Simha. 1991. Le Livre retrouvé. Ed. Nicole Lapierre. Trans. Aby
Wieviorka. Paris: Plon.
Heymann, Florence. 2003. Le Crépuscule des lieux. Paris: Stock.
Hoffman, Eva. 2004. After such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the
Holocaust. New York: Public Affairs.
Reitlinger, Gerald. 1953. The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews
in Europe, 1939–1945. New York: A. S. Barnes.
Ricœur, Paul. 2000. La Mémoire, l’ histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Seuil.
———. 1993. Remarques d’un philosophe. Écrire l’ histoire du temps présent. Paris:
CNRS Éditions.
Schultz, Deborah and Edwards Timms, eds. 2009. Arnold Daghani’s Memories of
Mikhailowka: The Illustrated Diary of a Slave Labour Camp Survivor. London:
Vallentine Mitchell.
Shachan, Avigdor. 1996. Burning Ice: The Ghettoes of Transnistria. Boulder: East
European Monographs.
Wieviorka, Annette. 1998. l’Ère du témoin. Paris: Plon.
Ch a p t e r Fi v e
Su rv i va l a n d M e mory: A r nold
Dag h a n i’s Ve r ba l a n d
Visua l D i a r i e s 1
Deborah Schultz
History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously

remember is what our conscience remembers. History is the Totenbuch, The
Book of the Dead, kept by the administrators of the camps. Memory is the
Memorbucher, the names of those to be mourned, read aloud in the synagogue.
History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every
moment is two moments.
—(Michaels 1998, 138)
The representation of memory was the foundation for the practice of

Arnold Daghani (1909–1985), who combined, juxtaposed, and interwove
media in varied and complex ways, with the verbal and visual forms of
his diary acting as contrasting representations of the events to which they
related. Daghani was witness, victim, and survivor, and his diaries can be
seen as significant testimonies to the Holocaust in Ukraine, about which
the historical evidence is sparse. They function as elements in the pursuit
of justice and, in fact, led to legal investigations into war crimes. When the
courts failed to execute justice due to lack of evidence, Daghani felt ever
more strongly his duty to keep the memory of his fellow inmates alive and
to make the world more aware of this forgotten corner of the Holocaust.
His habit of revising and amplifying his diaries may complicate the issue
of historical authenticity, but his aim was to enrich our understanding
both of events in the camp and ghetto and of the subsequent traumas.
These multiple reworkings of core experiences in visual and verbal form
produced the unique body of work that will be analyzed in this article.
Only his slave labor camp diary has been published, and only a fraction of
his artistic work has ever been exhibited. In elucidating Daghani’s complex
92 / deborah schultz
oeuvre, this article aims to rehabilitate an artist whose verbal and visual
reflections on the Nazi period deserve to be more widely known.
The main works discussed are Daghani’s slave labor camp diary, writ-
ten in English but first published in Romanian (1947). The English text
was only published fourteen years later under the translated title The Grave
is in the Cherry Orchard (1961), while the German translation became
Lasst mich leben! (1960). Each version was presented as a small paperback
book, and the Romanian and English versions included reproductions of a
selected number of around twenty drawings and watercolors that Daghani
had made in the camp and ghetto and managed to smuggle out.2
Daghani’s achievement was to personalize events and bring them alive,
removing the anonymity of the distant camps in this under-researched
region of the Holocaust. Thus his diaries interweave the public and the
private, contrasting a Fascist system of command and control with the
experiences of individuals, giving their suffering a human face and provid-
ing telling details that build up into an indictment of the exploitation of
slave labor by the German military and civil authorities.
Persecution and Exclusion: The Artist as Outsider

Arnold Daghani was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in
Suczawa, in the Bukovina, now Suceava in Romania. At the time of his
birth, the Bukovina formed the “easternmost” part of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, as Paul Celan, one of its best-known sons, described the region
(Felstiner 1995, 4). After the First World War, the newly expanded state of
Romania was rewarded for supporting the Allies and was given the region.
The Bukovina was renowned for its cultural life and ethnic diversity, but
this character was largely lost due to the effects of the Second World War
and the subsequent division of the region between Romania and Ukraine,
after which each part became absorbed by the stronger national identities
of these newly defined states.
In his autobiographical narratives, Daghani presents his life as one
structured by a fateful series of events over which he and his wife had
little control. He was married on June 27, 1940 to Anişoara Rabinovici,
whom he called “Nanino” and who was known by others as “Anna.”
On November 10, 1940 they suffered their first tragedy, an earthquake
in Bucharest that damaged their home. The Bukovina had already been
annexed by the Soviet Union and was thought to be a safer region for Jews
than Fascist-controlled Romania. The young couple relocated to the city
of Cernăuţi, the regional capital of the Bukovina (formerly the Austro-
Hungarian Czernowitz and now Chernivtsi in Ukraine). The move proved
to be a near-fatal mistake. For a while Daghani worked manually, painting
survival and memory / 93
children’s toys, until German and Romanian troops drove the Soviets out
and occupied the region in June 1941. After that date, Jews were only
allowed to carry out menial tasks. In June 1942, Daghani and Anna
were included in a large deportation of Jews by the Romanian authori-
ties from Cernăuţi, through Romanian-controlled Transnistria, and
across the regional border of the river Bug—the border between Romania
and German-occupied Ukraine—to a slave labor camp at Mikhailowka.
The camp was run by the SS, and the inmates worked for the August
Dohrmann engineering company, part of the Todt Organisation, repair-
ing the main road (the Durchgangsstrasse IV or DG IV), a strategic supply
road linking occupied Poland with southern Ukraine. Mikhailowka was
one of a number of camps set up in the region between the river Bug and
the route of the DG IV. The work was extremely demanding. Rather than
transport machinery to the region, the firms opted to use cheaper human
labor. Daghani portrays, both in words and images, the camp inmates
working with pickaxes and shovels on the road (figure 5.1).
Daghani’s artistic skills played an important part in his experience of
life at Mikhailowka and ultimately led to his and Anna’s escape. Initially,
he had been reluctant to take his watercolor box to the camp. In What a
Nice World, an extensive collection of his writings and drawings bound
Figure 5.1 Arnold Daghani, On the way to work on the road (1974) in 1942
1943 And Thereafter (Sporadic records till 1977) (1942–1977) ink on tracing paper
(G2.054r) (Arnold Daghani Collection, Special Collections, University of Sussex
©Arnold Daghani Trust).
together in book format, he describes the scene in which two plain-clothes

policemen came to their room in Cernăuţi to issue their deportation order.
One of them noticed the box of watercolors and sketchbook to be left
behind: “ ‘Why had we not packed them, too?’ he wanted to know. Seeing
the shrug of my shoulder, he ordered me to open the rucksack and to put
the colors and sketchbook in. I refused stubbornly, saying: ‘We are being
sent to death and you expect me to take them? To what use? No, I am not
going to take ‘em.’ ‘To what use?’ he answered back. ‘They might just save
your both lives; one never can tell.’ As I went on being refractory, he made
Anna open the rucksack, and both sketchbook and colors were placed on
top” (Daghani, What a Nice World, G1.035r).
Daghani emphasized that it was not his choice to take the art materi-
als. But in Mikhailowka he began to both paint and write, aware that he
would be punished if it became known that he was making a record of
the ordeals of the camp. The most poignant of his early works, combining
word and image, is the creased and tattered painting of a vase of red tulips
(figure 5.2).
On the painted surface are inscribed the place and date, “Mikhailowka
1 Jan. 1943” and the dedication to his wife (in Romanian): “Happy New
Year! May God help us that in 1943 we should be home together with our
family. Arnold.” This was one of the works smuggled out of the camp when
the couple escaped. The signature was added later, and when the piece was
attached to a mount, Daghani added a further inscription in ink, recalling
that it was painted on a piece of paper provided by a German soldier.
Once it became known that he was an artist, Daghani was able to take
a break from the labor of road building, as he was commissioned by the
guards to paint their portraits or scenes of their rooms. In some cases,
as his diary records, they rewarded him with apples or bread (Daghani
1961, 37 and 43–44). A complex hierarchy meant that for lower-ranking
guards he would have to make the works secretly. Paper was also in short
supply. A priest gave Daghani some writing paper to use for watercolors,
while a police sergeant was unable to buy paper in a local shop as it was
reserved for officers. Daghani observed, “It is easy, it seems, to become a
master over the lives and deaths of men: for that, the rank of a sergeant
is sufficient–but it is not enough to enable one to buy writing paper!”
(Daghani 1961, 8).
In April 1943, the engineers Werner Bergmann and Josef Elsässer, from
the August Dohrmann company, commissioned Daghani to make an
eagle mosaic at their headquarters in Gaissin, a town some distance from
Mikhailowka. Daghani insisted that Anna should be his assistant. Bizarre
as it seems, in the middle of the war, Daghani and Anna were “comman-
deered” to “embellish” the engineers’ garden (Daghani 1961, 57). No
Figure 5.2 Arnold Daghani, New Year flowers for Nanino (1943) in 1942 1943
And Thereafter (Sporadic records till 1977) (1942–1977) ink and watercolor on
paper (G2.060r) (Arnold Daghani Collection, Special Collections, University of
Sussex © Arnold Daghani Trust).
transport was available to take them there every day from the camp, so
in June it was decided that they would stay in the headquarters’ garage
until the mosaic was completed. During those few weeks they came into
contact with Abrasha, a local cobbler, who offered to help them escape.
The Daghanis hesitated, not believing escape was possible, and fearing the
consequences for their fellow inmates in Mikhailowka.
However, one night in mid-July, the plan was carried out, described
in dramatic detail in Daghani’s diary. There were many moments when
it looked as if it would fail. Daghani and Anna were due to be sent back
to Mikhailowka as soon as the mosaic was complete, but at the last min-
ute Bergmann asked Daghani to paint some parchment as a gift for a
lampshade for Atti Grae, the secretary with whom he was romantically
involved. Painting this gave Daghani and Anna an extra night at Gaissin.
They hid that night in an empty building where, miraculously, they were
not discovered during a house-search by German soldiers. After spending
the second night in a garden and the third in a potato field, Abrasha gave
them clothes to help them look like local peasants and they joined a cart
going to the nearby town, Sobelewka. There they met a guide whom they
followed on foot for around forty miles. That night they crossed the river
Bug, carrying with them Daghani’s precious paintings. They succeeded
in reaching the Romanian-held territory of Transnistria and the relative
safety of the ghetto in Bershad.
A few months later, partisans attacked Mikhailowka. Some inmates
escaped, but the remainder were relocated to the nearby camp of Tarassiwka
until early December. Here, as the Red Army advanced, they were all shot
by their German captors and buried in the mass grave that gave Daghani’s
diary its poignant title. When he heard what had happened, Daghani was
deeply traumatized; he recalled his fellow inmates in memories and night-
mares until the end of his life. In this way, for Daghani, being an artist
became connected with his guilt of surviving the camp while the other
inmates were killed. His suffering as an artist became directly connected
with his fate, his life and work closely interwoven.
Daghani continued to draw and paint during the months of hiding
in Bershad, depicting everyday life in the ghetto’s streets and markets.
His works may appear understated, avoiding direct representations of the
crimes and sufferings of war. However, recording scenes from the camp or
the ghetto without permission was a criminal offence. If caught, he would
have faced a court-martial. Those assisting him also risked punishment.
Daghani’s detailed observations bring his narrative to life, highlighting
many unexpected moments. In late December 1943, with the assistance of
the Red Cross, he and Anna were able to return to Bucharest. Though only
a short time previously they had been working as slave laborers in a camp
and living unregistered in a ghetto, on the train journey to Bucharest, a
German senior officer offered Anna a seat. Furthermore, Daghani writes,
“on learning from Nanino that I was an artist, [he] introduced himself to
me as a fellow-artist of Bonn . . . Among the senior officers there were two
with the distinctive mark of the SS . . .” (Daghani, What a Nice World,
G1.067r). Daghani describes such moments in straightforward language,
with details that emphasize their unexpectedness. His careful observations

highlight the ways in which relationships may change in moments in dif-
ferent contexts and also draw attention to the ways in which people behave
as individuals rather than follow stereotypes.
They arrived in Bucharest in March 1944, a few months before Romania
was “liberated” by the Red Army. But during the following years Daghani
suffered a further form of exclusion, living in ideological exile. The cre-
ation of the Romanian People’s Republic in 1948 led to cultural life domi-
nated by the Soviet model of Socialist Realism. Daghani refused to work
in the officially prescribed style and did not join the Artists’ Union until
1957, shortly before emigrating. He was thus unable to exhibit publicly.
However, he continued to work actively as an artist while earning a living
teaching English. A number of artists and critics visited him and admired
his work, including some leading figures on the Romanian art scene, such
as artist and director of the National Gallery Max Herman Maxy, and the
critics Radu Bogdan and Eugen Schileru.
During this period, Daghani developed a successful drawing style—
not dissimilar to that of Henri Matisse—in which the form is reduced
to a limited number of animated lines. He drew portraits, female nudes,
interiors, and a number of studies of traditional Romanian dolls made by
his friend Daniela Miga, with whom he was romantically involved for a
time. He recorded images of workers and peasants in the streets, as well
as sites around Bucharest, putting himself in the role of detached but not
unsympathetic observer. He also wrote poetry and short stories, the latter
often in the style of “kitchen sink” domestic dramas, vividly conveying
the cramped and difficult housing conditions then experienced by many
Romanians.
In hope of a better life and greater recognition elsewhere, in the “free
world” of the Cold War period, Daghani and Anna emigrated to Israel
in 1958. However, Daghani was apprehensive and he soon became disap-
pointed. In 1960 they left Israel to face a long period of instability in exile.
His hopes and expectations were never fully realized, and while he was free
to draw and paint in whatever style he wished, his audience was small and
his reputation restricted. They moved to Jona, a small town in Switzerland,
before spending a short time in London. But they were unable to obtain
residency permits. Daghani wrote in despair, “Which country will receive
us? We have too long been standing on one leg. Like me, Nanino is wait-
ing for a miracle to make its appearance round the corner” (Bohm-Duchen
1987, 38).
In 1960 they settled in Vence, in the south of France, where Daghani
was initially supported by the Michael Karolyi Foundation, and they
remained there for ten years. Works relating to the camp comprised only
a small part of his output, which was a mixture of nudes, portraits, land-
scapes, abstracts, and works on musical and literary themes. He continued
to develop in new directions, in many media, commenting on his experi-
ences as an artist, often with black humor. Daghani began making collages
that he called “alienations,” in which parts of photographs, generally of
female nudes, were transformed into figures and objects. These range from
the witty and ironic to the more sharply satirical works on contemporary
life, often incorporating newspaper cuttings or using newspaper as a base
to accentuate their contemporaneity.
Having failed to comply with the conditions of their Israeli passport,
Daghani and Anna became stateless. In 1970 they were granted permis-
sion to stay in Jona, but there was no artistic scene and Daghani was even
farther, both physically and in terms of recognition, from the art world.
Finally, in 1977, Daghani and Anna received residence permits and were
able to settle in Hove, near Brighton in the South of England. The move
was facilitated by Anna’s sister Carola and her husband Miron Grindea
(editor of Adam literary journal), who had been living in England since
1939. But Daghani’s health was deteriorating. He suffered from both
depression and Parkinson’s disease, evidenced in his increasingly shaky
drawings and handwriting. However, he continued to produce and, as
in previous homes, covered not only the walls of his apartment with his
work, but also the surfaces of furniture and lampshades, bathroom tiles,
and the glass windows of doors. Moreover, his commitment to the task of
commemoration remained undiminished and he devoted endless hours
to working on the revised typewritten versions of his diary. Daghani and
his wife remained in Hove until they died—Anna in 1984 and Daghani
in 1985.
Life Testimonies: Diaries, Memoirs, Albums,

Stories, and Collages
Daghani’s understated narrative made a considerable political impact when
it was translated into German in 1960. This publication prompted the
German public prosecutor in Lübeck to begin investigating war crimes in
the slave labor camps in Ukraine. Regarding Mikhailowka, Daghani and
twelve employees of the August Dohrmann company gave legal deposi-
tions of the camp, as did several of the Nazi officers identified in Daghani’s
text. These included SS-Unterscharführer Walter Mintel, a deputy camp
commandant, who claimed that he had never been at Mikhailowka,
although—according to Daghani’s account—he was involved in several
executions. In 1971 the investigations were annulled for lack of hard evi-
dence. But Daghani, refusing to abandon the pursuit of justice, obtained
transcripts of all of the testimonies and related documentation, filling

four large files. Although the investigations never reached the courts, his
account helped to bring attention to the region, providing some form of
recognition for those who had suffered there.
From the 1960s until he died in 1985, Daghani reworked and revised
both the original version of his diary and his artworks, creating elabo-
rate and extensively detailed versions with further drawings and paintings.
From the information contained in the Lübeck files, he handwrote and
typed lengthy extracts into his revised diaries. These multi-layered works
bring together images and writings from different periods, interweaving
memories with current events. They are fragmented and repetitive, barely
covering some periods, while examining others in extensive and minute
detail. These revised sequences take various forms—some handwritten and
combining words with images, some type-written and using only words.
Among the principle handwritten and artistically embellished versions,
What a Nice World, hand-bound into a single monumental volume, con-
tains texts and images created over a period of thirty years (1943–1977).
Equally impressive is 1942 1943 And Thereafter (Sporadic records till 1977)
(1942–1977), a folio of loose painted and inscribed sheets, arranged and
numbered as a cumulative sequence.
These diaries prompt questions about how such testimonies should be
used and what value they have. Daghani interwove his own original nar-
rative from Mikhailowka and Bershad with the depositions recorded at
Lübeck, adding other voices to the narrative. The most striking of these
cumulative testimonies is the authorized version of Let Me Live. In this
typed manuscript, Daghani divides each page between his diary and the
court testimonies, offering parallel accounts of one and the same event
simultaneously, from strikingly different points of view. Colored felt pen
lines indicate the sources of the material with highlighted sections show-
ing his original diary text (in green) and extracts from the depositions (in
red). Some of the latter are so extensive that they take over most of the
page, cutting into and fragmenting the original diary text. By combin-
ing these forms of testimony—diary and court depositions—so intricately,
Daghani raises fundamental questions about the interpretation of docu-
mentary evidence.
The cumulative working processes involved in Daghani’s texts and
images reflect a concept of history as a combination of sources, some pre-
sented as memories, others as factual events. Different perspectives emerge
through the orchestration of voices, providing a postmodern reading of
the events, so that the simple form of the diary evolves into something far
more complex. The visual qualities of the page, with the colored sections,
further emphasize this parallel process. Hayden White has asked about
the Holocaust, “Can these events be responsibly emplotted in any of the

modes, symbols, plot types, and genres with which our culture provides us
for making sense of such extreme events in our past?” (1999, 28). Daghani’s
practice of multiple forms of representation seems to offer a plausible
answer. His method seems to acknowledge that no single response is suf-
ficient or fully representative. Rather, he can be seen as working around
the events and his memories of them, incorporating different narratives in
an openly fragmented format.
The question of whether a diary can be rewritten without losing its
authenticity can be answered in terms of the two divergent intellectual
traditions on which the artist drew. From the European Enlightenment he
derived the notion that truth can be rationally pursued in a single-minded
way. But Daghani was brought up as a Jew, familiar with a fundamentally
different tradition in which truth is approached not factually, on the basis
of incontrovertible evidence, but through cumulative processes of inter-
pretation. His continuous rewritings and replications can thus be plau-
sibly related to the Jewish tradition of Midrash (interpretation), in which
Biblical texts are continually reinterpreted over time and no single version
is regarded as primary. Commentary is an essential part of the text rather
than something additional. Midrash relates to a tradition of remember-
ing, questioning, and reconstituting the shared and subjective contexts
that commemorate the past; Daghani’s accumulated footnotes and mar-
gin inscriptions correlate with this tradition of adding to and rewriting
interpretations.
The Lübeck investigations led Daghani and his wife to contact some
of the former August Dohrmann employees, Germans with a shared
responsibility for their sufferings. They wanted to know more about the
motives of these Germans for being part of what Daghani termed the
“extermination-cum-forced labour camp,” and to understand how those
implicated in events at Mikhailowka dealt with their consciences in the
aftermath of the war. Werner Bergmann, Josef Elsässer, and their sec-
retary Martha Fischer (née Grae) responded, their letters all arriving at
the Daghanis’ home in Switzerland on the same day. After they had met
and started to correspond, these contacts prompted the artist to create
further drawings, paintings, and writings. When Daghani and Anna vis-
ited Bergmann and his wife at their home in Freudenstadt in the Black
Forest, Bergmann welcomed them at the railway station with a bouquet of
flowers Daghani later recorded in black ink and gold paint. The meeting
with the Bergmanns was clearly very moving for them all, and Daghani
later wrote: “Neither of us THREE, that is he, Nanino and me had been
able to hide emotion as we said “good bye” to each other. To me it was
as if I was taking leave of an elder brother. Nanino and I have reconciled
ourselves with the past” (Daghani, Let Me Live, 279). When Bergmann
died in 1977, Daghani wrote that “the news hit us like a thunderbolt”
(Daghani, Live, 286).
Daghani’s tolerance, lack of bitterness, and humanistic treatment of
others reveal a spiritual openness reflected in the motto on one of the first
pages of What a Nice World, paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln: “To make
of your enemy a friend” (Daghani, G1.009v). He was able to interact
with people as individuals, and he developed friendships with Bergmann,
Fischer, and—to some extent—Elsässer during the following years. His
artistic decisions related to his approach to people in general. The way he
responded to his fellow inmates and captors, with restraint and an effort
to understand, directly informed the unique series of works he made dur-
ing the terrible years he spent in Mikhailowka and Bershad. Since the
1980s, Holocaust studies have increasingly taken into consideration the
experiences of victims and survivors, both in oral histories and memoirs,
as well as the roles and responsibilities of the “ordinary men” on the side of
the perpetrators. Some commentators and survivors, notably Primo Levi,
have warned that attempting to understand the perpetrators and their col-
laborators may come close to justifying their actions. But a contrasting
perspective may be found in the diaries of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jew who
perished in Auschwitz. Hillesum records that she was asked by a friend:
“What is it in human beings that makes them want to destroy others?” To
this she replied: “Human beings, you say, but remember that you’re one
yourself . . . All the appalling things that happen are no mysterious threats
from afar, but arise from fellow beings close to us” (Hillesum 1983, 72).
The Scripting of Experience

The limitations of verbal communication have been discussed extensively
in postmodern theory. As an exile, displaced from the territory of his
native language, and as a survivor, concerned with telling of the camps
in Ukraine, Daghani may have experienced both the “necessity” and the
“inadequacy” of language (Bartkowski 1995, 129). Maurice Blanchot has
written about L’ écriture du désastre (The Writing of the Disaster), in which
écriture has been interpreted as meaning both the physical activity of writ-
ing as well as the marks that are made (as opposed to écrit, which refers to
what is written) (Blanchot 1995, xiii). Both aspects of Blanchot’s écriture
are important in Daghani’s work, as well as the language he used. Daghani
usually wrote in English, even for the first version of his diary (The Grave
is in the Cherry Orchard, 5). Why he did so is unknown; he was certainly
an Anglophile, reading extensively in English even in Bucharest in the
1930s while working as a translator in an import- export company. Perhaps
he came to see German, his mother tongue, as the language of the enemy.
Writing his clandestine camp diary in English may have also protected
him from the risk of discovery. In the longer term, he doubtless hoped to
reach a wider audience by using that language.
The visual appearance of Daghani’s writing forms a striking contrast to
its content. For hand-written versions, Daghani employed a range of styles
from a simple freehand to an Old English form. His most dominant style
was Gothic script, which confers on the text an authority reminiscent of
sacred manuscripts. Since that was so obviously time-consuming to pro-
duce, it signals a work of particular value or significance. There are pages
upon pages of this rather labored, elaborate writing in books and albums
such as What a Nice World (see, for example, figure 5.3).
The use of handwriting demonstrates the personal nature of the endeavor
and seems to attest to the authenticity of the work. At the same time, the
aestheticized writing and ornamentation could also be a distancing device;
rather than write in his own hand, Daghani adopted a stylized form that
enhances his authority. The writing style recalls that of legal documents
or medieval manuscripts, particularly in the case of What a Nice World.
Handwritten, with illuminated first letters and a cover decorated with
metal corners, the book looks as if it could only have been produced before
mechanical printing presses were invented (figure 5.4).
A pencil on a leather string is attached to the book, emphasizing the
act of writing. For Daghani, it became the symbol of his unique authority.
When he went to Lübeck to make his deposition to the public prosecutor,
he carried this weighty volume with him.
As in illuminated manuscripts, Daghani often used gold paint, adorn-
ing his texts with decorative letters, calligraphic flourishes, and elaborate
borders. Often the first word is accentuated in scale and color to designate
a new section, while ornamental motifs mark the ends of chapters. His
decorations may seem simple compared to those of many manuscripts, but
they convey a comparable sense of the dignity of the medieval scribe.
Although Daghani saw himself primarily as an artist, his written out-
put was substantial. Aside from the diaries and memoirs, he produced a
number of poems, short stories, and other pieces of prose. In 1958, Paul
Celan wrote: “In this language [i.e., German] I have sought, during those
years and the years since then, to write poems: so as to speak, to orient
myself, to find out where I was and where I was meant to go, to sketch out
reality for myself . . . They are the efforts of someone . . . who goes with his
very being to language, stricken by and seeking reality” (Felstiner 1995,
115–116). For Daghani, the primary existential attachment was not to lan-
guage—and certainly not to German—but to the visual image. However,
in a period of unprecedented crisis, he realized that images alone were
Figure 5.3 Arnold Daghani, Untitled (woman with baskets and diary entry)
(1963) in What a Nice World (1943–1977) ink on paper (G1.023r) (Arnold Daghani
Collection, Special Collections, University of Sussex © Arnold Daghani Trust).
Figure 5.4 Arnold Daghani, What a Nice World (1943–1977), spiral-bound

sketchbook with mixed media (G1) (Arnold Daghani Collection, Special
Collections, University of Sussex © Arnold Daghani Trust).
not enough. Only through pictorial narratives, involving both images and
inscriptions, was it possible to convey the magnitude of the disaster. For
Daghani, writing may have been a means of locating himself and of find-
ing his way. Although not a cathartic process, writing seems to have been
a necessary activity and a means of exploring the relationship between
language (visual or verbal) and events. In L’ écriture du désastre, Blanchot

makes a point that seems to reflect Daghani’s activity too: “Not to write—
what a long way there is to go before arriving at that point . . . One must just
write, in uncertainty and in necessity” (Blanchot 1995, 11).
Like Primo Levi and other survivors who wrote of the camps, Daghani
had a strong sense of responsibility, and he might well have echoed Levi’s
words, “I am at peace with myself because I bore witness” (Agamben 1999,
17). However, neither Levi nor Daghani seems to have really found peace
through writing. Elsewhere Levi has written, “We survivors are not only an
exiguous, but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their pre-
varications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so,
those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned
mute . . . We speak in their stead, by proxy” (Levi 1989, 21). Daghani too wrote
of his continuing feelings of disquiet: “Not to this very day have I been able
to get rid of the horrifying thought how our fellow inmates were butchered
one after another. By right we should have shared their fate” (1942 1943 And
Thereafter, G2.113v). But the shame of being a survivor has humanist impli-
cations, as Bruno Bettelheim indicates: “Only the ability to feel guilty makes
us human, particularly if, objectively seen, one is not guilty” (1979, 313).
Writing, creating images, and bearing testimony were necessary but
ultimately unsatisfying activities. They did not provide catharsis for those
survivors who felt compelled to revisit their memories, writing about the
same events over and over again. Daghani’s oeuvre speaks through repeti-
tion rather than finding a way of working through his experiences to reach
another place. For him, the scripting of his experiences was a circular activ-
ity in which writing led to more writing, images to further images. The
proliferation of different formats in his diaries, of voices offering different
viewpoints on events, gives a sense of unending circularity that overrides
structural chronology. His endless activity suggests both a fear of person-
ally forgetting and a broader fear of history forgetting the inmates and the
camps in Ukraine. As Daghani carefully wrote and rewrote the events of
those years, the process seems to have become as significant for him as
the resulting works. His guilt of surviving though others perished became
intertwined with his awareness of the impermanence of memory and the
danger of forgetting. The lack of public interest in the camps in Ukraine,
with all the attention focused on better-known camps such as Auschwitz,
intensified his frustrations. Daghani believed ever more strongly that his
account had to be heard. He felt obliged to act as a historian, to provide
“A Chapter of Contemporary History” that was still largely unknown
(1942 1943 And Thereafter, G2.131r). His tireless revisions, in which cer-
tain narratives are obsessively recalled and reinscribed, highlight the space
between the event, memory of it, and verbal and visual representations
of it. For none of these representations are mimetic; all involve different
filters. Events are perceived through our subjective responses, to which
earlier memories add further layers of interpretation.
Even the most elaborate of Daghani’s written records cannot transcend
the limits of language. But he was fortunate in being able to share the task
of commemoration with his wife Anna, who had been at his side through-
out their ordeals. Their shared memories enabled him to record the fate of
the prisoners at Mikhailowka in a form that recalls the traditional Jewish
“Memorial Book.” In the folio 1942 1943 And Thereafter, he devoted five
pages to a reverently calligraphic “ROLL-CALL,” a list of the names and
responses of those who perished at Mikhailowka, Tarassiwka, and other
labor camps in Ukraine. Their fates are recalled as if they were answering
the roll-call in their own voice:
Mr. Schwarz, hairdresser Present I was shot dead Feb 1943 at

NIEMIROW
Mrs. Schwarz Present I was going with child, so I was shot
dead by the order of the commandant
Polizeimeister Alfred Jähnig
The list includes 250 persons in all, including many children. A specific
identity is indicated even for people for whom Daghani and his wife could
no longer remember a personal name: “Young Ukrainian Jewish mother
from TEPLIK or UMAN with babe newly born in the camp.” Reciting the
names of the dead became a solemn ritual, repeated by Daghani and his
wife every year at Yom Kippur. The limitations of the written record were
transcended as the names were liturgically recited within the framework of
an age-old religious tradition.
Eloquent Understatement and the Layering of Memory

In addition to the artistic works in Mikhailowka “commissioned” by the
guards and engineers, Daghani secretly produced over fifty drawings and
watercolors there and in Bershad, forming a fragmentary visual diary.
These works had to survive a long and arduous journey. Hidden in a metal
tube in the camp, the artist carried them in a sack above his head while
wading across the river Bug and sewed them into the lining of Anna’s
coat for their journey back to Bucharest. Daghani described these works
as “genre” scenes. They include portraits; interiors; and scenes of inmates
at evening prayers, at work on the road, and at the gravel pit. They appear
gentle and low key, sensitively drawn and painted in soft colors. Daghani
repeatedly depicts particular incidents, often with Christian iconographic
connotations, such as a woman giving birth in the stables at Mikhailowka.

When Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, the poet and cousin of Paul Celan, died
of typhus and her body was handed down from her bunk, Daghani was
reminded of traditional images of Christ being lowered from the cross. As
he later noted, “Who would have thought that in the camp I should be
confronted with “Nativity” and “Pieta?” (Let Me Live, 68).
His perception of Christian analogies raises the events above the squalor
and brutality of life in the camp; he portrayed the inmates with great rever-
ence. These drawings have unspoken narrative implications. Daghani later
added sheets of tracing paper on which he inscribed short verses from the
New Testament. In this way he directs the viewer’s reading of the images.
To the drawing of the woman giving birth he added an adapted verse from
St. Luke, in English and French. Rather than as a title, the text is written
over the image, visually integrated with it. The text reads: “Nativity at
Night. And so it was, that while they were there, the days were accom-
plished that she should be delivered.” “He” becomes “she” in Daghani’s
adapted text and a scene from the harsh conditions of the camp becomes
a religious image. To the drawing of Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger being
handed down on a ladder, he added the words from St. John, “Then took
they the body.” Daghani’s religious sensibility led him to take the images
out of the immediate context to which they related and infuse them with
more complex religious dimensions. Word is added to image to strengthen
the Biblical references.
In portraying the routines of the camp, from working parties and soup
lines to sleeping quarters and evening prayers, he returns a sense of mean-
ingful existence to the human subject. His carefully selected images do not
show executions or beatings; even in his text, these tend to take place just
out of sight, although the shrieks of the victims can be heard. As he wrote,
“I do not show crimes in the way of being committed, but martyrology of
another kind” (What a Nice World, G1.165r). Though his written accounts
record many acts of brutality, briefly and without graphic detail, Daghani
was especially careful in selecting both the subject matter and form of the
images he represented. Furthermore, his verbal account included events
that were told to him by other inmates, whereas his visual images repre-
sent only what he witnessed personally. The two media function in diver-
gent ways. The verbal accounts play the role of witness historian, telling
as directly as possible of the events in the camp, while the visual images
achieve a certain aesthetic distance. The fascination of his work arises from
the tension between the two modes.
Daghani’s differentiated selection process for his written and drawn or
painted works reflects the fragmented and oblique relationship between
the event and its verbal and visual representations. The drawings and
watercolors were produced in the camp, but he wrote up the text from
notes after he returned to Bucharest. As Ziva Amishai-Maisels has indi-
cated, inmates tended to make rather objective recordings due to a neces-
sary repression, for fully expressing their feelings while in the camp would
have made their traumatic experiences more difficult to survive psycho-
logically (1995, 50). In portraying the inmates as ordinary and dignified
people rather than as victims, Daghani affirms their humanity. He treats
them as individuals and records their characters with great warmth and
perception, giving a more intimate picture of the interactions between
individuals within these very particular circumstances. Daghani’s works
from the camp and ghetto are not dissimilar in style to those of other art-
ists in comparable circumstances. What makes his works strikingly unique
is that—unlike many of the other artists—as a survivor, he was able to
spend years reworking and reflecting on his experiences, thereby adding
another dimension to his works.
The inscriptions on certain visual works draw attention to this refracted
word-image relationship. On a 1943 watercolor showing the sleeping quar-
ters at Mikhailowka, Daghani later added a note about the water dam-
age that occurred when he and Anna were wading across the river Bug
(figure 5.5) (1942 1943 And Thereafter, G2.063r).
Thus, the most significant point of their escape from the danger of Nazi-
occupied Ukraine to the relatively less perilous Romanian Transnistria
left its visible and irremovable mark on the image, a unique “watermark,”
confirming its authenticity. Daghani also added a sheet of tracing paper,
which can be seen as a material metaphor for the layering of memory, on
which he noted the names of those depicted. The parallel with Charlotte
Salomon’s Leben? oder Theater? Ein Singespiel (Life? or Theatre? A Singing
Play) [1940–1942] is striking, although he probably would not have been
familiar with her work. The words inscribed on the overlay amplify the
significance of the visual image. A 1972 self-portrait of the artist painting
the watercolor adds a further layer of memory (figure 5.6). Past and present
become interwoven as the present reactivates memories of the past. In this
multiple visual reminiscence Daghani places himself within an enlarged
field of vision. This complex image within an image acts as a staging of the
processes of memory, with the earlier work acting as a prompt.
One might think that Daghani’s inscriptions unduly impinge on his
images. But there are also significant examples in which he uses isolated
images to convey unspoken emotions within the framework of his extended
narratives. An example is a drawing in ink and gold paint in What a Nice
World that represents his wife’s shoes. The image is stark in its simplicity:
an old pair of shoes against a gold background with a black border. The
title is also minimal: “Nanino’s shoes.” For the viewer or reader familiar
Figure 5.5 Arnold Daghani, Camp interior (1943) in 1942 1943 And Thereafter
(Sporadic records till 1977) (1942–1977) watercolor on paper (G2.063r) (Arnold
Daghani Collection, Special Collections, University of Sussex © Arnold Daghani
Trust).
with the context of Daghani’s autobiographical art, the title suffices to

evoke the circumstances of their escape. When Anişoara’s shoes needed
mending, Stasia, a kitchen hand, took Daghani to Abrasha rather than
one of the other cobblers in the town. Stasia knew that Abrasha belonged
to the resistance and could help them escape. Thus, the simple shoes rep-
resent Daghani and Anna’s survival, because of the help of people who
were willing to risk their lives. On the facing page, Daghani adds a fur-
ther image, this time with a more explicit explanation. The page shows
a table-like structure with an inscription above it: “Gaissin: July 16th,
1943–Friday. To think that the wreck of a pair of shoes, Nanino’s, should
have brought about our escape.” Faces of the other inmates emerge from
the shadows.
Thus, textual inscriptions may radically alter the way an image is read.
The image may appear complete, but the text adds further layers of refer-
ence. Latently present in the image, these emerge more fully through addi-
tional inscriptions. An example is the watercolor “Nanino at the window
(in Czernowitz)” [figure 5.7].
Figure 5.6 Arnold Daghani, Sunday morning (1972) in 1942 1943 And
Thereafter (Sporadic records till 1977) (1942–1977) ink on paper (G2.062r) (Arnold
Daghani Collection, Special Collections, University of Sussex © Arnold Daghani
Trust).
This painting, completed in 1942 before their deportation, is the earliest

work by Daghani known to have survived. It shows Nanino standing by
a window, looking out into the street. The handling of the colors is soft
and muted; at first glance, the viewer might read the image as a domestic
interior without further significance. Some years later, Daghani included
Figure 5.7 Arnold Daghani, Nanino at the window (1942) in 1942 1943 And
Thereafter (Sporadic records till 1977) (1942–1977) ink and watercolor on paper
© Arnold Daghani Trust).
the image in the folio 1942 1943 And Thereafter, where he pasted it onto
a much larger sheet and added inscriptions to frame the image: “Nanino
at the window (in Czernowitz) awaiting full of apprehension my coming
home. Too much of a risk in the streets . . .” This inscription develops the
visual tensions inherent within the image. Daghani was absent, but the
composition is structured from a point in the room behind his wife, as if
he was watching her watching out for him. An apparently simple domestic
scene becomes representative of the sense of danger felt by the Jewish com-
munity, their fragile lives and imminent suffering. A further inscription
above the painting closes the framework by recalling that it, too, survived
“by chance”; the Daghanis came upon it unexpectedly after their return to
Bucharest in 1944.
Haunting Images and Fading Words

In addition to the works in which words and images are juxtaposed and
combined in relation to each other, Daghani made a number of synthe-
sized works in which words and images function simultaneously. In “Cloth
of our time bearing impression of suffering Man”, he inscribed the titles of
some works he made in Mikhailowka on the features of a Christ-like som-
bre face, alluding to the ghostly traces on the Turin shroud. He thereby
conflated words and images with memories of the events that continued
to haunt him. Self-quotation is repeatedly used as a visual metaphor for
his memories, establishing connections between the slave labor camp and
processes of reconciliation in the post-war era.
In transforming words into images, Daghani drew on the tradition of
micrography in which minute words are written in the form of abstract or
representational forms. It is a practice found in medieval Hebrew and Islamic
manuscripts and decorations, often as a means of overcoming the prohibi-
tion on images in religious contexts. In Hebrew manuscripts, for example,
micrographic forms may be found in the writing of Masorah or marginal
notes, adding a decorative border to the Biblical text. Although the intricate
shapes make the words difficult to read, these notes contribute to and com-
ment on the central text such that “the flow of the main text is continually
interrupted by a chorus of divergent voices . . . a multi-vocal chorus contain-
ing dissonance and atonality” (Voolen 1990, 9). The voices coexist, with no
attempt to find a common perspective—a practice that recalls the Jewish
interpretative tradition discussed earlier with regard to Daghani’s revisions
of his diaries. These micrographic works are presented as autonomous word-
image creations, rather than as supplementary decoration.
Elsewhere, Daghani characterizes images with a resounding silence.
For example, the murdered inmates of Mikhailowka reappear spectrally in
wordless works, in light ink washes. Indistinguishable faces emerge repeat-

edly in the shadow of other images, or alone as a haunting presence. Word
and image are also combined in symbolic shapes, representing a silent lan-
guage through which Daghani felt his fellow inmates were attempting to
communicate with him. Hieroglyphic shapes, which are unintelligible to
both Daghani and the viewer, are “written” across the image. As he wrote
in 1975 on one of these hermetic works:
This is what the victims were dictating me. All hermetic. Their dreams,
joys, worries, illusions, hopes, fears, sensual perception, success, failure,
tenacity. All were taken into the grave, where they were made to descend.
Their lives erased by the wanton pleasure for killing of those aiming at
them from the brink of the grave (Untitled drawing (1975), in 1942 1943
And Thereafter, G2.006v).
There are pages and pages of hieroglyphic forms in a number of differ-

ent works, combining stylized faces and abstract shapes, which are at the
same time both words and images. While zoomorphic characters may be
found in a number of literary traditions, including Hebrew and Islam,
Daghani adapts faces to his lines of text rather than to animal forms.
Although he felt that the inmates were speaking to him, their language
remains hermetic, making the effect all the more poignant. He senses
their presence, but just as their lives were cut short, so communication
is fractured, resulting in an “oppressive silence” (Daghani, What a Nice
World, G1.200r).
Whereas Daghani’s written diaries reveal a conscious wish to remember
his fellow inmates, his visually encoded memories appear to have been more
involuntary. Memories are modified over time, forming an ever-changing
sequences, and they run at their own speeds—sometimes quickly, other
times in slow motion or repetitively like a broken spool. Although some
memories may be called up by an act of will, others impose themselves
upon the mind. They appear and reappear, making the past a persistent
part of the present. In this way, forced conditions are mirrored by the
involuntary nature of memory. A survivor may retain the feeling of having
no control over either external or internal life (Schultz 2004, 67–86). The
notion of “involuntary memory” is familiar from Marcel Proust’s experi-
ence of eating a madeleine that returned him directly to his childhood.
For Proust, this “instant” was prompted by the sensation of taste, while for
Walter Benjamin, it has been suggested that smell had a comparable effect
(Leslie 1999, 116). Benjamin argued that true (in contrast to intentional)
memory is involuntary and has a shock effect.
Daghani’s involuntary memories are expressed not as a sudden shock,
but as a persistent haunting of the artist’s mind. His images may more
aptly be compared to what Henri Bergson describes in Matter and Memory

as “dream-images” that “appear and disappear independently of our will”
(Bergson 1911, 97). A number of works give visual form to these concerns
in which the past is condensed and displaced, imposing itself on the pres-
ent. These include some of the images already discussed, such as the 1972
self-portrait with hidden faces in the shadows. In some works, the faces
are barely visible, colorless shadows whose presence can be scarcely felt.
One drawing is structured by the line of the river Bug, beyond which the
ghostly faces appear (figure 5.8).
Beneath this line, Daghani wrote:
Images after the encounter with a World of phantoms

kept rushing on, superseding and juxtaposing one another.
Mind trying to sort them out, ordered
Word to be their spokesman.
But, alas, Word faded, and
Images in their oppressive silence
have since then gone on
haunting me.
For Daghani, words seem to have represented reason, rationality, and

control, while images often could not be restrained. As a result, although
many of his visual works were also consciously planned, it is in these rather
than the written works that the effects of involuntary memory can be most
strongly found. Yet Daghani continued to analyze images in words, seek-
ing a way of coming to terms with the past, even if the words were limited
in their effect and the past continued to haunt him. On the same drawing,
Daghani identified with James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in finding history
“a nightmare from which he was trying to awake.”
Conclusion
In word-image analysis, distinctive functions and modes of operating have
been attributed to the verbal and the visual. To summarize Norman Bryson,
this “is the distinction between a form of knowledge which aspires to a
smoothly comprehended world, ordered and organized, narrated through
words as a logical and completed account of the events it describes, and a
form of knowledge which is, in its dialectical capacity to hold disparate
versions of the same material simultaneously in tension, able to represent
the unknowableness of the world” (Corbett 2000, 46). While words aim
to explain events and decipher their meanings, “visual representation may
be able to reproduce for us the uncertainty, unknowableness and confusion
Figure 5.8 Arnold Daghani, Images after the encounter with a world of phan-
toms keep rushing on . . . (1973) in What a Nice World (1943–1977) ink on paper
© Arnold Daghani Trust).
of the lived experience in history.” For Daghani, words, in particular, were

not as logical or complete as one might imagine.
When analyzing his verbal and visual works, it is difficult to disen-
tangle Daghani from his practice. The informed viewer/reader comes to
recognize his particular handwriting and becomes intimate with his per-
sonal history. There is an inherent tension in the relationship between a life
history consciously constructed, both in images and words, and the invol-
untary memories of a haunted mind, expressed in shadowy images and
compulsive reworkings and rewritings. In fact, as much is communicated
by the artist’s working process as by what he intentionally says. Neither
words nor images could fully satisfy Daghani’s aim of representing the
past, while the discrepancies between the media highlight the gap between
the memory of the event and the mode of representation. His practices
bring historical events back to life, giving access not only to the experiences
of an individual, but to those of the minority to which he belonged.
Notes
1. An earlier version of this article was published in Pictorial Narrative in the Nazi
Period: Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Arnold Daghani, co-authored
with Edward Timms (London: Routledge, 2009), 64–91. I am very grateful to
Edward Timms for his comments and contributions.
2. These works are now in the Arnold Daghani Collection, Special Collections,
University of Sussex and the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem.
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Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books.
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Responses to the Holocaust in Contemporary Art. Ed. Monica Bohm-Duchen.
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with Lund Humphries.
Bartkowski, Frances. 1995. Travellers, Immigrants, Inmates: Essays in Estrangement.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
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& London: University of Nebraska Press.
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and John Lynch. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
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1977). Unpublished folio, Arnold Daghani Collection: University of Sussex.
———. What a Nice World. 1943–1977. Unpublished book, Arnold Daghani
Collection: University of Sussex.
———. 1947. Groapa este în livada de vişini. Bucharest: SOCEC.
———. 1960. Lasst mich leben! Tel Aviv: Weg und Ziel Verlag.
———. 1961. The Grave is in the Cherry Orchard. Adam: International Review.
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———. 1980s. Let Me Live. Unpublished authorized manuscript, Arnold Daghani
Collection: University of Sussex.
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York: Random House.
Michaels, Anne. 1998. Fugitive Pieces. London: Bloomsbury.
Schultz, Deborah. 2004. Forced Migration and Involuntary Memory: The Work
of Arnold Daghani. Cultures of Exile: Visual Dimensions of Displacement. Eds.
Peter Wagstaff and Wendy Everett. Oxford: Berghahn. 67–86.
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London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Ch a p t e r Si x
M i h a i l Se ba st i a n a n d
M i rc e a Eli ade: Ch ron ic le of
a Brok e n Fr i e n d sh i p 1
Andrei Oişteanu
The Amniotic Period (until 1933)

In the archive of the National Museum of Romanian Literature there is a
remarkably interesting set of photographs. They depict a group of happy
youngsters in their mid-20s on a sort of “holiday game” in the Bucegi
Mountains. In these photographs, taken in July 1932, we see Mircea Eliade
(recently returned from India), Mihail Sebastian (recently returned from
Paris), Haig Acterian, Mihail Polihroniade, Marietta Sadova, Floria and Sylvia
Capsali, Mac Constantinescu, and others.2 Ethnically heterogeneous as it
was—Romanians, Jews, Greeks, Armenians, and others—this was a typical
group of friends in interwar Bucharest. The usual examples of multicultural
and multiethnic towns of Greater Romania include Timişoara, Cernăuţi,
Brăila, and some others. Bucharest is always forgotten, though it, too, was a
multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual, and multi-confessional city.
The 1920s and early 1930s came after the miraculous year of 1918, when
Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transylvania were united with Romania, form-
ing Greater Romania. “Romania is so lucky,” P.P. Carp would ironically
comment, “it no longer needs good politicians.”3 Greater Romania seemed
to enjoy a short, quasi-paradisiacal period, with a generation of young intel-
lectuals who, as Mircea Eliade believed, for the first time in history did not
have a historic mission to fulfill. It was an “amniotic period,” as Ioan Petru
Culianu would call it, referring to the state of the fetus, protected by the
amniotic fluid in the maternal womb (Culianu 2004, 216). In Eliade’s words
(as used in The Myth of the Eternal Return), “the terror of history” acted more
softly. Consequently, “the boycott of history” could also be applied in a softer
manner (Eliade 1969, 163–164). It was probably the very lack of a common
Figure 6.1 Mihail Sebastian (first from the left), Mircea Eliade (sitting middle-
left), and their group of friends during a summer vacation in the Bucegi Mountains
(July 1932). The archive of the National Museum of Romanian Literature,
Bucharest.
mihail sebastian and mircea eliade / 121
Figure 6.2 Mihail Sebastian (second from the left) and Mircea Eliade (fourth
from the right) surrounded by friends during a summer vacation in the Bucegi
Mountains (July 1932). The archive of the National Museum of Romanian
Literature, Bucharest.
“national mission” (or at least a “common danger,” to generate the syndrome

of the “citadel under siege”) that atomized society and led to the brutal “fall
from Paradise” and the well-known political failure to come.
The friendship between Eliade and Sebastian was an exceptional one,
not just in terms of its depth, but also in terms of its bumpy manifestation:
a Dostoyevskyan friendship, if not also a Eugéne Ionesco-type one. For, at
a certain moment, around Sebastian-Béranger, Romania was “rhinoceros-
izing” itself in ever-constricting circles, reaching the last and most inti-
mate circle— that of friends. Just like Béranger, the protagonist of Eugéne
Ionesco’s play Rhinocéros, Sebastian gradually became a pariah, surrounded
by people transformed into rhinoceroses.
Eliade in Sebastian’s Defense (1934–1935)

In 1934, following the publication of Sebastian’s novel De două mii de ani
[For Two Thousand Years] with the infamous antisemitic foreword signed
by Nae Ionescu,4 Mircea Eliade publicly defended his friend Sebastian,
polemizing with their common mentor, the author of the foreword.
Among other things, in his first article, “Judaism and Antisemitism,”
Eliade criticized the “certitude of Jewish damnation,” and Nae Ionescu’s
opinion that Jews had irremediably lost their access to redemption—extra
ecclesiam nulla salus, in Origen’s formulation. To judge this way, Eliade
122 / andrei oişteanu
writes, meant “to intervene in God’s free will,” which “could redeem any-
one, by any means.” In two other articles, “Christianity Facing Judaism”
and “A Last Clarification,” Eliade continues this controversy with theo-
logian Gheorghe Racoveanu, fellow contributor to Cuvântul and a friend
of both Eliade and Sebastian. There are “certain Jews,” Eliade would
nevertheless admit, who “are Devil’s sons.” These Jews “shall not find
redemption.”5
Eliade’s jump to the public defense of his friend Sebastian was obvi-
ously a laudable and courageous act. Sebastian fully appreciated it. In
August 1934, he wrote Eliade the following in a letter: “Your answer [to
Racoveanu’s article], dear Mircea, [was] excellent. You could not put it
better. I am deeply sorry you were dragged into this mess, in a way because
of me” (Handoca 1999, 32). This was written at the time when Sebastian
was being attacked from all directions, from the right and from the left,
by the Legionnaires and by the Communists, by friends and by enemies,
by Romanians and by Jews. According to the Romanian P. Nicanor,
for instance, “[Sebastian’s] intellectual profile is primarily hooliganic”
(Sebastian 1990, 239), while for the Jewish writer Isaac Ludo, Sebastian
is a “dramatic bone rodent,” a “lowlife,” a “scoundrel,” a “dejection of
the Jewish ghetto” (Sebastian 1990, 290). In short, Sebastian was too
Jewish for the Romanian nationalists and too Romanian for the Jewish
nationalists.6
But Mircea Eliade approached the issue of Judeophobia from a some-
what cold, technical, and strictly theological perspective. Consciously or
not, he largely ignored the political perspective (not to speak of the moral
one) of anti-Semitism. At that moment, in the mid-1930s, the Romanian
(and European) Jews needed physical, not metaphysical, salvation. They
needed redemption on the earth, while still living, rather than in heaven,
after death. In fact, Sebastian himself sarcastically amended this theolog-
ical controversy in his book Cum am devenit huligan [How I Became a
Hooligan]: “I do not claim any right to have a say in this debate [between
Eliade and Racoveanu], which, moreover, in its depth, is profoundly and
totally indifferent to me. I have a vague impression that after my death I
shall not be judged by Mr. Racoveanu’s texts. And if I am wrong, let God’s
will prevail” (1990, 323).7
Still, Sebastian fully appreciated the fact that his friend Eliade was
one of the few who came to his defense. On the cover page of his volume
Cum am devenit huligan, Sebastian inserted a dedication showing his
gratitude: “To Mircea, who kept me from despair while enduring the
miseries related here [in the book]—which will only survive, if they will
ever survive, because he had a say—the most beautiful.” Signed: “Mihai
1935”.8
Sliding to the Far Right: First Signs (1935–1936)

In the fall of 1935, Sebastian started to notice that Mircea was “sliding
ever more clearly to the right” (Sebastian 2000, 29). On November 27,
1935, Sebastian notes: “When we are alone together we understand each
other reasonably well. In public, however, his right-wing position becomes
extreme and categorical. He said one simply shocking thing to me, with a
kind of direct aggressiveness: ‘All great creators are on the right.’ Just like
that” (2000, 29).9
Everything still seemed remediable. Sebastian’s decision was firm; he
would avoid at any cost the breaking up of their friendship. He was con-
vinced he had even found the appropriate strategy: “I shan’t allow such
discussions to cast the slightest shadow over my affection for him. In the
future I shall try to avoid ‘political arguments’ with him” (2000, 29).
In less than a year, however, this strategy would be proven unsuccessful,
or at least impossible to apply. On September 25, 1936, Sebastian writes: “I
should like to eliminate any political reference from our discussions. But
is that possible? Street life impinges on us whether we like it or not, and
in the most trivial reflection I can feel the breach widening between us”
(2000, 79).
In the fall of 1936, the “painful political arguments” between the two
friends seemed harder and harder to avoid, leading to irreparable discords
(Sebastian 2000, 84).
He [Mircea Eliade] is a man of the right, with everything that implies,

[Sebastian noted in his journal on 25 September 1936]. In Abyssinia, he
was on the side of Italy. In Spain, on the side of Franco. Here [in Romania]
he is for Codreanu. He just makes an effort—how awkwardly?—to cover
this up, at least when he is with me. But sometimes he can’t stop him-
self and then he starts shouting, as he did yesterday . . . Will I lose Mircea
for no more reason than that? Can I forget everything about him that is
exceptional, his generosity, his vital strength, his humanity, his affectionate
disposition, all that is youthful, childlike, and sincere in him? I don’t know.
I feel awkward silences between us which only half shroud the explanations
we avoid, because we each probably feel them. And I keep having more and
more disillusions, not least because he is able to work comfortably with the
anti-Semitic [journal] Vremea, as if there were nothing untoward about it
(Sebastian 2000, 78–79).
Nevertheless, Sebastian concluded on a still hopeful note, “I shall do every-

thing possible to keep him” (2000, 79).
Mihail Sebastian did not know how to choose between the intellec-
tual value of his friends and colleagues and their moral one. He didn’t
know whether to adopt a position of political tolerance or one of ethical
intransigence. For example, Sebastian’s reaction of embarrassment about

his contact with Dragoş Protopopescu (a journalist at Porunca Vremii and
co-editor at the journal Buna Vestire), who became an Iron Guardist, is
symptomatic: “There should be—and it’s not the first time I say this to
myself—there should be more intransigence, more rigidity even, in my
life” (56), Sebastian notes in his diary on June 15, 1936. “I am too ‘sou-
ple’—and I utter this word with a touch of scorn for everything in me is
too accommodating” (56).
Between Love and Hate (1937–1939)

But things developed speedily. On January 13, 1937, the two leaders of
the Iron Guard, Ion Moţa and Vasile Marin, died. They had both fought,
as volunteers, on Franco’s side in the Spanish civil war. The ritual of their
bodies being brought home, followed by their funerals, exhibited great
pomp and turned into a huge propagandistic pro-Legionnaire manifes-
tation. “[Ion] Moţa and Vasile Marin have died in Spain” (2000, 106),
Sebastian notes in his journal on January 15, 1937. “It’s hard for me to
talk about that with Mircea. I sense that he’s in mourning. As far as I’m
concerned, I feel sad when I think about what has happened. There’s
more blindness than humbug in their camp, and perhaps more good faith
than imposture. But then, how is it possible that they don’t realize their
terrible mistake, their barbarous mistake? What aberration explains it?”
(2000, 106).
Sebastian became unable to tolerate his hypocritical relationship with
Mircea Eliade and other right-wing friends (Haig Acterian, Marietta
Sadova, Dinu Noica, and Nina Mareş).
The situation is becoming more and more painful. I don’t feel I can stand
the duplicity that our friendship has required since they went over to the
Iron Guard. Mircea’s recent articles in Vremea have been more and more
“Legionary.” I avoided reading some of them. The latest one I read only this
morning—though it came out on Friday and everyone has been talking
to me about it. Is friendship possible with people who have in common a
whole series of alien ideas and feelings—so alien that I have only to walk in
the door and they suddenly fall silent in shame and embarrassment? (2000,
112–13).
On February 25, 1937, Sebastian lists a possible solution to his troubled

relationship with Eliade: “Maybe we’ll spare ourselves a stormy farewell
and let things break up by themselves over time” (2000, 113).
Between 1937 and 1939, Sebastian’s Legionnaire friends were disturbed
by his presence. They would change the subject or keep silent whenever
Sebastian stepped into the room. Only their dog Joyce—not affected by
the Legionary Movement—“shouted with joy” at his sight. “Only Joyce
reminded me of the time when I felt somehow at home in that house”
(2000, 175), Sebastian wrote on August 30, 1938. “Our friendship is rap-
idly breaking up,” he noted in his diary on March 25, 1937. “We don’t
see each other for days at a time—and when we do, we no longer have
anything to say” (120). At times, in despair, Sebastian himself would ask
Eliade to change the subject. “But is friendship possible under such cir-
cumstances?” (123), he wrote in his journal on April 4, 1937.
On December 19, Sebastian felt he was about to lose all his friends,
including “the closest friend of all, Mircea” (134). Indeed, a few days before
the elections of December 20, 1937, Eliade’s infamous text “Why I Believe
in the Victory of the Legionary Movement” appeared in the far-right pub-
lication Buna Vestire. In it, Eliade asked: “Can the Romanian people end
its days . . . wasted by poverty and syphilis, invaded by Jews and torn apart
by foreigners . . . ?” (133). Stupefied, Sebastian transcribed in his journal a
fragment of Eliade’s text. The long and vivid political disputes they had
throughout 1937 did not manage to clarify things between them. “He’s
neither a charlatan nor a madman. He’s just naive. But there are such cata-
strophic forms of naiveté,” concluded Sebastian on March 2, 1937 (114).
The two friends’ encounters were less frequent, until they ceased com-
pletely: “It’s nearly two months since I last saw Mircea,” Sebastian wrote
in his journal on January 13, 1938. “Should I let things unravel by them-
selves? Should I wrap it all up with a final explanation? I feel such revulsion
that I would prefer us both to stop speaking once and for all. I have noth-
ing to ask him, and he certainly has nothing to say to me. On the other
hand, our friendship lasted for years, and perhaps I owed it one harsh hour
of parting” (145).
Half a year later, when they eventually did meet again, Sebastian did
not know how to manage his relationship with Eliade. Out of control,
his feelings oscillated between sympathy and antipathy, between love and
hate:
Dinner at Mircea’s on Sunday evening. It was a long time since I had seen
him. He’s unchanged. I looked at him and listened with great curiosity to
what he said. The gestures I had forgotten, his nervous volubility, a thou-
sand things thrown together—always congenial, straight-forward, capti-
vating. It’s hard not to be fond of him. But I have so much to say to him
about Cuvântul, about the Iron Guard, about himself and his unforgivable
compromises. There can be no excuse for the way he caved in politically. I
had decided not to mince my words with him. In any case, there’s not much
left to mince. Even if we meet again like this, our friendship is at an end . . .”
(155) [April 12, 1938].
Like Sebastian’s feelings about Eliade, the relationship between the

two friends itself was oscillating. Sebastian constantly felt he was losing
Eliade and then finding him again. On March 6, 1939, he offered as a
gift to Nina and Mircea Eliade his new volume, Corespondenţa lui Marcel
Proust (Marcel Proust’s Correspondence), with the following short but
meaningful dedication: “To Nina and Mircea, found again.” On July 22
of the same year, Sebastian joyfully commented in his journal about “a
meal in a garden restaurant” with Nina and Mircea, where things felt
“like in the best times of old” (216). Everything seemed to be mendable.
Then, on September 1, 1939, Hitler attacked Poland. Mircea Eliade was
“more pro-German than ever, more anti-French and anti-Semitic” (238).
“What is happening on the frontier with Bukovina is a scandal,” Eliade
told Petru Comarnescu, “because new waves of Jews are flooding into the
country. Rather than a Romania again invaded by kikes, it would be bet-
ter to have a German protectorate” (238). This echoed Eliade’s sentiments
in his December 1937 text “Why I Believe in the Victory of the Legionary
Movement”—he was obsessed with “the invasion of Romania by kikes.”
This was too much for Sebastian. The man whom he had considered “the
closest friend of all” only two years previously was now his “ex-friend Mircea
Eliade” (239).
Iphigenia, or the “Legionary Sacrifice” (1939–1941)

In December 1939, Mircea Eliade wrote the play Iphigenia. In Eliade’s
view, King Agamemnon’s daughter not only did not oppose being sac-
rificed, but even made a eulogy of self-sacrifice, offering herself “for the
redemption of the others” (63). She could have avoided this fate by marry-
ing Achilles, but preferred instead to “throw herself in the arms of death”—
to “marry death,” as Eliade would put it—in order to allow the Greek army
to leave for the Trojan War. The references to Legenda Meşterului Manole
[Master Manole’s Legend] were obvious in the play: “I shall not be built
in,” Iphigenia declared, “at the foundation of a grandiose construction, to
give it breath and life,” but rather at the foundation of Greek victory over
Troy (Eliade 1996, 63).10
The choice of the martial subject and the play’s meanings were trans-
parent. As Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine also notes, “[I]n this tragedy in
three parts one can find all the ideological topics that remained dear to
him [Eliade]—particularly the exaltation of sacrifice, and of death for
the motherland—skillfully integrated in an a priori dramatic script, with
no direct connection to the Romanian and European political actuality.
Numerous passages are in fact almost word by word reproductions of the
articles devoted by Eliade, in 1937, to the Frankist “sacrifice” of Ion Moţa

and Vasile Marin” (2002, 197).
The play had its opening night on February 12, 1941, eighteen days
after the Legionary rebellion. A fragment of Sebastian’s Journal explains
the following:
The premiere of Mircea Eliade’s Iphigenia at the National Theatre. Of

course, I didn’t go. It would be impossible for me to show myself at any pre-
miere, let alone at one which (because of the author, the actors, the theme,
and the audience) was bound to be a kind of Legionary reunion. I’d have
felt I was at a meeting in their “den”. . . The text is full of allusions and
ambiguities (which I already noticed when I read it last year) . . . The symbol
does strike me as rather crude: the play might be called “Iphigenia, or the
Legionary Sacrifice.” Now, after five months of being at the helm and three
days of revolt, after so much killing, arson and pillage, you can’t say it is not
relevant (322–323).
About one month later, Sebastian eventually went to see the play. His
comments in the Journal were less critical. He noted that “only here and
there were there annoying Legionary allusions” (328).
It has been said that, at the time, Mihail Sebastian was particularly
sensitive, suspicious, and subjective. He was, supposedly, a man who
saw “Legionary allusions” everywhere, even where they were not pres-
ent. Four decades later, however, the young scholar Ioan Petru Culianu
deciphered the play’s message in a similar way. Reading the script of
Iphigenia in 1977, Culianu discovered “with a certain amazement and
sadness” his master’s association with the ideology of the Legionary
Movement. This was an embarrassing “ideological position” that
Culianu concluded “seems to us today entirely impossible to under-
stand” (2004, 328).
Not surprisingly, a few Romanian Legionnaires published the script
of Eliade’s tragedy Iphigenia in Argentina in 1951. Eliade himself made
several changes and even added a brief foreword: “I publish with joy, but
also with sadness, this play of my youth, which was so loved, at the time
of its writing, by my friends Haig Acterian, Mihail Sebastian, Constantin
Noica and Emil Cioran.” In fact, he dedicated “this text, which we all
loved at the dusk of our youth,” to “two of my best friends,” Haig Acterian
and Mihail Sebastian.11 In 1951, when these lines were printed, Mihail
Sebastian could no longer express his reserve toward such a statement
(he had died in 1945). However, before his death, he had admitted in his
journal that, feeling embarrassed to tell his friend the truth, he feigned
some appreciation of the play’s script in February 1940: “After [reading]
Iphigenia . . . I use a few admiring declarations to cover my real sense of

dissatisfaction” (275).
A Failed Encounter (1942)

In the summer of 1942, Mircea Eliade came from Lisbon to Bucharest with
a message from Salazar to Antonescu. This was to be his last trip home.
Eliade met with his Legionnaire friends and “all the friends from Criterion”
(Jurnalul portughez, 132)12 except for Mihail Sebastian. Overwhelmed, the
latter noted:
I heard a while ago—but omitted to mention it in this journal (is it becom-

ing so unimportant to me?)—that Mircea Eliade is in Bucharest. He did
not try to get hold of me, of course, or show any sign of life. Once that
would have seemed odious to me— even impossible, absurd. Now it seems
natural. Like that, things are simpler and clearer. I really no longer have
anything at all to say to him or ask him (498).
It is significant that Eliade’s wife Nina, also an old friend of Sebastian’s,

did not attempt, either in 1942 or in 1943, to see him while in Bucharest
(see Sebastian’s entry on May 27, 1942; 489–490).
There have been many speculations as to why Eliade avoided Sebastian
in the summer of 1942. In the “Mircea Eliade File,” author Theodor
Loewenstein (Dr. Lavi), an Israeli historian of Romanian descent,
advanced a cynical motive: “As a diplomat Mircea Eliade was of course
aware of the fate awaiting the Jews. Why, then, should he have seen his
ex-friend, who was doomed to death?” (1972, 26). It was indeed that sum-
mer that Ion Antonescu and Gustav Richter (Adolf Eichman’s represen-
tative in Romania) signed an agreement for the deportation of the Jews
to the extermination camps in Poland. On August 8, 1942, Sebastian
himself quoted in his journal an article from Bukarester Tagesblatt, which
gave an extensive description of the plan to transform Romania into a
country free of Jews (judenfrei) by the fall of 1943 (500). However, in my
opinion this explanation for Eliade’s avoiding him seemed too morbid to
be true.
In this respect, Eliade had his own motivation to avoid Sebastian. In
a letter of June 6, 1972, the Israeli professor Gershom Scholem asked
Eliade for explanations concerning this (and other) matters: “Ever since I
met you, I have had no reason to believe that you were an anti-Semite, all
the less a leader of anti-Semitism. I consider you a sincere and just man,
for whom I have great respect, and that is why I find it natural to ask you
to tell me the truth. If there is anything to be said about this, let it be
said, and let the atmosphere be cleared of general or specific accusations”
(Europa, Asia, America. Corespondenţă, 140). Eliade answered Scholem

that in Bucharest in the summer of 1942, he felt the Gestapo or the
Romanian secrete service was watching him and he did not want to direct
them toward Sebastian, thus making additional trouble for him.13 This
was a clumsy attempt to exculpate himself. The same evidence for men-
daciousness can be found in Eliade’s Memorii (Memoirs), also written
in the 1970s, but not in the journal he kept in Portugal (Eliade 2006,
130–133).
In October 1946, while in Paris, Eliade wrote in his journal about
his relation with Sebastian and the reason he had avoided Sebastian in
Bucharest in the summer of 1942:
I shall never find consolation for the fact that I did not see him in August
[actually July] 1942, when I went back to Bucharest for a week. I was
ashamed, at the time, ashamed of myself—cultural counselor in Lisbon—
and of the humiliations he had to stand, because he had been born, and had
chosen to remain, Iosef Hechter [Sebastian’s real name]. Now I am uselessly
struggling amidst the irreparable (Eliade 2006, 88).
I think it was only in the fragment of his journal quoted above that Eliade
confessed the truth. In fact, he felt ashamed of, and responsible for, the
actions of a regime that was discriminating and civically annihilating his
friend Mihail Sebastian.
Sebastian finished 1942 in severe personal crisis. On December 20,
1942, he reflects on his situation at the age of thirty-five, concluding that
he has “no job,” “no money,” “no escape,” and especially “no real friend-
ship.” “Everything I have done has failed miserably” (526).
Post-Mortem (1945–1980)
On December 13, 1944, Sebastian nostalgically muses about memories
with Mircea Eliade : “Our walks in the mountains, the summers in Breaza,
the games in Floria’s [Capsali] yard at Strada Nerva Traian; our years of
fraternal friendship—and then the years of confusion and growing apart,
until it all broke down in hostility and oblivion” (625). This was one of the
last entries in Sebastian’s journal. A few months later, May 19, 1945, the
writer died, run down by a mysterious truck.
Upon hearing of Sebastian’s death, Eliade was overwhelmed. Still in
Lisbon, he noted in his journal the same day:
This news moves me deeply by its absurdity: Mihai lived, undoubtedly, a

dog’s life for the past five years. He escaped the massacres of the rebellion
of January 1941, the Antonescian prison camps, the American air raids,
and all that followed after the coup d’état of 23 August. He saw the fall of
Hitler’s Germany. And he has died in a traffic accident at the age of thirty-
eight! . . .
I recollect our friendship. In my dreams of the future, he was one of the
two or three persons who would have made Bucharest bearable. Even dur-
ing my Legionary climax, I felt close to him. I gained tremendously from
his friendship. I was counting on that friendship to enable me to return to
Romanian life and culture. And now he’s gone, run down by a truck! With
him goes yet another large and very beautiful piece of my youth. I feel even
more alone. The majority of those persons I loved are now beyond.
La revedere, Mihai! (Eliade, 2010, 212).
This journal entry clearly indicates that Mircea Eliade was aware of the
crimes against the Jews during the pogrom in Bucharest (January 21–23,
1941), of the Jews’ deportation to the camps of Transnistria during the
Antonescu regime, and of the suffering and trauma endured by his friend
who “had been born, and had chosen to remain, Iosef Hechter.” Eliade
does not have the excuse that, being abroad, he did not know about the
fate of Romanian Jews. Nevertheless, nowhere else in his journals, in his
memoirs, or in his letters did he note the anti-Jewish atrocities to which he
was contemporary.
Thirty-five years later, in 1980, when he had the chance to meet with
Beno, Mihail Sebastian’s brother, in Paris, Mircea Eliade gushed:
Your letter touched me greatly—and it also touched Christinel [Eliade’s

second wife], who knows all the three of you [the Hechter brothers],
from the stories I have told her in the 31 years of our marriage. It is
futile to try and tell you more; I would need tens, hundreds of pages . . . I
am looking forward to hearing your voice, to listening to you speak
about [the book] De două mii de ani [For Two Thousand Years], to
finding Mihai again . . . I embrace you with old friendship (Eliade 2004,
141–42).
In Romanian cultural history there are many great personalities, but

not many great friendships among them. Although broken, the relation-
ship between Sebastian and Eliade was, in my view, a great friendship. It
was intense, though asymmetric. It was actually a friendship based on love,
though an “unequal” one, as Marta Petreu correctly noted: “A love relation in
which one [Sebastian] loved and the other one [Eliade] mostly accepted to be
loved . . . One who gave and the other one who mostly received” (2009, 234).
These men lived during an eventful and agitated time in which history ruth-
lessly invaded the private space. History intervened in the destiny of these two
Romanian intellectuals and brutally altered relations between them.
Notes
1. This article is based on a lecture delivered at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem (October 24, 2007) and UNESCO, Paris (November 24, 2007)
upon the centennial celebration of Mihail Sebastian’s birth. An earlier version
was published in Studia Hebraica 7 (2007): 142–153.
2. Mircea Eliade recalled that time as a quasi-paradisiacal, Adamic period,
which occurred before the “language mix” and the “fall of the Babel tower”:
“We spoke in turns or at the same time, and among laughter and interruptions
we heard and understood each other. Each of us, in his or her own way, found
again the holidays of their childhood and teenage. We had become such good
friends we no longer realized how good we felt together, how spontaneous
without pretense, or vulgarity. That week we spent in the Bucegi Mountains
charmed us so much that we decided to go back every summer,” Memorii
(1907–1960) [Memoirs], 248.
3. Petre P. Carp (1837–1919) was a Romanian politician and literary critic, who
served twice as prime minister of Romania (1900–1901 and 1911–1912).
While there is no exact quote recorded, he is known to have made the com-
ment above.
4. Nae Ionescu (1890–1940) was a Romanian philosopher with far-right views,
who had a powerful influence on the generation of Eliade, Sebastian, Emil
Cioran, and Constantin Noica.
5. See the three articles published by Mircea Eliade on this topic: “Iudaism
şi Antisemitism. Preliminarii la o discuţie” [Judaism and Anti-Semitism.
Preliminaries to a Debate], “Creştinătatea faţă de iudaism” [Christianity Facing
Judaism], and “O ultimă lămurire” [A Last Clarification]. The first two texts
were republished in Mircea Eliade, Textele “ legionare” şi despre “românism,”
[“Legionary” Texts and about “Romanianism”] 116–117. Mircea Vulcănescu
also intervened in this dispute in “O problemă teologică eronat rezolvată? sau
Ce nu a spus d. Gh. Racoveanu” [A Theological Issue Erroneously Solved? or
What Mr. Gh. Racoveanu Did not Say].
6. On Mihail Sebastian’s “Jewishness” and “Romanianism,” see Andrei
Oişteanu, “Criza identitară a lui Mihail Sebastian” [Mihail Sebastian’s
Identity Crisis].
7. See also, Mihail Sebastian, Cum am devenit huligan (1935) and Mihail
Sebastian, De două mii de ani . . . (1934), with a foreword by Nae Ionescu.
8. See Mircea Handoca, “Mircea Eliade & Mihail Sebastian,” in România
Literară 22 (1997).
9. Mihail Sebastian, Journal (1935– 1944). The Fascist Years, with an Introduction
and Notes by Radu Ioanid, trans. Patrick Camiller, in association with the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Ivan R. Dee: Chicago, 2000).
All the quotations from Sebastian’s Journal used in this text were taken from
this edition. I thank Radu Ioanid for sending me the book.
10. The mythical Meşterul Manole (The Master Builder Manole) was the archi-
tect of the Curtea de Argeş Monastery in Wallachia, southern Romania. The
legend describes Manole’s hardship in building this monastery and the mys-
terious events that occurred during its construction. The walls built during
the day kept tumbling during the night, so every day the workers had to start
raising the walls all over again. In his despair, Manole prayed to God for help
and found out that the only way he can finish the building is by sacrificing a
human being. Unfortunately, Ana, his pregnant wife, who came to bring food
to her husband, was the first person who appears and a distressed Manole was
forced to sacrifice her. Ana, unaware of her tragic fate, was ultimately walled
in and the building finished.
11. Mircea Eliade, Iphigenia, volume published in Romanian by a Legionary
printing house in exile (Valle Hermosa, Argentina: Cartea Pribegiei, 1951).
12. See Mircea Eliade, The Portugal Journal, translated from Romanian by Mac
Linscott Ricketts, New York, State University of New York Press, 2010, 31.
13. Mircea Eliade, Europa, Asia, America. Corespondenţă, 132, 138, 140.
Works Cited
Culianu, Ioan Petru. 2004. Mircea Eliade. Trans. Florin Chiriţescu and Dan
Petrescu. Iaşi: Polirom.
Eliade, Mircea. 2010. The Portugal Journal. Trans. Mac Linscott Ricketts. New
York: State University of New York Press.
———. 2006. Jurnalul portughez şi alte scrieri [The Portugal Journal and Other
Writings]. Ed. Sorin Alexandrescu. Bucharest: Humanitas.
———. 2004. Europa, Asia, America. Corespondenţă [Correspondence]. Vol. 3,
Ed. M. Handoca. Bucharest: Humanitas.
———. 2001. Textele “ legionare” şi despre “românism” [“Legionary” Texts and
Texts about “Romanianism”]. Cluj-Napoca: Dacia.
———. 1996. Coloana nesfârşită. Teatru [The Infinite Column. Theatre]. Ed.
M. Handoca. Bucharest: Minerva.
———. 1993. Jurnal [Journal]. Vol. 1, 1941–1969. Ed. M. Handoca. Bucharest:
Humanitas.
———. 1991. Memorii (1907–1960) [Memoirs]. Ed. M. Handoca. Bucharest:
Humanitas.
———. 1969. Le Mythe de l’éternel retour. Archétypes et répétition. Paris: Gallimard.
———. 1951. Iphigenia. Valle Hermosa, Argentina: Cartea Pribegiei.
———. August 5, 1934. Creştinătatea faţă de iudaism [Christianity Facing
Judaism]. Vremea 349: 3.
———. July 22, 1934. Iudaism şi Antisemitism. Preliminarii la o discuţie [Judaism
and Anti-Semitism. Preliminaries to a Debate]. Vremea 347: 5.
———. August 26, 1934. O ultimă lămurire [A Last Clarification]. Vremea
352.
Handoca, Mircea, ed. 1999. “Dosarul” Eliade. Cu cărţile pe masă [The Eliade
“File”. The Books on the Table]. Vol. II, 1928–1944 . Bucharest: Curtea Veche
Publishing.
Laignel-Lavastine, Alexandra. 2002. Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco. L’oubli du fascisme.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Dr. Lavi (Theodor Loewenstein). 1972. Dosarul Mircea Eliade [Mircea Eliade
File]. Toladot 1: 21– 26.
Oişteanu, Andrei. 1999. Criza identitară a lui Mihail Sebastian [Mihail Sebastian’s
Identity Crisis]. Sebastian sub vremi. Singurătatea şi vulnerabilitatea martorului.
[Sebastian and His Time. The Loneliness and Vulnerability of the Witness].
Ed. Geo Şerban. Bucharest: Universal Dalsi. 163– 168.
Petreu, Marta. 2009. Diavolul şi ucenicul său: Nae Ionescu—Mihail Sebastian. [The
Devil and His Apprentice: Nae Ionescu —Mihail Sebastian]. Iaşi: Polirom.
Sebastian, Mihail. 2000. Journal (1935–1944). The Fascist Years. Ed. Radu Ioanid.
Trans. Patrick Camiller. Published in association with the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.
———. 1990. De două mii de ani & Cum am devenit huligan [For Two Thousand
Years and How I Became a Hooligan]. Foreword by Nae Ionescu. Bucharest:
Humanitas.
———. 1935. Cum am devenit huligan [How I Became a Hooligan]. Bucharest:
Cultura Naţională.
———. 1934. De două mii de ani [For Two Thousand Years]. Foreword by Nae
Ionescu. Bucharest: Editura Naţională-Ciornei.
Pa rt II
Tr a nsnat iona l M e mory i n
Li t e r at u r e a n d Fi lm
Ch a p t e r Se v e n
Pau l Ce l a n’s A e st h e t ics of
Tr a nsnat iona l R em em br a nc e
Iulia-Karin Patrut
La poésie de Celan est portée par le souvenir.1
Paul Celan repeatedly called attention to three problems which, isolated,

always appear as fixed points in his work: (a) violence/Shoah, (b) You/the
Other, and (c) aesthetic creation/communication.2 His poems also reflect
this correlation. Thus, memory of the “date”3 becomes a central aesthetic
figure in Celan’s works,4 a date in the double sense of the given—the
inevitable—and of concrete events, which take place at a given time. It is
generally known that Celan’s artistic commemoration primarily focused
on the Shoah, and it seems to go without saying that the complex pro-
cess of mutual agreement (interpersonal, public, and hermeneutical) about
the symbolic interpretation of the Shoah was a transnational process from
the beginning, especially in Celan’s case. This is because of the transna-
tionality of Celan’s character, biography, and work. Seen from the history
of the discourse, the other two variables either do not have or have very
little of a transnational character; these variables are historical events and
aesthetic creations, which Celan obsessively combined to ever new equa-
tions. For older European scholars, coming to terms with the Shoah was
limited by the boundaries set in confronting and describing the respective
national history. Only more recently has scholarly research attempted to
reconstruct—in hindsight—a synchronic analytical perspective in coming
to terms with the Shoah. In doing so, research has shown that completely
different contextualizations of, and even emphases on, the Holocaust have
occurred in the individual countries in differently structured stages (Welzer
2007). During Celan’s lifetime, there could be no question of a transna-
tional—even only a pan-European—understanding, let alone agreement.
In fact, even the smallest possible common denominator, the set phrase
138 / iulia-karin patrut
of the “collapse of civilization” (Zivilisationsbruch), was endorsed in most

of the eastern European countries only to a small degree, if at all (Diner
and Benhabib 1988). It is true, in these countries, that the genocide of the
Jews and the “Gypsies” was considered to be a great war crime for which
a defeated Germany and the Germans were primarily responsible, but the
idea of the singularity of the Shoah in the sense of a basic undermining
of anthropological and civilizing certainties hardly achieved public aware-
ness before 1989.5 Celan, his letters, and his poems thus communicated in,
with, and across heterogeneous discourse, language, and cultural spaces
that were beginning to develop their own characteristic history and Shoah
narratives at the time he was writing.
It is well known that Celan was born in Czernowitz on November 23,
1920 and spent the first twenty-seven years of his life in Romania. He can
be considered a deeply transnational person because of his Jewish origins
and his multilingualism (German as his mother tongue, then Romanian,
French, Russian, and English, among others), but also because of the mul-
ticultural microcosmos of Czernowitz. Even before World War II, at age
eighteen, Celan traveled all over Europe and finally began medical studies
at the Sorbonne in Paris (1938–1939),6 which the beginning war inter-
rupted. From 1945 on, northern Bukovina belonged to Ukraine, a fact
that stirred Celan (who had always attended Romanian-speaking gram-
mar schools) to move to the Romanian capital Bucharest. Nevertheless,
Celan maintained a distinct and rather positive relationship to Russian
and Ukrainian language and literature compared to most of the Romanian
intellectuals, exemplified by Celan’s numerous translations of Russian
literature.7 Altogether, he spent almost three years in Bucharest, years
in which he worked as a translator for Cartea Rusă,8 a publishing house
newly founded in the wake of the Soviet occupation. He then emigrated
via Vienna (1947) to Paris (from 1948 on). Seen from a particular perspec-
tive, this move can be viewed as a sort of return to the “halcyon days” of
his early university studies before the Shoah. The poem “La Contrescarpe”
recounts this journey, with the now famous verse “floß deinen Blicken ein
Rauch zu / der war schon von morgen”9 (“you were met . . . by a plume /
of tomorrow’s smoke already)” (Celan 2004). It bears witness to a distinct
reflection of exactly this interdependence and the attempt to create retro-
spectively a trans-European space of remembrance of the Shoah through
poetry. Celan made it clear, particularly in his acceptance speeches for
the Büchner Prize and the Bremen Literature Prize, that he trusted the
artistic, the aesthetic, as best positioned to contemplate the historical and
even the individual-biographical in transnational perspectives, so that the
artistic can be shared by others. This also means that others can adopt
the artistically created remembrance and share it in turn. Consistent with
aesthetics of transnational remembrance / 139
this paradigm, Celan worked to build an extremely broad network of per-

sonal transnational relationships (some through letters) to intellectuals
and writers. Examples include: Martin Heidegger in Todtnauberg (Black
Forest),10 Ingeborg Bachmann and Max Frisch in Austria, Switzerland,
and Italy,11 Nelly Sachs in Sweden,12 Ilana Shmueli in Israel,13 as well as
Edith Silbermann14 and Erich Einhorn15 in Germany. A common denomi-
nator of these relationships was Celan’s desire to agree on the importance
of the Shoah or, rather, to search for a commensurate (and commonly held)
transnational remembrance of the Shoah. Eventually, he felt that his own
remembrance was preserved less and less in these (and other) interpersonal
relationships and also in the public remembrance discourses.16 It seems
likely that just this alone could have led to the increasing aesthetic radical-
ization in his late work and in the posthumously published collection of
poems, Zeitgehöft (1976). On the other hand, however, Celan’s feeling of
isolation also led to increasing distress in his own personality, as he real-
ized that his own perspectives on the remembered could be shared only to
a small extent, if at all. To a great degree this is due to the fact that during
Celan’s lifetime no trans-European remembrance narrative had emerged.
There was work done in the wider context of critical theory, but it was only
after Paul Celan’s death that the implications of such work slowly came
into the collective conscience, beginning in the 1970s. He felt that Europe’s
coming to terms with the Shoah, especially in the public discourse on the
Holocaust, was too one-sided and flimsy, not radical enough, and not
conducted in the comprehensive anthropological perspective. “All kinds
of Philosemites everywhere . . . but not only one human being,” as Celan
wrote in a letter to Alfred Margul-Sperber on February 8, 1962 (Solomon
1987, 263).
At this point, the question arises: Are the Romanian language and
the aesthetic and mnemonic traditions in Romania to be accorded a spe-
cial value in Celan’s biography? The answer is surely “yes” and not sim-
ply for the reason that, for Celan, Romania was actually the country in
which he spent the longest period of his life, namely twenty-six years. The
Romanian language assumed a rather positive, slightly ambivalent posi-
tion for him, but, as he finally rejected it as language of his poetry, it may
also have caused to a certain extent the poet’s categorical “uprooting.” The
scholars mainly ascribe this “uprooting” to his love and, at the same time,
antipathy toward the German language, a language which was correlated
for Celan with the murderers of his parents. At the same time, he did use
the German language as a medium for aesthetic creation and even tried
to develop a poetical German language of aesthetical and political com-
memoration. Celan must have perceived this—employing German in his
creative work—as the greatest imaginable concession to Germany and the
Germans.17 He had such a command of Russian, French, and Romanian

that he would have been able to write poetry in any one of these languag-
es—his work as a literary translator is proof of this fact.18 In his Bucharest
years, Celan translated from Russian into Romanian Mikhail Lermontov’s
A Hero of Our Time (1840) and Anton Chekhov’s Peasants (1897), as well
as four short stories by Kafka: “Excursion into the Mountains,” “Passers-
by,” “A Message from the Emperor,” and “Before the Law.”19 All of these
texts dealt with domination, violence, flight, expulsion, and art. These
translations can possibly be judged as the first phase of aesthetic com-
memoration and coming to terms with the past; it is no coincidence that,
in the case of Kafka, Celan chose German texts that were dear to him to
translate into the language that was his own literary language during those
years: Romanian. Upon his departure from Bucharest, Celan left behind
eight poems and eight prose poems with the German-speaking Jewish poet
Alfred Margul-Sperber, his first (and probably only) patron. Each treats
similar themes, though in quite his own literary form, even though the
Romanian critics spoke of the “Kafkaesque features” of Celan’s Romanian
prose poetry. In addition, Celan’s numerous friends and work colleagues
in Bucharest were rather unanimously convinced that Celan had finally
become happier in Romania. One such statement by Marcel Aderca, a
translator colleague from the Cartea Rusă publishing house, commented:
Am citit că, la un moment dat, copleşit de multe mizerii pe care le-a avut de
îndurat, s-a gândit să se întoarcă în România. Cred şi acum că i-ar fi fost cu
mult mai bine alături de noi, că nici boala lui de nervi n-ar fi căpătat formele
acute pe care le-a avut . . . [Î]n mediul ambiant de aici, cu toate relele, cu noi
alături, i-ar fi fost cu mult mai bine (Aderca 27–28).
(I have read that once, overwhelmed by the many miseries he had to
go through, he thought about returning to Romania. I think even now
that it would have been much better for him, had he stayed among us, and
that his illness would not have turned acute the way it did . . . Here, in this
atmosphere, despite all the bad things, he would have felt much better in
our midst.)
Statements in Celan’s letters also refer to his time in Bucharest very pos-
itively, especially to the poetic dialogue with both Jewish and non-Jewish
poets, a dialogue that also unquestionably included empathetic discussion
about the Shoah. The most well-known documentation of this dialogue is
surely Celan’s literary debut, the poem in Romanian that appeared in 1946
under the title “Tangoul morţii” in the journal Contemporanul. Celan
socialized not only with the surrealists Gherasim Luca and Paul Păun; he
was acquainted or even friends with many Jewish and non-Jewish poets
and personalities of Bucharest’s cultural life. In addition to Ion Caraion, his
Romanian-speaking “poet-friends” included Alexandru Philippide, Petre

Solomon, Nina Cassian, Veronica Porumbacu, Ovid S. Crohmălniceanu,
Maria Banuş, Despina Mladoveanu, and Marcel Aderca. During this
period, which was full of extremely productive and diversified exchanges
with the above-mentioned personalities, Celan wrote texts in Romanian,
including one especially illustrative passage in a letter to Petre Solomon:
“J’ai connu—et traduit—un certain nombre de grands poètes français.

(Comme j’ai connu la ‘fine fleur’ des poètes allemands.) Certains m’ont
témoigné, dans des envois et dédicaces, une amitié dont je ne dirai que ceci:
elle s’est avérée être bien ‘littéraire.’ Mais j’ai eu, il y a longtemps, des amis
poètes: c’était, entre 45 et 47, à Bucarest. Je ne l’oublierai jamais” (Solomon
1987, 229).20
(I came to know—and to translate—several great French poets (as I
knew the “elite” of German poets). Some of them showed me, through their
letters and dedications, a friendship about which I would say this: it proved
to be quite “literary.” But I did have, a long time ago, poet friends; this hap-
pened between 1945 and 1947, in Bucharest. I will never forget it.)
Many intellectuals with whom he was friends wondered to what extent

Celan, “even if he wasn’t caught in a dilemma of choosing between two
languages, did at least flirt with two literary citizenships” (Caraion, “Nu-l
dureau,” 34). In May 1947, Ion Caraion, who wrote the lines cited here
and who was the editor of the journal Agora,21 preferred Celan’s German
poems over the Romanian versions: “Das Gastmahl” (The Banquet),
“Das Geheimnis der Farne” (The Secret of the Ferns), and “Ein wasser-
farbenes Wild” (A Watercolored Fleece). This preference, however, was
not for reasons of quality but because it strengthened the multilingualism
of the journal. These “survivors” who had known Celan or with whom
he was good friends all performed a double, even triple role, in process-
ing remembrance: All those named here published their reminiscences of
Celan, his Holocaust memories, and, finally, the events of World War II
and the Shoah as they themselves had experienced or learned about them
in Romania’s public discourse.
This remembrance discourse was quite feebly developed in Romania
and ran anti-cyclical to that of the Western European discourse (typical
of the Socialist countries). What was strongly branded as a crime in the
early years after the war was not actually completely forgotten but was
brought up even less frequently from the 1960s on. Paul Celan was almost
constantly in contact by letter with some of his Romanian friends (after an
almost ten-year interruption from 1948–1957 most likely due to integra-
tion into his new homeland). He wrote primarily to Petre Solomon and
Alfred Margul-Sperber but also to Corina Marcovici and Maria Banuş.
Moreover, he sent the poems he had published in Germany to Romania,

where his friends worked to get them translated into Romanian and pub-
lished.22 In this way, Celan became a sort of nominal leader of the far
too weakly developed remembrance discourse in Romania. During his
lifetime, but even more so after his death, he became a central focus in
the process of remembrance, which conflicted with an arbitrarily active
censorship in Romania that viewed the Holocaust generally as “a thing of
the past” and, furthermore, disavowed Celan as a “defector.” Nevertheless,
some of Celan’s poems—including controversial poems such as “Denk
Dir” (Just Think!), which takes up the Six-Day War—were published
during the Socialist regime through the efforts of Petre Solomon, Nina
Cassian, and George Guţu.
Many who knew Celan and his work raised the questions: What would
have become of his artistic creations? How would the aesthetic expression he
would have arrived at been styled? And what form of remembrance would he
have arrived at if he had not left Romania during the socialist dictatorship?
Solomon believed that censorship would have hindered Celan considerably
in his artistic development. Caraion regretted that Romanian literature lost
one of its greatest poets but acknowledges that both German and world lit-
erature gained because Celan’s work was thus written in a world language.
Aderca, however, thought that Celan could have pursued his artistic path,
including work in remembrance, in ultimately a less problematic manner
had he remained in Romania, “And—that is perhaps the most important
thing—I believe that he could have written the poems he wrote (there here)
as well” (Aderca 28). This discussion is interesting less because of these spec-
ulative answers than because of their testament to the strongly felt presence
of Celan in Romanian debates—remembering him involved a rethinking of
the remembrance of World War II and its literary processing. Celan himself
answered the question of the language he chose for poetry:
Îi scriu, à tes bons soins, lui Sperber; şi lui îi spun, în limba aceasta
nemţească care e a mea—et qui reste, douloureusement, mienne—că mă
aflu, cu meridianul meu—rudă cu al tău, Petrică—exact acolo de unde
am pornit.23
[I also write, thanks to your help, to Sperber; I also tell him, in this
German language that is mine—and, unfortunately, it remains my lan-
guage—that I find myself with my “meridian”—which is, Petrică, related
to yours—exactly there where I started from] (Solomon 1987, 218).
Celan writes in Romanian and French here, yet mentions that German
“unfortunately” remains “his” actual language. He emphasizes that his
“meridian”—the central guideline of his life, his coordinate system—and
everything that is most important has (again) returned to his starting point.
The image of the meridian implies incorporating, transversing the entire

world; if put into normal prose, it would mean here that Celan’s migration
represented a time of spiritual search. It also alludes to an episode in the
life of Solomon in which the Jewish-Romanian poet emigrated to Palestine
from May 1944 to the autumn of 1946 to help establish the state of Israel.
He then returned to Bucharest, where he became acquainted with Paul
Celan on the editorial staff of Cartea Rusă. In any case, the deeply transna-
tional character of Celan’s imagery, which sees no categorical difference in
the language, is again apparent. The language is incidental for the “merid-
ian,” which was the metaphorical title of his Büchner Prize speech. It is
also important that Celan repeatedly cited parts of his poems in his let-
ters to his Romanian friends, explaining their meaning. Notably, the texts
chosen often treated war and violence and called attention to biographical
dimensions not understood in Western Europe.
From the beginning, this direct and unproblematic reference to his-
tory and reality represented the norm in the discussion in Romania sur-
rounding Celan’s work. Indicative is the comment Celan’s friend and
later famous critic Ovid S. Crohmălniceanu, alias Mony Cahn, made
in support of the publication of “Tangoul morţii”: “The poem whose
translation we are publishing is conceived as an evocation of real facts.
In Lubin, as in many other “Nazi death camps,” some of the prisoners
were forced to sing nostalgic songs while the others dug out graves . . .”24
(Solomon 1987, 58)
This statement is surprising because of its clear indictment of the
“death camps” in an era when the terms Holocaust and Shoah had not
been formulated and the trauma and manifold mortifications the prison-
ers suffered were scarcely a topic in Western Europe.25 The fact that this
actual historical and biographical substratum of his texts was never denied
is one of the main features of the Celan reception in Romania. The fact
that no one refused to discuss the genocide was beneficial, though this was
likely because (however unjustifiably) the question of a “Romanian guilt”
never came up. Celan himself did not place the guilt on the Romanians,
despite his experience performing forced labor in a Romanian labor camp
in Tăbăreşti in July 1942.26 This attitude can perhaps best be explained
by Celan’s unquestioned acceptance of the Romanian innocence discourse
from the post-1948 period, which implied that it was not fascist convictions
but concern for the country’s own territory that had moved the government
to enter the war on the side of the Axis powers in 1941. This explanation,27
naturally untenable, apparently aided Celan, as it did many other Jewish
Romanian writers with whom he was friends, in finding a basic consensus
with the non-Jewish population about the depravity of the crimes commit-
ted against the Jews—crimes ostensibly not committed by Romanians but
principally by the Germans and their original allies. This matter was seen
quite differently—justifiably so—in Germany and Austria.
According to the testimony of his Bucharest friends, Celan considered it
a blessing that this (alleged) consensus made it possible for his poetry to be
understood as a sort of “core statement” or “message” in Romania. As Petre
Solomon remembered it, in a sentence that consciously refers to the famous
image of “Flaschenpost”28 [Message in a Bottle] that speaks to the listener
along the transnational “meridian,”29 “Paul thought it very important that
the ‘message’ of one of his poems be well understood” (Solomon 1987, 59)
Solomon and all Jewish and non-Jewish “poet friends” from Romania express
in their publications great disapproval for the discussion on “absolute poetry,”
Hermeticism,” or “poésie pure” as key concepts in Paul Celan’s work.30 This
discussion arose primarily in Germany during the 1950s and continues more
or less to the present. The reasons for this asymmetrical reception between
the two countries are surely to be found in the different memory narratives
and guilt discourses. The reception of “Todestango”/“Todesfuge” (Tango
of Death/Death Fugue) is an informative example. Meanwhile in Romania
the poem was published precisely because it dealt with the Holocaust, in
Germany during the 1950s and 1960s some scholars were still hiding politi-
cal dimensions of Celan’s poetry. For example, in his review of “Mohn und
Gedächtnis” (Poppy and Memory), Heinz Piontek speaks of the exclusively
metaphorical character of the images in Celan’s poetry.31 In the same year,
however, Helmuth von Haas spoke of the elimination of every distract-
ing objectivity in the poetry, of the lyrical alchemy, and even of a “Zen
Buddist Satori experience” as the theme of “Todesfuge” (Haas 1983, 12).
In the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, writer Wolfgang Weyrauch characterized
“Todesfuge” in 1960 as “fragmentary and harmonious” and called its subject
matter “symbol, ritual, and door opener.”
Fundamental asymmetries in transnational remembrance during the
1950s and 1960s become obvious here, those that are involved in the indi-
vidual European societies with different narratives and different assump-
tions of perpetrator and victim roles, as well as those concerning the
relation between Jews and non-Jews. Celan himself wanted his poems to
trigger reflection on what the condition humaine means and on art in light
of the objective events of the Shoah. In the first post-war years, when sur-
realist and avant-gardist literary trends were still tolerated in Romania,
this was possible. However, this understanding was based on the nega-
tion of Romanian complicity in the Holocaust, a negation accepted by
both sides. As late as 1987, Petre Solomon stated that the publication of
“Todestango” in Romania was likely only an experiment for Celan because
those actually addressed by the poem were all Europeans, though especially
all Germans. The poem was intended “to stir up the conscience of the
Germans, who bore the guilt for the crime he [Celan] evoked” (Solomon
1987, 59). With the basis of common, society-wide condemnation of the
murder of European Jews, difficult topics such as war and death could be
contemplated, versified, and discussed at “literature festivals,” in public
readings, during private artists’ fêtes, and so on (Crohmălniceanu 1981,
213). For example, Crohmălniceanu remembers that his first memories of
Celan originated from such parties, where the poet liked to sing in a very
deep voice the old Renaissance mercenary’s song “Flandern in Not . . . / In
Flandern reitet der Tod” (Flanders in distress . . . / In Flanders rides Death)
(Crohmălniceanu 1981, 213).32 “After every stanza, he slammed his fist on
the floor and spoke, in an even deeper voice, the refrain: ‘Ge-Stor-Ben’ ”
(died) (Crohmălniceanu 1981 213). The song, which more than likely
recalls the time of the plague in the Low Countries, probably reminded
not only Celan but also others present—among them many Jews—of the
events of World War II. It is important here that the subject is widespread
deaths caused by an epidemic considered to have been a natural catastro-
phe and that the question of guilt is not brought up. The critic Caraion
also connects his first memory of Celan with a poem about death; Caraion
had published a translation of the French poem “Cris” by Henri Michaux,
verses from which are quoted here, verses he would always associate with
the image of Celan: “Ils meurent, Lazare / ils meurent / et pas de linceul /
pas de Marthe ni Marie / . . . je crie stupide vers toi / Si quelque chose tu
as appris / à ton tour maintenant / à ton tour, Lazare!” (They are dying,
Lazarus, / they are dying / without a shroud / without Martha or Mary /
stupid I am shouting at you / If you have learned something / it is your
turn now / it is your turn, Lazarus!) (Caraion 2001, 37).
Celan had Sperber give a note to Caraion (who later published his
poems in the Agora) in which he had written, “Eram eu, tu şi Michaux . . . Şi
fiindcă te-am citit, te îmbraţişez” (“It was me, you, and Michaux . . . And
because I read you, I embrace you”) (Caraion 2001, 37). Celan probably
never again experienced such a direct approach and communication in
so few words that then led to a friendship and to cooperation—and this
surely lies in the unexpressed “fundamental consensus” of the Bucharest
post-war years concerning human existence in light of the condemnable
violence, located somewhere outside. In Romania, almost everybody
agreed in strongly condemning the Holocaust, and Celan’s lyrical argu-
ment with violence was understood as such; but the questions of guilt and
responsibility remained largely unsolved, and this was felt by Celan as a
sharp barrier for his artistic work.
Later, as an increasingly strict and threatening censorship of the spirit of
proletarian art prevailed toward the end of the 1940s, only non-aesthetic,
preferably “constructively directed,” remembrance was possible at best.
Without restriction, in this intellectual climate Celan’s artistic sense

and the aesthetically communicated remembrance he aspired to would
have gone nowhere. However, what Celan experienced in the course of
the German confrontation with his texts in Western Europe, especially
in Germany itself, opened a deeper-seated wound when the allusions to
reality (primarily the Shoah, but also his entire person) were excised from
the intellectual horizon of his poetry. That is why Celan was to gain, as
Solomon formulated it so aptly, the impression that he increasingly “alien-
ated” (înstrăina) his own texts (Solomon 1987, 60).33 In this context,
Celan’s complaints about the German literature business, expressed in his
letters to Sperber and Solomon, are understandable. It was not just a mat-
ter of the Goll affair;34 the central point was rather a constant, deep-seated
lack of understanding—very painful for Celan—in the way his poetry was
received, discussed, and disassociated with history and his person.
During his stay in Austria, Celan, in a 1948 letter to Margul-Sperber,
was still hopeful (in his opinion) for a fair reception of his poems. He
called on Ludwig von Ficker, who saw in him a legitimate heir to Else
Lasker-Schüler.35 “What I’m especially pleased about was that he [Ficker]
responded completely to the Jewish in my poems—you know, of course,
that’s very important to me” (Solomon 1987, 251).36 Yet no long relation-
ship was established and further positive news about a satisfactory discus-
sion of historical allusions within his poetry and of the subject of Jewish
heritage developed in these poems did not materialize. Instead, a multi-
tude of rancorous passages such as: “Ah, you know . . . I have often won-
dered whether I wouldn’t have been better off with the shores of my home
country . . .” (Solomon 1987, 258). He complains in several places about
the persistence of Fascist ideas or personal continuities: “C’est l’heure de
la réalité pervertie . . . l’heure des ‘Männerbünde’ bien germaniques, bien
occidentaux, l’heure de la Projection [sic] et des alibis rétrospectifs” [It’s
the time of perverted reality . . . the time of the very German, very Western
‘Männerbünde’ (male societies; old boy networks), the time of Projection
and retrospective alibis] (Solomon 1987, 222).
Celan perceived the suppression of his person and experiences as one
dimension of a poem as theft of his authorship (Solomon 1987, 218). This
interpretation approach began to be established in literary theory only
with Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” (Barthes 1994, 491–495). In it
Celan did not see an interpretation approach but rather a refusal to process
memory, indeed a renewed, quite painful eradication of his person and his
authorship because of deep-seated anti-Semitism. If an attempt is made to
envision the status of the German debate at the beginning of the 1960s, it
must be recognized that the processing of the Shoah proceeded only very
slowly after the momentum of the Nuremburg Trials had leveled off.37
Instead, the demarcation between the “guilty” Germans and the “inno-
cent” Jews became increasingly pronounced. As a result, Celan’s attempts
at an aesthetically communicated understanding were perceived as an accu-
sation. Celan’s remarks hint at this, namely that, with his poetry, he had
approached the German-speaking public in a naïve and unprejudiced man-
ner and had given himself completely into their hands by aiming at a com-
mon “natural standpoint” (en persévérant dans le naturel) (Solomon 1987,
226). But then he says that “he was bitterly disappointed,” rejected again
and again, and greatly wounded. It is striking here that Celan, in his letters
to Solomon and Sperber, had relied on an understanding of the “natural,”
the human—a concept that for him contained a thought association of
person, art, and historical violence, just as he had experienced it during
the Bucharest years. As stated previously, this is decisively connected to
different developments of the memory narrative, namely, that the division
between “perpetrators” and victims failed to manifest itself in Romania
because of the collective identification with the Allies. Paradoxically, in
Germany, the increasingly hardened division (indispensible for coming to
terms with the past) hampered considerably the communication between
the resulting “two sides.” Celan’s letters to Romania suggest that the poet
did not comprehend exactly how and why the Holocaust memories dif-
fered, because his awareness of epistemic and power asymmetries between
East and West remained an intuition, which he didn’t analyze. He wanted,
more than anything, maximum public participation in the remembrance
communicated through his poetry. This presupposed public recognition
of his person and his individual history, which in his perception remained
absent for the most part. This lack of recognition was partially due to the
politics of the Iron Curtain and partially to the long history of asymmetrical
perceptions of the Holocaust between Eastern and Western Europe. Celan
either did not accept these reasons or, more likely, did not even perceive
them. “After I was ‘nullified’ as a person, that is, as a subject, I, perverted
to an object, am now allowed to survive as ‘topic’: mostly as a ‘bastard’
Steppenwolf with widely recognizable Jewish features . . . I am also—liter-
ally, dear Mr. Alfred Margul-Sperber!—the man who doesn’t exist” (Solomon
1987, 262). Until he committed suicide in the Seine in April 1970, Celan
believed the German-language reception of his poems systematically sup-
pressed their historical-biographical dimension in order to escape a “shared
history.”38 He viewed this as continued anti-Semitism. The developmen-
tal phases of his late works can be regarded (there is not enough space for
this here) in connection with this basic conflict. It has already been shown
that the reception in Romania and France,39 which Celan considered to
be not as problematic as the German one, could not satisfy the author,
because he wanted his work to dialogue with the Germans (this being one
of the reasons for his choice of German as language of his poems), and their
“misunderstanding” (as he thought it to be) hurt him more than any other
controversy. He, like his Romanian “poet friends,” placed the responsibility
for the Shoah almost exclusively on (West) Germany and wanted to reach
an accord with German poets and intellectuals—indeed, with the German
public as a whole—by aesthetic remembrance based on his perspective, a
utopian hope from the very start.
Finally, I will examine the thematic spectrum and the aesthetic form of
the lyrical and prose poetry Celan wrote in Romanian. These works con-
tain numerous images and metaphors seized on in later German pieces
in new contexts. Primarily, however, these texts—each by itself, but also
together—communicate an impression of coherence that Celan saw between
the themes of violence and Shoah, love and the Other, and aesthetics and
literary communication. In general, it can be said that these poems do not
concentrate on the concept of perpetrator or victim; they concern, rather,
a widespread network of relationships that are developed between the poles
of “aesthetic concentration,” “dialogue,” “You/love/the Other,” and “Shoah/
violence.” For example, the poem “Regăsire” (Encounter40) speaks of a pro-
cess of memory of violence and death: “Pe dunele verzi de calcar va ploua
astănoapte. / Vinul păstrat până azi într-o gură de mort / trezi-va ţinutul cu
punţi, strămutat într-un clopot” [It will rain tonight on the green limestone
dunes. / The wine, held until today in the mouth of a corpse, / will awaken
the land with the bridges, a land that withdrew into a bell] (Wiedermann-
Wolf 1985, 430). The preserved heritage of the dead “awakens” the sleeping,
on whom the heritage (as art) descends (“rains”) and becomes the bell toll
of remembrance. Later in the poem, the vision of the entanglement of love,
violence, and death emerges—a central image of Celan’s lyrical poetry from
the Bucharest years, appearing in all the Romanian lyrical poetry written
there: “Cântec de dragoste” (Love Song), “Réveillon,” (Awake / New Year’s
Eve) “Ora e cea de ieri” (It is the Hour of Yesterday), “Poem pentru umbra
Marianei” (Poem for Marianne’s Shadow), and “Tristeţe” (Sorrow). The
poems reveal that Paul Celan was concerned not about the differentiation
between “good” and “bad” relationships to a literary “You,” but about varia-
tions of the entanglement of love and violence. The poems seek a common
utopian position of disentanglement, apocalyptic images of the Shoah being
almost always in the background. Embedded are reflections on the placement
and range of the artistic as, for example, in “Regăsire,” which speaks of a “lau-
rel” that bites into “your/one’s” forehead [laurul meu scund, ca să-ţi muşte din
frunte] (Wiedermann-Wolf 1985, 430). One might interpret this as address-
ing the possibilities of art to undermine the “You” in its basic convictions,
comparable perhaps to Kafka’s image of the book—that is, literature—which
“[is] to be the axe for the frozen sea in us” (Kafka 1975, 28). In the prose
poems as well, especially in “A doua zi urmând să înceapă deportările” (The

deportations were to begin the next day), the question is asked: What can art
do in the face of imminent violence? Rescue and (religious) redemption are
alluded to, but neither of the two is realized in art. In this prose poem, art
can address only the endless fear, the disorientation, the feeling of despera-
tion, and the feeling of inadequacy of those who cannot find a way out of the
violent situation. An open-ended question stands as the final line: “Unde e
cerul? Unde?” (Where is heaven? Where?) (Guţu 1994, 217).41
After his emigration, it became increasingly problematic for Celan
to maintain what had been possible in Bucharest under the conditions
of the discourse of the emerging Romanian memory narrative, the
experimentation-friendly surrealistic scene, and the history of persecu-
tion shared by many Jewish writers. From his own perspective and from
the viewpoint of Romanian intellectuals and the interested public, he
succeeded in his artistic as well as in human “dialogue” with Romanian
remembrance. The remembrance process continuously lost significance
and occurred in ever smaller circles. In addition, it relied on shifting the
question of guilt to the outside. Exactly the opposite can be asserted for
the development in Germany: In Celan’s perspective, nothing—or hardly
anything—was achieved. At the same time, an ever wider public began
coming to terms with the past, and an intensive confrontation with the
idea of perpetrator and victim developed. It was perhaps this special devel-
opment of the German discourse (with the side effect of an attempt to
escape being the perpetrator) that Celan viewed as an insurmountable
obstacle to constructing a reader who could meet the “I” on the level of the
“human condition.” “ ‘Jews’ and ‘Philosemites’ everywhere,” Celan wrote
to Sperber. “But nowhere a human being.” This construction is, of course,
based on a problematic suppression of the question of guilt. In retrospect,
perhaps even beginning with the post-war years, Bucharest became for
Celan the place of projection of such “an understanding on the level of the
human condition” among “poet friends.” The suppression of the guilt ques-
tion, so symptomatic for the Romanian discourse after 1948, contributed
something of its own, and perhaps it was paradoxically the overemphasis
on this question that imparted the feeling that the German discourse was
powerless and led nowhere.
Notes
1. Zafer Şenocak 64.
2. All the translations from the Romanian, German, or French are my own
unless otherwise noted. I’d like to thank Frankie Kann [FK] for preparing
the English version of this article. Celan explained repeatedly how closely his
lyrical creations were bound up with his person, with the Holocaust experience
playing a central role. See the statements by Klaus Werner: “The ‘reality of
genocide,’ uniquely dimensioned in the Holocaust, has become for the major-
ity of German-Jewish writers and intellectuals from Galicia and Bukovina a
fact of their own biography” (279). As Beate Tröger has pointed out, in some
cases, “Celan erased the direct relationship of the poem to the biographical
context” (262).
3. “Perhaps one can say that every poem is inscribed with its own 20 January?”
(Wannsee Conference for the “Final Solution,” 1942 – FK) “Perhaps the radi-
cally new in the poems written today is just this: that it is here most clearly
attempted to remind us of such dates? But don’t we all write about ourselves
based on such dates? And which dates do we ascribe to ourselves?” (Celan, Der
Meridian, 53, speech on the occasion of receiving the Georg Büchner Prize in
Darmstadt on October 22, 1960). Compare the collection edited by Chaim
Shoham and Bernd Witte, Datum und Zitat bei Paul Celan.
4. The chapter “Biographismus” illuminates the connection between biography,
historical date, and the interpretability of lyrical art within the framework of
hermeneutic approaches. See Bollack and Wögerbauer, 315–336.
5. On the Romanian discourse, see Holocaustul evreilor români. Din mărturiile
supravieţuitorilor. The Eastern European Holocaust discourse is critically
discussed by Michael Brenner and Stefan Rohrbacher in Wissenschaft vom
Judentum, 113–114.
6. “La Contrescarpe” also refers to a trip from Czernowitz via Krakow to France:
“Über Krau/ bist du gekommen, am Anhalter/Bahnhof/floß deinen Blicken
ein Rauch zu,/ der war schon von morgen” (Collected Works, vol. 1, 283).
See also Gilda Encarnação,184 and Alfred Kelletat, 22. Felstiner has also
pointed out this connection (34). In addition, see also Andrei Corbea-Hoişie,
Czernowitzer Geschichten, 187.
7. In a letter to Alfred Margul-Sperber dated March 9, 1962, Celan calls him-
self in the signature “Paul—Russkii poet in partibus nemeţkih infidelium”
(approximately: “Paul—Russian poet in the zone of the perfidious Germans”)
(Solomon 268). See also Christine Ivanović, “Kyrrillisches, Freunde aus
das . . . ,” 54–61 and Das Gedicht im Geheimnis der Begegnung, 233.
8. On Celan’s work in the publishing company Cartea Rusă, see Crohmălniceanu,
Al doilea suflu, 39, and Hîncu, Excurs în timp.
9. Quoted in Barbara Wiedemann, Paul Celan. Die Gedichte. Kommentierte
Gesamtausgabe, 161. The poem was written in August 1962. As Wiedemann
explains, the “Place de la Contrescarpe” in the 5th Arrondissement in Paris,
not far from Celan’s workplace, offered the starting point for the poem’s title.
Compare in the same place (notes), 710. On the poem, see also Presner 47, and
Krings, 213–238.
10. On July 25, 1967, Celan spent a day with Heidegger in his Black Forest cabin
following a reading at the University of Freiburg. Compare the note to Celan’s
poem “Todtnauberg” in Wiedemann’s Paul Celan, 806, and France-Lanord,
Paul Celan und Martin Heidegger.
11. Bertrand Badiou, et al., eds, Ingeborg Bachmann—Paul Celan.
12. Barbara Wiedemann, Paul Celan—Nelly Sachs.
13. Shmueli and Sparr, eds. Paul Celan, Ilana Shmueli. Briefwechsel.
14. Amy Colin, ed. Paul Celan—Edith Silbermann.

15. Mariana Dmitrieva-Einhorn, ed., Paul Celan—Erich Einhorn.
16. It is known that the Goll affair contributed greatly to this. Compare Barbara
Wiedemann, Paul Celan—die Goll-Affäre: Dokumente zu einer “Infamie,” and
Ivanović and Reithmann, 127–167. A summary of the affair can also be found
in Robert Kleindienst, “Die ‘Goll-Affäre’,” 52–59. Nevertheless, the affair was
surely not the sole contributor to Celan’s increasing dissatisfaction about the
manner and content of the collective handling of the Shoah.
17. Research has repeatedly established that this compromise did not meet
with corresponding good will in the post-war society of West Germany.
See, for example, Klaus Briegleb, “ ‘Re-Emigranten,’ die Gruppe 47 und der
Antisemitismus,” 93–118.
18. See Axel Gellhaus, “ ‘Fremde Nähe’—Celan als Übersetzer,” an exhibition
by the German Literature Archives in cooperation with the Presidential
Department of Zürich in the Schiller National Museum, Marbach am Neckar,
and in the Zürich Strauhof; and Peter Goßens, 353–389.
19. See also Guţu, 221–223.
20. Celan’s letter to Solomon from September 12, 1962.
21. The Communist censorship banned further issues of this newly founded
multi-lingual literature journal; it was directed toward an international and
intercultural audience. On “Agora,” see also Felstiner, 379, note 15.
22. For the Celan editions in Romania, see Bianca Bican, Die Rezeption Paul Celans
in Rumänien, and “Problemfelder einer rumänischen Celan-Rezeption.”
23. Celan’s letter from Paris to Solomon dated March 8, 1962 (Solomon 218).
24. Quoted in Solomon, 58.
25. The term Holocaust became consolidated in the Western collective conscious-
ness only in the 1970s through a 1963 review by Elie Wiesel, although it had
been used as early as 1942 in the London magazine News Chronicle “explicitly
as a term for the Nazi genocide of the European Jews” (Glasenapp 143). An
examination of the terms Holocaust and Shoah can also be found in Annette
Krings, 10–18. Gundula van den Berg emphasizes especially the meta-
phoric use of the term Holocaust (20–23). The chapter “Erzählmuster und
Aneignungsverhältnisse” (Narrative Patterns and Learning Modes) points out
the connection with the “Diskussionen um angemessene Darstellungsformen”
(Discussion of Appropriate Artistic Forms ) (Torben Fischer and Matthias N.
Lorenz 245).
26. See also Reinhold Aschenberg, 297.
27. On this subject, compare Armin Heinen, 146.
28. Celan, speech on the occasion of receiving the Literature Prize of the Free
Hansa City of Bremen in Der Meridian und andere Prosa, 39.
29. Celan, Georg Büchner Prize speech in Der Meridian, 55, 62.
30. On Celan’s reception in West Germany, see primarily Thomas Sparr, “Zeit
der Todesfuge: Rezeption der Lyrik von Nelly Sachs und Paul Celan,” and the
chapter “Holocaust-Literatur als jüdische Literatur. Paul Celans ‘Todesfuge’ ”
in Dieter Lamping, Von Kafka bis Celan. Wolfgang Emmerich speaks of a
“skewed reception,” 366. Olschner refers to a 1960 article by Wolfgang
Butzlaff from the journal Der Deutschunterricht in which school students
were recommended to completely ignore the content of the poem and analyze
it as “literary fugue” (Olschner 89). In contrast, an Italian scholarly litera-

ture essay from 1959 states that the “Todesfuge” describes in an apocalyptic
vision, without hate or propagandistic intent, the murder of the Jews in the
German concentration camps (Bonaventura Tecchi 205–206). This presenta-
tion reflects surely a perceived lack of guilt concerning the Shoah in Italy.
31. Piontek called the poem “poésie pure” and a “zauberische Montage” (pure
poetry and a magical montage), which radiates “French elegance and the
splendor of the Balkans” and “the suggestiveness of chansons and the modu-
lations of melancholy.” Further, “It lives wholly from metaphor, image, and
archetype—reality is transposed into the encryption of poetry!” (Piontek
200–201).
32. See also Helmut Niemeyer, “Der Tod auf Rappen oder Schimmel. ‘Gestorben
muß sein’: Was der junge Paul Celan 1945 in Bukarest sang.”
33. On Celan’s own statement that he was aiming at a “grayer” language, one that
mistrusted the beautiful, see also Theo Buck, 11–12.
34. Claire Goll, the widow of the Jewish poet Yvan Goll, accused Celan during
the 1960s of plagiarizing her husband, whom Celan had come to know in
Paris shortly before Goll’s death in 1950. These accusations contributed to
Celan’s psychological problems.
35. Celan understood later, that the comparison with Lasker-Schüler (1869–
1945), one of the most important expressionist German-Jewish writers, hon-
ored him. By 1947, he knew little about her writings.
36. Celan’s letter from Innsbruck to Alfred Margul-Sperber dated July 6, 1948
(Solomon 251–52).
37. According to Dan Diner, it was only toward the 1980s that “that remem-
brance time, believed to have been lost, slowly awaked to new life” (7).
38. On the possibilities and limits of a “shared history” concerning the Holocaust,
see Lynn Rapaport, 185.
39. On the Celan reception in France, see the dissertation by Dirk Weissmann,
Poésie, Judaϊsme, Philosophie.
40. I am using the English translation by Julian Semilian and Sanda Agalidi in
Paul Celan: Romanian Poems.
41. Guţu pointed out early that central metaphors of Celan’s later poetry that
concerned remembrance, such as the urns, the poppy, or sand, had already
occurred in Celan’s early Romanian poems.
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Ch a p t e r Eig h t
Hom e sc a p e s of Ch i ldhood:
A h a ron A ppe l f e ld’s Li f e Stor i e s
of Cz e r now i tz
Emily Miller Budick
When Aharon Appelfeld’s autobiography Sippur Haim [The Story of

a Life] appeared in 1999, certain critics expressed disappointment that
the text did not contain fuller and more concrete historical information
about Appelfeld’s rather remarkable life, especially his early childhood
years before and during the Holocaust. In fact, absent from the story are
almost all of the usual markers of an autobiographical text: those detailed
and often poignant pieces of factual data, both private and public—dates,
events, and the names of “places and individuals”—which, Appelfeld says
explicitly, he will not give us (The Story of a Life, 2004, 91).1 “During the
course of the war,” he explains later in the text, “I was in hundreds of
places—in railway stations, in remote villages, on the banks of rivers. All
these places had names, but there’s not one that I can remember” (2004,
151). Indeed, Appelfeld refrains from even naming the city of his birth
until chapter 23 of the book, although this is a piece of information that
he surely does remember. The initial omission of the name of his birth-
place, Czernowitz, suggests that Appelfeld is being slightly disingenuous
concerning the degree to which memory alone determines what infor-
mation he does and does not give, and when and where, in his memoir.
The story of his life is, for Appelfeld, very much a constructed story, the
contours of which he feels free to determine for himself the same way that
any writer does.
By the time Appelfeld does give us information concerning Czernowitz,
he is well into his narrative, already recollecting his years as a young man
at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Within that context he recalls
an earlier moment, which is also part of his Israeli and not his European
158 / emily miller budick
experience. This is the moment when he meets, for the first time, one of
the writers who will be central to his artistic development: the important
Israeli author S.Y. (Shai) Agnon. This is when Appelfeld finally names
Czernowitz as the place where he was born. He does so to give this infor-
mation primarily to his literary mentor, Agnon and not to us readers:
There were fifty of us youths, Holocaust survivors from Poland and

Romania. Agnon would sometimes approach one of the children and
ask him about the city of his birth and about what he had been through
during the war. When I told him that I had been born in Czernowitz, he
was delighted. He knew the city well, and immediately began to rattle off
the names of people and places there. I had no idea what he was talking
about, but his appearance and manner of speech were not unfamiliar to
me . . . It was only years later that I got to know Agnon’s writing, and then
I immediately felt close to him. I was thrilled to encounter the names of
people, towns, and villages that I vaguely recalled from home. Bukovina
and neighboring Galicia had been separated only at the end of World War
I, and Father used to talk with great fondness about the Galician towns he
had frequented in his youth—Lemberg, Brod, and Buczacz . . . It was from
[Agnon] that I learned how you can carry the town of your birth with you
anywhere and live a full life in it. Your birthplace is not a matter of fixed
geography. And you can extend its borders outward or raise them to the
skies. Agnon populated his birthplace with everything the Jewish people
had created in the past two hundred years. Like any great writer, he wrote
not literal reminiscences of his town, not what it actually was, but what it
could have been. And he taught me that a person’s past—even a difficult
one—is not to be regarded as a defect or a disgrace, but as a legitimate
source to be mined . . . The years in Czernowitz and the years of the war
formed the synapses of my reflexes and emotions (2004, 151–155).
The indirect way Appelfeld provides this vital information concerning the
place of his birth, to which we are not even direct addressees but veritable
eavesdroppers, is not the only distancing device used in this passage, or, for
that matter, in the autobiography as a whole. Agnon’s manner of speech, for
example, is not, we are told, “immediately” familiar to Appelfeld. Rather,
it is only “not unfamiliar,” which is not the same thing. Only years later,
when Appelfeld comes to read Agnon’s writing, does he feel “immediately
close to him.” Similarly, the places of which Agnon speaks to him in that
earlier conversation are places that he does not know firsthand, but only
because his “[f]ather used to talk” about them. Indeed, he only “vaguely
recall[s]” them.
Not only is a “birthplace,”—as Agnon teaches him—“not a matter of
fixed geography,” which might be evoked through “literal reminiscences,”
it is also—for Agnon and Appelfeld—a largely mediated, primarily textual
place, a place that less bears the marks of direct and distinctive experience
homescapes of childhood / 159
than a place that is already storied. It is already part of a narrative tra-

dition, more verbal and literary than lived, which belongs not so much
to the realm of memory as to that of imagination. By citing the name
of his birthplace only within the context, not of his literal birth—as we
might have expected of an autobiography—but of his intellectual birth as
an artist, in relation to his spiritual, authorial father rather than his literal
father, Appelfeld emphasizes the importance for him of the term story in
the title of his autobiography. His life, we realize, is not only to be conveyed
through telling a story, but it is in a quintessential way itself a story, which
far transcends the concrete autobiographical events that chart Appelfeld’s
personal experiences. Through its association with Agnon and Appelfeld’s
own detachment from it, this story is also simultaneously the story of the
Jews and of the Holocaust.
Yet, there is another aspect to the story of Appelfeld’s life, which is
highly personal, albeit not in the ordinary way of an ordinary person liv-
ing an ordinary childhood. What Appelfeld’s life lacks, after the age of
eight, is that context of home and family, from which most of us grow and
develop and where we plant the memories that inform our future. From
age eight onward Appelfeld has no mother or father or family or home
or village. What he has instead is a natural landscape, inhabited less by
people than by water, pastures, trees, birds, animals, and everything else
that defines a natural as opposed to a populated environment.
Therefore it should not surprise us that in his life story geographical
place is itself a character as important and as imaginatively endowed as
any person—fictional or otherwise—that Appelfeld might include in his
story. The natural world of his childhood serves as a surrogate mother and
father for the orphaned child. For this reason, the natural world becomes
his home in a very real way. Czernowitz and the areas surrounding it are
not, then, just the incidental places where the events in Appelfeld’s auto-
biography and his other autobiographically inspired writings take place.
They are its homescapes as well. They are the reservoirs and repositories of
his childhood memories. Appelfeld may not be concerned in his writing
with a “fixed geography” or a “literal” one. Yet he is repeatedly concerned
with geography nonetheless.2 The homescape of his childhood is where his
story (i.e., his intellectual, verbal, and imaginative life) begins. It is where
his story takes shape. Hence, it is also where he resides, in imagination,
long after he has immigrated to Israel and become a Hebrew-speaking
Israeli author.
It is for this reason that the naming of his place of birth is made to travel
a trajectory from his father’s stories to Agnon’s and finally to his own.
The homescape, which both is and is not Czernowitz and the surrounding
areas, is the story Appelfeld has to tell, not only of his own life but of the
Jewish migrations, persecutions, and survivals, both during and preceding

the Holocaust, of which his life story is only one particular instance. As
such the landscape of his native Romania, which should, we feel, be an
unmitigated source of horror and pain for Appelfeld (and often it is), is also
deeply beloved by him. In the absence of family, friends, and community,
it becomes his childhood home and the place of his early nurturance in a
very literal way. Appelfeld needs time to get us readers to a place in our-
selves from which we can comprehend that the relationship to geography
is part of what governs the structure of the autobiography.
In one of his earliest important novels The Age of Wonders (1978),
Appelfeld has a child survivor living (like Appelfeld) in Jerusalem travel
back to the town of his birth (albeit in Austria, not Romania). What he
discovers there is that everything is the same, except that the Jews have
vanished without a trace. The landscapes of Europe would eradicate not
only the Jews, but the memory of the Jews as well. One goal of Appelfeld’s
writing, I would suggest, is to reverse this erasure of the Jews, literally and
figuratively. The landscapes of Europe may well have forgotten the Jews,
but the Jews, Appelfeld dramatizes for us again and again, have not forgot-
ten the landscapes of Europe. They will, through a writer like Appelfeld,
insist on their claim to be present and accounted for in those landscapes,
long after the Holocaust has abolished their literal presence there. This
is not only fictively narrated for us in The Age of Wonders, but it is physi-
cally enacted both in Appelfeld’s autobiography and in the movie, All That
Remains, that was being made simultaneously with the publication of the
memoir. In All that Remains Appelfeld actually reads out sections of the
autobiography verbatim.
The film captures Appelfeld’s trip back to his native town. As he
explains in the opening frames of the movie, he had hesitated to return
to Czernowitz because he feared that the actual reality of the place might
contradict the place he had constructed in his many fictional representa-
tions of it. But Appelfeld has a driving purpose in returning home, which
overrides his hesitations. He is searching for the mass grave in which his
mother was buried. Appelfeld’s motivation in the trip, as in the autobiogra-
phy and other of his writings, is clearly far more weighty than either a desire
for historical knowledge or a reality check. The trip back to Czernowitz is a
part of the journey of self-exploration begun early in his life, which, as the
writer matures, comes closer and closer to dealing directly with the literal
facts of his horrific experiences of the war. My life, the writer says twice in
the film, is an attempt to trigger memory and to build it, in other words, to
construct a world of memory in the absence of “literal reminiscences” (The
Story of a Life, 2004, 155). This makes the journey back to the motherland
necessary.
To some large degree, what Appelfeld discovers in Czernowitz is a

world very much like the one he drew several decades earlier in The Age
of Wonders. It is a world that is not only almost completely devoid of the
Jews, but of the memory of them as well. In The Age of Wonders, Appelfeld
puts it this way: “Faces flitted past, but he did not recognize anyone. ‘The
place hasn’t changed, but the people evidently have,’ he said absentmind-
edly, as if he were making small talk to himself with ready-made words”
(1981, 189–190).
This startling juxtaposition between the unchanged stability of the
place and the radical absence of the Jews who used to live there haunts the
novel throughout the second section:
The next morning spring sunshine flooded the broad streets. The tall trees
cast their damp shadows over the hedges and the morning lay cool and
quiet on the walls of the houses. Two days here already. The same light and
the same shade, falling from one house to the other straight and sharp as
a ruler. Even the old roofs covered in green ivy stuck up at the same blunt
angle. Only at the bottom of the gates was there a new, light mist. Apart
from this there was no change; not a single tree had been uprooted from
its place. Even the old stone posts marking the old boundaries still stood in
the places. Except for the light, for the cold reality, it would have been like
a vivid dream with all its details painted in carefully and precisely, but the
cold reality was clear and decisive; you’re here, Bruno, you’re here . . . The
low houses, lovingly tended, were modest and unassuming. A provincial
calm rested on their roofs. They were exactly as he remembered them. The
years had come and gone and they had not changed. Only the vividness was
new (Appelfeld 1981, 199–200, 208).
The extreme vividness of the scene, which makes it seem unreal and dream-
like, is a direct consequence of the inconceivable, inexplicable gap between
the unchanged town—exactly as Bruno remembers it—and the radically
altered population now inhabiting it. “Most of the day he [Bruno] spends
sitting on a bench measuring the shadows of the church spires; realizing
again that nothing has changed here, only him—he is already his father’s
age . . . None of [the neighbors] have survived but their shop is still standing
at exactly the same angle as before, perfectly preserved, even the geraniums
in their pots. Now a different man is sitting there with a different woman.
Strange—they don’t look like murderers . . . Strange, he reflected, ‘objects
survive longer; they are passive’ ” (Appelfeld 1981, 216–217, 258).
All That Remains, in which Appelfeld takes this motif to his native
Czernowitz, repeats Bruno’s experience of confronting the radical absence
of the Jews from the homes and shops they once occupied. Jews are
noticeably, startlingly missing from the scene of current-day Czernowitz,
although Appelfeld does, remarkably, meet one former classmate who
remembers him and his family and another villager who remembered
celebrating Purim at his home. Nonetheless, again and again in the film
(which is a relatively short twenty-five minutes), Appelfeld asks (through
an interpreter) the villagers he meets if they remember him and his family
or if they remember the Jews generally. Those elderly villagers who remem-
ber anything at all have only partial and vague memory of the events that
occurred there, and they are highly reluctant to engage in meaningful
conversation about what happened. Looking for his own home near the
old mill, Appelfeld asks one villager if he can tell him what used to be
there and if he remembers the Jews. The local man responds that yes, the
mill was here, and yes, there were Jews here. “And did you know them?”
Appelfeld inquires. “Why not?” The villager responds somewhat defen-
sively, as he begins to rattle off names, only to abruptly excuse himself.
He explains that he has a doctor’s appointment, otherwise he would tell
more; he knew all the Jews. “Do you remember the Jews?” Appelfeld asks
another villager, who also admits to recalling those terrible times but says
that though he remembers, he remembers very little. There were Jewish
homes here, but they were destroyed and new homes were built, a fact that
Appelfeld then independently confirms in relating his own experience as a
child returning from the ghetto in Dracinetz to the ghetto in Czernowitz
and seeing his own home gutted, even the windows taken out, all their
possessions stolen, the house a shell. Every house here, Appelfeld says, has
Jewish furniture and Jewish jewelry, an idea that motivates the plot in Iron
Tracks: where a protagonist named Erwin (Appelfeld’s given name) travels
through Europe collecting stolen Judaica.
Yet, there is an overwhelming and extremely powerful difference
between this undeniably haunting picture of absence and loss in All That
Remains and the earlier portrayal of the town in The Age of Wonders,
which so adequately anticipated the reality Appelfeld would find when he
returned home. This difference is the addition in the film of something
that is also pervasive in The Story of a Life. This is the presence of the
breathtakingly beautiful natural landscape that surrounds the now juden-
frei areas of the village. This natural landscape is largely free of inhabitants
altogether, although in one powerful clip, which appears in the film twice,
several lovely, enchanting young girls (too young to have any memory of
the events that transpired in their village) are holding hands, standing in
a field of wheat and flowers, which (as the second clip reveals) may well
mark the mass gravesite where Appelfeld’s mother is buried. The first pre-
sentation of the scene of the young girls is immediately preceded by the
narration of Appelfeld’s mother’s murder and his unwillingness to accept
her death. Appelfeld also tells a story about being sick in bed with the
mumps when he hears shooting and runs into the cornfields, where he
hides until his father finds him there at night. All the evidence points to
the place where his mother was buried, but the relationship between the
narrative and the physical scene is not clear until later, when the field is
identified, finally, as the likely location of the mass grave. Uncertainty
hedges every image and every bit of knowledge in this film, including the
most important facts of who were killed and where they were buried.
I will return to this scene in a moment. Now, however, I want to
stress the primacy in this film of the natural landscape itself, a feature of
the scenes shot in the Ukraine and Israel alike The landscapes alternate
between cityscapes, of which Appelfeld is less enamored, and scenes of the
Judean hills and the fields surrounding the youth village, where Appelfeld
and other Romanian youth were brought as refugees after the war. These
hills and fields Appelfeld loves with the same passion he feels for the scenes
of his childhood.
The attentiveness to the natural world distinguishes The Age of Wonders
from Appelfeld’s later works. It characterizes the texture of his undertak-
ing in The Story of a Life and in the movie, as well as to his growth as a
writer and as a person. Whereas in the earlier novel Appelfeld had to create
a fictional character in order to travel back to the scenes of his own child-
hood (there is significant overlap between the events in The Age of Wonders
and events in Appelfeld’s own life), now, despite his hesitations, Appelfeld
can travel back to Czernowitz in his own person. The film and autobiogra-
phy, as well as the novel Ice Mine (all of which explicitly depict the forced
march to the work camp with his father), evidence his development and
his ability to touch the “fire” (as he calls it in his autobiography) of those
events (Appelfeld 2004, 51).
Of course, in relation to the film, we do need to keep in mind that, even
though Appelfeld narrates sections of it, the work as a whole is put together
by a director who is interpreting Appelfeld through his own artistic lens. It
is to be hoped of course that the movie truthfully reflects Appelfeld’s posi-
tion in relation to birthplace and the memories that are for him located in
that natural setting, but we should be careful—tentative even—in assert-
ing that. What Appelfeld himself describes in the movie does seem to con-
firm the director’s visual presentation of Appelfeld’s experience.
Immediately following the conversation with the villager who claims to
have known all the Jews but is not willing to linger to discuss them, Appelfeld
(now in Jerusalem) says that what he had felt all his years in Israel was that
without a past, without parents, his personality would be lacking in some-
thing. What nourishes people, he maintains, is the ability to draw from the
“deep well” of childhood. At this point the film tellingly cuts back to the nat-
ural landscape of Ukraine, to pictures of water and birds. Appelfeld’s “deep
well” is not only figurative. It refers to, quite literally, the lakes and ponds
and other bodies of water that physically sustained him in his wanderings;
these are all that is left of his life with his family. An eight-year-old, Appelfeld
explains, does not remember much, but he remembers a lot. That “lot” has
everything to do with the natural world. Appelfeld describes his writing, both
in the film and in the autobiography, as an attempt at recollection. How one
remembers—in other words, whether memory is a bodily or mental activi-
ty—is very much the point of both the film and the autobiography.
In the preface to The Story of a Life, Appelfeld reminds readers that
under ordinary circumstances “memory and imagination . . . dwell
together” (2004, v). When they do reside comfortably together, they pro-
duce what we think of as stories in the ordinary sense, whether autobio-
graphical or fictional, transcribed or merely lived. When imagination and
memory, however, “compete” with one another, as they did for Appelfeld
during and after the war, a different kind of story and a different scene of
storytelling must necessarily emerge (2004, v). This sort of storytelling
requires exactly the strategies of indirection Appelfeld employs in both his
fiction and his autobiography. It requires the translocation and transmuta-
tion (what Appelfeld calls distillation in the movie) of the story from the
recognizably real world, mimetically reproduced in all of its myriad details
in the work of fiction, to the realm of the surreal and impressionist, which,
in replicating the torques of imagination attempting to get at and utilize
memory, mirror the writer’s disfigured reality.
That Appelfeld even has a story to tell is, of course, very much to the
point of his manner of storytelling. Under normal conditions all of us
always have a story. It is part and parcel of what defines us as human
beings. This is why telling a story can be so important to a Holocaust sur-
vivor. In and of itself, having a story affirms one’s humanity, one’s belong-
ing to the rest of the human world. The majority of the Jews of Europe did
not survive the Holocaust to tell any story whatsoever. If they did survive,
they did not necessarily survive with the psychological wherewithal neces-
sary for such storytelling. For a long time Appelfeld himself suffered such
a narrative lack, as he notes several times in the autobiography and in the
film (see, for example, the beginning of chapter 8; Appelfeld repeats much
of this material in the movie as well). As he also makes abundantly clear in
Ice Mine, what the Holocaust threatened to destroy (among other things)
for those who were lucky enough to survive it physically was imaginative
access to one’s memories (Budick 2005, 158–165).
Without imagination, memory can neither serve the individual psycho-
logical life, nor become the stuff of art. Without imagination, memory might
persist in the survivor—especially the child survivor—as only useless, pri-
marily physiological, traces of a horror one would do better to forget, if one
were able to forget it. As Appelfeld makes clear throughout the autobiography,
remembering is first and foremost a bodily function, which, in its imprint-

ing of the past in the flesh, repeats its pain and terror quite literally. Trauma
studies have more than adequately explained what Appelfeld is describing
when he says in the autobiography that “memory . . . has deep roots in the
body” and “more than my conscious mind, my body seems to remember”
(50); see, for example, Cathy Caruth (1996) and Geoffrey Hartman (1996).
The bodily impress of memory is a chord repeated throughout the autobi-
ography. Appelfeld describes it elsewhere in the autobiography: “The palms
of one’s hands, the soles of one’s feet, one’s back, and one’s knees remember
more than memory” (2004, vii). And later: “Because I spent a large part of
the war in villages, in fields, by riverbanks, this greenness is imprinted on
me, and whenever I remove my shoes and step on the grass, I immediately
remember the pastures and the dappled animals scattered over the endless
space. And then a fear of these open spaces returns to me” (2004, 151).
From the start of the autobiography, then, what organizes Appelfeld’s
story are not the factual data of his life (such as the date and city of his
birth), but rather the “synapses” of reflex and emotion. There will be
no “sequential and precise account in this story of a life” (2004, ix), he
announces in the preface to the book. Later in the narrative he presents the
primary reason for this:
Someone who was an adult during the war took in and remembered places
and individuals, and at the end of the war he could sit and recall them, or
talk about them. With us children, however, it was not names that were
sunk into memory, but something completely different. For a child, mem-
ory is a reservoir that doesn’t empty. It’s replenished over the years, clarified.
It’s not a chronological recollection, but overflowing and changing, if I may
put it that way (2004, 91–92).
Just as in the Agnon passage, Appelfeld is non-specific concerning what

constitutes a “person’s past”; he leaves carefully unspecified what a child’s
memory might be a reservoir of. That is, he does not give specific content
to what overflows and changes in this memory. In both passages Appelfeld
produces a natural, even geological, image of the remembering mind. In the
above passage this takes the form of a reservoir. He calls the past a “source
to be mined” (literally in Hebrew, a life-mine or life-quarry [ ]) in
the Agnon passage (2004, 138). “ ” is the same word Appelfeld uses in
the title of the book Ice Mine, which is also a highly autobiographical text.
Such physical, natural, and even geological images and terms open the
preface and conclude it:
Ever since my childhood, I have felt that memory is a living and efferves-
cent reservoir that animates my being [ ].
When I was still a child, I would sit and visualize the summer holidays at
my grandparents’ home in the country. For hours I’d sit by the window and
picture the journey there. Everything that I recalled from previous vacations
would return to me in the most vivid way . . . This book is not a summary, but
an attempt . . . to integrate the different parts of my life and reconnect them
to the wellsprings of my being [ ] (2004 v, ix; the English
translation preserves the natural metaphor that characterizes the original
Hebrew , which, more literally translated, means the source
or root of life’s flourishing; in the film Appelfeld refers to these springs as
wells [1999, 5, 8]).
For Appelfeld it is the landscape of his youth, the place of his roots and
wellsprings, the reservoir of his self, which remains the one continuous
experience of self and of home. It is the landscape that pre-exists the loss
and horror of war. It is the landscape, therefore, that remains a repository
for his earliest memories of home and family. And it is the landscape that
attends to his needs, psychological as well as physical, during his subse-
quent wanderings. Thus, when Appelfeld opens the autobiography proper
with the question “At what point does my memory begin?” his answer
has to do, not exclusively with home and family as we might expect, but
equally with the Carpathian Mountains. “It sometimes seems to me as if
it began only when I was four, when we set off for the first time, Mother,
Father, and I, for a vacation into the heart of the shadowy, moist forests of
the Carpathians” (2004, 3). Indeed, even when he backs up further, in the
next sentence, to an even earlier memory, landscape imagery dominates
the scene of recollection: “But I sometimes think that memory began to
bud from within me before that, in my room, next to the double-glazed
window that was decorated with paper flowers” (2004, 3; the sense of
memory budding or sprouting is contained within the original Hebrew
as well). And he continues a few paragraphs later, saying that even “clearer
memories” than those of home “are the walks along the banks of the river,
on the paths by the fields, and on the grassy measures. I see us climb a hill,
sit on top of it, and gaze around. Speaking little, my parents listen atten-
tively. With Mother it is more obvious. When she listens, her large eyes are
wide open, as if trying to take in everything around her” (2004, 5).
These reminiscences virtually repeat what he has already just told us
in the preface, thus marking even more prominently their psychological
significance for Appelfeld. “It’s amazing,” he tells us in the preface,
how clear even my most distant and hidden childhood memories can be,
in particular those connected to the Carpathian Mountains and the broad
plains stretching out at their foothills. During those last vacations before
the war, our eyes would devour the mountains and plains with a fearsome
longing, as if my parents knew that these were the last holidays, and that
from now on life would be hell (2004, vi).
Needless to say, the young child cannot himself have known what his par-
ents knew, though a sensitive child like Appelfeld might well have intuited
his parents’ more informed anxieties. Therefore, the “fearsome longing”
that Appelfeld attributes to himself as much as to them must, at least to
some degree, reflect his present relation to that landscape as he projects it
backwards. This suggests also his fearsome longing not to escape from,
but to return to, that homescape, despite what is about to occur there, in
the past. He wishes to return, not to the town where anti-Semitism and
human cruelty reigned supreme,3 but to the natural setting that continues
to hold in his mind’s eye the image of him and his parents as an intact,
flourishing family.
It is his mother’s “large eyes . . . wide open . . . trying to take in everything
around her” that, throughout the early chapters of the autobiography, pro-
vide Appelfeld’s perspective on the landscape of his birth, even as later it
is his Agnon’s repeating his father’s naming of places that puts Appelfeld
into a more mature, intellectual, and cultural relation to the homescape.
Appelfeld, one might say, is reborn twice in this autobiography: once
through his mother’s eyes taking in the landscape and again through his
father’s and Agnon’s more cognitive verbalizations of geographical place.
We might think of this gesture in the autobiography as Appelfeld present-
ing a re-wedding of his mother and father, thereby recovering the family he
has lost. In this reconstruction of the lost family he recovers as well both
his lost mother tongue (which is not merely German but his particular
relation to the natural world) and his equally lost fatherland. The book
achieves a repatriation that is both linguistic and national.
As Appelfeld stresses several times in the text, using various forms
of the Hebrew word (hitbonenut), his is a craft of observation,
reflection, contemplation, and insight. All of these are possible meanings
of the word hitbonenut, which also evokes mystical, kabbalistic contexts
(Budick 2005, xi). “The pages before you,” Appelfeld says at the begin-
ning of the preface, using the very word hitbonenut, “are segments of con-
templation and memory” (2004, v; 1999, 5). In thus viewing the world
and telling his story, Appelfeld assumes his mother’s position of watchful
observer of the world. By seeing through her eyes, he not only restores
to her sight the land she so loved that so brutally expelled her, but also
restores her to that landscape as well. For, finally, Appelfeld’s various
pilgrimages back home succeed in bringing his mother back home, albeit
in a mediated and distilled way, as the scene of Appelfeld at his mother’s
graveside depicts.
What is important to understand in order to interpret this amaz-

ing scene in the movie is that, for Appelfeld, the landscape of his native
Romania continues to function as any birthplace might for a writer (or
for any of us), as a source (to be mined) of his fondest recollections, both
before and—perhaps ironically and unexpectedly—during the war as
well. Appelfeld refuses to relinquish his homeland to the exigencies of the
post-war demand that he renounce his childhood along with the Nazis.
This is what happened when he first arrived in Israel—he was compelled
to give up his native language, his mother tongue, which was quite liter-
ally the language of his beloved mother. German was the language of
the murderers, to be sure, and Appelfeld acknowledges this directly in
the autobiography. Nonetheless, it is his language as well. By robbing the
young man of his mother tongue, the newly restored homeland of the
Jews committed an act of theft not so different (psychologically, at least)
from that perpetrated by European anti-Semitism. Language and home-
land both are rights, which Appelfeld would reclaim for himself and his
family through writing his presence and theirs back into the landscape
that birthed them.
In his last conversation with Agnon before Agnon dies, Appelfeld tells
us that Agnon
tried to explain to me what my parents had not been able to tell me and
what I wasn’t able to learn during the war years. Every writer needs to have
a city of his own . . . a river of his own, and streets of his own. You were
expelled from your hometown and from the villages of your forefathers, and
instead of learning from them, you learned from the forests (2004, 165).
Those forests, Czernowitz, and the Carpathian Mountains become

Appelfeld’s homescape, and he will mine them for all they are worth.
Thus, in the manner of the Romantic poets, the rivers and pastures that
accompanied and sustained the boy through his wanderings are a source
of profound wonder and amazement, both to the young boy and to the
older artist re-imagining them in words (and pictures, in the film). “The
war revealed to us, to our surprise,” Appelfeld records in the collection of
lectures entitled Beyond Despair, “that even the most dreadful life of all was
nonetheless life.” He continues:
The struggle for physical survival was harsh and ugly, but that command-
ment, to remain alive at any price, was . . . far more than a commandment to
live. It bore within it something of the spirit of a mission . . . I hesitate to say
it, but one must: The apocalyptic horror of the Holocaust was felt by us as
a deeply religious experience (1994, 30–31, 45).
When Appelfeld goes on to define the “qualities of the religious feelings” to

which he refers, they have everything to do with the physical landscape:
Mostly they were “illuminations” after days of hunger, danger, and despair,
a sense of wonder about people or objects, a kind of contact with one’s par-
ents, self-consolation. For the children it was perhaps more “primordial”—
contact with the trees in the forest, the moist earth, the straw, sucking
fluids from the roots of the trees, the night skies. These contacts with a
hostile space, for us, homeless and orphaned, had a quality that was beyond
“discovery” or curiosity . . . I remember sitting beside a pond in the forest,
looking at twigs floating on its surface, observing them with a kind of
“devotion,” as if they were not twigs but rather enchanted objects which
had come to me from a great distance (1994, 49).
In The Story of a Life, an equivalent moment is rendered as follows:
I don’t remember entering the forest, but I do remember the moment when
I stood before a tree laden with red apples. I was so astonished that I took
a few steps back . . . It had been two days since any food had passed my
lips, and here was a tree full of apples. I could have put out my hand and
picked them, but I just stood in wonderment, and the longer I stood there,
the deeper the silence that took root in me. . . . Finally, I sat down and ate a
small apple that was on the ground and was partially rotted (2004, 50–51).
The sentence: “I just stood in wonderment, and the longer I stood there, the
deeper the silence that took root in me” is more literally rendered from the
Hebrew:“I stood and marveled and the longer I stood, the more I was para-
lyzed or rooted to the place” (1999, 49).
Thirst drives him on, and he goes in search of water. Here it is that his
mother is restored to his sight, if only for a fleeting moment:
The water opened my eyes, and I saw my mother, whom I hadn’t been able
to visualize for many days [more literally: who had disappeared from sight].
First I saw her standing by the window and gazing out of it, as she used to.
But then she suddenly turned to me, wondering how I came to be alone in
the forest. I walked toward her, but I immediately understood that if I went
too far I’d lose sight of the stream, and so I stopped. I returned to the stream
and looking into the same beam of light, through which Mother had been
revealed to me, but it was closed (2004, 51–52); in the Hebrew original the
beam of light is more nearly rendered as the “same small circle” (1999, 50).
Alone in the forest, threatened with death, the child’s eyes “open” (like
a circle) to see his mother’s gaze, not from the child’s normal position
next to her, looking out those same windows that contain his own earliest
memory of seeing out alongside her, but as the very object caught in her
circle of sight. The “small circle” that then closes is not only the circle of
her eye, closed in death (the very next paragraph deals with the murder of
his mother), but of his own eyes closing as well. He not only can no longer
see her, but he cannot afford the luxury of seeing her. To do so would mean
that he would “lose sight of the stream” on which his life now depends. He
would also be obliged, by continuing to look at her looking at him, to see
in her gaze the terror she feels for him, as he stands alone and in danger
in the woods. The circle that threatens to close is his very life. Therefore,
what he must do is to take up his mother’s gaze from behind her eyes,
begin to see with her, through her eyes, an external world of which they
can share a view. This he does, not only in this scene in the woods, but
throughout the autobiography.
The above passages from the autobiography mark the crucial transi-
tion from the forests as a place of danger to the place where the mother’s
watchful eye will abide, not so much dissipating the terror as containing it,
permitting the child to see through it, enabling him to keep his mother’s
presence with him. On the one hand, the torments of hunger, thirst, and
fear will never leave him. “More than fifty years have passed since the end
of the war,” he begins the chapter, “I have forgotten much . . . yet I can still
sense those days in every part of my body” (2004, 50). His memories do
no less than, in his words, pierce him (2004, 50). Indeed, his entry into
the forest is preserved in his body, not his mind, as is his first taste of a
rotten apple after days without food (2004, 51). On the other hand, the
wonder that is also a part of his experience of the woods—in relation to
the landscape that he inherits directly from his mother and that becomes
their shared perspective of reality—also abides within him. If we think of
trauma as the mental, bodily imprint of an experience that resists being
channeled through normal interpretive processes into consciousness, then
the literal impression of the beloved landscape of his mother is the homeo-
pathic antidote to this trauma. It reinstates the mother in the physical
world where she can, like any mother, nurse the hurt child.
By transporting or—to use a key word in the film—“distilling” his life
story into his fiction, Appelfeld achieves the distance he needs to tell his
story, the distance that he replicates in the autobiography through indi-
rection. According to Appelfeld, the text that (at least in the early 1990s)
most closely paralleled the “story of my life” was Tzili, which is subtitled in
English The Story of a Life. Appelfeld explains in an interview with Philip
Roth:
I tried several times to write “the story of my life” in the woods after I
ran away from the camp. But all my efforts were in vain. I wanted to be
faithful to reality and to what really happened. But the chronicle that
emerged proved to be a weak scaffolding . . . But the moment I chose a

girl, a little older than I was at that time, I removed “the story of my
life” from the mighty grip of memory and gave it over to the creative
laboratory (1994, 68–69).
In Tzili, Appelfeld suggests the power of the landscape to serve as sur-

rogate parent. As he explains to Roth, “With no parents, in enemy fields,
isolated from humanity . . . we learned from the trees and the streams. Our
parents had left us and gone away, and sometimes it seemed as if we had
been born there, as if the earth had give birth to us” (1994, 11–12). “Over
time,” he explains in the autobiography, “I learned that objects and animals
were true friends” (2004, 101). “Surrounded by trees, bushes, birds, and
small animals,” Appelfeld would fall “asleep alongside them [and] sleep as
deeply and as tranquilly as . . . in my parents’ bed” (2004, 102).
The very fact that Appelfeld has to divvy up his life story among his
three most autobiographical books—Tzili, The Age of Wonders, and Ice
Mine— says something about the heat of that story, which he finds almost
impossible to touch. One other strategy Appelfeld has for touching the
untouchable, or speaking the unspeakable, is depositing the human dimen-
sions of the story in the geography that witnessed the story, was scarred
and deformed by it, yet survived—like the child—resistant to the forces of
human history that it witnessed. This returns me to the powerful film clip
of the young girls on Appelfeld’s mother’s gravesite. It could be intended
only to impress viewers with the cruel irony of history. At first glance, these
young Ukrainian girls who obviously had nothing whatsoever to do with
the war appear to be the faces of innocence. On second viewing, however,
it is shockingly apparent that pure innocence cannot reside in a world that
is literally built on the bones (not to mention the property) of murdered
Jews. Yet the image of the girls, like the pictures of the landscape, is also
exactly what it appears to be: the girls are sweet, lovely, and untainted,
perfect human reflections of the landscape surrounding them. They repre-
sent the face of the paradoxical coexistence of innocence and evil and the
frequent difficulty of telling them apart. The scene also demonstrates the
difference between forgiveness and acceptance, resentment and pain.
The kaddish prayer that Appelfeld asks to be said over what is likely
the mass grave where his mother is buried (which he does not know by
heart and therefore cannot say directly) and the scene of its being said
convey perfectly the fraught ironies that characterize the history (public
and private) embodied in the scene. That is Appelfeld’s life work—as well
as his story. The uncertainty of whether or not this really is where his
mother is buried makes the scene all the more painful, as is the fact that
Appelfeld does not know the kaddish prayer by heart and therefore needs
to ask someone else to say it for him. The kaddish itself, we need to real-
ize, is not a prayer to or about the dead. It is rather a prayer to God to
restore to His creation the beauty and life that the single death of the single
human being had withdrawn from it. The young girls who stand there
in his mother’s stead are not to be forgiven for the murder of his mother,
even though they are not themselves the murderers. Yet, there they are in
their youth and beauty. Their vitality cannot, nor should it, be denied or
ignored. To lay the past to rest means precisely not forgetting it, which is
why we maintain gravesites and visit them. Whether this is or is not where
Appelfeld’s mother lies, it is the place at which he says psalms and has the
kaddish recited. It is the place where a reflourishing is occurring, both for
the author and for the world of his childhood.
Appelfeld’s reconciliation with the landscape and his recovery of the
homescape of Bukovina literally restore his mother to the landscape. He is
able to mark the place where she lies buried. In this way, he can reclaim the
landscape for her, make it hers once again. Earlier in the movie Appelfeld
quotes from the diary he kept after his arrival in Israel: “Mother, Father,
home,” he reads aloud to us in that lyrical, liquid, child-like voice of his, “I
will not betray you; I will remain loyal to you.” How, we are forced to ask
ourselves, do you remain loyal to a home and family that no longer exist?
Would such loyalty include loyalty to the homeland that destroyed them?
“I am a refugee,” Appelfeld tells us in the movie, “I have two homelands.”
And then, with an aerial shot of Jerusalem as background for his narration,
he tells us that this is not his landscape, immediately adding in a somewhat
contradictory matter, “I have another landscape too, a very different one, of
water and many trees and many green fields. Jerusalem is also a homeland.
But so too is Bukovina.” The film returns to the water, trees, and pas-
tures of this other landscape as Appelfeld’s voice asks, “To which land do I
belong? Which is closer to me? I love the Judean hills,” he confesses, “The
town of Dracinetz is a ghost—without Mother and without our home it
isn’t Dracinetz. Yet, I found there something that still nourishes me, even
if it has undergone distillation. I, too,” he remarks by way of further expla-
nation, “have also undergone distillation.”
In this way we are returned to Appelfeld the writer who has distilled his
experience into his writings and who is by these writings himself distilled,
virtually transformed into a sort of landscape of self. There’s nothing there,
he says of his birthplace. What remains is what’s in me. A person, he says, is
spirit, and spirit is what you take with you, wherever you go. The film ends
on that happy note, which the autobiography strikes as well. As Agnon had
told him, geography is not a fixed location, nor necessarily a literal one.
Yet, the landscape exists. There it is, in the film, and in the autobiography
as well: quite fixed and literal. It is a place once called Romania, to which
Appelfeld travels in order not only to lay his mother to rest but to come to
see that world once again, almost literally, through her eyes.
Appelfeld tells us explicitly that one reason he wanted to go back to his
homeland was to stand quietly at his mother’s grave and, in connecting
himself to that silence, to see what was to be seen from the place where
his mother is buried. This land is Appelfeld’s home and the home of his
mother, whether they were wanted there or not. And he will claim that
place as a home for both of them. In so doing, he will continue both as a
man and as a writer to produce the story of his life, which is his legacy from
his mother. Ad 120.
Notes
1. All uncited quoted materials are approximate translations of the movie which
is in Hebrew.
2. Geography as figure and structure is a major part of Yigal Schwartz’s argu-
ment. Gila Ramras-Rauch provides useful biographical and geographical
information.
3. This violence is recorded in abundant detail in the early chapters of the autobi-
ography and features prominently in All That Remains.
Works Cited
All That Remains. 1999. Dir. Zoltan Terner. Israel.
Appelfeld, Aharon. 2004. The Story of a Life. Trans. Aloma Halter. New York:
Schocken Books.
———. 1999. Sippur Haim [The Story of a Life]. Jerusalem: Keter.
———. 1997. Ice Mine. Jerusalem: Keter.
———. 1994. Beyond Despair: Three Lectures and a Conversation with Philip
Roth. Trans Jeffrey M. Green. New York: Fromm International Publishing
Corporation.
———. 1983. Tzili: The Story of a Life. Trans. Dalya Bilu. New York: Grove
Press.
———. 1981. The Age of Wonders. Trans. Dalya Bilu. Boston: David R. Godine.
Budick, Emily Miller. 2005. Aharon Appelfeld’s Fiction: Acknowledging the
Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hartman, Geoffrey H. 1996. The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Ramras-Rauch, Gila. 1994. Aharon Appelfeld: The Holocaust and Beyond.
Schwartz, Yigal. 2001. Aharon Appelfeld: From Individual Lament to Tribal Eternity.
Trans. Jeffrey M. Green. Hanover: Brandeis University Press.
Ch a p t e r Ni n e
Nor m a n M a n e a: “I a m no t a
Wr i t e r of t h e Holoc aust ”
Jeanine Teodorescu
In 1971, Norman Manea was shocked when he discovered his name in

Jewish Writers of Romanian Language, a Hebrew anthology published
in Israel (Petreu 1992, 7). At that time he considered himself simply a
Romanian writer, without any connection to a specific ethnicity. His
Jewishness, which he never proclaimed or denied, was strictly a private
matter. Although he alluded to the Holocaust in fiction (in some short
stories of October 8 O’Clock, for instance), he strongly emphasized that
the Shoah was not the main focus of his writing: “I am not what we call a
‘Writer of the Holocaust’. . . Neither do I believe in this thematic “specialty”
which is practiced, quite successfully, by some writers” (Bogaart 1988).
Things gradually changed, however, as he acknowledged in several inter-
views (e.g., Cugno, 1995 “Vieţuire şi supravieţuire”), he realized that his
Jewishness was inescapable and openly recognized the importance of eth-
nicity in his writing (see Casa melcului). His latest memoir marks a definite
shift from intimations of his experience to a complete and straightforward
analysis of his identity as shaped by tragic personal events in Romania.
In this essay, I will examine how The Hooligan’s Return: A Memoir,
through its encounter with anti-Semitism, is closely connected not only
to the Shoah, but also especially to Manea’s quest for identity and a pro-
gressive self-consciousness of his Jewishness. In this sense, the book can
be seen as central to my understanding of his oeuvre. I will also analyze
how, since the book’s publication, Manea can indeed be considered a
writer of the Holocaust. Manea’s memoir attests that his life and his
writing were shaped in the context of the twentieth-century totalitarian-
isms, Fascism and Communism, and by the background of political and
literary anti-Semitism, as confirmed by the reception some of his articles
received in Romania.
176 / jeanine teodorescu
Born in 1936 in Bukovina, Manea was deported at the age of five,

together with his family, to Transnistria; he returned to Romania only
in 1945.1 An engineer turned writer, he chose self-exile from Romania in
1986, at the age of fifty, after a long period of steadfast refusal to leave his
country, despite his parents’ and friends’ advice. His reluctance to leave
Romania reflected the writer’s fear of losing his voice and the belief that a
writer can fulfill his vocation only in his mother tongue, therefore in his
mother country. Paul Celan would have agreed only on the importance
of keeping his native language: “The poet’s country of origin is his lan-
guage, even when it is German and the poet is Jewish” (Manea 2008, 62).
Manea also decided to take his language with him in his “snail’s house”
(The Snail’s House).
By the time he left, Manea was already a recognized author in Romania;
his novels, essays, short stories, and collections of interviews had been
well received by the literary milieu as well as by his readers in general.
Captivi (Captives), 1970; Anii de ucenicie ai lui August Prostul (The Years
of Apprenticeship of August the Fool), 1979; Octombrie, ora 8 (October
8 O’Clock), 1981; and Plicul negru (The Black Envelope), 1986, are only
some of his best-known works. He was particularly praised for his sub-
versive writing that presented Communism as masquerade, duplicity,
and imposture. Manea’s writing, sometimes influenced by magic realism,
describes an Orwellian and Kafkaesque society and is a subtle satire of
totalitarianism.
Translations of his books in Germany, and then new publications and
translations in the United States and elsewhere in Europe, established his
international recognition. His works have been enthusiastically received
and have become best-sellers in America and in Europe. In the meantime,
Manea has also been awarded numerous prestigious prizes, among them
The Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundation Fellows Award (U.S, 1992);
the Prix Médicis Etranger (France, 2006); the Order of Cultural Merit
(Romania, 2007); as well as the French distinction of Commandeur dans
l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2009). His latest books are Vizuina (The
Bunker) (2010), and Laptele negru (Black Milk) (2010), an allusion to Paul
Celan’s famous poem “Todesfuge” (Death Fugue).
Manea’s memoir is in good company, along with Elie Wiesel’s Night,
Aharon Appelfeld’s The Story of a Life, Edgar Hilsenrath’s Night, and
Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo (Survival at Auschwitz), to name just a
few of the many books belonging to the literature of the Holocaust. The
narrator’s journey is both a return to the past and an encounter with the
present; the return, meant to cure his nostalgia for his native country, is
also an attempt to come to terms with his past. It is, at the same time, a
means of acknowledging the reality of his nomadic inner self and how this
norman manea / 177
is connected to his Jewish identity, through “le regard d’autrui” (“the gaze
of the Other.”) (Sartre 1976, 321).
The Hooligan’s Return: A Memoir, a moving and compelling story of
critical importance in defining Manea’s authorial and personal identity,
follows a socio-political and literary itinerary in Romanian literature: from
Mircea Eliade’s The Hooligans (1935), to Mihail Sebastian’s How I Became
a Hooligan (1935), and finally to Manea’s The Hooligan’s Return (2003).
These three books, by three recognized names in Romanian culture and
literature, trace aspects of identity as perceived in 1935 and in 2003.
Manea’s book can be understood only within this political and literary
context.
Eliade2 focused, in The Hooligans, on a generation of young men who
were marginalized iconoclasts, and he presented them in an idealized way:
they did not believe in humanism, but felt that their destiny was defined
by vitalism, virility, and destruction. Although it was ostensibly a work
of fiction, critics considered it an endorsement of Fascism. Later, Eliade
himself described what he considered at the time the important mission
of the 1930s Romanian generation: “We wanted to address ourselves to
the broadest possible public and inject some vitality into Romanian cul-
ture, because it was in danger of sinking into a creeping provincialism if
we didn’t” (Eliade 1982, 182). A contemporary of Eliade and Sebastian,3
Eugène Ionesco4 would redefine these “isms” (vitalism and organicism)
as “ ‘biology’—the last refuge of the skeptics” (1992, 236). It was only
through this violent and demolishing energy that the “young generation”
put into practice their nihilism; violence and destruction are Fascist char-
acteristics, which Hannah Arendt describes in detail in her The Origins of
Totalitarianism.5 Later, Ionesco would create the metaphor of the “rhinoc-
erization” of Romanian intellectuals 6 (1968, 116–120), most of whom had
gradually become ardent supporters of the Iron Guard (a Fascist move-
ment). Eliade was not alone; other colleagues and friends, such as Emil
Cioran7 and Constantin Noica8 strongly believed in this right-wing mysti-
cal ideology.
Sebastian’s book For Two Thousand Years appeared the same year
that Eliade’s Hooligans was published (1934). Its main theme is the ques-
tion of identity, a question which confronted young Romanian Jews in a
society where anti-Semitism was becoming the norm. Its title referred to
the presumed length of time of the Jewish presence in Romania, which
Sebastian thought entitled him and his co-religionists to consider them-
selves Romanian. Without denying his Jewishness, he asked confidently:
“I would like to know, for instance, the anti-Semitic legislation which
could ever annihilate for me the irreversible fact of having been born on
the banks of the Danube and loving this land” (Sebastian 2000, 230; my
translation). The preface to the book, written by Nae Ionescu (no connec-
tion to Eugène Ionesco), whom Sebastian considered his mentor (Sebastian
had been his student at the university and had become a great admirer
of his), was devastating for its author—because of its venomous anti-
Semitism, its rejection of Sebastian himself, and even its determination to
annihilate him—whom Nae Ionescu9 called throughout the entire preface
only by his Jewish name, Joseph Hechter (which never appeared in the
book). This harsh and irreversible condemnation was made on the grounds
that Sebastian could never be considered a Romanian because he was not
Orthodox Christian.10 Despite this appalling attitude toward his work and
person, and despite his own shock, Sebastian made a shocking decision
in turn: he determined that it was his duty and his “true revenge” to pub-
lish the preface, which thus became a testimony of the implacable Fascist
Legionary movement in Romania and its nefarious effects on Romanian
intellectuals, their new converts. Sebastian gives a detailed account11 of
this decision and of the devolution of his relationship with Nae Ionescu
in How I Became a Hooligan. Sebastian’s courage has left to posterity an
invaluable document of the Iron Guard generation, of what Julien Benda
called “la trahison des clercs” (“the betrayal of the intellectuals”), a period
which prepared the way for and made inevitable the future pogroms and
deportation of Jews.
Sebastian’s second book, How I Became a Hooligan (1935)—evidently
an allusion to Eliade’s The Hooligans—was his response to the scandal
triggered by For Two Thousand Years and its preface. This book included
quotations from the most hateful and vulgar anti-Semitic articles written
against him, both from the right and from the left. Only Eliade defended
him, but he conveniently addressed only the theological aspect of Judaism
in the preface, completely ignoring Nae Ionescu’s rabid anti-Semitism
and nihilism, probably in order not to antagonize his mentor, and also
because he in fact shared many of his ideas, as his later articles would
demonstrate.12
Sebastian realized this time that his proud confidence in his right to
be considered a Romanian and his notion of belonging to his native coun-
try were pure illusion, despite his significant literary contributions. He
was and remained, even for his Romanian friends (including his closest,
Mircea Eliade), only a foreigner, a Jew.
In this context, Manea’s memoir, The Hooligan’s Return, written sixty-
eight years later (2003), is a clear reference and follow-up to Sebastian’s
work; it reveals the same preoccupation with the problem of identity—in
his case, Jewishness within the Romanian society. To his dismay, Manea
had been himself the target of invective (in the tradition of those against
Sebastian in the 1930s) and he became profoundly disillusioned with many
norman manea / 179
of his contemporaries. History was repeating itself. One of these incidents

was connected to Sebastian himself and belongs to the three scandals
related to Manea’s publications in Romania: one under Communism in
1981 and two under post-Communism in 1992 and 1998. I will exam-
ine these events which illustrate Manea’s confrontation of anti-Semintism
in Romania. I will start by reviewing the first event of 1998, which is
similar to the reaction to Sebastian’s book De două mii de ani. The scan-
dal followed the publication in The New Republic of Manea’s article “The
Incompatibilities,” which refers to Sebastian’s opinion that, in contrast to
other nations, the Romanian society lacked gravity and seriousness, and
had a culture of “smiling lampoonists” (Sebastian 2000, 242). In his article,
Manea discussed the then recently republished Journal by Mihail Sebastian
(1996) and focused on Sebastian’s complicated friendship with Mircea
Eliade and the dissolution of their relationship as the direct consequence of
Eliade’s fierce anti-Semitism and enthusiasm for the Iron Guard. Eliade’s
strong anti-Jewish sentiments were devastatingly revealed in articles he
had published in several right-wing journals, but equally troubling, Manea
insists, were his complete detachment from Sebastian and his neglect and
lack of compassion for his friend’s fate as a Jew in those difficult years of
pogroms and deportations. For Manea this “friendship,” became, para-
doxically, more a symptom of incompatibility than a true friendship.
The responses of many Romanian writers and journalists to both
Manea’s article and Sebastian’s Journal were, once again, shocking. Not
only did they deny historical events and well-known evidence in an effort
to distort and misrepresent reality, but they also used this opportunity
to insult and discredit Manea, a gesture that undoubtedly reveals the
unusual (yet also so usual) aggressiveness of these critics. They became a
sort of “accusation party,” a party made up of former Communist mem-
bers turned into right-wing nationalists, negationists, or misinterpreters of
history, who blamed exclusively the Nazis for persecuting and killing Jews.
Their intention was to exculpate the Romanian government and army of
the crimes they consciously committed against the Jews. Perhaps the most
troubling expression of some of these writers’ profound anti-Semitism was
their questioning the authenticity of Sebastian’s Journal (republished in
Romania in 1996). Recently, Sebastian has become the target of another
critic whose aim is to debunk what she considers his “idealized” image
as one of the few democrats among Romanian intellectuals during the
Fascist years. Marta Petreu’s most recent book, Diavolul şi ucenicul său:
Nae Ionescu şi Mihail Sebastian [The Devil and His Apprentice: Nae
Ionescu and Mihail Sebastian] [2009], extremely controversial, has stirred
much criticism for its assertions. Here, notes Laszlo Alexandru (Tribuna
2009), Sebastian is accused, preposterously, of having been a member of
the extreme right, a sympathizer of Fascism in sync with his Iron-Guardist

professor (Petreu 2009, 127).13
With respect to Manea’s article on Sebastian, even the liberal literati’s
reaction was either defensive, or expressed as a recurrent form of trivi-
alization of the Holocaust, which was insistently compared to the “red
Holocaust,” Communism. Such responses tried to accredit the idea that
Communism had been equal to, or even more devastating than, the
pogroms, ghettoes, and labor camps in Transnistria. As late as 1998, many
Romanian intellectuals still had refused to come to terms with Antonescu’s
crimes against the Jews, his government’s attempt at ethnic cleansing in
Bukovina and Bessarabia, and—more generally—Romania’s undeni-
able culpability for its contribution to the Holocaust.14 Even today, after
the publication of the Final Report of the International Commission on the
Holocaust in Romania (2005), there are still dissenting voices among intel-
lectuals who are either negationists or who express doubts and suspicions
regarding Romania’s true history.
However, the aggressive anti-Semitic outbursts against Manea, and
even the more subtle accusations in the liberal press, have been countered
by the outspoken defense of Manea’s work by increasingly numerous writ-
ers. One of his supporters, George Voicu, could not help noticing the trou-
bling continuation of a long and unfortunate tradition: the presence of
“an anti-Semitic undercurrent in contemporary intellectual life” (quoted
in Livezeanu 2003). Michael Shafir debates the same topic in his work.
In fact, the first post- Communist vituperation took place in 1992,
and was triggered by a critical article on Mircea Eliade that Manea
wrote in 1991 (published in Romanian in 1992). Called “Felix culpa”
[Happy Guilt]—in theological terms, “Fortunate Fall”—the article criti-
cized Eliade’s youthful support for the Iron Guard. Eliade had used this
expression, “Felix culpa,” in his last Journal, referring to his political
past which prevented and therefore protected him from going back to
Romania, where he would have most certainly been imprisoned by the
Communist government. What Manea reproached Eliade for was his not
having acknowledged, later in life, his right-wing past. Nowhere in his
Journal did Eliade mention the word “Holocaust,” nor did he ever dem-
onstrate any regret for his Iron- Guardist zeal; on the contrary, he consid-
ered Nae Ionescu a great philosopher in his Encyclopedia of Philosophy and
asserted that Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the founder of the Iron Guard,
would be judged only by history.15 The Romanian literary milieu, in
its acerbic reaction to Manea’s criticism of Eliade, accused Manea of
being unpatriotic for denigrating the most revered and world-renowned
intellectual Romania had, besides Cioran. Manea’s fault was that he had
tried to demolish Eliade’s iconic status among Romanians. Iconoclasm,
norman manea / 181
ironically, is now hardly appreciated in Romania, contrary to the 1930s

when Fascists wanted to start a new society by destroying democracy.
Insulting outbursts and ad hominem attacks in the press followed. Manea
was called “a traitor,” “the dwarf of Jerusalem,” and “garbage.” He was
not spared even by the democratic press, for whom he had become “a
White House agent” and “a policeman of the spirit” (quoted in Manea
1999, 156).
Yet it was earlier, in 1980, during the Communist era, that Manea
confronted the first slander connected to Jewish identity. The weekly
Săptămâna16 published a viciously anti-Semitic article in the vein of the
ultra-nationalism promulgated by Ceauşescu (but not addressed to Manea).
In response, Manea gave a courageous interview in Vatra condemning
anti-Semitism and stirring up quite a scandal. The editor who published
the article was dismissed. New articles in the same weekly followed, which
were, this time, vituperative toward Manea’s own Jewishness. The event
had become an affair of state. There was no possibility of Manea reply-
ing because of Communist censorship. The invective was similar to that
directed at Sebastian in 1934: “an idiot and a renegade,” “a hooliganic
Jew,” “the Yid Joseph Hechter,” and so on (Sebastian 2000, 246, 338).
These three incidents provide a background to Manea’s The Hooligan’s
Return, his open embracing of his ethnicity, and his addressing publicly
the theme of the Holocaust.
Manea’s Hooligan’s Return can be analyzed on two levels: factual and
fictional. The narrator brings out the reality of his family’s deportation
to Transnistria and later his parents’ and his own testimonies about their
experience in the labor camp of Moghilev. These real events, which have a
testimonial function, are interspersed with memories of friendships, loves,
and professional and political choices. Fictionalized discussions with his
friends and imaginary conversations with famous authors and personal-
ities—Kafka, Celan, and Freud—along with reflections on his past and
present offer a dramatic picture that enlivens the spirit of the book. Full
of fascinating digressions, this memoir reminds one of Montaigne’s moral
Essays, since Manea’s book is written not only as an analysis of autho-
rial subjectivity (in Montaigne’s words: “Je suis moi-même la matière de
mon livre” [“I am myself the subject of my book.”] (Montaigne, 1962, 1),
but also, as Matei Calinescu notices, as an ethical understanding of facts
and history (in Manea’s case, of the Holocaust) (2008, 27). In a perma-
nent search for truth, Manea asks questions and sometimes gives his own
answers, careful not to impose them on his readers, but rather to challenge
them. It is interesting how “I” changes regularly into “he” (2008, 29),
offering a detached and theatrical perception of the narrator who is, in
fact, the writer’s alter ego.
The memoir includes “Preliminaries” (a sort of prelude to the opus,

creating the atmosphere for the book) and three chapters, each divided in
subchapters. The Preliminaries reveal his current life in America, inters-
pered with a Romanian recurrently invasive past. In the chapters I “The
First Return (The Past as Fiction),” II “The Viennese Couch,” and III
“The Second Return (Posterity)” Manea gives more details about his life,
the socio-historical context of various biographical episodes, and meditates
on his inner and outer trip caused by his return to Romania.
The first chapter, “The First Return (The Past as Fiction),” pres-
ents events that define the author’s personal identity and his family’s
life (before deportation) in “the land of beeches . . . sweet Bukovina, that
delightful garden” (2003, 80), which—seen in retrospect—looks idyllic.
The writer reflects on his life, his early youth and naïve enthusiasm for
the utopian “paradise,” and his adult life under Communism. He also
recognizes his initiations into exile, from his deportation and his inner
exile to his decision to leave the country, this time in a self-chosen exile.
The narrator is thus experiencing a rite de passage similar to that of
Joyce’s Leopold Bloom/Ulysses, in search of himself and probably the
truth of his life and times. Initiation remains a constant theme through-
out the book.
The next chapter, “The Viennese Couch” provides more details of the
deportation of Manea’s family and their life in the labor camp of Moghilev
and offers a historical description of the Fascist years under Antonescu,
transitioning from personal to historical events. Manea also incorporates
fiction into the chapter, through philosophical and self-searching dia-
logues about identity.
The memoir’s third and last chapter, “The Second Return (Posterity),”
presents the narrator’s visit to Bucharest, day by day, with all its anxiet-
ies and trials. He relates his encounters with the present-day city and his
imaginary or real dialogues with his friends; he offers more reflections
on Jewishness and the Holocaust (interrupted by memories of his mother,
whose ghost follows him everywhere, even in his dreams); and he describes
movingly his first visit to his mother’s grave. Nostalgia for places and peo-
ple no longer living permeates the text, as do considerations on language
and exile.
Interestingly, the book starts with ironic, peripatetic cogitations
on Manea’s former life in “paradise”—the Communist “paradise.”
Paradoxically, the narrator lives now in another “paradise,” a surreality
(reminiscent of Baudrillard’s description of America) made of signs and
symbols, in its locus mundi, New York. Here, the narrator walks through a
still alien, yet friendly world, where people are not afraid to mention their
Jewishness, as is not often the case in Europe. It is in this second “paradise”
norman manea / 183
that the writer becomes an important member of the American literary

milieu, fully assuming his ethnicity.
The narrator feels at home among the Jewish intelligentsia of New
York (Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and others), whose mem-
bers he meets in Jewish diners, where the atmosphere “has the memories
of the ghetto, pure cholesterol, Oy mein Yiddishe mame” (the nostalgia
of the Old World with its shtetls where Yiddish was spoken); or at recep-
tions, where his life story stirs interest and leads to a publisher’s request
for his autobiography. It is easier to be a Jew in America than in Europe,
he notices. However, even here, in New York, he still feels under threat
when he receives an anonymous Chagall picture postcard representing The
Martyr, which depicts the figure of a young Jewish man tied to a stake, in
a Christ-like position (yet not on a cross), at whose feet is a mother with a
child, while to the sides of the painting are depicted a rabbi and a fiddler,
important figures in the life of a shtetl. The village is all in flames; the
image represents a pogrom—one of those which regularly took place in
Russia. Manea’s anxiety over this anonymous Chagall postcard is under-
standable, given the numerous attacks and even death-threats whose target
he had been. Although the writer wonders whether this simple postcard
actually represents a danger or not, his fears are also triggered by the 1991
assassination at the University of Chicago of professor Culianu, who may
have been the victim of Romanian-American Iron Guardists. Manea’s rest-
lessness is, obviously, rooted in the past. “I had obliterated the horror of
the past, that ghetto disease. I was healed, so I thought” (2003, 29). Yet he
realizes that such obliteration is not possible.
The memoir relates the narrator’s reluctant short trip from America
back to his country of origin, which he had left nine years before. The
invitation of the president of Bard College, who is also a well-known musi-
cian, to accompany him to Romania, is apprehensively accepted by the
writer, who decides to take this opportunity to visit his mother’s grave in
Bukovina, near Suceava. Her death had occurred not long after he had
chosen exile, during the Communist period, which made impossible his
return to attend her funeral. His American friends encourage his decision
to go back now, in 1997. They consider that this return “could finally
cure [him] of the Eastern European syndrome” (2003, 10). In fact, the
narrator also concludes that this trip may have a therapeutic effect: “Only
a return, whether happy or unhappy, would mark the final break, liberat-
ing me” (2003, 50). This decision overcomes the strong anxiety caused
by the anticipation of “a reunion with the self I have been or a translation
of the one I have become” (2003, 49). While the “present” encounter with
the past is not easy, and stirs not only disturbing but also moving memo-
ries, the discovery of the present can be irritating as well as an opportunity
to search out and reflect on old friendships that are still alive. The writer
moves in an in-between world—between the past and the present, between
the present seen through the past and between the past as reflected in
the present. Will this Proustian “remembrance of things past” and “time
regained” experience achieve its goal of liberation? In the end, the narrator
seems briefly to think so, yet the ambiguity of the memoir leaves the reader
unconvinced. The writer seems to remain an incurable patient of his past
and an accepting, and even willing, prisoner of his nomadic snail shell, his
native language. In fact, there is no possibility of escaping the past, (“the
past has a claim on us, no one escapes its summons”) (Walter Benjamin
1998).
The writer—apprehensive—prepares to travel to Jormania (a name
Ioan Petru Culianu coined17), which naturally sounds like “Germania”
in Romanian. It is from Manea’s “Jormania” of the 1940s that Marshal
Antonescu deports the Jewish population of Northern Moldavia, Bukovina,
and Bessarabia to a territory recently occupied by the Nazis and the Fascist
Romanian army. The conditions are appalling and many deportees die
either on their way to or in the labor camps of Transnistria. Although
focusing on the dreadful experience of the Holocaust, Manea succeeds in
presenting anything but a story of victimization, something for which he
has a definite aversion (as he declared in the interview, “I am not a writer
of the Holocaust”). The author’s modesty and detachment make these
descriptions of real events seem even more poignant, while at the same
time they remain an ethical reflection on the inhumanity of the Fascist
period in Romania.
In The Hooligan’s Return, Manea reflects upon his experience not
only under Antonescu’s Fascist regime, but also under Communism.
Significantly, most of these memories are connected to his Jewish identity,
since the writer concludes that he was “born under the sign of the intruder”
(2003, 28). The Jewishness and the “intruder” status cannot be defined,
however, without an understanding of the two prevalent ideologies of the
twentieth century: Fascism and Communism. Therefore, Manea remains
at the intersection of two identities: ethnic and political.
In the context of totalitarianism, Manea could definitely say, like
Bernard-Henry Lévy in “La Barbarie à visage humain”: “Je suis l’enfant
naturel d’un couple diabolique, le fascisme et le stalinisme” [I am the
natural child of a diabolic couple: Fascism and Stalinism] (1977, 7), my
translation. However, these two totalitarian ideologies are distinct, in
Manea’s opinion: “Nazism defined its purpose in clear terms, kept its
promises, rewarded its faithful, and annihilated its victims without hesita-
tion, without offering them the chance to convert or to lie. In contrast,
the Communism of universal happiness encouraged conversion, lying,
norman manea / 185
complicity, and was not reluctant to devour even its own faithful” (Manea
2003, 228–229).
Manea clearly disagrees with equating these two types of totalitarianism,
as Hannah Arendt does in her Origins of Totalitarianism. He is also very dis-
appointed by the current Romanian views that deny any difference between
Fascism and Communism, ultimately presenting a distorted image of both
ideologies. Manea’s observations underscore very important nuances that
should not be overlooked when analyzing politics and history.
Manea’s naïve enthusiasm for Communism when he was a child
and later an adolescent (first as a pioneer and then as a member of the
Communist Working Youth, when he became “a red figure of authority”)
(2003, 147) was cured when the young Manea realized the ruthlessness of
the party doctrine, inflexible towards any opposition by those who chose
to remain independent. As a university student, he withdrew completely
from involvement with political organizations, pretending that he wanted
to concentrate on his studies. Later, Manea’s vocation as a writer (after a
career as an engineer) provided him first a retreat and then the strength
to defy authority through subversive writings. Despite harsh censorship
preventing the publication of Plicul negru for almost two years, the book
(which obliquely addressed Jewishness) was finally in print in 1986.
In his memoir, Manea reflects on his permanent confrontation with his
identity. After years of rampant anti-Semitism during the Fascist period
(the 1930s and early 1940s in Romania), which was characterized by
pogroms and deportations, internationalist Communism condemned and
outlawed any type of anti-ethnic behavior. However, latent anti-Semitism
was periodically revived under Communism in several countries of Eastern
Europe, including the Soviet Union. In Romania, one such occasion was
the period of intense nationalism promulgated by Ceauşescu in the late
1970s and 1980s, which led to an intersection between Communism and
Fascism. Thus, Manea’s impression that his Jewishness was irrelevant, was
shockingly challenged in the early 1980s:
[T]he new horror [anti-Semitism under Communism] had not only

replaced the old one, but had co-opted it: they now worked together, in
tandem. When I made this discovery public, I found myself thrown into
the center of the ring. The loudspeakers barked repeatedly—foreigner, for-
eigner, anti-this and anti-that. Once again, I had proven myself unworthy
of the motherland of which, truth be told, my ancestors had been equally
unworthy (2003, 29).
In Bernard Malamud’s words: “If you ever forget you’re a Jew, a Gentile
will remind you” (1964, 29). Manea’s compatriots kept reminding him
that he was not one of them.
As mentioned before, the intimidations triggered by Manea’s articles

on Eliade and Sebastian continued, in the United States, where he received
even death threats, proof of the renewal of Fascist ideology in his native
country and its long reach into countries of exile and sanctuary. However,
as Manea notices, some Romanians acknowledged and were troubled by
the incomprehensible and unbearable fact that ethnic hatred continued to
exist. Petru Creţia, a religious Christian writer, expressed his dismay with
the current anti-Semitism in Romania (in an article published in Realitatea
Evreiască, 1997) concerning
figures who in public display flawless morality, an impeccable democratic

conduct, a wise moderation, accompanied, in some cases, by pompous
solemnity, yet who are capable of, privately, and sometimes not so privately,
foaming at the mouth against Jews [ . . . ] I have seen the irrefutable proof
of the fury triggered by Sebastian’s Journal and of the feeling that lofty
national values are being besmirched by the disclosures made, so calmly
and with such forgiving pain, by this fair-minded, often angelic witness
(quoted in Manea 2003, 338).
Creţia’s frank testimony of the behind-the-scenes discussions of intel-

lectuals in 1998 is quite relevant, and exposes a post-Communist duplic-
ity. In the new Romanian society, where civic European laws have been
implemented, it is no longer “politically correct” to be anti-Semitic, at least
in public. Therefore, the resentment against and even hatred of Jews are
vented through anti-Semitic outbursts in private discourse.
In Manea’s opinion, condemnations of anti-Semitism should come more
often from non-Jews, such as Christian intellectuals, writers, and artists—the
elite of the country—rather than from Jews. Such attitudes would be a heart-
ening sign that consciences have been stirred and attitudes have changed.
Lately, an increasing number of writers and journalists (e.g., George Voicu,
Paul Cernat, Gabriela Adameşteanu, and others) have started to criticize and
condemn anti-Semitism. The new generation, aware of the Holocaust and
Romania’s responsibility during World War II, has a better understanding of
the tragedy of the Jewish community thanks to more open discussions about
Romania’s history, the publishing of research and testimonies of that period,
education about the Holocaust, as well as the creation of departments of
Jewish Studies in universities. Unfortunately, it seems that anti-Semitism
cannot be eradicated, despite any and all efforts to expose and combat it.
In his quest of identity, affected by anti-Semitism, Manea raises a fre-
quently asked question: How does one become a Jew? In an engaging,
imaginary dialogue with Freud, a “nonreligious, non-nationalist, non-
speaker of the sacred language” (2003, 241), Manea wonders if “Jewishness”
may be simply defined by circumcision, the “covenant carved in the flesh”
norman manea / 187
(2003, 242). Yet the answer comes abruptly, from the author himself: The
concrete covenant is not as important as Manea’s own “accreditation” as a
Jew, through his own biography. At the age of five, he had become part of
“the collective destiny” (243).
Manea was forced to be aware of his Jewishness in 1941, when he was
deported. Similarly, in 1934, Sebastian realized his irreversible condemna-
tion when he was brutally designated a “Jew” for eternity by his mentor
and his friends, members of the intellectual elite. Like Freud, a “nonre-
ligious, non-nationalist, non-speaker of the sacred language,” Sebastian
realized that Jewishness translates into a perpetual history of pogroms,
death trains, and deportations. Being Jewish seems to merit an eternal
destiny of guilt. Manea quotes the half-joking remark of a German-Jewish
writer: “We Jews will never be forgiven for the Holocaust” (2003, 243).
Paradoxically, murderers project their guilt on their victims. In this case,
they hate being reminded of the crimes of the past.
Becoming a Jew in the eye of the “other” also means being excluded.
In this respect, Cioran’s ironic aphorism fits Manea perfectly: “Being
excluded is the only dignity we have” (2003, 48). Manea’s initial exclusion
functioned as a catalyst for his finding his true identity and, by extension,
his true dignity. For him, assuming his Jewishness represented the sine qua
non of being true to himself and, through his memoir, he addressed his
own traumatic experience of the Holocaust.
In The Hooligan’s Return, the Holocaust often appears in his conver-
sations with his parents and in his own memories of the deportation,
presented in the form of testimonies by the three Maneas: each of his par-
ents and the narrator himself. Manea’s mother, the most important pres-
ence throughout the book no matter where he happens to be (New York,
Bucharest, or Suceava), accompanies and seems to protect her son; the
old lady visits him in his dreams and nightmares and appears as “a ghost,
out of the blue” (Manea 2003, 7) at the very beginning of the memoir.
During the deportation, she struggled to save her family from the trap
of resignation and despair. Her memories of the Holocaust center on the
forced departure of her family, along with the other Jews from Suceava
and its surroundings, who were pushed into “a freight train transport-
ing cattle; [we] were one on top of the other, like sardines. At Ataki, the
plunder began, screamings, beatings, shots” (2003, 94). Her story is famil-
iar; it appears in innumerable testimonies, including Malaparte’s “Cricket
in Poland” chapter in his well-known book Kaputt, which refers to the
pogrom of Jassy and the trains of death.
Manea’s mother’s ingenuity was soon at work and she succeeded in
keeping the family together, as she vividly remembers: “I was brave. I went
to him [the soldier] and told him: Mister, my parents were left behind at
Ataki, they are old. I’ll give you 1,000 lei, please bring them here” (Manea
2003, 95). Her transactions saved the entire family—especially her hus-
band, who was demoralized and ready to give up—while inspiring her
son to fight for his life. Her stamina and will are still fresh in the author’s
mind: “Nothing is more important than survival, Mother kept saying, as
she sought to sustain her husband and son. Death was extinction, which
had to be fought at any cost” (2003, 211). Yet despite this unrelenting
struggle against seemingly insurmountable adversities, which did achieve
small victories, loss could not be prevented: her parents (Manea’s grand-
parents) died of typhus in the camp.
The writer’s relationship with his mother is complicated, because of her
exaggerated compulsive need to protect him and to make decisions in his
life. What else is this than being a proverbial Jewish mother, a Yiddishe
mame? She interferes, for example, in his romantic relationships and stops
him from marrying the woman he loves, because she is a “shiksa”: “We
are we and they are they,” she insists (17). She is guilty, in her son’s eyes,
of “the tyranny of affection, the unbearable malady of the ghetto” (214).
Although “the language of the ghetto” is not spoken at home, at the end of
her life and while in the hospital, in her dreams and nightmares, she always
speaks Yiddish, which is connected to her experience in the camp during
which the family spoke this language with the other deportees. She seems
to relive her trauma, which is deeply inscribed in the family psyche.
His father also provides a testimony of the Holocaust in Manea’s
Memoir. At his son’s request, Manea’s father writes his autobiography,
which reveals not only his extremely sensitive nature but also how badly
he had been afflicted by his loss of dignity during deportation. He ended
his life in a nursing home in Jerusalem, suffering from Alzheimer’s dis-
ease and, paradoxically, being cared for by a young German man who was
trying—as Manea believes—to redeem the Nazis’ crimes.
For the Maneas, the Romanian Holocaust also revealed the goodness of
some people, whose humanity remained intact. A young Romanian woman,
Maria, proved her deep love for those whom she considered her family. At
the railway station, she “tried to squeeze herself into the cattle car” (Manea
2003, 139) and struggled with the guards who forced her off; she simply
wanted to share her family’s fate. However, though initially she failed, she
did not give up. Realizing she could be of even more help she went from
Bukovina to Transnistria on foot, at her life’s peril, bringing food and cloth-
ing to her loved ones—not once, but twice. (The second time everything
she brought was confiscated). She even lived for a while with the Maneas in
the camp of Moghilev, taking care of them, particularly the grandparents
who were dying of typhus (182). Her luminous figure and moving spirit of
sacrifice bring warmth to Manea’s memory of the trauma.
norman manea / 189
The narrator’s father also remembers the kindness of other people (for
example, a Romanian soldier and an officer) who helped the family with
food and vital advice. At such barbaric times, when inhumanity was the
rule, some had the courage to act according to their conscience, imperiling
their own lives. In 1941, Traian Popovici (1892–1946), a lawyer and the
Romanian mayor of Cernăuţi (Bukovina), strongly opposed the deporta-
tion of the city’s Jews to Transnistria and defied the orders of Antonescu’s
Fascist regime. He fought with determination to keep at least the Jewish
professional population in Cernăuţi, arguing that these professionals were
vitally needed for economic reasons and the good functioning of the city’s
administration, and saved twenty thousand Jews by providing his “Popovici
authorizations” (as, later, Raoul Wallenberg granted Swedish passports to
Hungarian Jews in 1944). In his very moving testimony, Spovedania unei
conştiinţe [Confession of Conscience] (1945), he describes in detail the harsh
measures taken by the government against an innocent population and the
tragic fate of this population that was brutally forced to live in inhuman
conditions in the ghettos and later deported to the camps of Transnistria.
Popovici explains the reasons for his courage and tenacity, which drove him
to defy authority under extremely dangerous circumstances:
As far as I am concerned, what gave me strength to oppose the current, be

master of my own will and oppose the powers that be, finally to be a true
human being, was the message of the families of priests that constitute my
ancestry, a message about what it means to love mankind. What gave me
the strength was the education I received in high school in Suceava, where
I received the light of classical literature, where my teachers fashioned my
spirit with the values of humanity, which tirelessly enlightens man and dif-
ferentiates him from the brutes (quoted in Final Report, 290).
In recent years, as mentioned above, attitudes toward Romanian his-

tory have changed, although there are still many efforts to be made in
this direction. In 2008, Manea’s Memoir was enthusiastically received in
Romania by most critics. In several interviews, the writer suggests that this
warm reception may also be due to his new readers, members of a younger
generation, who are more “connected to the Western society,” (Dima 2008)
more open to encounters with Romania’s past, and more critical of it.
The memoir is not just another tale of suffering, because Manea consid-
ers “the trivialization of suffering . . . mankind’s endless enterprise” (2003,
244). In his opinion, “suffering corrupts.” His distaste for being consid-
ered a victim prompts him, in the words of Larissa MacFarquahar, “[to
heap] contempt upon himself and his opinions, neurotically forestalling at
every juncture the possibility of pity” (MacFarquar 2003). Manea’s mem-
oir may be considered what Balzac would define as “l’histoire privée d’une
nation” (Balzac 1997, 107). According to Imre Kertész, who had another
traumatic experience in Hungary: “L’Holocauste est une expérience uni-
verselle, le judaïsme est une experience universelle renouvelée . . . elle a dû
acquérir un savoir douloureux qui fait désormais partie intégrante de la
conscience européenne” [The Holocaust is a universal experience, Judaism
is a renewed universal experience which had to acquire a painful knowl-
edge which from now on belongs completely to the European conscience]
(Lacroix 42–43). Manea is also able to see himself through the universal
perspective of the human condition: “Jewish destiny is nothing, in the
end, but the exacerbation, through suffering, of human Destiny” (Cugno
1995).
Despite the catastrophe and the trauma of the deportation, the sur-
vivor’s testimony in Manea’s Memoir is infused with a kind of equanim-
ity and generosity. Yet Manea felt compelled to tell his story Behind his
detachment and universal understanding of this uniquely tragic event, he
stands a writer of the Holocaust: in his memoir, written under the sign of
an ethical insight, the unforgettable and unforgivable live side by side.
Notes
I would like to thank Anca Munteanu (LeMoyne College) for her invaluable advice
during our long discussions, her editorial skills, and for being a source of inspira-
tion for me. I am also grateful to William Ford (University of Illinois at Chicago)
for his enlightening conversations, patient editing, and moral support.
1. After the liberation of Transnistria by the Soviet troops, Manea’s father was
enrolled into the Soviet army (but he succeeded in escaping). Manea studied
for a year in a Soviet school.
2. Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) was a Romanian historian of religions, novelist,
philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago.
3. Mihail Sebastian (1907–1945) was a Romanian playwright, novelist, journal-
ist, and essayist. His Journal 1935–1944 The Fascist Years was published in the
United States in 2000.
4. Eugène Ionesco was Romanian by birth, but he became a famous playwright
in France and was one of the founders of the Theatre of the Absurd. Ionesco
also wrote memoirs, essays, and a novel. In Présent Passé Passé Présent he remi-
nisces about the Fascist period in Romania, when his friends, one by one,
fell under the spell of the Iron Guard and turned into “rhinoceroses.” He
and Sebastian were two among the few Romanian intellectuals who remained
democrats and were appalled by this extreme right-wing movement in their
country.
5. Hannah Arendt describes the characteristics of Fascists as “violence, power,
cruelty” (28). Cruelty was considered a “major virtue because it contradicted
society’s humanitarian and liberal hypocrisy,” (29) and “terrorism [became] a
kind of philosophy” (30).
norman manea / 191
6. This theme is developed in his play Rhinocéros. In Passé Présent Présent Passé, he
explains how the metamorphosis happened: “I have seen people transformed
almost before my eyes . . . I felt how another soul, another mind germinated
in them . . . they became other.” When one friend made the first concession
to the Fascists about Jews, “they [the Fascists] seem to be right on one point,”
Ionesco recognized “the first symptom of an incubation that would go on
until he had a bad case of the disease” 116–119.
7. Emil Cioran (1911–1995) was a Romanian philosopher and essayist who
mostly wrote in French. Due to the aphoristic content (skeptical and nihil-
istic) of his essays, Cioran is considered the La Rochefoucauld of the twenti-
eth century. In his later writings, he expressed his regret for his anti-Semitic
youth.
8. Constantin Noica (1909–1987) was a Romanian philosopher and essayist who
remained in Romania and was imprisoned by the Communists. However,
towards the end of his life he was recuperated by Communists for the isola-
tionism, nationalism, anti-Europeanism, and strong critique of the Western
world found in his later essays.
9. Eugène Ionesco described Nae Ionescu in Past Present Present Past: “He is a
very nice, very refined, very distinguished man . . . He is an Iron Guard. He
tells the party militants to be ‘frightfully good.’ The ‘good’ here has either the
conscious or the unconscious role of hiding ‘frightfully.’ He thus tells them
that they must kill with ‘kindness’ ” (124). Nae Ionescu is the source of inspi-
ration for the Logician (a ridiculous demagogue) in Rhinoceros.
10. Nae Ionescu concludes in the preface to Sebastian’s book, “Judas is suffering
because . . . he is Judas . . . Judas will agonize until the end of time” (De două
mii de ani, 9, 24; my translation).
11. In 1931, Sebastian had asked his professor to write a preface for a “Jewish
book” he intended to write. At the time, Nae Ionescu (also editor of the news-
paper Cuvântul [The Word], which, according to Sebastian, was “antihit-
lerian” until 1933) had a great interest in and knowledge of Judaism, even
lectured on some of its aspects, and seemed to be a philosemite. However, in
1933 Ionescu had suddenly become a staunch supporter of the Iron Guard, the
Romanian Fascist-Orthodox movement that flourished from the 1920s until
the early 1940s (although in 1941 it was outlawed by Marshal Antonescu). The
blow of the preface triggered Sebastian’s stupefying decision. He gave several
interesting explanations for the reason of the preface publication: because he
had asked for it, because he did not want to censure any “written page,” and
because “he was indifferent about its publication.” Yet for Sebastian it was
most tragic that Nae Ionescu, his beloved and much admired professor, “could
ever conceive and write it.” Sebastian’s “true revenge” and “obligation,” he
acknowledged, was to publish Nae Ionescu’s preface (Cum am devenit hooli-
gan, 316).
12. In one of his Journal entries, when he describes his shock on hearing of
Sebastian’s sudden death in 1945, Eliade uses a vocabulary and tone in the spirit
of Nae Ionescu’s ultra anti-Semitic preface to Sebastian’s 2000 Years (7–24).
In this entry he explains (it seems to me rather hypocritically) the reason he
had avoided Sebastian during the worst years of the Iron Guard in Romania,
when he was consul in London and then in Lisbon: “I was ashamed . . . of
his humiliations he had to stand, because he had been born, and wished to
remain, Joseph Hechter.” See Mac Linscott Ricketts, “Les Oublis d’Alexandra
Laignel-Lavastine,” Asymetria, www.asymetria.org/rickettsvslavastine3.html.
It was exactly at that time, in my opinion, that Sebastian needed Eliade’s
friendship the most.
13. Laszlo Alexandru, in his article “Mihail Sebastian pe masa de operaţie”
[Mihail Sebastian on the Operating Table], Tribuna 174 (December 2009):
13, refutes Marta Petreu’s claim in Diavolul si ucenicul său: Nae Ionescu si
Mihail Sebastian [The Devil and his Apprentice: Nae Ionescu and Mihail
Sebastian] that Sebastian’s publication of articles in Nae Ionescu’s Cuvântul
turned him almost into a Fascist. Alexandru points out that Petreu refused to
take into account the fact that most of Sebastian’s articles appeared before the
newspaper veered to the extreme right.
14. Regarding the long tradition of anti-Semitism in Romanian culture, see
Zigu Ornea, Anii treizeci—Extrema dreaptă românească. [The 1930s—
the Romanian Extreme Right]; Leon Volovici, Nationalist Ideology and
Antisemitism—The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 1930s; Vladimir
Tismaneanu, Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism and Myth in
Post- Communist Societies; and Andrei Oişteanu, Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic
Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central-East European Cultures, with a
foreword by Moshe Idel, translated by Mirela Adascalitei.
15. Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) was the founder of the (Fascist type)
extreme-right Legionary Movement, represented by the Iron Guard (The
Legion of the Archangel Michael), which was viciously anti-Semitic, mystical-
Romanian Orthodox, and ultra-nationalist. Codreanu committed and insti-
gated political assassinations, a program which his followers continued after
his death.
16. Săptămâna was a weekly journal edited by Eugen Barbu, who was in fact a
writer and journalist spokesman for the Communist Party. Corneliu Vadim
Tudor (who is currently a member of the extreme-right party, România Mare)
wrote the article “Idealuri” (Ideals) in which he attacks “the teachers of demo-
cratic tarantella,” “the foreign Irods,” and “the lazy prophets and Judases.”
17. Ioan Petru Culianu (1950–1991) was a professor of the history of religions
at the University of Chicago and a philosopher. A close disciple of Mircea
Eliade, he was later greatly disappointed by Eliade’s Fascist past. Culianu was
murdered under mysterious circumstances at the university in 1991.
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Ch a p t e r Te n
El i e Wi e se l’s N I G H T : Th e D e at h of
Hop e a n d Rom a n i a’s P robl e m at ic
Mor a l Sta n d i n R e l at ion to
t h e Holoc aust
Domnica Radulescu
The truth is that [the Holocaust] is an inappropriate word because no word can
express this tragedy: no word can contain the humiliation, the suffering, and the
loss of human life that it is meant to encompass. We use it only because we can
do no better.
—(Wiesel 1999, 5)
Close to four hundred thousand Jews were deported and/or extermi-

nated from the former Romanian territories—Northern Bessarabia and
Bukovina, the Regat (Old Kingdom), and Northern Transylvania—under
the Antonescu and Horthy governments, leaving in 1945 only about half
of the entire population of Jews that had lived in Romanian territories
before 1941 (Rozen). In the territories of pre-war Romania and Northern
Transylvania, whether under the Antonescu or the Horthy regimes,
between 1941 and 1944 there were pogroms, ghettoes, “the sealed wagons”
(Ioanid 2000, viii), hangings of Jews in public squares, Jews set on fire in
their homes or in furnaces by Romanian soldiers (Ioanid 2000), and trains
filled with Jews that departed from Sighet destined for the Auschwitz-
Birkenau or Buchenwald camps (Braham 2000).
Today, try asking a Romanian in the street, in the halls of a theater or
university, in a doctor’s waiting room, or in a marketplace, what happened
to the Jewish population of Romania between roughly 1941 and 1944. Most
likely, he or she will tell you that Romania was “a haven for Jews” (Ioanid
2000, xi), that Romanians were actually good to the Jews, that Romanians
saved many Jews from deportation and extermination. Some might still tell
196 / domnica radulescu
you that Marshal Antonescu was a “hero,” a “patriot”; others might even
shock you by saying that he did well to “rid” the country of many of the
Gypsies and the Jews. If you ask about Elie Wiesel, the answer is often a pro-
verbial washing one’s hands, something along the lines of: “Oh, Wiesel was
deported by the Hungarians, not the Romanians.” And yet others might
even leave you completely speechless by saying something that would seem
unlikely for the twenty-first century in a European country, namely how
they deplore the fact that Antonescu “did not finish the job.”
“How to understand the popularity of Antonescu after the fall of the
Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu?” asks Elie Wiesel in the preface
to Radu Ioanid’s book The Holocaust in Romania (2000, viii). “Streets
bearing his name, statues erected, elected officials observing a moment
of silence to honor his memory: has the nation so quickly forgotten his
bloody misdeeds, the atrocities he ordered, his crimes against humanity,
and his death sentence?”
Elie Wiesel was born in the Northern Transylvanian town of Sighet,
which in 1940, under the Second Vienna Award, was lost to Hungary.
In early June of 1944, when all the Jews in Sighet and Northern
Transylvania had been placed in ghettos, Elie Wiesel together with his
parents and sister, Tzipora, were among the very last Jews from the region
to be deported (Schoenberg, Wiesel & Franciosi 2002); he was separated
from his mother and sister, who died in the camps. His father died also
in Buchenwald, a couple of months before the camps were liberated in
April 1945.
Romanian president Ion Iliescu established the International
Commission on the Holocaust in Romania in 2003, under pressure
after making a statement denying the Holocaust in Romania. Iliescu
asked Wiesel to serve as chair of the Commission, which he accepted.
Wiesel and his family were deported under the Horthyst government
and therefore as part of the Hungarian Holocaust, not the Romanian
Holocaust under General Antonescu. Nevertheless, he is among the
Romanian-born Jews who were deported. Recognition of all deporta-
tions, placing in ghettos, and exterminations of Jews in the territories
of present or former Romania has been slow in coming. Although there
have been efforts by post-1989 governments—Iliescu, Constantinescu,
and the present Băsescu governments—to break the silence surrounding
Romania’s deliberate and sometimes frighteningly enthusiastic participa-
tion in the Holocaust (Ioanid 2000) and to teach the truth in schools
about Romania’s past alliance with Nazi Germany, sadly, anti-Semitic
attitudes, fierce denial of this dark episode in Romania’s history, and
even troubling nostalgia for Fascist movements such as the Iron Guard
still abound in today’s Romania.
elie wiesel’s NIGHT / 197
Wiesel’s Night and Dante’s Inferno—A

Marriage Made in Hell
This article examines Wiesel’s Night in light of Dante’s circles of hell in the
Inferno. It pursues this critical task not simply as an intellectual exercise
but as a moral one, following Wiesel’s own urging to break the silence
and keep remembering, in order to raise consciousness both among my
own compatriots and in the world at large about Romania’s role in the
Holocaust and its long and profoundly disturbing silence with regard to it.
This essay is also prompted by Wiesel’s own openly ambiguous relation to
silence versus speech in terms of bearing testimony to the Holocaust. He
has at various times throughout his life noted his own ambivalence with
regard to the tension between silence and speech, as well as with regard to
the inadequacy of language to even start to express the horrors of the Nazi
genocide. “Everything raises the question of speech and silence,” he noted
in an interview, “The problem is not to choose between speech and silence,
but to try to make sure that speech does not become the enemy of silence
and that silence does not become a betrayal of speech” (Wiesel and de
Saint Cheron 2000, 7). In A Jew Today, Wiesel raised questions about the
form or language that one should adopt in talking about the Holocaust:
“How does one describe the indescribable? How does one use restraint in
re-creating the fall of mankind and the eclipse of the gods? And then, how
can one be sure that the words, once uttered, will not betray, distort the
message they bear?” (1979, 15). One of Elie Wiesel’s characters from the
novel The Forgotten wonders how one can imagine the unimaginable and
talk about that which is unspeakable. Yet Wiesel himself notes that “to
be against speech one must use it” (Wiesel and de Saint Cheron 2000, 7).
Speak we must, for silence and forgetfulness are the direct and immedi-
ate accomplices of genocides. The Holocaust happened while the world
watched and kept silent either out of fear or disbelief or both.
In my own attempt to come to terms with this stain on the history
of my native country, I would like to discuss Wiesel’s autobiographical
work Night, as a constant and continuous awakening of the memory of
evil, focusing in particular on what I call the “perfection of suffering” on
the one hand, and the death of God, man, and ultimately the values of
Western Humanism on the other hand. Jewish émigrés in America, such as
Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, have asked the following question:
how can one continue to live; how can art still exist; and what kind of art
can still be created in a world that has seen and experienced the Holocaust?
Wiesel’s text certainly poses similar questions, but starkly, uncompromis-
ingly, defiantly refuses an answer. Of course, Night itself and its blood-
curdling testimony of evil and human suffering are its own answer.
Dante’s images of human suffering, of justice, and of divine retribu-

tion as illustrated in the Inferno lend themselves to a productive compari-
son with Wiesel’s Night. I argue that what Dante imagines in his Inferno,
Wiesel and the characters of his book experience in flesh and blood. But
even further, I advance the idea that the very notion of the “contrapasso,”
that is, of the perfect match between the sin and the punishment, and
the “perfection” of the suffering of the souls in the Inferno after the sec-
ond coming are part of a theological, philosophical, and ethical system of
beliefs that has been developed throughout the history of Catholic and
Orthodox Christianity and has contributed significantly to the ideologi-
cal basis for the justification of such events as the Holocaust. The notion
that the Inferno and the suffering of its dwellers directly illustrate God’s
love and justice; the placing in Limbo of those who, though virtuous, still
cannot enter Paradise because they lived before Christ (among them the
Greek and Roman sages and philosophers); and finally the methodical and
aesthetic depictions of various forms of human suffering and torture have
often made good company with anti-Semitism and the view of Jews as the
people “responsible” for the martyrdom and killing of Christ. Augustine’s
stern theology of predestination, which may also have been transmitted
to Dante via a theologian such as St. Bernard, largely accounts for the
Italian poet’s “development of the tragic fate of the virtuous pagans and
un-baptized children” and prevails over the Thomist notion of predestina-
tion (Lansing and Barolini 2008, 814).
Images and references to hell, to infernal sounds, to smoke, and to
flames abound in Wiesel’s Night. Upon entering Auschwitz—like Dante
entering the Inferno—Wiesel is surrounded by unearthly cries; by pes-
tilent smells; and by the sight of flames, smoke, and lost-looking souls
wandering around the camp, having indeed lost all hope, as the sign upon
the gate of Dante’s Hell advertises. The narrator of Night notes: “In one
ultimate moment of lucidity it seemed to me that we were damned souls
wandering in the half-world, souls condemned to wander through space
till the generations of man came to an end, seeking their redemption, seek-
ing oblivion—without hope of finding it” (Wiesel 1982, 34). Like Dante,
he enters a long night, with many stages or circles: to Dante’s nine circles
of Hell correspond Eliezer’s seven nights. “Never shall I forget that night,
the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night,
seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget the little
faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke
beneath a silent blue sky” (Wiesel 1982, 32). But very much unlike Dante,
the sixteen-year-old boy Eliezer enters as one of the “sinners,” as one of the
“suffering souls,” in order to be “punished” for descending from the line of
those placed in the ante-chamber of Hell, and not, like Dante, as a traveler,
as an initiate for the purpose of personal enlightenment. For Eliezer, his

mother, father, and sister Tzipora that “long, cursed night” becomes the
only reality, while for Dante it is a voyage, an intellectual experiment, and
part of a humanist quest for knowledge. Most poignantly, for Eliezer that
“long, cursed night” destroys all hope, annihilates faith and the belief in
any possibility of divine justice or love, and destroys his trust in humanity:
“Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never
shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of
the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my
God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these
things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never”
(Wiesel 1982, 32).
For Dante, his journey among the tormented souls of the Inferno only
confirms for him the perfection of God, the magnificence of the divine
plan, and the justice of God. At the end of his journey he comes back out
into the light “a riveder le stele” (once more to see the stars), a hero in the
Western tradition like Ulysses, Aeneas, and those great men who have gone
into the underworld and have emerged from it alive, initiated, and full of
glory. The suffering as much as the beatitude of the souls are both fully
just, according to Dante’s moral vision.
By the end of his time in Auschwitz, and then Buchenwald, Eliezer has
barely survived physically and emerges with his spirit broken, his hopes
shattered, his body damaged—a living corpse. The novel ends with the
following image: “I wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the
opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of
the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared
at me, has never left me” (Wiesel 1982, 109). The camp experience is a
Dantesque journey, a punishment for no obvious crime other than being
of a certain race and religion, just as the souls in Limbo are prevented from
any redemption, despite their moral worth, merely on the basis of when
they were born. At the end of this experience there is no redemption; it
all ends with the death of God, with the death of man, with the death
of the very humanistic values heralded by Dante’s Divina Commedia and
expanded throughout the history of humanist thought.
The trajectories of the two “infernal” journeys bear striking similari-
ties: there are flames and smoke and furnaces burning human flesh in
Auschwitz: “Flames were gushing out of a tall chimney into the black
sky . . . In front of us flames. In the air that smell of burning flesh. It must
have been about midnight. We had arrived at Birkenau, reception center
of Auschwitz” (Wiesel 1982, 26). All throughout Dante’s Hell there are
flames, flaming tombs with people half-buried in them (sixth circle); people
standing with their feet in burning holes, rains of fire, and flaming arrows
(seventh circle); and flaming cloaks encasing “deceivers” like Ulysses—

custom-made flames for all the sinners. Even though Dante often feels
pity for or identifies with some of the sinners; gets teary-eyed at the sight
of some of them, such as Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta, or
Ulysses himself; or even faints at the sight of some of the punishments;
he ultimately does not question the divine intelligence and architecture
of such a place, but accepts it, as he is confirmed in his faith and the righ-
teousness of God’s justice.
Eliezer and the other prisoners, on the other hand, as the ones to have
to suffer through the scorches of Auschwitz, end up questioning, denying,
and rejecting all notion of a God who would allow such atrocities. When a
child is being hanged in front of the entire camp, one of the prisoners keeps
asking: “Where is God? Where is He? Where is God now? . . . Where is He?
He is—He is hanging here on this gallows . . . That night the soup tasted
of corpses.” This wrenching question resonates with a similar pondering
expressed a century before by Dostoyevsky’s memorable character Ivan
Karamazov: “And where is the harmony if there is hell? . . . if the suffering
of children goes to make up the sum of suffering needed to buy truth, then
I assert beforehand that the whole of truth is not worth such a price . . . And
therefore I hasten to return my ticket” (Dostoyevsky 1991, 245). On the
night of Rosh Hashanah, Wiesel’s narrator notes: “I felt very strong, I was
the accuser, God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone—terribly
alone in a world without God and without man” (Wiesel 1982, 65). So
profound is the loss of faith in a just God that one of the prisoners says
with dark humor: “I’ve got more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He’s
the only one who’s kept his promises, all his promises to the Jewish people”
(Wiesel 1982, 77).
When the senseless suffering exceeds human endurance, the victims
lose their capacity to shed tears and are reduced merely to bodies in need
of bread and water. Just as the last circles of Dante’s Hell are all ice and
cold, the last days of Eliezer’s ordeal happen in the snow—a ten-day run
through the snow: “We lived on snow; it took the place of bread. It never
ceased snowing. All through these days and nights we stayed crouching,
one on top the other, never speaking a word. We were no more than frozen
bodies” (Wiesel 1982, 94). And when he wakes up at Buchenwald after
his father dies, he says: “I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not
weep. But I had no more tears” (Wiesel 1982, 106). In Dante’s ninth circle,
the traitors of kin are all immersed in ice, head down with their tears fro-
zen: “So livid in the ice, up to the place / where shame can show itself, were
those sad shades, / whose teeth were chattering . . . / Each kept his face bent
downward steadily; their mouths bore witness to the cold they felt, / their
eyes, which wept upon the ground before, / shed tears down on their lips
until the cold / held fast the tears and locked their lids still more” (Inferno,
Canto XXXII).
Both scenarios offer the spectacle of the freezing of humanity, the freez-
ing of all human emotion behind a mask of grief and hopelessness. Again,
however, the difference of perspective and of positioning vis-à-vis this
infernal universe is fundamental, for in Wiesel’s Night, the protagonist
is speaking from within the circles of Hell, as one of the victims, while
in Dante’s Inferno, the narrator is speaking as an observer, from outside
the world of the victims. One experiences the pain, the other analyzes,
sublimates it, and turns it into poetry. One barely survives it and gives tes-
timony to it so it may be remembered and never repeated again; the other
is a voyeur into a universe of methodically created human suffering that
he presents as a model of divine justice and as a cautionary note precisely
because it will be repeated again and again in an eternity of suffering.
At the opposite end of Western civilization and the Western humanist
thought represented by Dante, Elie Wiesel looks into an abyss of horror
that is more petrifying than anything in Dante because it is not imagined,
but real, and because of its blood-curdling reality, annihilates in one dark
night the values accumulated during the centuries in between. It shat-
ters into many broken pieces the grandiose image that man has created of
himself during those centuries: all Eliezer sees of himself in the mirror is
a living corpse. Wiesel’s look and experience of this abyss of horror shakes
from its foundation the very structure of Christian theology that holds
together the moral edifice of La Divina Commedia. How can so much
human suffering, torture, elaborate and imaginative methods of produc-
ing pain, as expressed in the elevated poetry of Dante’s terze rime, be the
expression of love? As Wiesel states in the interview with de Saint Cheron,
“For the most part, the killers had been baptized. They had been reared
under Christianity, and some of them even went to church, to Mass, and
probably to confession. Yet still they killed” (Wiesel and de Saint Cheron
2000, 68). Randolph Braham expresses similar views in his discussion of
the persecution and deportation of Jews in Northern Transylvania: “The
Christians,” he says, “even those friendly to the Jews, were mostly passive.
Many cooperated with the authorities on ideological grounds . . . Neutrality
and passivity were the characteristic attitudes of the heads of the Christian
churches in Transylvania” (2000, 128). The methodical killing of the Jews
during the Holocaust is to some extent the “perfection” of centuries of
anti-Semitism—persecutions, chases, and discriminations—that some-
how lived side by side and has been well woven into much of the religion,
art, and culture of Western humanist thought, together with the sense
of the superiority of Christian theology, practice, and morality. The Jews
in Wiesel’s Night are like the sinners in Dante’s Inferno, only punished
for no precise “sin” other than that of being Jews. Wiesel stated precisely
that Fascist ideology and philosophy had a foundation in Christianity and
its theology: “[N]o thinker, no honest religious person would now deny
the Christian influence on Nazi anti-Semitic theory. Sometimes we find
an identical archetypal fanaticism. Without the foundation afforded by
Christianity, Nazism and anti-Semitism would not have attained the vio-
lence that it did, nor the paroxysm of hatred and murder” (Wiesel and de
Saint Cheron 2000, 69).
Foucault argues that the very idea of “Man” is the result of a certain
epistemic system of the modern period, a sign, a category produced by vari-
ous codes and epistemological structures or, as he calls them, “epistemes.”
To Nietzsche’s famous outcry about the “Death of God” corresponds
Foucault’s idea of the death of Man, or of the idea of Man as measure
of all things (Calinescu 1987). Indeed, at the end of Eliezer’s ordeal at
Auschwitz, the mirror only reflects a corpse. As Susan Neiman has pointed
out, with the Holocaust “the impossible became true”; Dante’s Inferno of
the trecento turned from fantasy to reality in a most ghastly way and with
the very support of the philosophical thought that inspired part of Dante’s
Divina Commedia in the first place.
Wiesel vis-à-vis Romania and the Holocaust

In 2002, Elie Wiesel was awarded, by the Romanian president Iliescu, the
medal of the Star of Romania. In 2004, he decided to return that medal, in
protest of the same honor being conferred on Corneliu Vadim Tudor, head
of the extremely nationalist Greater Romania Party, and on Gheorghe
Buzatu, another party leader and Holocaust denier. The Greater Romania
Party has a long and entrenched history of anti-Semitism, anti-Jewish con-
spiracy theories, and Holocaust denial insofar as it relates to Romania’s
involvement. Abraham Foxman, the president of the Anti-Defamation
League, stated that awarding the honor to these men clearly contradicts
attempts by President Iliescu to educate his people about the atrocities of
the Holocaust and the role Romania played in it. My analysis of Wiesel’s
Night from the perspective of Dante’s theological system of contrapasso and
of the larger ideologies of the superiority of Christian faith is not unrelated
to the history of the silencing of the Holocaust in Romania. By connecting
the two—or rather, setting the two aspects of Wiesel’s thinking, life, and
work side by side—I hope to offer a glimpse into the complexities of this
country’s history of genocide as seen both within the larger circle of the
Holocaust in Europe and within the tight circle of persisting ideologies
that disturbingly connect Romania’s past with an insufficiently critical or
even at times entirely uncritical and unenlightened present.
What would it mean for Romania to come to terms with the Holocaust?
It would mean that offensive public acts—confusion between victims and
oppressors, conferring the same medal to a Holocaust survivor and a pro-
fessed anti-Semite—would not happen; it would mean precisely that the
Romanian government, schools, and media fully follow the recommenda-
tions of the Wiesel Commission and honestly and methodically educate
Romanian people about the role that past Romanian governments and
segments of the population itself played in the killing and extermination
of Jews. The official rhetoric and the initiatives are partly there, but the
truth is that both anti-Semitic discourses and elaborate right-wing philoso-
phies with a frightening neo-Fascist substratum still abound in a variety of
forms. By way of example, I will mention the Romanian pantomime actor
who has been quite a sensation on Romanian television, in the media, and
in bookstores: Dan Puric, whose recent book Cine suntem (Who We Are)
has been a best-seller in Romania. Though he makes no overt anti-Semitic
commentaries—at least in public, most educated Romanians know better
these days, whether willingly or not—the book continues in the footsteps
of those who had once been rightly called by the Romanian poet Tudor
Arghezi “the philosophers of anti-Semitism,” anti-Semitic intellectuals and
politicians like Nicolae Iorga and A.C. Cuza who went on and on in highly
elaborated and fiery manifestoes about the “Jewish question.” Puric’s book
develops with panache the old clichés about the Romanian people hav-
ing been born “a Christian people” and rides on dangerous and grandilo-
quently expressed views with regard to the superiority of “Christian art”
compared to the artistic expressions connected to different religious and
cultural landscapes. In fact, according to Puric, “Christian art” is the only
true and real art and Christianity the only authentic and successful path
for the Romanian people toward some kind of social, political, and cul-
tural redemption. And in case Romanians everywhere might be confused
about “who we are,” Puric has the answer for us all: we are Christian; we
are Romanian; and the soaring eagle once portrayed on the flag is the sym-
bol and model that we should follow unquestioningly. As for the young
people, Puric suggests in a recent interview in the Romanian newspaper
Adevărul (December, 2009) that all they need to find their path is to “con-
sider themselves children of God.” But even more worrisome is the joke
with which he concludes his interview, quoting a former Romanian politi-
cal prisoner—Valeriu Gafencu—who apparently told a Jewish man, “You
know, I would like for Romania to be led by Jews, only you know what
kind: Jews like the Apostle Paul, not like Ana Pauker, because then we’ll
all go to Hell.” If there was doubt that Puric’s ideology relies on some of
the same old anti-Semitic sentiments and views that Jews were respon-
sible for the creation of Communism in Romania, this conclusion and
the disturbing bad taste of the joke should certainly remove even that last
shred of doubt.
This breathless and passionate call to Romanians to embrace, return,
blindly follow, and glorify its Christian heritage is more elegantly articu-
lated than, say, calls by famous Romanian writers and philosophers in the
past to close the borders against Jews and fight against the “Jewish ele-
ment,” but the essence of the discourse is quite similar: that of extolling
a would-be “superior” religion, ethnicity, culture, and race. The theories
expounded in the book Who We Are provoke the lucid and critical reader
to wonder whether Puric would not have been much wiser to have stuck
to the silent and less offensive art of pantomime. It also makes one worry
not so much about the book itself, but rather about the great success it
enjoys in Romania among even the more sophisticated of the country’s
intellectuals. The growing success, visibility, and media fascination with
and adulation of this pantomime-Christian-philosopher who sees himself
as some kind of prophetic voice for Romania’s future is cause for serious
concern. It is the same Puric who in his more recent book, Om frumos
(Beautiful Man), dismissed evolution theories as mere “stupidities.” As it
is, more than 70 percent of Romania’s population does not believe in evo-
lution, and the teaching of evolution theories has been eliminated from
most high-school curricula. The uncritical, if not blind, glorification of
Puric’s ideas and theories is disturbing, as is the fact that these views find
exuberant followers among the young and the old, the highly educated
and the less so. Gheorghe Ceauşu, the author of the book’s “Afterword,”
notes that Puric’s call for the Romanian nation to achieve “an optimum
crystallization” of its conscience is driven by “a deep love,” and not just
any kind of love, but “Christian love,” for in the process of setting the
“right hierarchy of values” for the Romanian people, only “Christian
love” is “true” love, and—in Ceauşu’s words—Puric is “a true Christian
Orthodox and a true Romanian” (Puric 2008, 170–171). The notion that
to be a “true” Romanian—whatever that might mean—one has to be also
a “true” Christian is being widely circulated in this post-1989 Romania
of the twenty-first century in which the lines between religion and state
are becoming frighteningly blurred. In this Romania of the twenty-first
century, the state supports and funds religion under the guise of “religious
education,” and students in middle and high schools are actually being
indoctrinated with Christian ideologies. An alarming number of people
of all walks of life—from the least educated, to post graduates, to profes-
sors, artists, or theater directors like Puric—are pleading for a return to
the teaching and embracing of creationism at the expense of theories of
evolution and to teaching Christianity as the “only” way to national unity
and redemption.
And for readers who might have some knowledge of Elie Wiesel’s writ-
ings, it really brings things full circle in an area where one would only hope
the circle had been forever broken. Now let us return to Wiesel’s justified
statement and the thesis of this article, that theories of the superiority of
the Christian religion and Christians in general were tied into, or friendly
to, the Nazi ideologies that led to the extermination of those perceived
for centuries as “enemies” of Jesus and the religious institutions created
in his name. The poetic idealization of human suffering as “perfect” ret-
ribution for human flaws in light of God’s “perfect” justice, as seen in
Dante’s Inferno, has contributed to a larger tapestry of de-sensitizing repre-
sentations, aesthetic and cultural constructs that have facilitated the actual
implementation of similar forms of retribution, torture, massacres, and
genocide in reality. Renewed and reworked under different discourses and
different masks, these philosophies and mental and cultural constructs
can be just as dangerous as the philosophies and ideologies that formed
the basis of the Holocaust and other genocides. In his riveting interview
with Michael de Saint Cheron, Elie Wiesel says the following about Pope
John Paul II’s visit to Auschwitz and about his having celebrated Mass at
Birkenau:
[H]e celebrated mass in Birkenau. I find that insensitive, because the Jews
who died in Auschwitz–Birkenau were among the most pious in Europe.
He should have taken a rabbi and nine Jewish men with him and told
them to say Kaddish for the Jewish victims while he celebrated mass for
the Catholics. What was he trying to do? Convert the Jews posthumously?
(2000, 70).
For those who uncritically think and live in line with the Augustinian
theology that permeates Dante’s Divina Commedia, truly, the answer to
Wiesel’s question is a pathetic “Yes.” Didn’t Dante place Homer, Aristotle,
and the other greats of pre-Christian thought in the antechamber of the
Inferno itself and punish them with an eternity of yearning for something
they could not have, with immobility, inaction, and endless apathy? As he
did children who had died without being baptized? Truly, Augustine’s and
Dante’s judgment, or their interpretation of God’s judgment, is one such
attempt at posthumous conversion, which translates into being punished
for when and where and how one was born or died. It is not disconnected
from John Paul II’s message as he celebrated Catholic Mass in a place
where millions who were not of that religious persuasion died in atrocious
suffering and humiliation. It is not too far from Romania’s new-right phi-
losophies and discourses of the “superiority” of Christian art, of “true”
Romanian essence, of a “true hierarchy” of values and morality, which can
only be true if Christian. In fact, this line of thinking is quite disturbingly

close to the very anti-Semitic views and discourses of Romania’s former
“philosophers” of anti-Semitism and the rabid nationalism that persisted
in elaborating theories of “superiority.”
In the play Rhinocéros, a brilliant and dark mockery of dictatorial
ideas of “superiority,” the Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco
denounces the dehumanizing and frightening effects of such thinking on
both individuals and society at large. Jean, Bérenger’s best friend, insists in
his conversations that “the superior man does his duty.” Later on, he turns
into a rhinoceros before Bérenger’s own terrified eyes. Ionesco mentions
as the source of inspiration for his play precisely that period in Romania’s
past when “philosophers of anti-Semitism” were not only in abundance
but were finding too many eager and receptive ears. He notes that the
fear he himself experienced at the sight of the progressive dehumanization
and transformation of the people around him gave him the idea of creat-
ing the metaphor of the rhinoceros. He once stated in an interview in the
Figaro littéraire: “Long time ago, I had the experience of fanaticism . . . It
was terrible . . . I noticed that fanaticism disfigures people . . . dehumanizes
them” (1976, 30). The people-rhinoceroses in his play embrace conform-
ism, formulaic language, rigid forms of thought, and insensitivity to basic
human values, only to devastate everything and everyone in their passage.
Bérenger is left alone, desperately holding on to his humanity, surrounded
by crowds of humans-turned-rhinos whose language and actions he no lon-
ger understands. These “rhinos” were many Romanians in the late 1930s.
“The deep roots of Romania’s anti-Semitic traditions,” in Ioanid’s words
(2000, xxiii), are still flourishing in today’s Romania and link its history
and culture to what Wiesel himself calls in his “Foreword”: “Ancestral
influences, absurd accusations of deicide, the need for a scapegoat” (viii)
through worrisome manifestoes, such as the one by Puric, and the blind
enthusiasm of those who embrace them.
For Romanians living in the West, coming to terms with the Holocaust
entails a double responsibility. For someone coming from a country with
a heritage of involvement in and practice of Fascism, which has been con-
sistently denied, it means being doubly lucid and critical of both my native
country’s attitudes, history, and politics; and also of distinguishing and
denouncing signs, mental structures, attitudes and policies in my adopted
Western country that have the potential of establishing a disturbing kin-
ship with the extreme ideologies of the right so eagerly emulated by my
non-Western native country: religious fervor, the mixing of religion and
politics, and the arrogant belief in the superiority of Christian morality
and values. As thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno have
noted, genocides and atrocities can happen everywhere. Arendt stressed, in
her analysis of the Eichmann trial, that it did not take a fantastical monster
to participate so fully in the genocide of millions; it only took a dutiful,
unthinking bureaucrat who became too good at his job. Dutiful employees
who never question their “duty,” or why that duty is somehow supposed
to make them “superior,” are just like Ionesco’s rhinos. Similarly, Adorno
developed his theory of negative dialectics and intellectualism as the only
form of resisting any mass thinking and the destruction of individualism.
In his interview with de Saint Cheron, Wiesel noted that “Hiroshima
was possible because Auschwitz had occurred” (2000, 33). The very recent
genocide in the Balkans, namely the wars of ethnic cleansing against
Bosnian Muslims by Christian Serbs in the nineties, could be seen as a
scary confirmation of Wiesel’s prediction and of an even scarier possibil-
ity: that contrary to the “Never again!” slogan, and in fact because the
Holocaust happened, a new pattern of evil has been created which can be
repeated and “perfected.” Talking about the future of the world, Wiesel
notes, “Fanaticism. It’s rising, it’s gaining ground, it’s making conquests,
and in some places, triumphantly, whether it’s a matter of political fanati-
cism, or religious or ethnic fanaticism—or even of anti-fanatic fanaticism”
(2000, 225). Wiesel’s suggested solution is memory “as a way of balancing”
between the past and the future (2000, 227).
It is the erasure of national memory, promoted for decades by Romanian
governments and significant parts of the Romanian population, that is
conducive to the recurrence of the patterns of evil analyzed here. If the
memory of the suffering that was caused to hundreds of thousands of Jews
and Roma people in the Romanian territories is wrapped in silence, the
ideologies that formed its basis are more apt to proliferate and, even worse,
continue to manifest themselves in various forms of racism and anti-
Semitism, as well as to find more elaborate patterns in the “perfection” of
suffering inflicted upon those deemed as “guilty,” as “sinners,” as “other.”
That is not the kind of “perfection” that any country under the sun should
ever aspire to, ever again.
Works Cited
Alighieri, Dante. 1992. Inferno. Trans Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Banta.
Adorno, Theodor. 2008. Lectures on Negative Dialectics. New York: Polity.
Arendt, Hannah. 2006. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
New York: Penguin Classic.
Braham, Randolph. 2000. The Politics of Genocide. Detroit: Wayne State University
Press.
Calinescu, Matei. 1987. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant- garde,
Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. 1991. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Richard Pevear and
Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage Classics.
Ioanid, Radu. 2000. The Holocaust in Romania. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Ionesco, Eugène. 1976. Rhinocéros. New York, London: Holt, Rinehart, and
Winston.
Lansing, Richard & Teodolinda Barolini 2008. The Dante Encyclopedia. New
York: Garland Publishing.
Marcu, Rozen. Holocaust Survivors and Remembrance Project. http://isurvived.
org/2Postings/2MarcuRozen-2book/023-Data_Tables.html.
Neiman, Susan. 2006. Evil in Modern Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Puric, Dan. 2008. Cine suntem. Bucharest: Platytera.
———. December 17, 2009. Zidul Berlinului s-a prăbuşit peste noi.” Adevărul.
http://w w w.adeva ru l.ro/la _ ma sa _ adeva ru lui/Da n _ Puric- _- Zidu l _
Berlinului_s-a_prabusit_peste_noi_0_172783205.html.
Schoenberg, Shira. Jewish Virtual Library. A Division of the American Israeli
Cooperative Enterprise. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biogra-
phy/Wiesel.html.
Wiesel, Elie. 1999. After the Darkness. Reflections on the Holocaust. New York:
Schocken.
———. 1999. And the Sea Is Never Full. New York: Knopf.
———. 2002. Conversations. Ed Robert Franciosi. Jackson, MS: University Press
of Mississippi.
———. 1996. All Rivers Run to the Sea. New York: Schocken.
———. 1982. Night. New York, London: Bantam Books.
———. 1995. The Forgotten. New York: Schocken Books.
———. 1979. A Jew Today. New York: Vintage.
Wiesel, Elie and Michaël de Saint Cheron. 2000. Evil and Exile. Trans. Jon
Rothschild and Jody Gladding. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press.
Ch a p t e r El e v e n
“TH E P E O P L E O F I S R A E L L I V E S !”
P e r for m i ng t h e Shoa h on Po st- Wa r
Buc h a r e st ’s Yi ddi sh Stag e s
Corina L. Petrescu
Yiddish theater1 had not been a rarity in Bucharest, Romania, since

Abraham Goldfaden had arrived there with his troupe in 1877. Yet, it is
surprising that in the immediate aftermath of the Shoah, it was the Yiddish
stage, in a country that had seen more than its share of horrors due to racial
laws and discrimination, to first thematize the Jewish trauma. Two perfor-
mances by Yiddish language theaters in Bucharest brought the experiences
of the Shoah to the stage in 1945 and 1949. Their engagement of the topic,
I believe, refutes claims that in Romania’s postwar phase Yiddish theater
was only a mouthpiece for the country’s new Communist authorities2 and
testifies to the theater’s potential as a tool for educating as well as providing
covert critical social commentary.
The first performance by the—at that time—still privately operated
Idisher Kultur Farband Teater (IKUF Theater) was Ikh leb [I live] by the
Soviet-Jewish author Moshe Pinchevski. It detailed the story of survival
and self-empowerment of a group of Jewish prisoners in a German camp in
the Ukraine. The second performance, staged by the Teatrul Evreesc de Stat
(TES), counts as the first autochthonous Yiddish play written after World
War II. Nahtshiht [The Night Shift] by Ludovic Bruckstein was the story
of two former Auschwitz inmates, who, while waiting for their husbands to
return from the night shift in a factory recalled their ordeal in the camp and
how they were saved by a Soviet Communist. While both performances
were products of their times in that they displayed ideological markers of
the mid- to late-1940s in Romania, they were also pathbreaking in their
endeavor. The degree to which their topic failed to initiate a public dis-
cussion about the fate of European Jewry had more to do with Romania’s
210 / corina l. petrescu
sociopolitical realities than with artistic considerations. The late 1940s was
not the time to confront this history in Europe, in general, as the destruc-
tion and dearth following the war made survival everyone’s main concern.3
It was even less so the case in a country whose own tumultuous past of not
too long ago had left its population ambiguous toward its Jewish fellow citi-
zens. If historical repression followed by general amnesia vis-à-vis the Shoah
were possible in Germany, the country that had engineered the Shoah
Romanian society found it even easier to exculpate itself (Adorno 2008,
10–28). After all, the Romanian authorities in power at the time of the
crimes against the Jews had been overthrown and put on trial for their alli-
ance with Hitler’s Germany. Even as allies of the Germans, Romanians did
not consider themselves responsible for the deportations or encampments,
which were all ascribed to the Germans or justified as acts the Germans
forced the Romanians to carry out. Moreover, like the National Socialists,
Romania’s wartime leaders had held ultra-nationalist views. After 1944, the
country embarked slowly but surely on the road to Communism, presum-
ably the “egalitarian” ideology, which did not recognize ethnicity as a social
denominator and hence could not discriminate against people based on it.
Therefore, references to concentration and extermination camps remained
symbolic and a confrontation with them impossible.
* * *
Robert Skloot has identified five objectives of playwrights depicting the

Shoah: “honoring the victims, teaching history to audiences, evoking
emotional responses, discussing ethical issues, and suggesting solutions to
universal, contemporary problems” (1988, 10). The first attempts to con-
front this topic in Romania came from Yiddish stages and fulfilled Skloot’s
requirements in all but one aspect. The one goal Yiddish stages could not
address objectively was the teaching of history; already by the mid-1940s,
the history of the country was being rewritten through the ideological
lens of the war’s Eastern victor. Yet the existence of a large number of
Shoah survivors among Romania’s Jewish population4 and the tradition of
Yiddish theater to address specifically Jewish concerns made these produc-
tions possible and legitimate. The first-person testimony of the playwrights
and of many of the actors—survivors of the atrocities they enacted—was
the rhetorical kernel on which the performances were based. These people
could bear witness and perform their testimony at the same time without
running into the ethical difficulties of later artists.5
When Abraham Goldfaden created the Yiddish theater in Jassy in
1876, he strived to educate his audiences in the tradition of the Haskalah,
since Goldfaden was himself a maskil.6 Performances were in Yiddish and
“THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL LIVES!” / 211
depicted realities of East-European Jewish life. Yiddish theater persisted

in Romania in this vein until 1940. At that point, aspirations to perform
in Yiddish were countered by the determination of Romanian authorities
to exclude both Yiddish artistic endeavors and Jewish performers from
Romanian stages and the public sphere in general. The Romanian state
under Marshal Ion Antonescu admitted the existence of one Romanian lan-
guage Jewish theater, in other words, a theater where only Jews (determined
according to the racial laws of 1940) could perform.7 Similar to the German
Nuremberg Laws, Decree-Law No. 2650 of August 8, 1940, sought racial
justification and used religious criteria to exclude so-called non-Romanians
from any form of public life.8 Jewish artists responded to this constraint by
establishing a theater that complied with all the demands of the Romanian
authorities: Baraşeum Hall—Jewish Theater. The enterprise was a way to
survive both for the theatre and Jewish artists and, with few exceptions,
performed vaudevilles throughout its four-year-long existence.
After August 23, 1944, when Romania changed sides during World War
II, several groups of actors wanted to bring back the tradition of authentic
Yiddish theater along the lines of what they had known to be its acme: the
Vilna Troupe. This return was the basis for post–World War II Yiddish theater
in Romania, which combined the artistic drive of talented performers with
the enthusiasm of eager audiences. The wartime Baraşeum Theater, which
had been created so artificially, dissolved. The actors either returned to the
theaters where they had been active before 1940 or opened new, private the-
aters (Caler 2004, 117). Splinter troupes performing either in Romanian or
Yiddish harbored former members of the Baraşeum Theater. The Baraşeum
Hall became a building for rent like any other, without an agenda or mission
statement. Incomplete archival material available today makes it difficult
to distinguish between the splinter troupes, since in some cases actors per-
formed one play with one ensemble and another with a different one. Yet the
mere existence of such a variety of troupes makes apparent that the theater
scene in Bucharest was heterogeneous and that all these theaters attempted
to survive in the city’s cultural landscape by (re)negotiating with and for
themselves a state of normalcy. The variety of troupes underscores another
important point: the availability of a large public to attend the performances,
but also to accept and reject the theaters depending on their offers.
Post–World War II Yiddish culture in Romania is most commonly and
substantially linked to the organization Idisher Kultur Farband (IKUF).
The IKUF was founded in 1937 out of the genuine need for secular educa-
tion and culture on part of Jews in Bessarabia, Moldova, and Maramureş.9
The preoccupation with Yiddish came from the left, as Zionists embraced
Hebrew as the defining Jewish language (Kuller 2006, 51). The IKUF
recommenced its activities in Moldova before August 23, 1944, most likely
due to the earlier advancement of the Soviet Army in that part of the coun-
try. It improvised a theater group that performed in Yiddish in Botoşani
in the same hall where Abraham Goldfaden had acted in 1876 during his
tour. The performance was called Naht-Tog [Night-Day] and contrasted
the dark past prior to the arrival of the Red Army with beliefs in a better
future made possible by the liberators. It conveyed its message by alternat-
ing songs from the forced labor camps in Transnistria with hits of the
pre-war Yiddish repertoire (Bercovici 1998, 195). Soon after August 1944,
the IKUF gained legal status and became very active in organizing Jewish
cultural life, with a heavy emphasis on Yiddish (Bercovici 1998, 198).
In July 1945, the IKUF created the IKUF-Theater10 in Bucharest
under the leadership of Iacob Mansdorf. It premièred on October 17,
1945, with the play Ikh leb [I live] by the Soviet-Jewish author Moshe
Pinchevski (Bercovici 198; Kuller 2002, 188). Iacob Mansdorf was a
man of the Yiddish theater in the old tradition. He was a graduate of the
drama school in Warsaw and a former student of both David Hermann
and Konstantin Stanislavski. He had been a member of the famous Vilna
Troupe and other ensembles (AZAZEL, Pariser Idisher Arbeiter Teater,
GOSSET ), and had performed side by side with the star of the Jewish
theater in Moscow, Solomon Mikhoels.11 When he arrived in Bucharest,
Mansdorf was determined to craft the theater established by the IKUF
into a qualitative enterprise. In what seems to have been his first interview
in the Romanian capital on July 28, 1945, he talked about the bad reputa-
tion that the Romanian theater in general and the Yiddish one in particu-
lar had abroad due to its boulevard character. The theater was dominated
by mercantile considerations owing to the absence of endowments and the
reliance on donations from the public, which in return asked for cabaret-
style entertainment. Thus, Mansdorf argued, the theater lacked a cultural,
educational, and artistic agenda, which he was determined to bring to it.
His goal was to transform the IKUF-Theater into “an art theater.” He
affirmed: “Our agenda is the obligation to put on stage our rich heritage of
historical figures—Bar-Kokhba, Yehuda Maccabi—not some nonsensical
appearances built on pranks. As Sholem Aleykhem fought in past times
with a positive oeuvre against the shoddy literature of Shomer, so will we
replace cheap shows with true art.”12 The article was programmatically
entitled “In Goldfaden’s Footsteps” and taking into account Mansdorf’s
career before his appointment with the IKUF-Theater there is no reason
to doubt his statement. In order to put together an ensemble that corre-
sponded to his expectations, Mansdorf went outside Bucharest to recruit
young artists. This situation can be interpreted in two ways: On the one
hand, Mansdorf, like any master, might have wanted to mold his own
actors in the spirit of the tradition for which he himself stood. On the other
hand, given the IKUF’s ideological left leanings, actors of the pre-war era
who were already in Bucharest might have willingly kept their distance
from this troupe. In an interview with me, Anton Celaru13 remembered
that Mansdorf was also eager to avoid becoming involved in the usual
intrigues of the theater milieu characteristic of the Yiddish theater world as
well. Instead of putting up with the whimsical moods of stars and starlets,
he wanted to generate his own.14
The opening performance was a success and available reviews praised
Mansdorf for his artistic and directorial skills, as well as his determination
to see his ensemble shine.15 Present at the pre-opening alongside Mihail
Ralea, the Minister of the Arts, were important members of Romania’s
new political and cultural elite and representatives of the Jewish commu-
nity. In his address, Ralea emphasized the importance of the theater and
the historic moment unfolding before the public’s eyes. The performance
received the support of the government but it is unclear in what form
(Lemnaru).
The choice of the play was not coincidental. Mansdorf knew that if
he wanted his theater to triumph, he had to do three things: give credit
to the victorious Soviet occupiers, flatter the Romanian authorities, and
offer the Jewish audiences an experience that would both strengthen their
Jewish self-awareness and delight them artistically to ensure their return
to his theater. It seems logical that a play about surviving the Shoah could
do all of that: the Red Army had liberated the death camps in Eastern
Europe and received acknowledgment for doing so; responsibility for the
Shoah was placed exclusively on German shoulders and did not demand
that the Romanians answer for their contribution to it either inside war-
time Romania or in the territories beyond the Dniester; the Jews were
granted a chance to remember the dead but also to celebrate their survival
as a people. Under Mansdorf’s guidance, the performance achieved even
more.
The play presented the story of a group of Jewish prisoners in a German
camp in the Ukraine. Rabbi Tzala Shafir, his daughter Miriam, and singer
Hershel Klezmer were the protagonists, as the camp’s commander sends the
rabbi and the singer in the woods to spy on partisans. He keeps the rabbi’s
daughter as guarantee and pocks Klezmer’s eyes out lest he run away. The
two prisoners depart on their mission without knowing that a German
soldier named Paul follows them. One day the soldier catches a woman
partisan and wants to take her to his superior, but the rabbi prevents him
from doing so by strangling him. When the camp’s commander retrieves
the rabbi and the singer, he determines to have the rabbi executed, but the
partisans arrive and save him. Shortly thereafter, the Soviet Army frees the
camp. After the initial joyous moments, the rabbi and the singer vow to
continue the fight and the curtain falls on the rabbi shouting, “There is no
other way; it’s either live in freedom or die fighting.”
The applause of a numerous and enthusiastic audience at the end of
the show rewarded the ensemble both for its efforts and its creativity in
conveying a message that resonated with most of the spectators. The
play was undoubtedly a tribute to the Soviet Army, which had delivered
not only Romania’s Jewish population, but also liberated half of Europe
from National Socialist Germany. Contemporary reviews commended
the play for doing so.16 However, it also thematized Jewish action and
self-defense during the war without subordinating it to Communist
forces. A rabbi joining the partisan resistance in the Ukraine was
a potent image meant to empower the audience and raise their self-
consciousness. The blind singer who did not succumb to despair per-
sonified the strength of the jovial Jewish spirit enduring the galut.17
The Hebrew banner adorning the stage on the night of the première,
announcing, “The people of Israel lives!” appealed precisely to these senti-
ments, while also hinting at Jewish solidarity across class or ideological
barriers.18 The latter was Mansdorf ’s audacious statement vis-à-vis the
time in which he lived.
Shortly after the première, in Viaţa evreească (Jewish Life), Geri Spina
opened the question of the value of the IKUF-Theater beyond its artis-
tic significance, which he called upon the theater critics to evaluate. He
saluted the IKUF-Theater for its sociopolitical role, which he identified
as the carrying of the “cultural torch” put out by the war (Spina 1945).
Goldfaden’s tradition was an important aspect of the IKUF-Theater’s dra-
matic activity, not only because Mansdorf had taken the classics of Yiddish
literature as his standard, but also because parts of the public remembered
and cherished that tradition. Mansdorf praised this disposition of the
Jewish public in Bucharest in an interview with Hanna Kawa on January
5, 1946. He rejoiced at their reaction to the theater, especially since he
had been warned before arriving in Romania that Romanian Jews spoke
no Yiddish.19 He was, however, dissatisfied with the reluctance of other
Jewish cultural organizations to cooperate with the IKUF-Theater (Kawa
1946). Their reasons were political—as the IKUF stood for leftist ideals,
distance from its theater meant distance from its politics—but Mansdorf
could not accept that. For him, this theater was a site of artistic dialogue
and his choice to début with Ikh leb was also a first statement about the
theater’s potential. It would not only honor the classics, as Mansdorf had
advocated in his interview, but also enrich Yiddish theater’s repertoire by
promoting new texts that were also relevant to the audiences in view of
their recent experiences during the war. When he realized the impossibility
of engaging in such a dialogue in a country set for the Communist order,
Mansdorf left the country, before the authorities could misuse his passion
and idealism.20
As the Communists progressed toward full domination of the Romanian
public sphere in its political and cultural dimensions, they made the IKUF
instrumental in achieving their ideological purposes by mandating in
March 1948 that whoever wanted to perform Yiddish theater had to join
the IKUF-Theater, which by then was receiving state subsidies. Its trans-
formation into a state institution under the name Teatrul Evreesc de Stat/
TES (The Jewish State Theater) on August 1, 1948, was merely a bureau-
cratic, cosmetic shift.
On October 1, 1949, the TES presented the first autochthonous play,
Nahtshiht (The Night Shift) by Ludovic Bruckstein, an Auschwitz sur-
vivor. The event marked several major milestones: it was the first origi-
nal dramatic work to be written in Yiddish; it was the first attempt to
address Jewish existence in the People’s Republic of Romania; and it
was a direct response to the repertoire crisis that haunted the TES at the
time. The plotline was uncomplicated. Two former Auschwitz inmates,
Lana and Mira, recall their ordeal in the camp and how they were saved
through the actions of a Soviet Communist while waiting for their hus-
bands, Aron and Eli, to return from the night shift at a factory. They
remember how the National Socialist persecution began with the burn-
ing of the Reichstag and the subsequent hounding of the Communists,
the Jews, and other so-called inferior races, including—according to
the characters—the Austrians, the Czechs, the Poles, the Hungarians,
and the Romanians. In addition, the two women evoke the memory of
Ivan, a Soviet political prisoner, who coordinated acts of sabotage in the
camp and led the liberation fight against the guards presented in the
play’s last act.
If Pinchevski’s camp remained anonymous, thus ascribing a general
significance to the events unfolding on stage, the naming of Auschwitz in
Bruckstein’s play conveyed a different message. Spelling the name of the
camp out emphasized that the characters had survived not any camp but
the most atrocious one of all; the author also overemphasized the impor-
tance of the Soviet Communist prisoner Ivan and his ideologically moti-
vated deeds. The clear identification of the camp also left no doubt as to the
perpetrators—the Germans. Jews from Romania (according to its wartime
borders) had not been deported to any extermination camps in Central
Europe, but Jews from Northern Transylvania (under Hungarian rule
between 1940 and 1944) had shared the fate of their Hungarian brothers.
By making Lana and Mira former inmates of a camp undoubtedly beyond
the control of any Romanian authorities, the playwright dissociated him-
self from critiques of Romania’s attitude toward its Jewish population
during the war.21 Bruckstein’s loyalty lay with the new Romanian state,
which had no need for nuanced historical arguments.
Thus the play incorporated several obligatory elements for literary cre-
ations at the time. It condemned the past not only in terms of the war, but
also as the time of a ruthless bourgeoisie, which—irrespective of its nation-
ality—was responsible for the war. After 1948, the political discourse had
changed in Romania in the sense that the idea of ethnic unity that had been
so important in the early 1940s was reinterpreted as reactionary deviation
(Rotman 2004, 113). The new demand was for unity among the members
of the working class and for the denunciation of the so-called bourgeois
elements regardless of ethnicity. Through the figure of the Jewish mer-
chant Sacher, who betrayed his fellow inmates to the German command-
ers, the playwright rendered the new requirement artistically.
Having the female protagonists reminisce on their horrific past spent
under the motto Arbeit macht frei (Work liberates), while Auschwitz
brought predominantly death to its inmates, allowed the author to use
the remembering process as a springboard to the characters’ “rosy” pres-
ent. Through work—in the service of a Communist order—they had
reached happiness, after their liberation had been made possible by fol-
lowers of that same ideology. The play extolled the merits of Communists
and especially of Soviet Communists. If Pinchevski’s Ikh Leb had given
liberation a double meaning —physical liberation through the Soviet
Army but also, more importantly, self-liberation by overcoming one’s
passivity—such a subversion of the liberator role was no longer tolerable.
The Soviet Communists alone could fill that position and had to be
depicted as such. Feeble outbursts by Jewish inmates in Auschwitz had
to be subsumed under the leadership of Ivan, the harbinger of the new
weltanschauung.22
Another mandatory element was the description of the People’s Republic
of Romania as a haven allowing for the friendly and fruitful cooperation
between Jews and Romanians, as in the case of Aron and his co-worker
Traian, who perfected a common invention. The author thus aligned its
voice with the official propaganda slowly gathering momentum for a vig-
orous anti-Zionist campaign in the 1950s. In this sense, two notions of
work during the night shift were juxtaposed: the sacrilegious incineration
of dead bodies in the camp, which was the result of the previous bourgeois
order, and Aron and Traian’s teamwork in the factory of a Communist
republic. In line with the ideological prerequisites of the time, the latter
form was not only righteous because it was not forceful exploitation, but
also because—according to the official dogma—it paved the way for the
integration of ethnic minorities into Romanian society as long as they dis-
played the “right” class background and awareness.
A surprising aspect of the play was the presence of a good German,

Heinrich the anti-Fascist. In view of the international developments of the
year 1949, this discursive twist served to integrate the German Democratic
Republic and its people into the Socialist camp on the same level as all
other Soviet satellites—former victims of National Socialism and covert
supporters of the Soviet Union. Germans could thus no longer be exposed
as National Socialists in toto, but rather as a bad majority of obedient fol-
lowers of Hitler and a good minority of defectors who, however, adhered
to the ideals of the Soviet Union.23
The reviews of the play contained no real criticism, but merely pre-
programmed statements molded into a language soon to be devoid of real
meaning: the demand for social realist art with no expressionist tones;24
the request for an accessible Yiddish dialect spoken by the masses and not
an aestheticized form;25 and the commendation that the play was a good
beginning for the development of indigenous Yiddish literature.26 Valentin
Silvestru’s very detailed chronicle in Flacăra (The Flame) is representa-
tive for the linguistic changes taking place within the realm of theater
criticism.27 The new ideological trace was unmistakable in the passages
eulogizing the Soviet Army and its role during the war. Presumably, the
insight of Marxist teachings had helped the playwright “clarify and orga-
nize the material collected through his own life experience” (Silvestru
1949). Silvestru underscored the culpability of the bourgeoisie as a treach-
erous collaborating force and the virtues of “anonymous heroes” who had
followed the example of the Communist fighter embodied by the “Soviet
man.” He uttered his harshest critique with respect to the prologue and epi-
logue, which he considered insufficiently developed and not correspond-
ing to the social reality of Jewish life in the new Romania. “Probably,”
he wrote, “[Bruckstein] has not studied sufficiently the conditions of the
Jewish worker today and the problems arising from this new life-style.
The class struggle is not over; it presents special forms among the Jewish
population of our Republic. The state of complete happiness in which the
four characters find themselves in the prologue and epilogue is not in con-
formity with reality; they talk only about the enemy abroad and give the
impression that here [i.e., Romania] they have liquidated the antagonized
bourgeoisie” (Silvestru 1949). In order to compensate for this slippage,
Silvestru called on Bruckstein to write a play examining the problems of
the Jewish community in a more thorough manner.
This demand replicated the new set of party directives targeting the
dissolution of ethnic loyalties, which were to be replaced by a class-based
sense of belonging. Although hardly necessary, the straightforwardness of
this request for a theater of social realism (compared to earlier calls by the
press for a Yiddish theater of art) made it unmistakably clear what role the
Yiddish theater had to fulfill by the end of the 1940s: mouthpiece of the
regime among the Jewish masses. That the theater managed to subvert
this role again during its future existence and become a “parallel space”
(Rotman 2004, 121) of spiritual resistance for Romania’s Jewish minority,
was due to its dedicated actors and their artistic director, Israil Bercovici. A
passionate Yiddishist who led the theater from the mid-1950s until the late
1980s, Bercovici walked a thin line between serving the Romanian state
and serving the cause of Yiddish (as language and culture). The theater
was not simply a mouthpiece of and for the regime, but also a site for the
cultivation of a Jewish identity with a Yiddish sensitivity.
* * *
Regardless of how one judges the existence of the Yiddish theater in Romania
in the twentieth century, it is noteworthy that in the 1940s, at a time when
no other institution of its kind even attempted to tackle the horrors of the
Shoah, the Yiddish stage in Bucharest was making just such endeavors.
The fairly large number of Jews living in the city provided an audience
receptive to the topic, while the old tradition of Yiddish theater afforded
a base from which to glean creative guidance. Although in line with the
political status quo being established in Eastern Europe then, the first per-
formance, Ikh leb, from October 1945 could still claim artistic value and
express an opinion about the events it depicted and their consequences for
the Jewish community. The director even dared to stage the play as a plea
for Jewish activism and solidarity in the face of collective danger. While
the press across the political spectrum reviewed the production, true to the
mentality of the time, the play understood responsibility for the Shoah to
lie exclusively with the Germans and failed to establish any connections
between the fate of Jews in Romania (or even Bucharest, as a matter of
fact) between 1941 and 1944 and the human suffering portrayed on stage.
Consequently, its resonance quickly faded. Romanian society as a whole
was too preoccupied with the daily realities of the lost war to be willing to
question its recent past, despite available knowledge about such gruesome
events as, for example, the Bucharest pogrom of January 1941.28
By 1949, when the second play was staged, the political context in the
country had changed so dramatically—the Soviet occupation was solidi-
fied, the king had been forced to abdicate, and Romania was a People’s
Republic on its way to Communism—that the performance’s ideological
character can hardly surprise. Class struggle replaced ethnic solidarity;
Jewish self-empowerment through active confrontation with the perpetra-
tors was completely lacking in the play; and the “good,” anti-Fascist German
emerged—all in a perfect social realist dramatic text and performance.
Bruckstein put his pen and his lived experience of Auschwitz at the dis-
posal of the regime to assist with what he thought to be the solution to the
ethnic problem that had sparked so many conflicts during the twentieth
century. Condemnable as this may be, his decision to make Auschwitz a
part of his political agenda also allowed him to bring the Shoah back on
stage and thus into people’s consciousness. While it certainly served the
interests of the Romanian state, his play was at the same time and in a
twisted manner also a memorial and cenotaph for Europe’s fallen Jews.
For Romania, it was both too late and too soon to examine its own role
in the Shoah. Too late, because the Communists had written off responsi-
bility for the crimes of the early 1940s to the previous regime and perceived
their coming to power as a historic caesura that had delivered society of
any accountability for its unwanted past. Too early, because Romanian
society as a whole for the next forty years had no interest in questioning its
past or contemporary anti-Semitic tendencies. This remained a desidera-
tum until the new millennium.
Notes
1. Research for this article was possible due to the generous support of the New
Europe College Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in Bucharest,
Romania, whose fellow I was between October 2005 and July 2006.
2. Compare to Elvira Grözinger, Die jiddische Kultur im Schatten der Diktaturen.
Israil Bercovici—Leben und Werk, 242–243; and Liviu Rotman, Evreii din
România în perioada comunistă 1944–1965, 117.
3. Images of Auschwitz published by the American occupation forces soon after
Germany’s capitulation or the forced sightings of dead bodies from camps did
not initiate a confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with this reality. They forced
Germans to visualize or witness certain consequences of the regime they had
first supported and then not opposed between 1933 and 1945. It was not until
the Auschwitz Trials in Frankfurt am Main (1963–1965) that German society
began to confront its past. In Romania, such a process did not begin until after
the fall of Communism in 1989.
4. By the end of World War II, the number of Jews living in Romania was esti-
mated at about 353,000 (compared to 800,000 prior to the war), making the
Romanian Jewish community the second largest after that in the Soviet Union.
Liviu Rotman, “Romanian Jewry: The First Decade after the Holocaust,” 287.
5. Compare to: “The staging of a theatrical text requires the physical presence of
the actor, that ‘other’, that ‘impostor’ who was not in Auschwitz. How can that
actor, who lives in the same world as us, who performs in the same space which,
we, the audience, inhabit, how can that actor effectively convince us that he
is a camp inmate, a Nazi officer, or even a survivor from those days?” (Claude
Schumacher, Introduction, 4).
6. A maskil is an adherent of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment)
movement.
7. Letter from Felix Aderca to the General Director of the Romanian Theaters
and Opera Houses of October 16, 1940 referencing Authorization No. 9335
from October 8, 1940, which allowed the existence of a single Jewish theater
under its leadership. ASR, Ministerul Artelor, Direcţia Generală a Teatrelor şi
Operelor Române, Dosar 12/ 1941, 95.
8. For the text of the Decree-Law No. 2650 of August 8, 1940, see Lya Benjamin,
ed., Evreii din România între anii 1940–1944, 46.
9. “Stenograma şedinţei cu conducerea CDE din ziua de 16 martie 1953,” ASR,
Comitetul Democrat Evreesc, Dosar 23/1953, 15.
10. Invitation to a meeting discussing the Yiddish theater, ACSIER, Dosar 79, 1.
11. (Author unknown), “Pe urmele lui Goldfaden . . . O convorbire cu Iacob
Mansdorf ” Viaţa evreească 28.07.1945: 2. N.B. Many of the reviews cited or
simply referenced in this article display incomplete bibliographical data and I
apologize to the reader for this. In the course of my research so far I have been
unable to locate complete collections of the newspapers I use, so that I had to
rely on fragmentary holdings or clippings without annotations. Throughout
the article, the missing information will be listed as: (——— unknown).
Furthermore, many artists and public figures in those days did not use their
full name in public: some initialled their first name, some both name and
surname. When I could find the full name behind the initials, I completed
the names, sometimes inserting them into [ ] to suggest that the original
text I quoted or referenced did not include the full name. When I could not
trace the initials back, I left the names as they appeared in the press in those
days.
12. Ibidem.
13. Anton Celaru was born Iosif Faerstein in June 1919 in Huşi. He worked as an
editor-in-chief first for the IKUF-Bleter, later for the newspaper of the Jewish
Democratic Committee (CDE) Unirea (Unity)—called Viaţa Nouă (New
Life) as of January 1951. In 1953, when the CDE ceased its existence, the
newspaper was also suspended. Celaru changed to Informaţia Bucureştiului
(Bucharest’s Information) from where he took an early retirement in 1974 due
to his disappointment with the political and social situation in Romania. As
a young man, Celaru had truly believed that Communism would deliver the
world of injustice and ethnic discrimination. Interviews with Anton Celaru at
his residence in Bucharest, July 1 and 2, 2006. See also, Alina Darie, “Presa
şi suferinţa. Interviu cu Anton Celaru, cel mai in vârstă ziarist din judeţul
Vaslui,” 3.
14. Interview with Anton Celaru, July 1, 2006, at his residence in Bucharest.
15. Oscar Lemnaru, “Teatrul Baraşeum: ‘Ih leb’ piesă în 3 acte de Pincewski”; i. fl.,
“Teatrul Baraşeum: ‘Trăiesc!’. . . Trei acte de Pincewsky”; (author unknown),
“Teatrul de artă idiş ‘I.K.U.F.’ a câştigat bătălia. Spectacolul ‘Trăiesc’ o mare
biruiţă artistică”; C.F., “Ansamblul de artă IDIŞ ‘IKUF’ ‘Ih leb!’ (Trăiesc), 3
acte de M. Pincewscky”; St. T., “Ih leb . . .”
16. Lemnaru and G[eri] Spina, “Sensul ne-artistic al teatrului IKUF,” page
unknown.
17. Galut is the Jewish exile or Diaspora.
18. I am thankful to Anton Celaru for informing me about the banner. Interview
with Anton Celaru, July 1, 2006, at his residence in Bucharest.
19. Hanna Kawa, “Tewie der Milchiger. În dialog cu Iacob Mansdorf,” page
unknown.
20. According to Anton Celaru, Iacob Mansdorf left Romania in 1947 and died
not too long thereafter in South Africa. Interview with Anton Celaru, July 1
and 2, 2006, at his residence in Bucharest.
21. The most notable example was Matatias Carp’s Cartea neagră. Fapte si docu-
mente. Suferinţele evreilor din România 1940–1944.
22. Weltanschauung refers to a comprehensive conception of the world from a par-
ticular standpoint, in this case Communism.
23. Compare to Jost Hermand, “ ‘Der häßliche Deutsche wird wieder schön!’ Das
westdeutsche Wandlungsbild in den Nachrichtenmagazinen der Luce-Presse
(1947–1955),” 73–87.
24. Mioara St. Cremene, “Începutul unei literaturi dramatice noi de limbă idiş,”
page unknown; and I. G. Voinescu, “Cronică dramatică: Schimbul de noapte,”
page unknown.
25. Sara Feuer, “La Teatrul Evreesc de Stat se repetă piesa ‘Schimbul de noapte’ de
L. Bru[c]kstein,” 2.
26. Ion Marin Sadoveanu, “Teatrul Evreesc de Stat: ‘Schimbul de noapte’ de d.
Ludovic Bruckstein,” page unknown.
27. Valentin Silvestru, “O piesă şi un spectacol care arată odată mai mult dece
luptăm pentru pace,” 5.
28. The two most important books of the 1940s documenting the rise of anti-
Semitism and anti-Semitic acts in Romania were: Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu,
Problemele de bază ale României (1944), which was written between 1942 and
1943; and Matatias Carp.
Works Cited
Arhiva Centrul pentru Studierea Istoriei Evreilor din România [Archive of the
Center for the Study of the History of the Jews in Romania]:
Dosar 79: Oscar Lemnaru, “Teatrul Baraşeum: ‘Ih leb’ piesă în 3 acte de Pincewski,”
Facla (October 2, 1945): 2; i. fl., “Teatrul Baraşeum: ‘Trăiesc!’. . . Trei acte de
Pincewsky,” Timpul (October 26, 1945): (page unknown); (Author unknown)’
“Teatrul de artă idiş ‘I.K.U.F.’ a câştigat bătălia. Spectacolul ‘Trăiesc’ o mare
biruiţă artistic,” Eră Nouă (November 8, 1945): (page unknown); C.F.,
“Ansamblun de artă idiş ‘IKUF’ ‘Ih leb!’ (Trăiesc), 3 acte de M. Pincewscky,”
Victoria (November 28,1945): (page unknown); St. T., “Ih leb . . . ,” Libertatea
(December 6, 1945): (page unknown); G[eri] Spina, “Sensul ne-artistic
al teatrului IKUF,” Viaţa evreească (October, 1945): (page unknown);
Hanna Kawa, “Tewie der Milchiger. În dialog cu Iacob Mansdorf,” (news-
paper unknown), (January 5, 1946): (page unknown); Mioara St. Cremene,
“Începutul unei literaturi dramatice noi de limbă idiş: ‘Schimbul de Noapte’ de
L. Bru[c]kstein la Teatrul Evreesc de Stat,” Contemporanul No. 164 (date, page
unknown); I. G. Voinescu, “Cronică dramatică: Schimbul de noapte” (news-
paper, date, page unknown); Sara Feuer, “La Teatrul Evreesc de Stat se repetă
piesa ‘Schimbul de noapte’ de L. Bru[c]kstein” (newspaper, date unknown): 2;
Ion Marin Sadoveanu, “Teatrul Evreesc de Stat: ‘Schimbul de noapte’ de d.
Ludovic Bruckstein,” Universul (October 13, 1949): (page unknown); Valentin
Silvestru, “O piesă şi un spectacol care arată odată mai mult dece luptăm
pentru pace: ‘Schimbul de noapte’ de Ludovic Bruckstein pe scena Teatrului
Evreesc de Stat,” Flacăra (October 15, 1949): 5.
Arhivele Statului Român (ASR) [Archives of the Romanian State]:
Ministerul Artelor. Direcţia Generală a Teatrelor şi Operelor Române. Dosar
12/1941 (Ministry of Art. General Direction of Romanian Theaters and Opera
Houses. File 12/1941).
Comitetul Democrat Evreesc. Dosar 23/1953 (The Democratic Jewish Committee.
File 23/1953).
Petrescu, Corina L. July 1 and 2, 2006. Interviews with Anton Celaru at his resi-
dence in Bucharest. Recordings in possession of the author.
Previously Published Works

Adorno, Theodor W. 1971. Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit.
Erziehung zur Mündigkeit. Vorträge und Gespräche mit Hellmut Becker 1959–
1969. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 10–28.
Benjamin, Lya, ed. 1993. Evreii din România între anii 1940–1944 [The Jews in
Romania 1940–1944]. Bucharest: Hasefer.
Braham, Randolph L., ed. 1994. The Tragedy of Romanian Jewry. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Bercovici, Israil. 1998. O sută de ani de teatru evreiesc în România [One Hundred
Years of Jewish Theater in Romania]. 2nd edition. Bucharest: Integral.
Caler, Leny. 2004. Artistul şi oglinda. Repertoriu, roluri şi parteneri de neuitat.
[The Artist and the Mirror. Unforgettable Repertoires, Parts and Partners].
Bucharest: Universal Dalsi.
Carp, Matatias. 1946/1947 Cartea neagră. Fapte şi documente. Suferinţele evreilor
din România 1940–1944. Bucharest: Socec. Translated by Seán Murphy as
Holocaust in Rumania: Facts and Documents on the Annihilation of Rumania’s
Jews, 1940- 44. Budapest: Primor Publishing, 1994.
Darie, Alina. July 1, 2006. Presa şi suferinţa. Interviu cu Anton Celaru, cel mai in
vârstă ziarist din judeţul Vaslui [The Press and the Pain. Interview with Anton
Celaru, the Most Senior Journalist in Vaslui County]. Adevărul de Vaslui: 3.
Grözinger, Elvira. 2002. Die jiddische Kultur im Schatten der Diktaturen. Israil
Bercovici—Leben und Werk. Berlin/Wien: Philo Verlag.
Hermand, Jost. 1996. “Der häßliche Deutsche wird wieder schön!” Das west-
deutsche Wandlungsbild in den Nachrichtenmagazinen der Luce-Presse
(1947–1955). Angewandte Literatur. Politische Strategien in den Massenmedien.
Berlin: Sigma. 73–87.
Kuller, Hary. 2002. Evreii în România anilor 1944–1949 [The Jews in Romania
1944–1949]. Bucharest: Hasefer.
———. December 2006, Difuzarea idişului între cele două războaie mondiale
şi după, în România [The Distribution of Yiddish in Romania between the
Two World Wars and After]. Buletinul Centrului, Muzeului şi Arhivei Istorice a
Evreilor din România [Bulletin of the Center, the Museum, and the Historical
Archive of the Jews in Romania]: 47–62.
Pătrăşcanu, Lucreţiu. 1944. Problemele de bază ale României [Romania’s Basic

Problems]. Bucharest: Socec.
Rotman, Liviu. 2004. Evreii din România în perioada comunistă 1944–1965 [The
Jews from Romania during the Communist Period 1944–1965]. Bucharest:
Polirom.
———. 1994. Romanian Jewry: The First Decade after the Holocaust. The
Tragedy of Romanian Jewry. Ed Randolph L. Braham. New York: Columbia
Schumacher, Claude. 1998. Introduction. Staging the Holocaust: The Shoah in
Drama and Performance. Ed Claude Schumacher. Cambridge: Cambridge
Skloot, Robert. 1988. The Darkness We Carry: The Drama of the Holocaust.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Ch a p t e r Tw e lv e
Fr a m i ng t h e Si l e nc e: Th e Rom a n i a n
Je w ish a n d Rom a n i Holoc aust i n
Fi l m ic R e p r e se n tat ions 1
Valentina Glajar
Silence is the antiworld of speech, and at least as polyvalent, constitutive, and

fragile. The necessary refuge of the poet, the theologian, and the intellectual, it
is equally the instrument of the bureaucrat, the demagogue, and the dictator.
Silence can be the marker of courage and heroism or the cover of cowardice and
self-interest; sometimes, it is the road sign of an impossible turning. Silence
resembles words also in that each production of silence must be judged in its own
contexts, in its own situation of enunciation. Silence can be a mere absence of
speech; at other times, it is both the negation of speech and a production of
meaning.
—Peter Haidu2
Cultural memory or remembrance is a process that reflects the way a soci-

ety deals with its past and is itself subject to historical change, according to
Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (2005, 262). The avoidance and absence
of memory work also reflects on a society, its rigid thinking, and its refusal
to accept responsibility for its past. In post–World War II Romania, one
can speak of a double silence regarding the pogroms and the deportations
to Transnistria: the official and the personal one. Officially, the Holocaust
in Romania was not acknowledged during the Communist years, and
according to Liviu Rotman, a “chain of silence” was created that included
victims, perpetrators, and bystanders (Rotman 2003, 205) This silence
prompted Elie Wiesel to remark during his first return to Sighet in 1964:
“[Sighet] seems almost petrified in its forgetfulness and in the shame that
springs from that forgetfulness.”3 As a result of this silence and misinfor-
mation, “[f]or fifty years, for numerous educated adults, the tragedy of the
Jewish population did not exist; neither did the dead of Iaşi or Dorohoi.
Transnistria was a simple geographic reference, not a location on the
Holocaust map” (Rotman 2003, 214).4 Since 1989, however, Romania has
made great strides in acknowledging the suffering of the Romanian Jews.
The report of the Holocaust Commission led by Elie Wiesel has eluci-
dated the role that Romania played during the Holocaust and the country
established a National Institute for Holocaust Studies in 2005.5 Moreover,
a Holocaust Memorial for the Jewish and Roma victims was unveiled in
Bucharest on October 8, 2009.6
In spite of the important steps taken by the Romanian government and
the now well-documented Romanian Holocaust in historical studies, the
memory work in film is still lagging behind. Very few movies confront
the Holocaust in Romania, in part because film directors grapple with
the impossibility of representing such atrocity, horror, and suffering, but
mostly because the Holocaust is still a controversial topic in twenty-first-
century Romania. As filmmaker Lucian Pintilie contends, fundamental
questions have to be asked and a nation has to face its past in order to
move into adulthood.7 However, minimalization, denial, and trivialization
still hinder an honest confrontation with the role Romania played during
the Holocaust. Michael Shafir brilliantly analyzes the various negationist
attitudes in his study “Between Denial and ‘Comparative Trivialization’:
Holocaust Negationism in Post-Communist East Central Europe,” which
includes various forms of denial and deflection of the Holocaust in Romania
and other Eastern European countries. In the Romanian context, he finds
that the legacy of “organized forgetting”8 during Communism has contin-
ued into the post-Communist years, when Romanian politicians such as
Corneliu Vadim Tudor or academics such as Gheorghe Buzatu still deny
the existence of the Holocaust in Romania. Under Ceauşescu, as Shafir
explains, Jewish extermination referred mainly to the Jews in Hungarian-
occupied Northern Transylvania, while Antonescu’s extermination of Jews
in Transnistria was never mentioned (Shafir 2004, 52).9 Furthermore,
deflecting responsibility onto the Nazis, the Iron Guard, and even the
Jewish victims themselves is still common practice in Romania. Even in
2009, the question among many Romanians is still, “Was there or wasn’t
there a Holocaust in Romania?”10
In the following, I review several documentaries and three feature films
that deal with aspects of the Romanian Holocaust and anti-Semitism. As
Peter Haidu’s quote above so eloquently describes meanings of silence, I am
most interested in silence as a production of meaning that can be framed
culturally, politically, ideologically, or aesthetically. I focus on three fea-
ture films to touch on this silence in the context of re-presenting or refer-
ring to the Romanian chapter of the Holocaust, which certainly shares
the Nazi goal of exterminating Jews and Roma, but, at the same time,
exhibits an autochthonous Sonderweg that Jean Ancel called a Romanian
framing the silence / 227
“manual Holocaust.”11 Manole Marcus’s Actorul şi sălbaticii (The Actor

and the Savages) [1974] was produced during the more liberal years of
Ceauşescu’s era and focuses on the Romanian Fascist Iron Guard, which
was responsible for the pogrom of Bucharest and whose members were
part of Antonescu’s government in 1940. To avoid any overt discussion of
these events, the movie is conveniently set in the late 1930s—before the
pogrom of Bucharest and before Antonescu came to power—and while
it exposes the main characteristics of the Iron Guard, it ultimately does
not alter the Communist position on the Holocaust. Radu Mihaileanu’s
Train de vie (Train of Life) [1998] is the first Holocaust film directed by a
filmmaker of Romanian descent—this alone is reason enough to include
it in this discussion. While the movie is a fable about the destruction of
East European Jewry and Roma, it also draws attention to Mihaileanu’s
biography and the relatives he lost in Transnistria and on the “trains of
death.” Mihaileanu, like Radu Gabrea, the director of Călătoria lui Gruber
(Gruber’s Journey) [2008], left Romania and returned to film these movies
after a lengthy stay abroad. Gabrea comes closest to breaking the silence
as he quite specifically confronts the pogrom of Iaşi in his latest movie
Gruber’s Journey. Whether it is the critical distance that Mihaileanu and
Gabrea required and acquired, or a new eye-opening perspective, they
produced two unique movies that contribute to the Romanian cultural
memory in an unprecedented way.
I
“Where is our Holocaust?”: Romanian and
Israeli Documentaries
In recent years, various Romanian TV stations have aired programs that
address the Holocaust in Romania, including the pogroms of Iaşi and
Bucharest, the “trains of death,” the Struma,12 and the Romanian camps
in Transnistria.13 Roundtable discussions with Holocaust scholars and
historians have also been televised; while very informative, the broad-
casts elucidate the ignorance and misinformation of the interviewers or
moderators, as well as the lack of interest on behalf of a large segment of
the population, which still grapples with the long-lasting effects of the
Communist dictatorial regime and the seemingly unending transition to
democracy and a free-market economy.14 As Liviu Rotman specifies in
a broadcast from January 21, 2008, that commemorated the pogrom of
Bucharest, the younger generation exhibits a completely different attitude
than that of their parents; younger Romanians seem to be openly willing
to confront the history of their country.15 Rotman refers specifically to col-
lege students, who take his Holocaust class, which is an elective, in larger
numbers than expected.16 While Rotman’s example is certainly very posi-

tive, it can hardly be an indicator for young Romanians in general. The
anonymous internet blog comments from Romanians expound the same
anti-Semitism, ultra-nationalism, and malicious ignorance regarding the
Holocaust as before 1989.
The Holocaust in Romania has received relatively late attention in Israeli
documentaries, although many survivors of Transnistria immigrated to
Israel after World War II to escape the Communist regime. The Israeli edu-
cational documentary production Transnistria, the Hell (1996, 2000) pres-
ents the history of Transnistria through interviews of orphaned Holocaust
survivors from Romania. While the interviewees came to Israel at different
times after World War II, they all felt that their story was never told in the
context of the Holocaust. Esther Gelbelman, for example, explains: “I’ve
been in Israel for 22 years, and every Holocaust Day is a day of death for me.
No one knew about our Holocaust. I’ve never heard it mentioned. These
victims also deserve a memorial, a stone at Yad Vashem” (Transnistria, the
Hell). The famous Israeli writer from Bukovina, Aharon Appelfeld, also
mentioned: “There wasn’t a warm reception for the survivors. Not at all”
(Transnistria, the Hell). For many survivors and their children, the decades
of silence in Romania gave way to new “territories of silence” in Israel.17
One of the most gaping silences in film documentaries and feature films
is the absence of the Roma Holocaust.18 The first Romanian documentary
directed by the Roma director Laurenţiu Calciu about Romani survivors
is O Krisinitori/Judecătorul (2007). Calciu presents the story of three sib-
lings who survived Transnistria and are willing to be interviewed about the
various stages of their ordeal and, most importantly, who allowed Calciu
and his team to film their testimonies.19 The short documentary allows
non-Roma viewers rare access into aspects of Roma culture, especially the
way that the judge Constantin Marin (also called Suta) applied Romani
laws to solve various conflicts between Romanies.20 While most Romanies
in Calciu’s movie seem assimilated according to appearance, they strictly
adhere to the Romani laws and obey the decisions of Suta, whose wisdom
is appreciated and sought even by Romanies in other regions of Romania.
The stories of Constantin Marin, his older brother Ion Marin, and their
younger sister Mărioara Pavel deviate only slightly from Jewish testimonies.21
Standing in front of a long freight train in the interview, Constantin begins
his story of departure to Transnistria, relating how the three siblings and
their mother were forcibly loaded up in wagons and taken to Ciomarlia—
next to the river Bug, as his brother adds. Invoking the traditional custom
of raising horses, a sequence of frames depicting young Romanies riding
horses without saddles is juxtaposed with Constantin’s story about the loss
of freedom during the Holocaust. Hunger, lice, typhus, and killings fill the
memories of the siblings. There is little doubt in their minds about who was
responsible for their suffering; Mărioara curses Antonescu for all the pain
and the killings in Transnistria. Transnistria, and the fear that they might
be taken away again, resurfaced in their nightmares after their weeks-long
return on foot. There is little emotion directly expressed, with the exception
of Ion’s breaking down when he remembers having carried his little sister
on his shoulders from Bucharest to their home in Transylvania. However,
the picture of two generations, grandmother Mărioara telling her survi-
vor story and her young granddaughter leaning lovingly against Mărioara,
captures an important message of Calciu’s film: the suffering of Romanies
during Antonescu’s regime must transcend the silence imposed by tradition
or prejudices. It is part of Romania’s past, and this memory must be trans-
mitted to the new generations of Roma and Romanians. Calciu’s documen-
tary certainly provides an excellent point to begin the discussion about this
marginalized group of Holocaust victims in Romania.
II
Among feature films, there are very few movies that address directly or
even touch obliquely on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust and pogroms in
Romania. In fact, there are just four, of which three were made by film-
makers who left Romania: Radu Mihaileanu, who left Romania in 1980
and now lives in France; Radu Gabrea, who left Romania in 1974 and
since 1989 divides his time between Germany and Romania; and Manole
Marcus, whose film was released in 1974 during the Ceauşescu era. Radu
Mihaileanu’s award-winning film, Train de vie (Train of Life) [1998], is a
multinational co-production that features a most original story about an
East European shtetl whose inhabitants decide to deport themselves during
World War II.22 Radu Gabrea’s two films, Cocoşul decapitat (The Beheaded
Rooster) [2006] and most recently, Călătoria lui Gruber (Gruber’s Journey)
[2008], address more specifically the Romanian context of the Holocaust.
The Beheaded Rooster, a film adaptation of Eginald Schlattner’s eponymous
autobiographical novel, focuses precisely on the involvement of the German
minority of southern Transylvania with National Socialism and the dete-
rioration of the relationship between the Transylvanian nationalities dur-
ing this period—a topic that deserves significant attention on its own and
would exceed the boundaries of the project at hand. Gruber’s Journey is
based on the character of the Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte who
witnessed and wrote about the Iaşi pogrom in June 1941.23 Mihaileanu’s
and Gabrea’s films have received more attention outside of Romania than
within it and have failed to spark a public debate about Romania’s role
during the Holocaust.24
Manole Marcus’s Actorul si Sălbaticii and

the Iron Guard
One important exception to the movies made during the Communist
years is the 1974 film directed by Manole Marcus Actorul si sălbaticii (The
Actor and the Savages)—a movie that has never been released outside of
Romania and therefore is only known to film specialists and the older gen-
eration of Romanians. Actorul si sălbaticii is loosely based on the story of
Constantin Tănase (1880–1945), a famous actor and revue theater direc-
tor, who was known for his social and political satire. According to his
biography, Tănase was one of the few theater directors who refused to fire
his Jewish employees when the racial laws were introduced in Romania
under the Gigurtu government in 1940.25
Though predictably influenced by the Communist ideology of the
1970s, Marcus’s film exposes the Fascist movement of the Iron Guard and
its widespread influence among young Romanians (many of them edu-
cated) in the 1930s. The story of the film diverges from the usual fight of
Communists against Fascists predominant in films of this period.26 Set
in the late 1930s, the film presents actor Costică Caratase’s struggles with
the banks that want to cut his funds, with the censorship of Carol II, and
most importantly with the Legionnaires who try to stop a satirical show
in which Caratase wants to poke fun at Hitler and the Fascist Iron Guard.
Caratase, an imperfect hero played by Toma Caragiu,27 fights these “sav-
ages” to the very end, when he ultimately dies from a heart attack in the
wings, after he performs the Hitler act.28
While Caratase is the main target of the Legionnaires’ attacks and their
ruthless death threats (accompanied by dead rats and birds), Caratase’s
writer Ionel Fridman, played by Mircea Iorgulescu, has to face the rage of
the Iron Guard both as a Jewish Romanian and as the writer of the satirical
act about Hitler. Alternating between comic situations and tragic scenes,
the film depicts the ominous historical period of 1939 in Romania’s capi-
tal when the country was on the verge of entering the Axis coalition. For
much of the movie Fridman seems to be threatened and beaten by mem-
bers of the Iron Guard mainly because of the Hitler act and not because of
the profound anti-Semitic attitude of the Fascist Iron Guard. This ambiva-
lence is reflected in some anti-Semitic remarks by Caratase himself, who
is disappointed with Fridman for giving in to the Legionnaires and thus
accuses him and all Jews of cowardice. On the one hand, Caratase portrays
Fridman as a hero who fought in World War I and even saved Caratase’s
life; on the other hand, he tells Fridman that he and all Jews deserve the
treatment they receive because they are weak and cannot stand up to the
Legionnaires. Caratase’s provocation is successful in the end, as Fridman
hands him the valuable manuscript of the Hitler act, while at the same
time it allows some insight into the larger picture of anti-Semitic perse-
cution that targets Fridman’s entire family, especially his ten-year-old son.
The homogenization of Romania and the purification of the nation by
removing all the “foreign” elements were high priorities of the Iron Guard.
As Radu Ioanid contends in his study The Sword of the Archangel, Romanian
Fascism had several autochthonous characteristics, although it shared quite a
few with German National Socialism and Italian Fascism. The exaggerated
veneration of the Romanian Orthodox Church, mysticism, irrationalism,
the cult of death and sacrifice, and ultra-nationalism led to anti-Semitism
and racism.29 Through an effective and suggestive mise-en-scène, the film
evokes the premises of the Iron Guard in the scene in which members of the
Iron Guard keep Caratase and Fridman prisoners. A large, mostly empty
whitewashed room is adorned with an enormous cross on one of the walls
and a fire underneath—both elements that symbolize fundamental charac-
teristics of this Fascist movement. Caratase, tied to a chair in the middle of
the room, against the background of the cross and the “holy purifying fire,”
gives an important monologue exposing the danger of this Fascist move-
ment for the Romanian people. A central point of his monologue refers to
the simple pleasure of laughing at and ridiculing the absurd—a pleasure
that the Legionnaires have forgotten in their religious fervor and murderous
attempts to cleanse the Romanian nation, and now they forbid Romanians
to laugh as well. The definitions of laughter as understood by the editors
of Lachen über Hitler seem relevant in explaining Caratase’s pleading, as it
is exactly the anti-authoritarian laughter that invokes irony and self-irony,
and the subversion of overcoming one’s predicament that Caratase proposes
against the fanatic Iron Guard.30 The only laughter that the Legionnaires
emit sounds irrational and evil and suggests dementia, which seems a way
to explain their unquestioned following of their leader, “The Captain.” On
the other hand, it also conveniently excuses them. The scene culminates
with the murder of Fridman, who fights the Legionnaires but is ultimately
stabbed to death under the cross and in front of the “holy purifying fire”
of the Romanian nation. Fridman’s death against this background alludes
to his Jewishness, although the immediate reason for his death is his bold
provocative statement that he will distribute leaflets with the Hitler act all
over Bucharest. However, the symbolism of the background suggests oth-
erwise; his martyr’s death has a sacrificial character because he ultimately
saves Caratase’s life (for the second time) and the show—a metaphor for the
fight against the “savages.”
The much-awaited Hitler act, which Carol II attempts unsuccessfully
to ban, illustrates the consequences of a Hitler coalition for Romania.
Disguised as Hitler playing Santa Claus, Caratase, speaking half German
and half Romanian with a German accent, comically explains the tragedy
of a Hitler-occupied Europe. The comic act does not elicit any laughter
from the audience; on the contrary, a complete silence envelops the specta-
tors as they recognize the subversive character of Caratase’s comedy. Santa
Claus Hitler distributes Christmas gifts to five children, of which one is
the Romanian leader of the Iron Guard, Corneliu Stelea Modreanu (a
slightly changed but undoubtedly recognizable version of the leader’s real
name, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu). Czechoslovakia receives an SS Gauleiter
and Poland “one hundred pianists to execute the polonaise and the Poles,”
according to the old German saying rewritten here to describe Hitler’s
practices: “Ein Mann, ein Wort, ein Mord” (“a man, a word, a murder”).
When it comes to Romania, Santa Claus Hitler offers an “advantageous”
deal that foreshadows the historical reality of the pact between Hitler and
Antonescu: Romanian wheat and oil in exchange for the German Gestapo
and a little cage: “In diese colivie, punem micutz Românie” (“In this cage,
we place little Romania”).31
The humor and satire end abruptly when Caratase feels suddenly sick.
He slips out of the role by removing the Hitler moustache and wig and
turns to the audience as the actor Caratase, who admits that laughter is
not enough to fight the Iron Guard and to oppose “selling” Romania to
Hitler. The last part of his monologue is problematic, as it represents com-
mon deflections from assuming any historic responsibility that have been
perpetuated until today. In a grave tone, underlined also by the knowledge
of his serious heart problems and his potentially imminent death, Caratase
warns: “Opriţi să facă din ţara asta a noastră, frumoasă şi bună, un lagăr de
concentrare. Din poporul român o victimă sau un călău.” (Stop them from
transforming this good and beautiful country of ours into a concentration
camp, and the Romanian people into a victim or an executioner). Written
in the 1970s, the script reiterates the myths that ethnic Romanians, kind
and generous as they are, could not commit any atrocities; leaders such
as the Iron Guard and/or Hitler are responsible for the crimes of ethnic
Romanians against Jews (Romanies are predictably ignored as victims
in this film).32 The image of Romania as a concentration camp evokes a
country controlled by Hitler and the Iron Guard and transfers responsibil-
ity for atrocities to Nazi and Fascist leaders who have the power and the
followers to decide the fate of an entire people. One has to wonder about
the specific context in which the people become victims or executioners in
a concentration camp called Romania. Does the film suggest an ever so
slight responsibility from the perspective of the 1970s?33 So long as Hitler
and the Iron Guard are portrayed as the sole perpetrators, following the
Communist line of thought, the film was unlikely to spark any serious
debate about Romania’s role during the Holocaust. Nor was it meant to stir
any controversies; rather, it rehashes Romania’s position on the topic under

the watchful eyes of the Communist censorship.
The Jewish and Roma Holocaust in

Radu Mihaileanu’s Train de Vie
Twenty-four years later, Radu Mihaileanu (who lost several relatives to
the Holocaust) became the first director of Jewish-Romanian descent
to confront the Holocaust in his second film, the award-winning Train
of Life (1998), a French, Belgian, Dutch, and Romanian co-production.
Mihaileanu does not, however, specifically address the Holocaust in
Romania, because he distances himself from Romanian realities, thereby
missing the opportunity to raise awareness about often- overlooked
events of the Holocaust in Romania. As Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi points
out, however, “The rural Romanian landscapes through which the train
passes may be real, but everything else is highly mediated by both the
absence of historical probability and the cultural form itself—the folk-
tales from Chelm and Yiddish counter-narratives of historical trauma”
(2001, 292). The absence of historical probability and specificity, how-
ever, questions not only the sinodal course of the story but also the
paradigms created in Mihaileanu’s comedy, especially the relationship
between two victim groups: the Jews and the Romanies (who are mostly
played by Romanian actors and therefore clearly anchored in Romanian
realities).
Radu Mihaileanu grew up in the double silence created in Romania
after World War II when the new Communist regime minimized the suf-
fering of Jewish or Roma victims, who were reluctant to speak of their
trauma and tell their stories.34 According to Miriam Hollstein’s and
Dorothea Schmitt-Hollstein’s sources, Mihaileanu’s parents never talked
to him about deportations and murder, and he began exploring his Jewish
roots only after he emigrated to France (2000, 40). In a most interesting
Romanian interview that Ion Mihaileanu conducted with his son, Radu
Mihaileanu, they discuss the idea for the movie and the impact the film-
maker hopes this movie will have on the transmission of knowledge about
the Holocaust. The idea came from a story that a friend told the filmmaker
about an escape attempt that involved a fake deportation train. While
Mihaileanu and his father could not find any evidence to verify the story,
it was the spark that led to the tragicomic film he created a few years later.
Furthermore, Mihaileanu explains that after watching Stephen Spielberg’s
Schindler’s List, which had a tremendous impact on him, he recognized
that there must be a different way to talk about the Holocaust and to keep
the discussion going. He wanted to include Jewish humor and culture, to
re-create the shtetl of his ancestors, to delve into the absurd35 as he knows
it from Eugène Ionesco, and into the philosophy of Emil Cioran, whom he
considers the most amusing and most desperate philosopher.36
Mihaileanu’s movie inscribes itself into what Josefa Loshitzky, draw-
ing also on Slavoj Žižek, calls the liminal spaces of Holocaust represen-
tations—a new radical form, a hybrid space where tragedy, comedy, and
melodrama meet.37 The train that in Holocaust literature and film sym-
bolizes a tragic finality becomes in Mihaileanu’s film a refracted image of
the Nazi (or Romanian) deportation trains, creating a space that allows
comedy and tragedy to converge. Mihaileanu acknowledged that his title
alludes also to the Romanian “Trains of Death”—the focus of Gabrea’s
movie, Gruber’s Journey, in which thousands of Jews died from suffoca-
tion and dehydration after the wagons were sealed and the inmates were
locked up for days without water in unbearable heat. When the Romanian
soldiers finally opened the wagons, at least half of the inmates were dead.38
Mihaileanu’s train becomes a fable of imagined possibilities, in which peo-
ple reclaim their agency and challenge the limits of the possible, even if
only in a fairy tale imagined by the village fool.
Sander Gilman questions the emergence and the prospect of a new
genre, the Holocaust comedy, in his article “Is Life Beautiful? Can the
Shoah be Funny? Thoughts on Recent and Older Movies.” Gilman only
briefly mentions Train of Life, as it had not yet been released in the United
States, and focuses primarily on the other two Holocaust comedies that
were released during the late 1990s and met with various degrees of suc-
cess: Life is Beautiful created a controversy but received two Oscars, while
critics almost unanimously dismissed Peter Kassovitz’s Jakob the Liar,
pointing to Robin Williams’ uninspired and subdued performance and
to Frank Beyer’s Jakob der Lügner as the better of the two films. In his
analysis of Benigni’s, Kassovitz’s, and Beyer’s movies, Gilman arrives at
two conclusions. He claims that “Benigni’s laughter is proof that whatever
else will happen, the promise of the film, the rescue of the child, must take
place. Our expectations are fulfilled, and we feel good about our laugh-
ter” (2000, 304). And second, most importantly, Gilman concludes that
“laughter is again possible in the 1990s” as the Shoah has become history
rather than memory (2000, 305) and Jewish authenticity is not required
anymore, mentioning, of course, that Benigni was the first non-Jewish
director to produce a Holocaust comedy.39
Mihaileanu’s movie still has the imprint of Jewish authenticity, though
his perspective is that of a second-generation Holocaust survivor growing
up in Communist Romania. His father escaped from a camp, returned
to Romania, and changed his name from Mordechai Buchman to Ion
Mihaileanu. Born in 1958, Radu Mihaileanu belonged to the postgeneration
that felt the responsibility to keep the memory alive but relied on what
James Young calls “received history.” The problem for artists of the second-
generation, as Young explains, “is that they are unable to remember the
Holocaust outside of the ways it has been passed down to them, outside of
the ways it is meaningful to them fifty years after the fact” (At Memory’s
Edge, 3). Their experience is necessarily mediated through “[p]hotographs,
film, histories, novels, poems, plays, survivors’ testimonies” (Young 2000,
3). Marianne Hirsch coined the term postmemory to describe “the relation-
ship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences
that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them
so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right” (2008,
103). More specifically, in Family Frames, Hirsch refers to the impossibility
for the postgeneration to return to the world of their parents (1997, 242–
243). Mihaileanu, who was born in Bucharest, never experienced the shtetl
of his family that he tries to re-create in Train of Life. In an interview with
Stefan Steinberg, Mihaileanu addresses the discrepancy between mediated
fictional representations and the remembered world of the parents and
grandparents as he replies to the criticism of an elderly Jewish woman in
Berlin, who could not recognize her shtetl in Mihaileanu’s film: “She came
to see Rembrandt; my exhibition is Chagall.”40
The allegorical fairy-tale frame allows Mihaileanu not only to re-create
the shtetl and its inhabitants but also to employ Jewish humor because—as
Omer Bartov and others have remarked—the film does not pretend to
reflect reality in any way (Bartov 2005, 135). It is therefore only fitting
that Train of Life is framed as a fairy tale that begins with the formulaic
“Il était une fois un petit shtetl” (“Once upon a time, there was a little
shtetl”) and is narrated by Shlomo, the village idiot. Film director Dani
Levy also emphasizes the power of humor in defense of his latest movie
Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler—Germany’s first
Nazi comedy. As he claims, “[C]omedy is more subversive than tragedy. It
can assert things that aren’t possible in an authentic, serious portrayal.”41
To follow Gilman’s arguments in his analysis of comic Holocaust films,
Mihaileanu’s humor, just like Beyer’s in Jakob der Lügner, does not imply a
feel-good laughter that has to be followed by a hopeful and positive resolve,
as in Benigni’s movie. On the contrary, the expectations of the audience
are crushed at the end of the movie when viewers are faced with the freeze
frame of Shlomo, the village idiot and narrator of the story, behind barbed
wire in a concentration camp.
While Mihaileanu’s movie was criticized for too much slapstick humor
or too much music (although the soundtrack by Goran Bregović was cat-
egorized as excellent),42 it did receive some praise for including another
victim group (the Romanies) that has been mostly ignored or marginalized
in other feature films treating the Holocaust.43 In her article “Forbidden

Laughter,” Josefa Loshitzky dedicates a substantial section to the inclusion
of Roma in Mihaileanu’s movie, but fails to identify them as Romanian
Roma according to their names in the movie (Mânzatu, Miron Păstaie).
While she applauds the coalition between the two persecuted minority
groups, she insightfully notes that Mihaileanu’s movie perpetuates some
stereotypes associated with Romanies, especially what Dina Iordanova
calls “sexual projections of the majority” (2003, 10) in regards to the pas-
sionate Roma woman who lures Esther’s former lover away from trying to
set Esther and her new Roma lover’s tent on fire. Since most Jewish char-
acters have Roma counterparts in the film, Esther’s is the unnamed Roma
woman, but Iordanova’s critique stops short of addressing Esther’s sexual
appetite. Iordanova also points out that the Romanies in Mihaileanu’s
movie perpetuate the image of Roma as thieves. Unlike the Jews from the
shtetl who buy and repair wagon after wagon to build their escape train,
the Romanies want to steal the train (Iordanova 2003, 10).
Train de vie raises exactly the question of competitive victimhood that
Iordanova poses: “Why can’t we all be on the same train of history? Europe’s
Jews and Gypsies perished side by side in the 1940s” (Iordanova 2003, 11).
Some Holocaust scholars and historians have indeed denied equal status as
Holocaust victims to Jews and Roma, claiming that Romanies were sent to
concentration camps on grounds of “asocial” behavior and that the Nazis
never intended to exterminate all Romanies.44 However, there is little evi-
dence, beyond the Romanies trying to requisition the train, for Iordanova’s
claim that “Train de vie reiterates the tacit view that Romani history can
be nothing but a parasitic existence on someone else’s back” (Iordanova,
10). Judging by the two idiots’ (Shlomo and Mânzatu) embrace and by the
Rabbi’s invitation, “God is great, our train is small. Prisoners with prison-
ers, Germans with Germans,” Romanies are not portrayed as second-class
victims, but rather like brothers and comrades. Nor are they depicted as
less original or inventive, since they, just like the Jewish villagers, come
up with the same idea to deport themselves. The competitive spirit of the
two groups comes to life during the music duel in front of the bonfire in
which Jewish and Roma musicians showcase their talents and cultural her-
itage. What begins as a contest between violinists develops into a chorus of
instruments and voices playing and singing to the same tune in a celebra-
tion of life and brotherhood, as ethnic and social separation is seemingly
overcome through music and dance while the role separation, which has
been accentuated throughout the movie, imposes that “prisoners” dance
with “prisoners” and “Nazis” with “Nazis.”
The end of the movie and the realization that the whole story is just
a figment of Shlomo’s imagination erase any expectations and question
any assumptions about the journey and, ultimately, about the story’s opti-
mism. The positive relationship between the shtetl Jews and their neigh-
bors—who actually lament the Jews’ departure in the film—is suddenly
removed, giving way to the more realistic probability of the anti-Semitic
attitudes of many Eastern Europeans. The depiction of Romanies as broth-
ers in suffering—which would carry so much weight, especially in the
Romanian context—remains then also suspended in the realm of imag-
ined possibilities. By allowing Shlomo, the village idiot, philosopher, and
camp inmate, to tell the story of his shtetl through the prism of a unbeliev-
able fairy tale, the movie projects and simultaneously explains its hopeful-
ness against the tragic history of the East European Jewry, instilled into
one single suggestive freeze frame: Shlomo behind barbed wire.
Shattering the Silence: Radu Gabrea’s Gruber’s Journey

In 2008, sixty-seven years after the pogrom of Iaşi, Gabrea’s Gruber’s
Journey became the first feature film that specifically and directly addresses
the Holocaust in Romania. While The Actor and the Savages touches on
the brutality of the Iron Guard and Train of Life draws attention to the
destruction of the East European Jewry and Roma, Gabrea’s film raises
fundamental questions about historical responsibility and blazes the trail
for the work of Holocaust memory in Romanian film.
Based on a script by Răzvan Rădulescu (The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu)
and Alexandru Baciu, Gruber’s Journey presents a semi-fictional story of
the historical visit of the Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte to Iaşi as a
war correspondent with the German troops in June 1941.45 On his way
to the front, Malaparte visits Iaşi on the day after the Romanian version
of the Kristallnacht took place there, in which thousands were killed and
several thousand others were deported to Călăraşi and Podul Iloaiei on
the “trains of death.” Malaparte’s engagement with the events begins with
him having a severe allergy attack and frantically searching for an allergist
who was recommended to him by a physician in Bucharest. Since the aller-
gist and professor at the Pharmacology Institute, Josef Gruber, is Jewish,
nobody knows whether he was killed, was on one of the trains, or was
among the dead taken to the cemetery. Malaparte’s search for Josef Gruber
takes him on a Kafkaesque expedition that involves the Iaşi military garri-
son, the police headquarters, and the help of the Italian consul Sartori and
the German Wehrmacht officer Colonel Freitag. Malaparte slowly uncov-
ers the events that preceded his arrival as he tries to obtain signatures and
lists of deportees from uncooperative Romanian bureaucrats and officials.
While in Malaparte’s book, Kaputt, which documents the Iaşi pogrom,
Malaparte witnesses the chaos and killings in Iaşi, Gabrea’s film places
Malaparte in Iaşi on the afternoon of June 29, 1941. Malaparte, the wit-
ness who describes the carnage in Kaputt, becomes in the film a detective
of sorts who tracks down the events in his quest for Gruber. Thus Gabrea’s
movie avoids the graphic scenes in Kaputt and instead re-creates the pogrom
at Iaşi by pointing to the visual and olfactory evidence that suggests the
extent of the “operation.” There are no comments on Malaparte’s part;
the camera points out the clues Malaparte sees in his investigation. Before
arriving at the Iaşi train station, for example, Malaparte’s train is stopped
and crosses paths with a freight train. When Malaparte’s companions open
the window to let in air as they complain about the heat, the smell ema-
nating from the freight train is unbearable, suggesting in hindsight that it
was the first “train of death” going to Călăraşi. When Malaparte drives
through the streets of Iaşi on the way to the Italian Consulate, he is faced
with the results of the devastation of Jewish stores that are inscribed with
the Star of David, while the unscathed shops are marked with a cross. At
the police headquarters, several soldiers are cleansing the pavement of what
appears to be blood and whitewashing the walls, an activity that reflects
the bureaucratic cover-up to follow. Two coats are required to cover up the
red stains.46
The establishing shot of a beautiful landscape filmed through the win-
dow of the racing train ascertains the perspective of the film as it creates
distance from what is depicted and at the same time a certain transparency,
though blurred by the speed of the train and certainly by the passing of
time. The window, which becomes an important trope in the movie, not
only allows insight into the events but also provides a precarious emotional
and physical shield for Malaparte. Following him as he goes door to door
and window to window through Iaşi, the camera becomes a silent wit-
ness and Malaparte a tacit observer. His allergies prompt him to have the
windows closed, which seems counterproductive as a metaphor since his
quest for Gruber allows increasing insight into the events that transpired
before his arrival.
While perpetrators are individually mentioned by name and portrayed
in a light resonating with their recent or future actions, the portrayal of
the victims shows no individuation.47 As Ezrahi contends in her analysis
of Train of Life, the fact that there is no attempt at individuation makes it,
ironically, the most mimetic aspect of the film. Gabrea goes one step fur-
ther as he plays on the capacity of vision and sound to evoke other senses,
most notably that of smell. The victims in Gabrea’s film remain outside
the frame or unrecognizable. The presence of living victims is reduced
to muffled voices, coming from the train of death, that ask for help and
water. The closest that the viewer comes to seeing the dead is the scene in
which Malaparte and Sartori stand in front of a mass grave.
While the sheer size of the mass grave suggests the very high number of
victims, their faces are not recognizable because lime is spread over the bod-
ies like a symbolic white shroud of innocence. One can only recognize forms
of body parts until the camera lingers on the shape of a beautiful woman’s
face, resembling a rigid white statue. In the absence of the familiar window
shield, Malaparte’s olfactory functions are returning, triggered by the smell
of the corpses, and so is the emotion expressed at the sight of “the meadow
of death”48 and the news that Josef Gruber is one of the lime-covered vic-
tims. At this point, Gruber’s journey and the tragedy of the Jews from Iaşi
have become Malaparte’s story, visually rendered in the scene depicting
Malaparte and Sartori’s return to Iaşi: in this sequence of frames, the reflec-
tion and transparency of the car window allow the camera to superimpose a
close-up of Malaparte over the image of the train of death.
Gabrea’s Malaparte is certainly not the heroic correspondent of Kaputt
who, together with Sartori, sheltered one hundred Jewish victims in the
Italian Consulate and even kicked a police officer to save some of the flee-
ing people.49 In the movie, Malaparte does not succeed in opening the
door of the sealed wagons, as he is in the book when the dead bodies rolled
out of the train.50 His search for Gruber is a vehicle that allows viewers
to uncover the tragedy, but it also seems at times that the protagonist is
only interested in one person for his selfish benefit, though he does go to
considerable lengths to bring Gruber back in case he is still alive. In a twist
of fate, it turns out that Josef Gruber, the allergist, is still alive after all.
Niculescu-Coca, the new garrison commander, finds Gruber, who is actu-
ally the son of the Josef Gruber who died on the train and was buried in the
mass grave.51 In his search for Gruber, Malaparte tries to save, but actually
might just endanger Gruber’s life. While Gruber had been away on the
days of the pogrom, most likely trying to avoid the killings and deporta-
tion, he now is subject to close attention from the garrison commander and
the police chief. As a result, Gruber’s house and office are guarded by two
armed soldiers when Malaparte arrives, and the viewer is left to imagine
where Gruber’s journey might eventually end.
In a Romanian review of the movie, Andreea Chiriac concludes that
Gabrea’s film presents the story of the Iaşi pogrom in a very elegant way,
refraining from vitriolic and demonstrative revelations and without the
sensationalism of a bad talk show. There are indeed several aspects of the
film that would fit Chiriac’s characterization: One is the absence of images
of the victims, which allows the viewer to avoid the uncomfortable posi-
tion of looking into their eyes. The other “elegant” characteristic of the
movie is the distance created through the perspective of foreigners—Mala-
parte’s, Freitag’s, and Sartori’s. While Freitag alerts Malaparte, during
their trip from Bucharest to Iaşi, of the excesses of the Romanians in Iaşi,
mentioning that four Jews were hanged, it is difficult for any informed
viewer to understand Freitag’s disbelief, considering the situation of the
Jews in German-occupied Europe by 1941. One other “elegant” point is
the blame placed on a few officials, especially Constantin Lupu, who was
indeed one of the people in charge of solving “the Jewish problem” in
Iaşi following the direct orders of Antonescu. The officials’ indifference,
arrogance, incompetence, and lack of responsibility—blaming it all on
the war—allow the viewer to feel safe in his or her perceived conviction
of moral superiority, knowing that the responsibility lies out there, as it
always does, with some officials or bureaucrats. The last “elegant” point
is the scarce encoding of history. The historical context of the film would
create a much-needed frame of reference, and the last frame, in which the
twelve thousand Jewish victims of the Iaşi pogrom are mentioned, comes
too late and does not have the effect of Mihaileanu’s freeze frame (causing
the viewer to rethink the entire movie). Gabrea’s movie presents, indeed, a
sanitized version of the story, but nevertheless it begins a long overdue dis-
cussion of the controversial role Romanians played during the Holocaust.
Both documentaries and feature films dealing with the Romanian
chapter of the Holocaust reflect the end of a prolonged silence about the
suffering of Romanian Jews and Roma that has heretofore placed their
story at the edges of Holocaust and film studies. In presenting the story
of Constantin Tănase, Manole Marcus found an excellent angle through
which to speak about the 1930s and push the Communist censorship ever
so slightly into allowing a discussion about anti-Semitism and the historical
context of Romania’s joining the Axis Powers. Moreover, many Romanians
viewed it as a parable of the Communist dictatorship, and consequently,
for many years Actorul şi sălbaticii disappeared from Romanian screens;
it was released again after 1989. One has to wonder what kind of movie
Marcus would have produced in a censorship-free Romania or whether
the movie would have had the same impact in another time. Mihaileanu
fled the Communist dictatorship of Ceauşescu and produced Train de vie,
profoundly influenced by the shtetl he never experienced and the relatives
who died during the Holocaust in Romania. Train de vie allows Romanian
viewers not only to follow the adventurous journey of the shtetl Jews, laugh
with them, sit on the edge of their seats when Nazis appear to stop their
ghost train, and hope for a successful escape, but also to face questions
about the absence of this once flourishing Jewish culture in Romania.
Train de vie also touches a nerve with Romanian viewers because it forces
them to confront the suffering of Romanies—a minority group that con-
tinues to endure discrimination at every level in Romania.52 The veteran
film director Radu Gabrea, who was four years old when the pogrom was
unfolding in Iaşi, has produced the first Romanian Holocaust film, whose
reception remains to be assessed after its release in Romania in the fall of

2009. It is to be hoped that the young, talented filmmakers of the new
Romanian cinema who are celebrated in Cannes and elsewhere will write
or come across a script that continues Gabrea’s work of asking fundamen-
tal questions about the “manual Holocaust” in Romania.
Notes
1. I would like to thank Ileana Marin for reading an earlier version of this article
and Camelia Lazăr for having procured all the Romanian movies, even those
that had not been released.
2. Peter Haidu. “The Dialectics of Unspeakability: Language, Silence, and the
Narratives of Desubjectification,” 278.
3. Sighet, Sighet, dir. Harold Becker, 1967.
4. Marianne Hirsch also notes in Family Frames, “I can still conjure the cognitive
disjunction in which my friends and I grew up, hearing at home that we are to
disregard most of what we are told at school” (219).
5. The Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania
can be read on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
in Washington, DC. A complete copy was also published in Romanian in
2005.
6. As recently as May 6, 2009, several non-governmental organizations were try-
ing to move the project to another location because of the destruction of the
green space where the five constructions of the memorial (the memorial, the
Star of David, the column, Via Dolorosa, and the Roma wheel) are to be
placed.
7. Quoted in Anne Jäckel’s article, “Too Late? Recent Developments in
Romanian Cinema,” 106.
8. See also, Paul Connerton’s discussion about organized forgetting and his-
torical reconstruction in totalitarian regimes: “When a large power wants to
deprive a small country of its national consciousness it uses the method of
organized forgetting” (14). Connerton also refers directly to the Holocaust
as he suggests that Elie Wiesel’s writings are examples of oppositional histo-
ries that “preserve the memory of social groups whose voice would otherwise
have been silenced” (15) because one horrifying aspect of totalitarian regimes
constitutes “the fear that there might remain nobody who could ever again
properly bear witness to the past” (15).
9. Shafir refers also to president Ion Iliescu who, in his speech on the sixtieth
anniversary of the Iron Guard pogrom in Bucharest, lamented the fact that
it was “unjustified to attribute to Romania an artificially inflated number of
Jewish victims for the sake of media impact” (quoted in Shafir, 79). Moreover,
Iliescu expressed hope that this distorted image of Romania will be corrected
once Romanian historians begin work on the topic (Shafir, 79). In Iliescu’s
view, non-Jewish Romanian historians would restore Romania’s image that
Jewish historians tarnished.
10. In the national newspaper Cotidianul, Alexandra Olivotto interviews the
Romanian actor Florin Piersic Jr, the protagonist of Radu Gabrea’s Gruber’s
Journey (2008). Olivotto’s first question for Piersic is: “A existat Holocaust
in România?” (Was there a Holocaust in Romania?) The answer was equally
disappointing: Piersic does not deny the Holocaust, but refers to those who
claim that Jews “milk the Holocaust for all it’s worth” as not necessarily anti-
Semites, but rather people who cannot understand the trauma of the Jews in
that historical period.
11. In Preludiu la asasinat, Jean Ancel refers to a “Balkan manual Holocaust,”
which he thinks Romanians could have patented after Iaşi, Bessarabia, and
Transnistria (339).
12. The forgotten maritime disaster of the Struma drew the attention of two
film directors in recent years: Radu Gabrea released his documentary in
Romania in 2001 and Simcha Jacobovici in Israel in 2006. The Struma left
the port of Constanţa for Palestine on December 12, 1941 with 769 Jewish
refugees on board and sank in the Black Sea in the dawn hours of February
24, 1942, torpedoed by the Soviet submarine SEI133. David Stoliar was the
only survivor of the Struma. Stoliar’s story of survival and the tragedy of the
Struma is also the subject of D. Frantz and C. Collins’s book Death on the
Black Sea: The Untold Story of the Struma and World War II’s Holocaust at
Sea (2003).
13. In 2005, TVR (Televiziunea Română, Romanian Television) aired several
episodes on the history of the Romanian Jews from 1938 to 1944. This was
the first part of a new series titled “Minorităţi sub trei dictaturi” (“Minorities
under Three Dictatorships”). Many survivors were interviewed as well as
Holocaust historians such as the late Jean Ancel and Radu Ioanid. Two of
the interviewed survivors, Esther Gelbelman and artist Benno Friedel, had
been previously interviewed for the Israeli documentary Transnistria, the
Hell. Ruth Glasberg Gold, a survivor from Czernowitz and author of Ruth’s
Journey, describes her life in Transnistria where she lost her parents and older
brother within three weeks.
14. During a special edition program on the anniversary of the Bucharest
pogrom, Angela Avram, a successful TV moderator, confesses her ignorance
on the topic of the Holocaust in Romania—an ignorance shared by many
Romanians who grew up during Communism and never learned anything
in school about the Holocaust. While listening to her distinguished guests
and Holocaust scholars Lya Benjamin, Liviu Rotman, and Mihai Ionescu,
Avram creates a clear distance between her Romanian Jewish guests and
herself as she attempts several times to speak for ethnic Romanians and
explain to her guests what Romanians really think or fear about assum-
ing responsibility for the Holocaust (Televiziunea Română Internaţional,
January 21, 2008).
15. This was a special edition broadcast by Angela Avram that aired on Televiziunea
Română Internaţional on January 21, 2008.
16. For information on the introduction and treatment of the Holocaust in
Romanian public schools, see Tomas Misco’s study “ ‘We did also save peo-
ple’: A Study of Holocaust Education in Romania after Decades of Historical
Silence.” It analyzes collected data on teacher autonomy and training, institu-
tional support, controversies (especially Antonescu and Roma history), class
time, textbooks, and parental involvement.
17. For an insightful study on the complex territories of silence, see Ronit Lentin’s
Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying the Territories of Silence.
18. In 2002, Alexandra Isles produced the important documentary Porraimos:
Europe’s Gypsies in the Holocaust, but Romanian Roma survivors of Transnistria
are not represented.
19. I would like to thank Tumende TV for entrusting me with a copy of the
movie and for allowing me to discuss it in this article. While I am aware that
there exists one other Romanian film made by Luminiţa Cioabă called Roma
Tears, which was screened at a conference on Transnistria in Jerusalem in
2007, my repeated attempts to procure the movie from the director have been
unsuccessful.
20. For a discussion of Romani Law, see Walter Weyrauch’s edited collection,
Gypsy Law: Romani Legal Traditions and Culture, especially Ronald Lee’s arti-
cle, “The Rom-Vlach Gypsies and the Kris-Romani,” 188–230.
21. For a comparative discussion of the Jewish and Roma Holocaust in
Transnistria, see Jean Ancel’s “Tragedia romilor si tragedia evreilor din
România: asemănări si deosebiri,” 3–32, an introduction to Luminiţa
Cioabă’s collection of testimonies Lacrimi rome/Romane iasfa.
22. The fact that the language of the movie is mostly French confused the
American distributors, as the case of the U.S.-released VHS tape reads: “a
small French village.”
23. For a discussion of the Iaşi pogrom and Malaparte’s depiction of the event in
his novel Kaputt, see Gheorghiu’s essay in this book.
24. None of them have achieved the profound response that the much criticized
NBC’s Holocaust (1978) television miniseries received in Germany when it
aired in January 1979. On the reaction of Germans to the NBC miniseries,
see, for example, Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism:
Notes on the German Reaction to ‘Holocaust’,” New German Critique 19
(Winter 1980): 97-115. In the same issue of New German Critique, see also
Jeffrey Herf ’s article “The ‘Holocaust’ Reception in West Germany: Right,
Center, and Left,” 30–52, and Andrei Marcovits and Rebecca Hayden’s
“ ‘Holocaust’ Before and After the Event: Reactions in West Germany and
Austria,” 53–80.
25. In Ioan Massoff and Radu Tănase’s biography, Constantin Tănase, the actor
and writer N. Stroe is mentioned as one who was affected by the anti-Semitic
measures of the regime in power. Stroe’s name, for example, could not appear
as the writer of one of the shows because he was Jewish. Tănase, however, con-
tinued to pay him until Stroe found a job at the Barasheum Theater, a Jewish
theater in Bucharest (211).
26. Among Romanian historical films of the 1970s, one category comprises films
about celebrated rulers of Romania such as Mihai Viteazu (1970), Dimitrie
Cantemir (1973), Ştefan cel Mare (1974), Vlad Ţepeş (1978), and Intoarcerea
lui Vodă Lăpuşneanu (1979). The other category refers to films about the fight
against Hitler (it was never referred to it as the fight against Nazi Germany,
but always the anti-Hitler fight, even the adjective “antihitlerist” was often
employed) and the illegal Communist movement, such as Stejar, extremă
urgenţă (1973), Porţile albastre ale oraşului (1973), Pistruiatul (1973–1977), Pe
aici nu se trece (1974), Ediţie specială (1977), and Duios Anastasia trecea (1979).
27. Toma Caragiu was one of the most successful comics in the 1960s and 1970s
and played his most important role in Actorul si sălbaticii. He died during the
earthquake of 1977.
28. Constantin Tănase himself strongly criticized Hitler in couplets that he per-
formed in 1939. According to Massoff and Tănase’s biography, Constantin
Tănase and his writers were inspired by the Munich Treaty of 1938 and the
subsequent occupation of Czechoslovakia to write and perform a satirical
scene called “Don’t say, I didn’t tell you.” He describes the Munich Treaty as a
marked game of poker during which three were paying and one was taking all,
alluding also to the fact that no Czechoslovakian representatives were present
at the treaty. The show was censored after just a few performances (Massoff
and Tănase, 204–205).
29. See especially Part 4, “Characteristics of Rumanian Fascism,” 98–174.
30. Margrit Fröhlich, Hanno Lewy, Heinz Steinert, “Lachen darf man nicht,
lachen muss man.”
31. As Radu Ioanid explains in The Holocaust in Romania, Romanian oil had been
a priority of the Berlin authorities since at least 1935, and in 1940, delivery of
oil to support the anticipated war effort against the USSR became a condition
for the improvement of relations between the two countries (52).
32. For an elaborate discussion of Holocaust denial and deflection in East Central
Europe, see Michael Shafir’s study, “Between Denial and ‘Comparative
Trivialization.’ ”
33. On March 4–5, 1971, a conference under the title “Against Fascism: Critical
Analysis and Exposure of Fascism in Romania” reduced Romanian Fascism
to the Legionary Movement; Jews were mentioned only in a series of vic-
tims, including the proletariat, peasants, worker’s movement, and others.
The papers were published in Împotriva fascismului. Sesiune ştiinţifică privind
analiza critică şi demascarea fascismului în România, Bucharest, 1971 (quoted
in Rotman, 209).
34. See, for example, Rotman’s assessment of the survivors’ situation in post-
Holocaust Romania in “Memory of the Holocaust in Communist Romania,”
205–16. While Olga Lengyel’s Five Chimneys: The Story of Auschwitz (1947)
was probably the first book by a survivor from Romania, it referred to the fate
of the Jews from Hungarian-occupied Northern Transylvania. Her story is
presented in the documentation center of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.
Survivors from Transnistria wrote their experiences very late, in part because
many returned to Romania; Ruth Glasberg Gold’s Ruth’s Journey, for exam-
ple, was published in 1996 in the United States.
35. See Géraldine Kortmann’s excellent article on the absurd in Mihaileanu’s
Train de vie.
36. “Interviu cu Radu Mihaileanu,” http://www.cinemagia.ro/filme/trenul-vietii-
train-de-vie-2917/articol/2802/.
37. See also Žižek’s discussion of the end of comedies and tragedies in “Camp
Comedy.”
38. According to the Final Report of the Wiesel Commission, 1011 out of 5000
survived in the train from Iaşi to Călăraşi; in the second train to Podul
Iloaiei, 2000 out of 2700 lost their lives. See also, Jean Ancel, Preludiu la
asasinat: Pogromul de la Iaşi, 29 iunie 1941, especially chapter 5, “Trenul
morţii,” 151–175, and chapter 10, “ ‘Trenul morţii’ la Podul Iloaiei,”

329–344. However, Ancel’s numbers differ from those of the Wiesel
Commission.
39. There is also a controversy surrounding Benigni’s and Mihaileanu’s movies.
According to Mihaileanu, he sent Benigni his script for Train de vie because
he wanted Benigni for the role of Schlomo. Benigni rejected the role and
wrote his own La vita e bella. While the two films are very different, the idea
of producing a comedy about the Holocaust is, of course, the same. Not sur-
prisingly, Mihaileanu’s movie, which was released after Benigni’s, has since
always been mentioned in connection with Benigni’s more successful “first”
Holocaust comedy. A few scholars and critics, however, prefer Mihaileanu’s
Train de vie over Benigni’s film. See, for example, Stefan Steinberg’s “An
Interview with Radu Mihaileanu, the director of Train of Life: ‘We have to
learn to articulate these deep emotions.’ ” Steinberg calls Train de vie “far
superior to Roberto Benigni’s Life is beautiful.” Omer Bartov also considers
Mihaileanu’s film “a better—and, if one may say so, both more hilarious and
disturbing—film than Life is beautiful” (135).
40. Steinberg, Stefan. March 31, 2000. An Interview with Radu Mihaileanu,
the Director of Train of Life: “We have to Learn to Articulate these Deep
Emotions.” World Socialist Website. www.wsws.org/articles/2000/mar2000/
radu-m31.shtml.
41. David Crossland, “Meet Hitler, the Bed-Wetting Drug Addict,” Spiegel
Online.
42. See, for example, Kevin Thomas’s review, in which he remarks that many of
the stopovers “seemed lifted from Fiddler on the Roof.” Thomas’s review, how-
ever, is quite superficial and seems to miss the end of the movie. Moreover,
he tries to explain the Communist movement among the Jews on the train
with the utterly ignorant and simplistic, if not offensive, remark “[I]t’s not for
nothing that Mihaileanu is a refugee from Romania.”
43. In Sally Potter’s British movie, The Man who Cried, several Romanies are
present as secondary victims. Interestingly, the Romanies speak Romanian
and they include the Romani musical group Taraf de haiduci.
44. See, for example, Guenther Lewy, who argues that Romanies were never tar-
geted for total or even partial extermination, while Henry Friedlander and
Ian Hancock contend that the persecution and mass murder of Romanies
parallel the fate of the Jews under the Nazi regime. In the Romanian con-
text, see Ioanid’s study, The Holocaust in Romania, in which he documents
the persecution and deportation of Romanies alongside the Romanian
Jews.
45. Several historical persons are present in the film as well, as in Malaparte’s
book: Constantin Lupu, the commander of the municipal garrison of Iaşi,
who received the order from Antonescu to resolve the Jewish problem in Iaşi;
Niculescu-Coca, Lupu’s successor; and Satori, the Italian consul at Iaşi.
46. According to Ancel, five thousand Jews held at the prefecture of Iaşi were
killed during the pogrom (Preludiu la asasinat, 42).
47. Jean Ancel explains that Niculescu-Coca, who arrived in Iaşi the day before
the pogrom and who became Lupu’s successor as the commander of the gar-
rison of Iaşi in July 1941, turned out to be one of the most savage killers
in Odessa later that year. He was responsible for the deaths of twenty-two
thousand Jews, most of whom were burned alive in the village of Dalnic near
Odessa on October 23, 1941 (Preludiu la asasinat, 41–42).
48. The meadow at Podul Iloaiei was called “cîmpia morţii” (“meadow of death”)
because of the 1194 dead from the train who were left there for two days until
they reached an advanced degree of putrefaction (Ancel, 339).
49. During the night of the pogrom, Malaparte reports that he and Sartori saved
about one hundred Jewish people as they were trying to flee from the perpe-
trators (Kaputt, 142).
50. In Malaparte’s Kaputt, Malaparte and Sartori convince the officer to open
the train by invoking their connection with Mussolini. Once they opened the
door, they witnessed corpses dropping “in masses” from the train (174).
51. The script writers, Rădulescu and Baciu, are either unaware of, or choosing to
ignore for the sake of the plot, the Jewish custom of not naming children after
living relatives.
52. President Traian Băsescu’s much-publicized racist remark, accidentally
recorded on a cell phone he snapped from a journalist and forgot to turn off,
reflects the attitude of many Romanians toward Romanies. Băsescu called
Andreea Pană a “ţigancă împuţită” (“filthy/stinky Gypsy”). He later apolo-
gized in a press statement claiming that this unfortunate private incident made
public does not reflect his attitude toward the Roma minority. Unfortunately,
this is an all-too-common occurrence in Romania; obviously, the president is
no exception (D. Mihai).
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———. Paul Celan—Nelly Sachs. Briefwechsel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1993.
Wiedemann-Wolf, Barbara. Antschel Paul–Paul Celan. Studien zum Frühwerk.
Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1985.
Wiesel, Elie. After the Darkness: Reflections on the Holocaust. New York: Schocken,
2002.
———. All Rivers Run to the Sea. New York: Schocken, 1996.
———. Night. New York: Bantam Books, 1982.
———. A Jew Today. New York: Vintage, 1979.
Wiesel, Elie and Michaël de Saint Cheron. Evil and Exile. Trans. Jon Rothschild
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Wieviorka, Annette. L’Ère du témoin. Paris: Plon, 1998.
Wieviorka, Michel. La tentation antisemite, Paris: Editions Robert Lafont, 2005.
Young, James E. At Memory’s Edge. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
———. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University
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Con t r i bu tor s
Emily Miller Budick holds the Ann and Joseph Edelman Chair in
American Literature in the Departments of English and American Studies at
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Her major publications include:
Emily Dickinson and the Life of Language (Louisiana State University Press,
l985); Fiction and Historical Consciousness (Yale University Press, l989);
Engendering Romance (Yale University Press, 1994); Nineteenth- Century
American Romance (Twayne/Macmillan, 1996); Blacks and Jews in Literary
Conversation (Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Aharon Appelfeld’s
Fiction (Indiana University Press, 2004). She also edited Modern Hebrew
Fiction by Gershon Shaked (Indiana University Press, 2000) and Ideology
and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature (SUNY, 2001). She is
currently working on a book-length study of Holocaust fiction.
Alexandru Florian is the executive director of the Elie Wiesel National
Institute for Romanian Holocaust Studies and professor of political science
at the Dimitrie Cantemir University. He is the author of Fundamentele
doctrinelor politice [The Fundaments of Political Doctrines] (Bucharest,
2006), Modele politice ale tranziţiei [Political Patterns of Transition]
(Bucharest, 2004), Romania si capcanele tranziţiei [Romania and the Traps
of Transition] (Bucharest, 1999), Cunoaştere si acţiune socială [Knowledge
and Social Action] (Bucharest, 1987), Procesul integrării sociale [The
Process of Social Integration] (Bucharest, 1983), and the co-author of
Cum a fost posibil? Evreii din România in timpul Holocaustului [How was it
Possible? Romanian Jews During the Holocaust] (Bucharest, 2007), Radu
Florian: Evocations (Bucharest, 2005), Tranziţii in modernitate [Transitions
to Modernity] (Bucharest, 1997), and Ideea care ucide: Dimensiunile ide-
ologiei legionare [The Idea that Kills: The Dimensions of the Legionary
Ideology] (Bucharest, 1994).
Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu is a professor of sociology at the Alexandru
Ioan Cuza University in Iaşi, Romania, and associate member of Centre
de Sociologie Européenne (Paris), Centre d’Etudes de l’Emploi (Noisy le
Grand, CNRS), and Réseau Acteurs Emergents (Fondation Maison des
260 / contributors
Sciences de l’Homme, Paris). Since 2004, he has also served on the scien-
tific council of the Elie Wiesel National Institute for Romanian Holocaust
Studies in Bucharest. He is the author of Intelectualii în cîmpul puterii.
Morfologii si traiectori sociale (Iaşi, 2007), and co-editor of Mobilitatea elite-
lor în România secoluluii al XX-lea (Bucharest) and Littératures et pouvoir
symbolique (Bucharest, 2005).
Valentina Glajar is an associate professor of German at Texas State
University—San Marcos. She is the author of The German Legacy in East
Central Europe (Camden House, 2004), and co-editor (with Domnica
Radulescu) of “Gypsies” in European Literature and Culture (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008) and Vampirettes, Wretches, and Amazons: Western
Representations of East European Women (East European Monographs, dis-
tributed by Columbia University Press, 2004). She also translated (with
André Lefevere) Herta Müller’s novel Traveling on One Leg (Northwestern
University Press, 1998, 2010). Currently, she is working on a book-length
study on generational tales of expulsion and is co-editing a volume on
Herta Müller.
Florence Heymann is ingénieur de recherche at the CNRS in the Centre de
Recherche Français in Jerusalem. Her publications include Le Crépuscule
des lieux (Paris, Stock, 2003) and Un Juif pour l’ islam (Paris, Stock, 2005).
She also co-edited Le Corps du texte: Pour une anthropologie des textes de la
Tradition juive (Paris, CNRS Editions, 1997); L’ historiographie israélienne
aujourd’ hui (Paris, CNRS Editions, 1998); and Lettres choisies de Martin
Buber 1899-1965 (Paris, CNRS Editions, 2004).
Marianne Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English
and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and co-director of the
Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Her recent publications
include Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (1997),
The Familial Gaze (1999), a special issue of Signs on “Gender and Cultural
Memory” (2002), and Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust (2004).
She has also published numerous articles on cultural memory, visuality,
and gender, particularly in respect to the representation of World War II
and the Holocaust in literature, testimony, and photography. Her latest
book is Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory, co-
authored with Leo Spitzer (University of California Press, 2009).
Andrei Oişteanu is a researcher in the fields of cultural anthropol-
ogy and history of religions and mentalities at the Institute for History
of Religions (Romanian Academy) and the president of the Romanian
Association of the History of Religions. He is also an associate professor
at the University of Bucharest, Department of Jewish Studies. He is the
contributors / 261
author of several books, including Mythos and Logos: Studies and essays of
cultural anthropology (Nemira, 1998); Cosmos vs. Chaos: Myth and Magic
in Romanian Traditional Culture (The Romanian Cultural Foundation
Publishing House, 1999); Das Bild des Juden in der Rumänischen
Volkskultur (Konstanz: Hartung- Gore, 2002); Imaginea evreului in cul-
tura românescă (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2004); Religion, Politics and
Myth: Texts about Mircea Eliade and Ioan Petru Culianu, (Bucharest:
Polirom, 2007); Il diluvio, il drago e il labirinto: Studi di magia e mito-
logia europea comparata (Verona: Edizioni Fiorini, 2008); Inventing
the Jew: Anti- Semitic Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central-East
European Cultures, Foreword by Moshe Idel (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2009); Konstruktionen des Judenbildes: Rumänische und
Ostmitteleuropäische Stereotypen des Antisemitismus (Berlin: Frank und
Timme, 2010); Narcotics in Romanian Culture. History, Religion, and
Literature (Iaşi: Polirom, 2010). His books received prestigious prizes in
Romania, Italy, and Israel.
Iulia-Karin Patrut is research collaborator at the University of Trier,
Germany. She is the author of Schwarze Schwester—Teufelsjunge. Ethnizität
und Geschlecht bei Paul Celan und Herta Müller (Cologne, 2006) and co-
editor of Zigeuner’ und Nation. Repräsentation—Inklusion —Exklusion
(Frankfurt am Main, 2008); Minderheitenliteraturen: Grenzerfahrung
und Reterritorialisierung (Bucharest, 2008); Fremde Arme—arme
Fremde‚ Zigeuner’ in Literaturen Mittel- und Osteuropas (Frankfurt
am Main, 2007); Europa und seine‚ Zigeuner’ (Sibiu, 2007); Ethnizität
und Geschlecht. (Post-)koloniale Verhandlungen in Geschichte, Kunst und
Medien (Cologne, 2006); and Die andere Hälfte der Globalisierung.
Menschenrechte, Ökonomie und Medialität aus feministischer Sicht
(Frankfurt am Main, 2001).
Corina L. Petrescu is assistant professor of German at the University of
Mississippi. Her teaching and research interests include National Socialist
Germany, representations of 1968 in the German and Romanian imaginary,
protest movements, transnational/transcultural literature, German-Jewish
relations from the eighteenth century to the present, and Yiddish theater.
Her first book is titled Against All Odds: Models of Subversive Spaces in
National Socialist Germany (Peter Lang, 2009). Her new project focuses on
Romanian-born ethnic German writer Eginald Schlattner and highlights his
contribution to the process of coming to terms with the past in Romania.
Domnica Radulescu is professor of French and Italian literatures at
Washington and Lee University. She is the author of André Malraux: The
“Farfelu” as Expression of the Feminine and the Erotic (Peter Lang, 1994);
262 / contributors
Sisters of Medea (University Press of the South, 2002); and the novels Train
to Trieste (Knopf, 2008) and Black Sea Twilight (Doubleday, 2010). She also
edited Realms of Exile (Lexington Books, 2002) and co-edited Vampirettes,
Wretches, and Amazons: Western Representations of East European Women
(East European Monographs, distributed by Columbia University
Press, 2004); Theater of Teaching and the Lessons of Theater (Lexington
Books, 2005); and “Gypsies” in European Literature and Culture (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008). For her first novel, Train to Trieste, she received the
2009 Fiction Prize from the Library of Virginia.
Deborah Schultz is a research fellow in the Department of History,
University of Sussex, and assistant professor of art history at Richmond
University and Regent’s College, London. Her primary areas of study
focus on word-image relations, historiography, and memory in twentieth-
century and contemporary art. Her major publications include Pictorial
Narrative in the Nazi Period: Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and
Arnold Daghani, co-authored with Edward Timms (London, 2009);
Arnold Daghani’s Memories of Mikhailowka: The Illustrated Diary of a Slave
Labour Camp Survivor, co-edited with Edward Timms (London, 2009);
Marcel Broodthaers: Strategy and Dialogue (Bern: Oxford, 2007); and
“ ‘The Conquest of Space’: On the Prevalence of Maps in Contemporary
Art” (Leeds, 2001). She is a regular contributor to Art Monthly and other
contemporary art journals.
Leo Spitzer is the Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor of History Emeritus at
Dartmouth College and visiting professor of history at Columbia University.
His recent publications include Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a
Refuge from Nazism (Hill & Wang 1998); Lives in Between: Assimilation
and Marginality in Austria, Brazil and West Africa (Cambridge, 1990; Hill
& Wang, 1999) and the co-edited volume Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall
in the Present (University Press New England, 1999). He has also written
numerous articles on the Holocaust and Jewish refugee memory and its
generational transmission. He also co-authored, with Marianne Hirsch,
Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (University
of California Press, 2009).
Jeanine Teodorescu is assistant professor of French at Columbia College in
Chicago. Her teaching and research interests include theatre, the arts, com-
parative literature, Francophone studies, history, and politics. She has writ-
ten articles on Eugene Ionesco and Eastern-European cinema. Her book,
Ionesco, Politics, and Literature: Romania and France, is in preparation.
I n de x
Note: Please note that page numbers appearing in bold indicate illustrations.
Abrasha (member of resistance in Gaissin), 35; Eliade and, 121–122; films and,
94–96, 109 226, 229; Greater Romania Party and,
Acterian, Haig, 119, 127 202; Holocaust denial and, 36;
Actorul şi sălbaticii (The Actor and the Hooligan’s Return and, 175; identity
Savages) (film), 10, 227, 230–233, 237, and, 177; Ioanid and, 231; Manea and,
240 179, 180, 185, 186; media and, 13n20,
Aderca, Marcel, 140, 141 226, 229; present-day Romanian, 219,
Adev ărul (newspaper), 203 228; Puric and, 203–204; state-
Adorno, Theodor, 197, 206–207 sanctioned, 22–24, 26; Tudor and, 33,
Age of Wonders, The (Appelfeld), 160–163, 42n38
171 Antonescu, Ion Marshal, 20, 37n1, 67, 73, 86;
Agnon, S. Y., 158, 159, 165, 168 anti-Semitism and, 28, 34–35, 39n20;
Agora (journal), 141 Communism and, 27; deportations/
agrarian reform of 1921, 21–22 exterminations during regime of, 5–6,
Alexander, Jeffrey, 2 23–24, 41n35, 180, 195; Eliade and, 128;
Alexandru, Laszlo, 179, 192n13 fall of, 25; Fascism and, 182; Goma on, 32,
Alexianu, Gheorghe (governor of 40n29; Greater Romania Party and,
Transnistria), 86 12n19; Iaşi pogrom and, 240; Iron Guard
Aleykhem, Sholem, 212 and, 10; “Jormania” and, 184; Legionary
allies, 25 Movement and, 28, 33, 38n8; praise for, 5,
allies of Nazi Germany, 4, 22, 210 30, 33–36, 40n29, 196; responsibility of,
All That Remains (film), 160, 161–162 29, 31, 229; revisionist history and, 19;
Alpern, Naftali, 86 silence on, 226; Solomovici and, 33;
Amishai-Maisels, Ziva, 108 Solonari on, 2; trials of, 6, 25; Yiddish
Ampel, Rachel, 77–78, 79, 87n3 theater and, 211
Ancel, Jean, 2, 85–86, 226–227, 245n47 Antonescu, Mihai, 57
Andreescu, Gabriel, 30–31 Antschel, Paul. See Celan, Paul
Anii de ucenicie ai lui August Prostul (The Appelfeld, Aharon, 8, 9, 11, 157–173, 176;
Years of Apprenticeship of August the Age of Wonders, 160–163, 171; Beyond
Fool) (Manea), 176 Despair, 168; Ice Mine, 163–165, 171;
Anti-Defamation League, 202 Iron Tracks, 162; mother of, 160,
anti-Fascist Communists, 27 162–163, 166–167, 169–173; Sippur
anti-Semitism, 40n29, 181; Antonescu Haim: Story of a Life, 157, 162–164, 169,
regime and, 28, 34–35, 39n20; 170–171, 176; Transnistria, the Hell,
Appelfeld and, 167; Celan and, 146; 228; Tzili: The Story of a Life,
Christianity and, 202, 206; Coja and, 170–171
264 / index
Arendt, Hannah, 1–2, 177, 185, 197, Black Book (Carp), 3, 25–26, 69, 78
206–207 Blaga, Lucian, 9
Arghezi, Tudor, 9, 203 blame. See responsibility
Aristotle, 205 Blanchot, Maurice, 101
Armata, mare şalul şi evreii (The Army, the Blood Bath in Rumania: “. . . an orgy
Marshal, and the Jews) (Stoenescu), 31 unparalleled in modern history” (article
art. See Daghani, Arnold by United Rumanian Jews of
Artists’ Union, 97 America), 4
August Dohrmann engineering company, Bogdan, Radu, 97
93, 94, 98 Boia, Lucian, 20
Auschwitz, 10, 205, 207; Dante’s Inferno Bolshevik Revolution, 21
and, 198, 202; images on, 219n3; Bosnian Muslims, 207
Nahtshiht and, 215, 219 bourgeoisie, 216
authenticity, 91, 100, 102 Braham, Randolph, 201
Avram, Angela, 242n14 Bregović, Goran, 235
Bremen Literature Prize, 138
Bachmann, Ingeborg, 139 Brenner, Gottfried (Cernăuţi survivor), 58,
Baciu, Alexandru, 237 60, 70
Bal, Mieke, 3 Brenner, Hedy (Cernăuţi survivor), 58–59,
Balzac, Honoré de, 189–190 60
Banuş, Maria, 141 Brenner, Paula (Cern ăuţi survivor), 58
Barasheum Jewish Theater, 33, 41n35, 211, bribery: exemptions/autoriza ţie and,
243n25 68–69; of police, 59
“Barbarie à visage humain, La” (Lévy), Bruckstein, Ludovic, 10, 209, 219
184 Bryson, Norman, 114
barter, 83, 94 Bucharest, Romania, 209, 218
Barthes, Roland, 146 Bucharest pogrom, 4, 27, 130, 218
Bartov, Omer, 2, 235 Buchenwald, 199, 200
Bă sescu, Traian, 196, 246n52 Buchman, Mordechai, 234
“Before the Law” (Kafka), 140 Büchner Prize, 138, 143
Beheaded Rooster, The (film), 229 Bucovina (newspaper), 63
Belzec camp, 23, 29 Bucur, Maria, 2–3
Benda, Julien, 178 Budick, Emily, 9
Benigni, Roberto, 234, 235, 245n39 Bug (river), 73, 93, 96, 106, 108; in
Benjamin, Walter, 113 Daghani’s art, 114
Bercovici, Israil, 218 Bukarester Tagesblatt (journal), 128
Bergmann, Werner, 94, 96, 100–101 Bukovina region, 57, 69, 71, 92, 172;
Bergson, Henri, 114 northern, 58; rural, 80
Bershad ghetto, 96 Bunaciu, Avram, 73
Bettelheim, Bruno, 105 Buna Vestire (far-right publication), 125
“Between Denial and ‘Comparative Buzatu, Gheorghe, 12n19, 33, 34–35,
Trivialization’: Holocaust Negationism 42n38, 226
in Post-Communist East Central
Europe” (Shafir), 226 C ăl ătoria lui Gruber (Gruber’s Journey)
Beyer, Frank, 234, 235 (film), 10, 227, 229, 234, 237–238
Beyond Despair (Appelfeld), 168 Calciu, Laurenţiu, 228–229
Birkenau, 199, 205 Calinescu, Matei, 181
birthplaces, 157–158 Calotescu, Corneliu, 66, 73, 80
index / 265
“Camp interior” (Daghani), 108, 109 74n1, 87n3; Popovici and, 66–68, 72,
“Cântec de dragoste” (Love Song) (Celan), 73; troops in, 58, 80, 93
148 Chagall, Marc, 183
Capsali, Floria, 119 Chalfen, Lulziu (Cernăuţi Jew), 68
Capsali, Sylvia, 119 Chekhov, Anton, 140
Captivi (Captives) (Manea), 176 Chernovtsy, 58
Caragiu, Toma, 230, 244n27 Chiriac, Andreea, 239
Caraion, Ion, 140–141, 145 Christianity, 201–202, 203–207;
Carol II, King of Romania, 26, 38n8, 230 Catholicism and, 198, 205; Christian
Carp, Matatias, 3, 25–26; on Cernăuţi, 58, Serbs and, 207; Daghani’s art and,
59, 69, 72 106–107, 112; Orthodoxy and, 23, 198
Carp, Petre P., 119, 131n3 “Christianity Facing Judaism” (Eliade), 122
Carpathian Mountains, 166, 168 Cine suntem (Who We Are) (Puric),
Cartea neagr ă : Suferin ţele evreilor din 203–204
România 1940–1944 (The Black Book) Cioran, Emil, 127, 177, 180, 187, 191n7, 234
(Carp), 3, 25–26, 69, 78 Clendinnen, Inga, 8
Cartea Rusă (publishing house), 138, 140 “Cloth of our time bearing impression of
Caruth, Cathy, 165 suffering Man” (Daghani), 112
Cassian, Nina, 141, 142 Cocoşul decapitat (The Beheaded Rooster)
catharsis, 105 (film), 229
Catholicism, 198, 205 Codreanu, Corneliu Zelea, 180, 192n15, 232
Cazan, Ileana, 39n25 Coja, Ion, 35–36, 42n43
Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 25, 27, 32, 185, 196; Comarnescu, Petru, 126
nationalism and, 181; Shafir on, 226; Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des
Tudor and, 40n33 Lettres, 176
Ceauşu, Gheorghe, 204 commemoration, Daghani’s art and, 100,
Celan, Paul, 8, 73, 79, 102, 137–149, 105–106, 112–113
181; death of, 147; departure from Communism, 58, 80, 214, 218; Actor and
Romania by, 11; friendships of, 139, the Savages and, 240; Celaru and,
140–149; language and, 9, 138, 220n13; censorship and, 181, 225, 233;
139–140, 141, 142, 147–149, 176; effects of, 227; external evils and, 19;
reception of in West Germany, IKUF, 215; Manea and, 9, 175, 176, 179,
151n30; signature of, 150n7; 182, 184, 185; Marcus and, 230; media
translations of, 140 during, 6, 27–30; Nahtshiht and, 216;
Celaru, Anton, 213, 220n13 1944–1947, 25–27; post-Communist
censorship, 3, 37n8; Celan and, 142; negationism and, 30–36; as “red
Communism and, 181, 225, 233; Plicul Holocaust,” 180; responsibility for, 203–
negru and, 185 204, 240; Romanian Communist Party
Cernăuţi/Czernowitz, 57–74, 58–60, 77, and, 26; Sebastian and, 122; silence and, 3
189; Appelfeld and, 9, 157–163, 168; community, 71
Carp, Matatias and, 58, 59, 69, 72; competition, 20–21
Daghani in, 92–93; deportations from, Complot împotriva României (Plot against
57, 61, 63–69, 71–73, 79, 80–81, 93; Romania) (Hlihor), 41n34
ghetto of, 61–71, 79–80; Jewish Council concentration camps, 143, 227; Belzec, 23,
of, 62, 64, 65; Jewish Hospital of, 65, 29; Buchenwald, 199, 200; Mikhailowka,
67–68; Jewish Temple of, 58, 59; Jews 72, 87n11, 93–96, 98, 106–108;
spared in, 5–6; mail to, 86; Tarrasiwka, 87n11, 96, 106. See also
multiethnicity of, 119, 138; name of, Auschwitz; Birkenau; Moghilev camp
266 / index
Connerton, Paul, 3, 241n8 106; “Sunday morning,” 108, 110;

Constantinescu, Mac, 119, 196 testimonies and, 91, 98–100; “Untitled
Constantiniu, Florin, 31, 33 (woman with baskets and diary entry),”
Constantin Tănase (Massoff and Tănase), 103. See also 1942 1943 And Thereafter
243n25 (Sporadic records till 1977) (Daghani);
Constitution of 1923, 21 What a Nice World (Daghani)
Contemporanul (journal), 140 Daghani’s art: Christian analogies in,
contrapasso (“perfection” of suffering), 198, 106–107, 112; memory in, 99–100, 108;
202 style of, 96–98, 106–107; survival in,
“Contrescarpe, La” (Celan), 138, 150n6 109; word-image relationship in,
Conversations à Jassy (Pachet), 52 107–114, 116
Corespondenţa lui Marcel Proust (Marcel Dante Alighieri, 10, 197–202, 205
Proust’s Correspondence) (Sebastian), 126 Death of Mr. L ăz ărescu, The (R ădulescu),
Covaci, Maria, 28 237
Creţia, Petru, 186 “Death of the Author, The” (Barthes),
“Cricket in Poland” (Malaparte), 187 146
“Cris” (Michaux), 145 death trains, 12n17, 31, 187; Gruber’s
Cristea, Miron, 23 Journey and, 237–238; Train of Life
Crohmă lniceanu, Ovid S. (Mony Cahn), and, 10, 227, 229, 233–238, 240,
141, 143, 145 245n39
Culianu, Ioan Petru, 119, 127, 183, 192n17 De dou ă mii de ani (For Two Thousand
Cum am devenit huligan (How I Became Years) (Sebastian), 121, 179
a Hooligan) (Sebastian), 9, 122, 177, deflective negationism, 32
178 dehumanization, 206–207
Cuza, A. C., 203 democracy, 6, 22, 32, 227
Czernowitz. See Cernăuţi/Czernowitz; “Denk Dir” (Just Think) (Celan), 142
Chernovtsy deportations, 63–70, 184, 215; Antonescu
and, 5–6, 23–24, 41n35, 180, 195; to
Daghani, Arnold, 7–8, 91–117; Auschwitz, 10; Daghani and, 93;
authenticity and, 91, 100, 102; “Camp exemptions from, 64, 66–69, 72;
interior,” 108, 109; “Cloth of our time Holocaust denial and, 29; justification
bearing impression of suffering Man,” of, 57–58; Manea and, 176, 181, 182,
112; commemoration and, 100, 187; Mihaileanu and, 233–236;
105–106, 112–113; diaries of, 91–92, Popovici and, 189; recognition of, 196;
99–100, 105–106; emigration of, 11, responsibility for, 210; silence and, 225;
97–98; escape from Mikhailowka by, state-sanctioned anti-Semitism and, 22
94–96; Grave is in the Cherry Orchard, deportations from Cernăuţi, 61, 79, 93; in
The, 92, 101; handwriting of, 102–106; 1941 (first wave), 57, 63–69, 80–81; in
“Images after the encounter with a world 1942 (second wave), 71–73
of phantoms keep rushing on...,” 114, deportees, 79–80, 82
115; interpretation and, 99–100, Der Spiegel (magazine), 5
105–106; language and, 101–102; Let Diavolul şi ucenicul s ău: Nae Ionescu şi
Me Live!, 92, 99; life story of, 92–98; Mihail Sebastian (The Devil and His
“Nanino at the window (in Apprentice: Nae Ionescu and Mihail
Czernowitz),” 109–112, 111; “Nanino’s Sebastian), 179–180
shoes,” 108, cover; “New Year flowers distillation, 164, 170
for Nanino,” 94, 95; “On the way to Divina Commedia, La (Dante), 199, 201,
work on the road,” 93; “ROLL-CALL,” 202, 205
index / 267
Dniester (river), 57, 63, 81 saving from, 5–6, 13n22, 29, 30, 35,
documentaries, 227–230, 240 195–196
Dră gan, Iosif Constantin, 33 extortion from deportees, 82
Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven, 233, 238
education, 4, 30, 39n25
Ehrlich, Isaak (Cernăuţi Jew), 70 Family Friends (Hirsch), 235
Eichmann, Adolf, 207 fanaticism, 207
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Fascism, 4, 24, 184, 206; Antonescu and,
Banality of Evil (Arendt), 1–2 182; blame on for Holocaust, 19;
Einhorn, Erich, 139 Eliade and, 177; Ioanid and, 231;
Einsatzgruppe D, 58, 80 Manea and, 9, 175, 181, 185, 186;
Einsatzkommando Zehn B, 80, 81 Marcus and, 230; media and, 25–27;
Eliade, Mircea, 8, 9, 54, 120, 121, nostalgia for, 196; Popovici and, 189;
131n2; defense of Sebastian by, Sebastian and, 178, 179, 180; Wiesel
121–122, 178; Manea and, 177, 180, and, 202
186; right-wing political stance of, Felix culpa (Happy Guilt), 180
179; Sebastian’s death and, 129–130, Fichman, Pearl (Cernăuţi survivor), 68, 69
191n12. See also Eliade/Sebastian films. See Holocaust films
friendship Final Report (of Wiesel Commission), 4,
Eliade, Nina, 126, 128 23, 34–35, 36, 39n22, 180, 244n38
Eliade/Sebastian friendship, 8, 119–130, Final Solution, 22–24, 35; in Romania, 29
179; Eliade in defense of Sebastian and, fire, 199–200, 231
121–122, 178; Eliade’s avoidance of Fischer, Martha “Atti” (Grae) (secretary at
Sebastian and, 128–129; Eliade’s right- August Dohrmann company), 96,
wing political stance and, 123–124; 100–101
Iphigenia and, 126–128; oscillating Fisher, Julius, 3
nature of, 124–126; Sebastian’s death Flacăra (The Flame) (journal), 217
and, 129–130, 191n12. See also Eliade, “Flaschenpost” (Message in a Bottle)
Mircea; Sebastian, Mihail (Iosef (Celan), 144
Hechter) Florian, Alexandru, 6
Elie Wiesel Goes Home (film), 13n27 Forbidden Forest, The (Eliade), 54
Elie Wiesel Memorial House, 8, 13n27 “Forbidden Laughter” (Loshitzky), 236
Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study forgetfulness, 10, 39n20, 197, 225, 241n8
of the Holocaust, 4 For Two Thousand Years (Sebastian), 177,
Eliezer, 198–202 178
Elsässer, Josef, 94, 100–101 Foucault, Michel, 202
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Ionescu), 180 Foxman, Abraham, 202
Engler, Blanka (Cernăuţi Jew), 62 fragmentation, 99–100
Erll, Astrid, 3, 225 Freud, Sigmund, 181, 186–187
Essays (Montaigne), 181 Frisch, Max, 139
ethnic cleansing, 180
ethnic minorities, 21–22 Gabrea, Radu, 10, 227, 229, 234, 237–241,
evolution, 204 242n12; departure from Romania by, 11
“Excursion into the Mountains” (Kafka), Gafencu, Valeriu, 203
140 “Gastmahl, Das” (The Banquet) (Celan),
exile, 182; of Manea, 186 141
extermination of Jews, 22–24; Holocaust “Geheimnis der Farne, Das” (The Secret of
denial and, 29; recognition of, 196; the Ferns) (Celan), 141
268 / index
Gelbelman, Esther, 228 Hero of Our Time, A (Lermontov), 140

Gelber, Moritz (Cernăuţi Jew), 71 Heymann, Florence, 7, 77–89
genocide, 10, 24, 197, 207 Hilberg, Raul, 2, 22, 24, 41n34
Geppert, Klaus (German officer), 60 Hilgruber, Andreas, 34
German language, 139–140, 141, 147–148 Hillesum, Etty (Auschwitz victim), 101
Germans, 100–101; Nahtshiht and, 215, Hilsenrath, Edgar, 176
217; troops of in Cernăuţi, 58, 80, 93 Hiroshima, 207
Getzler, Nathan, 57, 61 Hirsch, Carl (Cernăuţi survivor), 61–66,
Gheorghiu, Mihai Dinu, 6 68, 70, 71–72
Gheorghiu, Virgil, 54 Hirsch, Lotte (Cernăuţi survivor), 59,
ghetto, 96, 188; of Cernăuţi, 61–71, 79–80; 61–65, 69, 71–72
map of, 63; recognition of, 29, 196 Hirsch, Marianne, 2, 6–7, 235
Gilman, Sander, 234 history, memory and, 7, 20–21, 85–87, 91,
Giurescu, Dinu C., 34–35, 42n41 99–100, 234–235
Glajar, Valentina, 10 History of Romania (Roller), 26
Gold, Ruth Glasberg, 1–2, 11, 242n13 History of Romanians (Buzatu), 34
Goldfaden, Abraham, 209–210, 212, 214 hitbonenut (observation), 167
“Goll affair,” 146, 151n16 Hitler, Adolf, 5, 26, 34, 210; Actor and the
Goma, Paul, 32, 40n29 Savages and, 230, 231–232; Wiesel and,
“good fortune,” 71, 79–80 200
Gottfried, Max (Cernăuţi Jew), 64 Hoffman, Eva, 79
Grave is in the Cherry Orchard, The Hollstein, Miriam, 233
(Daghani), 92, 101 Holocaust (as term): during Communist
Greater Romania, 21 era, 28, 34; pre-formulation of, 143;
Greater Romania Party, 12n19, 32–34, 202 Romanian context of, 31; in schools,
Gretzov, Boris (Romanian), 70 39n25; Tudor and, 33; Wiesel and,
Grindea, Miron, 98 151n25
Gruber’s Journey (film), 10, 227, 229, 234, Holocaust (television miniseries), 243n24
237–241 Holocaust comedy, 234, 235, 245n39
Guerri, Giordano Bruno, 50–52 Holocaust denial, 5, 19–20, 24–25, 226,
Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundation 242n10; anti-Semitism and, 36;
Fellows Award, 176 during Communist regime, 6;
guilt, 143, 145, 147, 187; of survivors, 96, 105 deportations and, 29; Star of Romania
Gulag, 20–21 award and, 202; Tudor and Buzatu
Guţu, George, 142 and, 42n38
Holocaust films, 4–5, 225–241; Actor and
Haidu, Peter, 225, 226 the Savages and, 10, 227, 229,
Hartman, Geoffrey, 165 230–233, 240; Beheaded Rooster and,
Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), 210, 219n6 229; documentaries and,
Hausleitner, Mariana, 11n7 227–230, 240; Gruber’s Journey and, 10,
Hebrew language, 211 227, 229, 234, 237–241; Schindler’s List
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 157 and, 234; Train of Life and, 10, 227,
Hechter, Beno, 130 229, 233–238, 240, 245n39; La vita e
Hechter, Iosef. See Sebastian, Mihail (Iosef bella and, 234, 245n39
Hechter) Holocaust in Romania, The (Ioanid), 4,
Heidegger, Martin, 139 196, 245n44
Hermann, David, 212 Holocaust Memorial in Bucharest, 4,
Heroes and Victims (Bucur), 3 42n42, 226
index / 269
Homer, 205 invasion of Poland, 126

homescapes, 9, 159, 168, 172 involuntary memory, 113–114
Hooligans, The (Eliade), 9, 177, 178 Ioanid, Radu, 4, 22–23, 196, 206, 231
Hooligan’s Return, The: A Memoir (Manea), Ionesco, Eugène, 121, 177, 190n4, 191n6,
9, 175, 177, 178, 181, 184, 187 234; dehumanization and, 206–207
Horthy regime, 195 Ionescu, Nae, 121, 131n4, 179–180, 191n9,
How I Became a Hooligan (Sebastian), 9, 191n11; For Two Thousand Years and, 178
122, 177, 178 Ionescu, Vasile, 67
humanism, 177 Iordanova, Dina, 236
humanity, 77–78, 92, 108 Iorga, Nicolae, 203
Hungarian Holocaust, 196, 226 Iorgulescu, Mircea, 230
Hungarians, 196, 215 Iphigenia (Eliade), 126–128
Hungary, 28 Iron Guard, 5, 10, 177, 196, 230; Actor
hunger in Moghilev, 83–84 and the Savages and, 227, 231–232, 237;
Huyssen, Andreas, 2 death of leaders of, 124
Iron Tracks (Appelfeld), 162
Ia şi pogrom, 2, 4, 240; Gruber’s Journey “Is Life Beautiful? Can the Shoah be
and, 10, 227, 237–239; Kaputt and, Funny? Thoughts on Recent and Older
47–54; Stoenescu on, 31; trials of Movies” (Gilman), 234
perpetrators of, 6, 25–26; Zile Israel, 163, 172
însângerate la Ia şi and, 28 Istoria evreilor. Holocaustul (The History of
ice, 200–201 the Jews: The Holocaust) (textbook), 30
Ice Mine (Appelfeld), 163–165, 171
identity, 175, 177, 178, 184, 186–187 Jacobovici, Simcha, 242n12
Idisher Kultur Farband Teater (IKUF Jagendorf, Siegfried (deportee in
Theater), 10, 209, 211–215 Moghilev), 5, 13n22, 85
ignorance, 13n20, 228, 242n14 Jagendorf ’s Foundry (Jagendorf), 13n22
Ikh leb (I Live) (Pinchevski), 10, 209, Jakob der Lügner (film), 234, 235
212–214, 215, 216, 218 Jakob the Liar (film), 234
IKUF. See Idisher Kultur Farband Teater Jewish committee of Moghilev, 85
(IKUF Theater) Jewish Council of Cernăuţi, 62, 64, 65
Iliescu, Ion, 32, 34, 196, 202, 241n9 Jewish Hospital of Cernăuţi, 65, 67–68
“Images after the encounter with a world of Jewish-owned businesses, 60
phantoms keep rushing on...” Jewish Studies, 186
(Daghani), 114, 115 Jewish Temple of Cernăuţi, 58, 59
imagination, 164–165 Jewish Writers of Romanian Language
“Incompatibilities, The” (Manea), 179 (Hebrew Anthology), 175
Inferno (Dante), 10, 197–202, 205 Jews, 38n8, 80, 121, 160, 162; crimes
“In Goldfaden’s Footsteps” (Aleykhem), 212 against, 143–144; definition of, 22–23;
intentional memory, 113 deportations of during Antonescu’s
International Commission for the Study regime, 5–6; Eliade and, 130; Kaputt
of the Holocaust in Romania (Wiesel and, 48; Legionary Movement and,
Commission). See Wiesel Commission 27–28; population of, 37n5, 219n4;
International Day of Commemoration of professional, 60, 64, 67; as responsible
the Holocaust, 1 for Communism, 39n24; as responsible
interpretation, Daghani and, 99–100, for Hitler, 34; silence of surviving, 25;
105–106 spared, 5–6, 29, 30, 35, 195–196; spared
interregnum phase, 80 by Jagendorf, 13n22; theater and, 211
270 / index
Jews of Jassy, 48–49 and, 28, 33, 38n8; Christian

Jew Today, A (Wiesel), 197 Orthodoxy and, 23; Codreanu and,
John Paul II (pope), 205 192n15; Eliade and, 124–128;
“Jormania,” 184 Sebastian and, 122, 178
Journal, 1935–1944 (Sebastian), 8, 30, Lermontov, Mikhail, 140
127, 179, 186 Let Me Live (Daghani), 99
Joyce, James, 182 Levi, Primo, 101, 105, 176
“Judaism and Antisemitism” (Eliade), Lévy, Bernard-Henry, 184
121–122 Levy, Dani, 235
Judeo-Bolshevism, 31 Life is Beautiful (film), 234, 245n39
Judeophobia, 36 Liiceanu, Gabriel, 30, 39n24
Loewenstein, Theodor, 128
kaddish prayer, 171–172, 205 Loshitzky, Josefa, 234, 236
Kafka, Franz, 140, 148, 181 L’oublié (Wiesel), 197
Kaputt (Malaparte), 6, 47–54, 187, Lübeck investigations, 98–100
246n50; Gruber’s Journey and, 237–239 Luca, Gherasim, 140
Kareţ ki, Aurel, 28 Ludo, Isaac, 122
Kassovitz, Peter, 234 Lustig, Oliver, 29–30
Kawa, Hanna, 214
Kertész, Imre, 190 Maccabi, Yehuda, 212
Kessler, Arthur (Cernăuţi Jew), 72 MacFarquahar, Larissa, 189
mail, illicit transportation of, 85–86
Laignel-Lavastine, Alexandra, 126 Malamud, Bernard, 185
landscapes, 169–170, 172–173 Malaparte, Curzio, 6, 47–54, 187, 229,
Langer, Lawrence, 1 246n50; Gruber’s Journey and,
language, 11; Appelfeld and, 168; Celan 237–239
and, 9, 138, 139–140, 141, 142, Malatesta, Paolo, 200
147–149, 176; Daghani and, 101–102; Manea, Norman, 9, 11, 175–190, 183;
German, 139–140, 141, 147–148; of deportation of, 176, 181, 182, 187
ghetto, 79; Hebrew, 211; Jewish Writers Mansdorf, Iacob, 212–215, 221n20
of Romanian Language and, 175; Marcovici, Corina, 141
limitations of, 10, 101, 106; Manea and, Marcus, Manole, 10, 227, 229, 230, 240
176, 188; Romanian, 139–140, 141, 148, Margul-Sperber, Alfred, 8, 140–141, 145,
175; Yiddish and, 188, 210–211, 215, 146, 147, 149
217, 218 Marin, Constantin (Transnistria Romani
Laptele negru (Black Milk) (Manea), 176 survivor), 228–229
Lasker-Schüler, Else, 146 Marin, Ion (Transnistria Romani survivor),
Lasst mich leben! (Let Me Live!) (Daghani), 228
92 Marin, Vasile, 124, 127
“Last Clarification, A” (Eliade), 122 Marinescu, Stere, 72–73
League of National Christian Defense, 22 Mark, Avraham (rabbi of Cernăuţi), 58
Leben? oder Theater? Ein Singespiel (Life? or Marshal Antonescu Foundation, 34
Theatre? A Singing Play) (Salomon), 108 Marxism, 217
L’ écriture du désastre (Blanchot), 101, 105 mass graves, 160, 163, 171–172, 238
Legenda Me şterului Manole (Master Massoff, Ioan, 243n25
Manole’s Legend), 126, 131n10 Matter and Memory (Bergson), 114
Legionary Movement, 22, 27–28; Actor Maxy, Max Herman (Romanian artist),
and the Savages and, 230; Antonescu 97
index / 271
media, 19–36, 227; 1944–1947, 6, 25–27; multiethnic towns, 119, 138

1948–1989, 6, 27–30; 1990–2008, 6, multilingualism, 138
30–36; anti-Semitism and, 13n20, 226, Munteanu, Miruna, 33, 41n35
229; censorship and, 37n8 Muslims, 207
Meerbaum-Eisinger, Selma, 107
Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth about Nahtshiht (The Night Shift) (Bruckstein),
Adolf Hitler (film), 235 10, 209, 215–217, 219
Memoir (Manea), 188, 189–190 Naht-Tog (Night-Day), 212
Memorii (Memoirs) (Eliade), 129 “Nanino at the window (in Czernowitz)”
memory, 1, 6–7, 105, 106; culture of (Daghani), 109–112, 111
memorialization and, 3; Daghani and, “Nanino’s shoes” (Daghani), cover, 108
99–100, 108; in film and literature, Nă stura ş, Constantin (prefect of
4–5; history and, 7, 20–21, 85–87, 91, Moghilev), 85
99–100, 234–235; imagination and, National Institute for Holocaust Studies, 226
164–165; involuntary, 113–114; nationalism, 27, 36, 181
morality of, 91; remembrance and, 3, National Legionary State, 38n8
142, 225; representation of, 91; Wiesel National Liberal Party, 25
and, 207 National Museum of Romanian Literature,
meridian image, 142–143 119, 121
“Message from the Emperor, A” (Kafka), 140 National Peasant Party, 25
Michael Karolyi Foundation, 97 National Socialists (Nazis), 54, 210;
Michaux, Henri, 145 Christianity and, 202; Communism and,
Midrash (interpretation), 100 27; Ioanid and, 231; Nahtshiht and, 217;
Miga, Daniela (friend of Daghani), 97 revisionism and, 24; Soviets and, 214
Mihaelovka camp. See Mikhailowka negationism, 21, 24–25; Coja and, 42n43;
Mihaileanu, Ion, 233, 234 Manea and, 179; post-Communist,
Mihaileanu, Radu, 10, 227, 229, 233–236, 30–36; present-day, 180; Shafir and,
240, 245n39 226; Zile însângerate la Ia şi and, 28. See
Mihok, Brigitte, 11n7 also Holocaust denial
Mikhailowka, 72, 87n11, 93–96, 98, Neiman, Susan, 202
106–108 New Republic, The (publication), 179
Mikhoels, Solomon, 212 newspapers, 57, 63
Minei, Ion, 28 “New Year flowers for Nanino” (Daghani),
Mintel, Walter (SS-Unterscharführer from 94, 95
Mikhailowka), 98 Nicanor, P., 122
“Mircea Eliade File” (Loewenstein), 128 Niculescu-Coca, 245n47
Mischlinge (half-breed), 23 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 202
Mladoveanu, Despina, 141 Night (Hilsenrath), 176
Moghilev camp, 81–85, 181, 182, 188; Night (Wiesel), 10, 176, 197–202
letters from, 7, 77–89 1942 1943 And Thereafter (Sporadic records
“Mohn und Gedächtnis” (Poppy and till 1977) (Daghani), 93, 95, 99, 109, 110,
Memory) (Celan), 144 111, 112; “ROLL-CALL” and, 106
Montaigne, Michel de, 181 Noica, Constantin, 127, 177, 191n8
morality, 91 nostalgia, 182, 196
Moţ a, Ion, 124, 127 Novick, Peter, 24, 27
mothers: Appelfeld and, 160, 162–163, Nünning, Ansgar, 225
166–167, 169–173; Manea and, 183, Nünning, Vera, 3
187–188 Nuremberg Laws, 22, 146, 211
272 / index
Octombrie, ora 8 (October 8 O’Clock) Plicul negru (The Black Envelope)

(Manea), 176 (Manea), 176, 185
Office of Jewish Affairs II, 72–73 “Poem pentru umbra Marianei” (Poem for
Oişteanu, Andrei, 8 Marianne’s Shadow) (Celan), 148
O istorie sincer ă a poporului român (A pogroms, 23; of Bucharest, 4, 27, 130,
Sincere History of the Romanian 218; films and, 229; images of, 183; of
People) (Constantiniu), 31 Jassy, 187; media addressing, 227;
O Krisinitori/Judec ătorul (documentary), silence and, 225; state-sanctioned anti-
228 Semitism and, 22. See also Ia şi pogrom
Om frumos (Beautiful Man) (Puric), 204 Polihroniade, Mihail, 119
“On the way to work on the road” Popovici, Traian, 5–6, 7, 65, 70, 73, 189;
(Daghani), 93 deportation exemptions and, 66–68, 69,
“Open Letter to the President...of the 72
United States” (Coja), 35–36 Portugal Journal, The (Eliade), 8, 54, 130,
Operation Barbarossa, 80 132n12
“Ora e cea de ieri” (It is the Hour of Porumbacu, Veronica, 141
Yesterday) (Celan), 148 Porunca Vremii (newspaper), 57
ordinances, 60, 61 predestination, 198
organized forgetting, 39n19, 226; Present Pasts (Huyssen), 2
Connerton and, 241n8 propaganda, 216
Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt), 177, 185 Protopopescu, ş, 124
Proust, Marcel, 113
Pachet, Pierre, 52–53, 54 Prut River killings, 58, 60
Paleologu, Alexandru, 31 Puncte Cardinale (Cardinal Points)
paradoxes, 79–80, 85 (magazine), 36
Partidul România Mare (Greater Romania Puric, Dan, 203–204, 206
Party), 12n19, 32–34, 202
Passé Présent Présent Passé (Ionesco), 191n6 Rabinovici, Anişoara (“Nanino,” “Anna”),
“Passersby” (Kafka), 140 92–98, 100, 106, 108–112
Pătrăşcanu, Lucreţiu, 19 racial legislation, 22–23
Patrut, Iulia-Karin, 9 racism, 246n52
Pauker, Ana, 203 Racoveanu, Gheorghe, 122
Paul Celan: Dimensiunea românească (Paul Radulescu, Domnica, 10
Celan: The Romanian Dimension) R ădulescu, R ă zvan, 237
(Solomon), 8 Ralea, Mihail, 213
Păun, Paul, 140 “Rats of Jassy, The” (Malaparte), 48, 52,
Pavel, Mărioara (Transnistria Romani 54n3
survivor), 228–229 Reading the Holocaust (Clendinnen), 8
Peasants (Chekhov), 140 Record, The (news bulletin), 4
“perfection” of suffering, 198, 201, 207 “Reg ă sire” (Encounter) (Celan), 148
Petrescu, Corina, 10 religious feelings, 168–169
Petrescu, Gheorghe, 66 repetition, Daghani and, 105–106
Petreu, Marta, 130, 179–180 representation, 8, 91
Philippide, Alexandru, 141 responsibility, 39n24; of Antonescu for
Pinchevski, Moshe, 209, 212, 215, 216 Transnistrian Holocaust, 29, 31, 229; for
Pintilie, Lucian, 226 Communism, 203–204, 240; deflected,
Piontek, Heinz, 144 32, 34, 226; deportations and, 210; of
Pistiner, Rita (Cernăuţi survivor), 69 Germany, 213, 218; Iaşi pogrom and, 240;
index / 273
of Jews for attacks against Romanian army, Salomon, Charlotte, 108

41n34; memory work and, 225; Romanian S ăpt ămâna (weekly paper), 181, 192n16
Holocaust and, 29, 58, 80, 242n14; Schileru, Eugen, 97
scientific accuracy to determine, 35; for Schindler, Oskar, 5
suffering of Jews, 31; of survivors, 105 Schindler’s List (film), 233
“Réveillon,” (Awake/New Year’s Eve) Schlattner, Eginald, 229
(Celan), 148 Schmitt-Hollstein, Dorothea, 233
revisionist history, 19, 24 Scholem, Gustav, 128–129
revisions of Daghani’s diaries, 99–100, Schultz, Deborah, 7–8
105–106 Schwammenthal, Beate (Cernăuţi Jew), 69
Rhinocéros (Ionesco), 121, 191n6, 206 Scurtu, Ioan, 31, 41n34
Richter, Gustav, 128 Sebastian, Mihail (Iosef Hechter), 8, 9, 30,
Ricœur, Paul, 7, 87 120, 121, 191n11; death of, 129–130,
da Rimini, Francesca, 200 191n12; identity and, 187; Manea and,
“ROLL-CALL” (Daghani), 106 177–181, 186; Petreu and,
Roller, Mihail, 26 179–180. See also Eliade/Sebastian
Roma (Romanies, “Gypsies”), 20, 204, friendship
236, 246n52 Se questo è un uomo (Survival at Auschwitz)
Roma (Romani) Holocaust (Porraimos), (Levi), 176
228, 233, 243n18 Shachan, Avigdor, 81
România Mare (magazine), 32, 33 Shafir, Michael, 5, 6, 20–21;
Romanian anti-Semitism, 58 anti-Semitism and, 180; on Holocaust
Romanian Holocaust Remembrance Day, denial, 36; Iliescu and, 241n9; on
4 negationism, 226
Romanian language, 139–140, 141, 148, Shmueli, Ilana, 139
175 Shoah. See Holocaust
Romanian Ministry for Education, 30 Sighet, Romania, 8, 13n27, 196
Romanian People’s Republic, 97 Sighet, Sighet (film), 13n27
Romanian return to Cernăuţi (summer of Silbermann, Edith, 139
1941), 58–60 silence, 25; Appelfeld and, 173;
Romanian troops in Cernăuţi, 58, 80, 93 Communism and, 3; Gabrea and, 227;
Romani (Roma) victims, 11, 229, 233, genocide and, 10; Gruber’s journey and,
235; attitude of Romanians toward, 237; Haidu and, 225, 226; Holocaust
240, 246n52; competitive films and, 240; Mihaileanu and, 233;
victimhood, hierarchization of, 3, Transnistrian camps, 226, 228–229;
236, 243n21; stereotypes associated Wiesel and, 197; Wiesel Commission
with, 236 and, 196
Roma survivors, 228, 229, 243n18 Silvestru, Valentin, 217
Roth, Philip, 170–171 Sima, Horia, 38n8
Rotman, Liviu, 225, 227–228 Simion, Auric ă, 27
Rubel, Kubi (Cernăuţi Jew), 68 Sippur Haim (The Story of a Life)
(Appelfeld), 157, 162–164, 169,
Sachs, Nelly, 139 170–171, 176
Sadova, Marietta, 119 Skin, The (Malaparte), 47
St. Augustine, 198, 205 Skloot, Robert, 210
St. Bernard, 198 slave labor, 93
de Saint Cheron, Michaël, 201, 205, 207 snow, 200–201
Salazar, António de Oliveira, 128 Socialist Realism, Soviet model of, 97
274 / index
Solomon, Petre, 8, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, testimonies, 5, 8, 91, 98–100; letters as,
147 77–79
Solomovici, Te şu, 33, 41n35 Theodorescu, R ă zvan, 39n25
Solonari, Vladimir, 2 “Todestango”/“Todesfuge” (Tango of
southern Romania, 5–6 Death/Death Fugue), 144–145, 152n30,
Soviet Army, 79–80, 212–214, 218; in 176
Cernăuţi, 58, 93; Fascism and, 4; Todt Organisation, 93
Nahtshiht and, 217 totalitarianism, 22, 175, 176, 184, 185. See
Spielberg, Stephen, 233 also Communism; Fascism
Spina, Geri, 214 Totok, William, 32
Spitzer, Leo, 2, 6–7 Train de vie (Train of Life) (film), 10, 227,
Stalin, Joseph, 27 229, 233–238, 240, 245n39
Stanislavski, Konstantin, 212 translations, 8, 142; of Celan, 140; of
Star of Romania award, 12n19, 34, 41n38, letters, 77–78; of Manea, 176
202 transnationality of Celan, 137–138
Stasia (introduced Daghani to Abrasha), 109 Transnistria, the Hell (documentary), 228
Steinberg, Stefan, 235 Transnistria 1941–1942 (Ancel), 86
Steingasse (Rom.: Şt. O. Iosif; Uk.: Transnistria: The Forgotten Cemetery
Pereyaslavska) (Cernăuţi), 62, 63–64 (Fisher), 3
Stoenescu, Alex Mihail, 31, 33, 40n28 Transnistria/Transnistrian Holocaust, 1–2,
stories, 164 3–5, 69, 73, 96, 225–226; Antonescu’s
story (as term), 159 orders and, 35; Communism as compared
Story of a Life, The (Appelfeld), 157, to, 180; deportations to, 184; Eliade and,
162–164, 169, 170–171, 176 130; Hlihor on, 41n34; letters and, 7,
Strette (Celan), 79 77–89; media addressing, 227; paradoxes
Struma disaster, 242n12 in, 79–80; silence and, 226, 228–229;
Sturdza, Dimitrie, 6 Zile însângerate la Iaşi and, 28
Sturdza, M.D., 50 Transylvania, 10, 26, 29, 215, 226
“Sunday morning” (Daghani), 108, 110 Tricolorul (newspaper), 33
survival: art and, 93–94, 109; in Cernăuţi, Trihatz (Trichati), 85
71 “Tristeţe” (Sorrow) (Celan), 148
survivors, 25, 164, 228; guilt of, 96, 105 Tröger, Beate, 150n2
Sword of the Archangel, The (Ioanid), 231 Tudor, Corneliu Vadim, 12n19, 32–34,
40n33, 42n38, 202, 226
Taguieff, Pierre-André, 6, 36 25th Hour, The (Gheorghiu), 54
Tănase, Constantin, 230, 244n28 Twers, Albert (German), 85–86
Tănase, Radu, 243n25 Tzili: The Story of a Life (Appelfeld),
“Tangoul mor ţii” (Celan), 140, 143 170–171
Tarassiwka camp, 87n11, 96, 106
Teatrul Evreesc de Stat (TES) (Jewish State Ukraine, 91, 92, 98, 105–106
Theater), 10, 209, 215 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Teich, Meir (deported from Suceava to (USSR), 25
Transnistria), 81 United Rumanian Jews of America, 4
Teodorescu (police commissioner of United States Holocaust Memorial
Cernăuţi), 59 Museum, 77
Teodorescu, Jeanine, 9 “Untitled (woman with baskets and diary
TES. See Teatrul Evreesc de Stat (TES) entry)” (Daghani), 103
(Jewish State Theater) Uricaru, Eugen, 6, 50
index / 275
Vatra (newspaper), 181 41n38, 202; term Holocaust and,

Velciu, Emil, 86 151n25; vs. Dante, 10
Via ţa evreească (Jewish Life) (publication), Wiesel Commission, 4, 23, 39n22, 180, 226,
214 244n38; Buzatu and, 34; Goma’s threat to
Vilna Troupe, 211, 212 sue, 32; Iliescu and, 196; influence of, 36;
La vita e bella (film), 234, 245n39 recommendations of, 203
Vizuina (The Bunker) (Manea), 176 Wieviorka, Michel, 6, 24, 27, 36
Voicu, George, 180 Williams, Robin, 234
von Ficker, Ludwig, 146 World War I, 22
von Haas, Helmuth, 144 Writers’ Union of Romania, 50
Vremea (journal), 123 Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust
(Young), 8
war crimes: deportations from Cern ău ţ i
and, 57, 61, 63–69, 71–73, 79, 80–81, Yad Vashem, 66, 78
93; Lübeck investigations and, yellow stars, 60–61
98–100; Nuremberg Laws and, 22, Yerushalmi, Yehudit Terris (Transnistria
146, 211 survivor), 84
“wasserfarbenes Wild, Ein” (A Yiddish language, 188, 210–211, 215, 217,
Watercolored Fleece) (Celan), 141 218
water, 164, 169 Yiddish theater, 209–219; Ikh leb and, 10,
Werner, Klaus, 150n2 209, 212–214, 215, 216, 218; IKUF and,
Weyrauch, Wolfgang, 144 10, 209, 211–215; Nahtshiht and, 10,
What a Nice World (Daghani), 93–94, 99, 209, 215–217, 219; objectives of, 210;
101, 103, 104, 108, 115; appearance of, TES and, 10, 209, 215–217; Vilna
102 Troupe and, 211, 212
White, Hayden, 99–100 Yom Kippur, 106
“Why I Believe in the Victory of the Young, James, 8, 235
Legionary Movement” (Eliade),
125–127 Zeitgehöft (Celan), 139
Wiesel, Elie, 8, 195, 196–202, 205–207, Zile însângerate la Ia şi (Bloody Days in
226; Buzatu and, 34–35; departure Ia şi) (Kareţ ki and Covaci), 28
from Romania by, 11; on forgetfulness, Zina (newspaper), 30
225; Manea and, 176; Night, 10, 176, Zivilisationsbruch (collapse of civilization),
197–202; Sighet and, 8, 13n27, 196; 138
Star of Romania award and, 13n19, 34, Žižek, Slavoj, 234

(Studies in European Culture and History) Valentina Glajar, Jeanine Teodorescu (Eds.) - Local History, Transnational Memory in The Romanian Holocaust-Palgrave Macmillan US (2011)

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Studies in European Culture and History

Published by Palgrave Macmillan:

Fictive Theories: Towards a Deconstructive and Utopian Political Imagination

Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of

Transformations of the New Germany

Caught by Politics: Hitler Exiles and American Visual Culture

Police Forces: A Cultural History of an Institution

Representing Masculinity: Male Citizenship in Modern Western Culture

Remembering the Occupation in French Film: National Identity in Postwar Europe

“Gypsies” in European Literature and Culture

Choreographing the Global in European Cinema and Theater

Converting a Nation: A Modern Inquisition and the Unification of Italy

German Postwar Films: Life and Love in the Ruins

Germans, Poland, and Colonial Expansion to the East

Cinema after Fascism: The Shattered Screen

Weimar Culture Revisited

Local History, Transnational Memory in the Romanian Holocaust

To my dear friends Francisca,

Part I Local History, Bearing Witness

Part II Transnational Memory in Literature and Film

Eight Homescapes of Childhood: Aharon Appelfeld’s

Selected Bibliography 251

3.1 Temple Burned by the Nazis, 1941 59

My Holocaust experience is different from others. I have no tattoo, because

gender and genocide, eugenics and modernization.9 In her most recent

communist dictatorship. Minimalization, trivialization, and flat-out denial

twenty thousand Cernăuţi Jews from deportation, earning a special place

contradictions that drove Romania’s Holocaust. Through memoirs, oral

In her article on Celan, Iulia-Karin Patrut focuses on the poet’s relation-

Turning west, to the Hungarian-occupied northern Transylvania 28 and

various destinations; their work literally and figuratively transcends

8. See, for example, Solonari’s article, “ ‘Model province’: Explaining the

contribution to the study of the Holocaust in Romania, President Băsescu con-

Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge

Laignel-Lavastine, Alexandra. 2002. Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco. L’oubli du fascisme :

The historiography and the memory of the Holocaust, of the Romanians,

space. Another important theory neglected by the nationalist historiog-

The Antonescu regime exterminated rather more than 100,000 Romanian

(2007, 101). In this context, the intellectual dispute of Holocaust versus

Particularities of the Holocaust in Romania

citizens, regardless of their ethnic affiliation.6 However, the slow rhythm

who, according to similar racial laws in Nazi Germany, were considered

In spite of these contradictory aspects that distinguish the Holocaust of the

The Reception of the Holocaust: A Problem of

Fascism as the Absolute Evil (1944–1947)

[T]he sequestration of the political parties’ properties, the verification

But there is no further description, nothing about pogroms or Transnistria

This kind of historiography was not necessarily an exception in the

The Unique Ideology and the Monolithic

always placed on the Legionary Movement. Marshal Antonescu appears

In a flagrant discrepancy with history, Minei denies the deportations and

through some unique features. According to Minei, Romania was the

Without minimizing at all Antonescu’s responsibility for the fact that

According to Lustig and other Communist-era historians, the suffering

The Post-Communist Negationism (1990–2008)

be exposed to experiments that could abash their consciousness with

Another type of negationism is deflective negationism. An extremely

As the quote above shows, Goma employs deflective negationism and

Romania, of authority, and of the removal of Judeo-Communism and

will be officially acknowledged” (Final Report, 374). Finally in 2008, dur-

of the United States,” published in the magazine Puncte Cardinale (Cardinal

18. See Benjamin, “Procesul masacrului de la Iaşi. Note pe marginea unor

is unreasonable . . . I think that, if we push things, the attitude towards Jews