Started to read this account and it brought to mind the account my mother,
Pearl Fichman, gave of almost being sent to Transnistria with her parents,
fortunately saved by the arrival of some last minute paperwork justifying their
remaining in Czernowitz. Her account is documented in her book, Before Memories
Fade. Thank you for sharing this.
Eytan
Eytan Fichman
B.Arch., M.Arch., Ed.M. 42 / 11 Trần Bình Trọng,Ngô Quyền, Hải PhòngViệt Nam
On Friday, January 10, 2025 at 02:08:07 PM GMT+7, Jim Wald
<jj...@hampshire.edu> wrote:
https://k-larevue.com/en/romanian-shoah/?utm_campaign=K.LaRevue%23198EN
History
Silenced Truths: Memory, Politics, and the Romanian Shoah. Interview with Marta
Caraion.
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- Elena Guritanu
- 9 January 2025
In twentieth-century Europe, there are places whose names are inextricably
linked with the atrocities committed there. Auschwitz, Majdanek, Buchenwald,
Dachau, Bergen-Belsen… But not all of them sound German or Polish. The family
trajectory of survival and exile that Marta Caraion traces in Geography of
Darkness. Bucharest-Transnistria-Odessa, 1941-1981 [Editor’s translation from
French original], reveals another toponymy of fear. Transformed by Marshal
Antonescu’s Romania into a laboratory for ethnic cleansing, Transnistria is its
darkest node. This intimate and brilliantly documented account unravels this
knot, thread by thread, exposing the long-obscured memory of the Romanian Shoah.
“Long live the liberating marshal!”
Transnistria. A fitting name for an imaginary country. As you read it, you can
imagine the presence of a mountain, a sea or a river, and a mysterious
territory beyond. Hergé could have invented it for new Tintin adventures. But
that’s no mistake, because while Transnistria is not a fictional state in the
strict sense of the term, it is one of the 400 or so micronations whose legal
status is not recognized by the United Nations, alongside the Kingdom of
Redonda, the Principality of Bérémagne and Zaquistan. Self-proclaimed an
independent republic in 1992 – after a war of secession with Moldavia, which
ended without a peace treaty and whose prolongation into a frozen conflict
raises tensions with each new crisis – today’s Transnistria is an autonomous
Moldavian region – under Russian occupation – which stretches along the right
bank of the Dniester to the border with Ukraine.
Given their geopolitical configuration, Hergé’s characters probably wouldn’t
have been thrilled by adventures in this region, no matter how many twists and
turns they might have had. But let’s get back to the river and the territory it
marks out. Transnistria has had two rivers. In 1941, under the government of
Marshal Ion Antonescu – whose armies followed those of the Wehrmacht – Romania
named the zone of military occupation stretching from the Dniester to the
Southern Bug and including the city of Odessa, its capital, the Governorate of
Transnistria. Taken from the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa, the
region between these two rivers was a gift to Romania from Hitler, in
compensation for the loss of northern Transylvania to Hungary.
The Transnistrian Governorate remained under Romanian civil administration
until its re-annexation by the Soviet Union in January 1944. Although
Transnistria was not formally incorporated into Romania, it was transformed, in
accordance with Marshal Antonescu’s wishes, into an ethnic dumping ground
where, between 1941 and 1943, more than 195,000 Jews from Bukovina, Bessarabia
and Romania were deported, along with some 25,000 Roma, as well as political
deportees and resistance fighters. Deported to ghettos and makeshift
extermination camps near the Bug. For this “Romanian Siberia” was not just a
place of banishment and forced labor, but of systematic massacre and
annihilation, the “tomb of the local Jewish population and that of Romania”, in
the words of Matatias Carp. In all, 380,000 to 400,000 Jews, including those
from Transnistria, were murdered there.
Deportation of Jews from Bessarabia to Transnistria, escorted by Romanian and
German soldiers.
Two rivers. To the west, the Dniester, and its “beyond, where the Jews are
thrown”. To the east, the Bug, and its camps, where they are murdered. In
between, Romanian Transnistria and its capital, Odessa, whose Jewish
inhabitants – fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, grandfathers, grandmothers,
granddaughters and grandsons – were also deported to extermination camps near
the Bug. Among them was the Berman family: Isidor, a survivor of the 1905
Odessa pogrom, Sprinţa – and her ever-present sewing machine, like a precious
survival tool -, and their daughter Valentina. They arrived in Odessa in the
autumn of 1940, from Bessarabia, the eastern side of the Dniester where they
had found a precarious refuge when fleeing Bucharest and its racial laws. All
three were deported. Isidor was shot on the edge of a mass grave in the spring
of 1942. Sprinţa and her daughter escaped, using a miraculous subterfuge to
save themselves from a convoy bound for the camps.
Marta Caraion is their granddaughter. We interviewed her for K.
Elena Guritanu
*
Elena Guritanu: Your previous book, Comment la littérature pense les objets
(How literature thinks about objects), published by Champ Vallon in 2020,
focused on the place of material objects in nineteenth-century literature. In
Géographie des ténèbres. Bucarest – Transnistrie – Odessa 1941-1981 [Geography
of Darkness. Bucharest – Transnistria – Odessa 1941-1981], published by Fayard
in August 2024, the narrative is structured around a single object, heavy with
history and meaning: the sewing machine of Sprinţa, your maternal grandmother.
How does one move from a materialist reading of objects in literature, from a
material object “that struggles to achieve full intellectual existence”, to the
personified object, through which family memory is reconstituted and narrated?
Was this a roundabout way of attacking the writing of this narrative, of
warding off its terror? Or is it, in a way, the very nature of your writing?
Marta Caraion: A precise understanding of the function of objects and, more
broadly, of individual possessions and dispossessions in the trajectories of
survival is essential in an approach such as the one I’ve undertaken, which is
both a micro-history illuminating macro-historical events in detail, and a more
intimate family narrative built around testimonies, archives, memories and
snippets of material life. How did a family deported from Odessa in October
1941, as part of a convoy of tens of thousands on foot to the mass grave at
Bogdanovka, where they all perished, manage to survive? What, in the detail of
gestures, words, choices and things, are the precise operations of this
experience called survival?
For years, my academic research has focused on the relationship between
literature and material culture; the questions I asked of literary texts are
also those I wanted to ask of my family history: how do objects become stories?
Why do certain objects provide invaluable support for the development of life
stories? What are these objects? The family history I have unfolded from a
multitude of very different sources and documents can be told through the
trajectory, in a continuous thread, of a single object – a sewing machine –
which became an object of genealogical memory, an object of attachment (in the
affective and concrete sense of the term), but which was first and foremost a
work tool, with a utilitarian function, and an instrument of survival, a vital
object. This sewing machine, which has crossed borders and exiles (it’s now at
home in Switzerland, out of place in my living room), was the foundation on
which, in the precariousness of days, it was possible for two Jewish women who
had emerged from a column destined for extermination to build a clandestine
existence, to insert themselves under a false identity into a social fabric of
military occupation, at a precise location, the town of Berezovka (now
Berezivka in Ukraine) under Romanian jurisdiction, and to get through the war.
This is the core of this micro-history, embodied in an object of memorial
transmission. But this sewing machine is also an object of knowledge, a
document on the concrete modes of survival.
Bogdanovka. Pig stalls where deported Jews were confined. Photo source: Yad
Vashem.
In the written testimony that served as the starting point for this book, the
account published in Romanian by my mother Valentina in 1991, I was interested
in the traces of objects, carefully observing the fluctuation of this family’s
possessions as they fled, were bombed, forcibly displaced, on death convoys,
despoiled, in transitory moments of settlement, departure and return. What do
we take with us when we flee? What do you leave behind? What objects are
indispensable? How is living or dying determined by the choice or luck of
owning the right shoes? How are objects of use, barter and memory shared?
Asking these questions with the idea of taking a precise count of objects in a
given situation, on a microscopic scale of observation, provides a detailed
understanding of the material life of extreme situations: deportation,
survival, exile.
Family history can be told through the continuous trajectory of a single object
– a sewing machine – which has become an object of genealogical memory, an
object of attachment (in the affective and concrete sense of the term), but
which was first and foremost a work tool, with a utilitarian function, and an
instrument of survival, a vital object.
As we know, the history of the Shoah is also a history of objects, of organized
looting, of plundering, of transactions, of radical upheavals in the value of
things. We’re all familiar with the mountains of shoes, the systematic sorting
of objects and the Kanada barracks at Auschwitz. At Treblinka, which was an
immediate extermination camp, only those selected to clear the corpses or to
take care of the dead’s belongings in the so-called “sorting square” remained
alive temporarily. To understand this, read an extract from Richard Glazar’s
account, Behind the Green Fence. Surviving Treblinka, which describes, page
after page, the “disheveled mountains of loose belongings”: “Suitcases and
backpacks, ordinary bags with laces for handles, thousands of pairs of boots
tied together and piled in a black, crumbly, disordered mountain, boots,
elegant and wretched, savates, fine lingerie, coats torn and full of lice. The
final baggage of thousands and thousands of people is an incredible sight. […]
A huge flea market where you can find anything but life. In the ghettos and in
the convoys of deportees to Transnistria, the economy of survival is less
documented, less spectacular and more complex. It often involved the local
population. In counting the number of objects lost, abandoned, rescued, stolen
and donated in my family’s particular experience of war, I felt it was
important to reconstruct this relational and material history. Certainly,
surviving objects are witness objects, and they restore an embodied memory that
tells a story and leaves a trace. We recently read that the Auschwitz museum is
restoring 8,000 children’s shoes; in such a project, as in all undertakings to
preserve and heritage the material remains of extermination, the treatment of
memory operates on several levels: documentary, testimonial, emotional and so
on. It is important to ask what knowledge and affects this memory is made up of.
Finally, the memory, knowledge and narrative contained in the sewing machine
that accompanied my family history also concern the specific nature of a
woman’s trajectory, of survival as a woman. On a more intimate level, it’s an
object of feminine transmission, over three or four generations of women, a way
of inscribing oneself in a lineage.
EG: In my native Moldavia, as in all Soviet states, the Shoah was, until the
fall of the USSR, a page torn from the history of the Second World War, or at
least eclipsed by that of the “Great Patriotic War”. As for the Romanian Shoah
and Transnistria as an area of genocide, the facts were simply glossed over,
buried under piles of Communist propaganda. At the same time as you were
learning from Valentina, your mother, and her testimony, what the Berman family
went through, along with hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews, between 1941
and 1944, what did you know about the Shoah in Romania? Did you know about
Transnistria and what image did you associate with it before starting your
research and writing this text?
MC: I’m answering your question at a time when part of the Romanian population,
tempted to elect a far-right president, is openly displaying its legionnaire
and fascist sympathies and nostalgia. In the first round of the November 2024
presidential election, more than 22% of the electorate voted for a candidate
who came out on top, who claims the legionary mystic-nationalist movement and
the fascist government of Antonescu as his political model, who, when
addressing the people, scripts speeches by Marshal Antonescu, reproducing his
gestures and words, and who also displays his admiration for Vladimir Putin.
Without going into the details of current political events in Romania – the
Constitutional Court having annulled the election and prevented the second
round from taking place on the grounds of foreign interference and manipulation
of social networks – this situation is that of a country that has never written
its own history, that has worked neither on the memory of fascism nor that of
communism, and that has hidden behind a national myth that is comfortable for
all political regimes. This myth took shape as early as 1945, in the very
rhetoric of the war criminals’ trials; it was relayed by forty years of
falsification (for it’s not just a question of concealment and silence, it’s a
highly effective form of negationism) of the facts by successive Communist
governments, in Stalinist or more nationalist tones depending on the period;
and it was paradoxically taken up again, after the fall of Ceaușescu in 1989,
by the fervor of an anti-communist nationalism that developed the idea, which
became an action plan for the rehabilitation of fascist doctrines, of the
political martyrdom of opposition forces under the communist dictatorship and
during the years of terror. To speak of the martyrs of Communist repression
seems fair and legitimate, except when it allows, in the deliberate confusion
of victims, the legal rehabilitation of war criminals and legionary clergymen,
and the initiation of an ideologically proactive movement to valorize fascist
memory, with the erection of commemorative monuments, public celebrations and
even sanctifications. The Romanian Orthodox Church canonizes priests who were
public promoters of the Legionary movement and militant antisemitism in the
public arena. In Romania, in the early 2020s, there were still streets named
after Marshal Ion Antonescu.
The current political situation in Romania is that of a country that has never
written its history, that has not worked on the memory of either fascism or
communism, and that has hidden behind a national myth that is comfortable for
all political regimes.
An ally of Germany until August 1944, Romania was the second country to
exterminate Jews, with its own organization of the ethnic cleansing process on
the territory of Transnistria, i.e. outside national borders, in occupied
territory. This truth remains inaudible, despite the major efforts of Shoah
historians to re-establish the facts. Several factors contribute to this
national deafness. On August 23, 1944, seeing the tide turning, Romania changed
sides: at a time when the Germans had lost the war and the Soviets were already
occupying eastern Moldavia, it “turned arms” – to use the official phrase –
against Germany and joined the Allies, thus avoiding a bloody Russian invasion.
This meant a rapid change of national narrative. But although the rhetorical
framework for invisibilizing the Shoah was similar to that imposed by Stalin in
the USSR, Romania’s state involvement in the genocide required the elaboration
of a different line of argument. The Soviets suppressed the ravages of the
Shoah in the name of the millions of victims of the Great Patriotic War,
refusing to acknowledge the specificity of the extermination of the Jews as a
significant fact of history, and thus prohibiting the creation of a collective
memory of the extermination process, which was nonetheless present in people’s
consciousness because it took place in broad daylight before the eyes and with
the help of part of the civilian population. Ilya Ehrenburg and Vassili
Grossman’s The Black Book, a collection of testimonies gathered at
extermination sites, was banned from publication in 1946. For Romania, the aim
was to erase state responsibility, the role of the army and the police in
organizing the massacres, and to shift the blame; this was achieved firstly by
making Germany (presented as the oppressive force of an enslaved and innocent
Romania) bear responsibility for the massacres; secondly, by camouflaging – in
line with Soviet strategy – the Jewish civilian victims on the one hand as war
victims (by assimilating them to Romanian soldiers who died at the front) and
on the other hand as Communist fighters (this transformation is fascinating to
study in history textbooks from the 50s); and thirdly, by arguing that the Jews
of the Old Kingdom (i.e. Wallachia and Moldavia) were neither exterminated nor
deported, having suffered only minor persecution (forbidden to profess, to go
to school, confiscations, forced labor, etc.). ), an argument already put
forward by Marshal Antonescu himself at his 1946 trial, and which has provided
a continuous line of defense, a shield for forgetting that this surviving
population (around 290,000 Jews) represents one half of which the other half
was indeed deported and killed.
Last year, the history of the Romanian Shoah was included in school textbooks
for high-school classes, in a genuine effort to pass on knowledge that had
hitherto been obscured. But the collective internalization of this knowledge is
laborious.
Political concealment was coupled with private silence, with a charge of
implicit knowledge that made it unnecessary to explain this knowledge, that
seemed bound to infuse spontaneously.
For my part, during my school years in Bucharest (1974-1981), I received no
instruction on the subject; no books, no films, no stories. The Shoah was
simply never a subject. Nor, for that matter, was the Jewish identity of my
mother and many of her friends. I did know very early on, however, because it
was said without further explanation, that some people were antisemitic
(sometimes followed in the family vocabulary by “ferocious”: a “ferocious
antisemite”), although “antisemitic” could not clarify the fact of being
Jewish; still less the course of historical events. In other words, political
concealment was coupled with private silence, with a charge of implicit
knowledge that made it unnecessary to explain this knowledge, which seemed
bound to infuse spontaneously. In fact, it did.
My knowledge of the Romanian Shoah was fuelled by years of reading, which
preceded the project of writing about it and unravelling my mother’s story. As
a child and teenager, knowledge of Transnistria and the events of the war first
oozed out in incomprehensible phrases and allusions: the name “Transnistria”
was uttered without a clear geographical referent and associated with a diffuse
situation of famine and fear, an indeterminate place of negativity; likewise
for the evocation of Odessa, the bombings, the deportation. It was during our
exile in Switzerland that my mother began to speak more fully about these
events, and in 1986-1987 she decided to give her testimony, first orally, then
transcribed and published when the Communist regime fell. But while the family
micro-history took shape, it took me some time to get to grips with the overall
historical fresco, which began to take shape with the opening up of archives in
Eastern Europe and the work of new generations of historians. This historical
fresco itself required several focal points and perspectival planes: I had to
understand events on an overhanging scale, of governments, armed troops and
political decisions, and on a microscopic scale of detailed facts, of precise
places, such as villages, ravines or pigsties transformed into warehouses, of
tiny local directives and individual choices. It was the only way to combine
scales of knowledge and form an “image” of Transnistria. I’m also aware that,
within the complexity of the genocide’s modus operandi in Transnistria, the
extermination of Odessa’s entire Jewish population has its own story, which
I’ve tried to tell by following my grandfather’s trajectory, with a broad
contextualization that goes back to the 1905 pogrom and the Russian Civil War.
EG: The historiographical treatment of the Romanian Shoah is still struggling –
despite considerable progress, including the publication in the immediate
post-war period and the re-publication in 1996 of Cartea Neagra. Le livre noir
de la destruction des juifs de Roumanie (1940-1944) [Cartea Neagra: The Black
Book of the Destruction of the Jews of Romania, 1940-1944 ] by Matatias Carp,
followed by the monumental Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania. The
Destruction of Jews and Roma under the Antonescu Regime, 1940-1944 – to a
national memorial resistance, with Romania very sparingly seizing opportunities
to confront its own past, even after the fall of Ceauşescu’s regime. Did the
taboos, omissions and evasions of the Romanian state apparatus with regard to
this period and the participation of natives in the Shoah in Romania almost get
in the way of writing this story, or, on the contrary, did they spur you to
persevere and find answers? To what extent did you come up against the silence
of the Romanian state on this subject?
MC: It’s difficult to build a collective memory when there’s no culture of
memory, no culture of bearing witness, and when the writing of history is
burdened for decades by the weight of suspicion. Working on the Shoah in
Romania, or in the USSR, is different from the approach taken by historians of
the Shoah in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Western Europe in general,
firstly because the aim is to unravel communist and post-communist
historiography, and secondly because the communist experience (of propaganda,
censorship, repression, or simply in its most ordinary everyday fabric) has
imprinted on people’s consciousness a certain relationship to reality and to
the past, the nature of which we need to grasp in order to understand the
degree of indifference, denial and rejection of experiences linked to fascism;
knowledge of genocide is different because it is part of the fabric of life in
Eastern and Western Europe.
I can’t say that the Romanian state apparatus’s evasions of the Shoah have
hindered my research. They have probably complicated it. And they certainly
nourished it, once it became clear to me that these evasions not only form part
of the historiography of the Romanian Shoah, but are also constitutive of the
testimonies and narratives, both collective and individual/family, and matrixes
in the discursive elaboration of these narratives (whatever their anchorage:
whether the author is a survivor or a Communist Party ideologue). Hence the
need to interrogate the silence or allusive opacity of family discourse in the
light of these politically organized omissions; the texture of this silence
differs from that produced by the trauma or the hindrance of testimonial speech
caused by the incomprehension of an audience unfit to listen; it’s an
additional layer of silence, nourished by the political terror prolonged in
another form (the transition from fascism to communism provides the canvas) and
by the irreducible contradiction between the official public narrative and the
private, self-narrative; and this impossible coincidence of narratives is
played out both at the ideological level and at the level of the very
possibility of putting clear, precise words on the lived experience, on the
places, the actors, the factual chain, the modus operandi of mass destruction,
and so on. ).
It’s difficult to build a collective memory when there’s no culture of memory,
no culture of testimony, and when the writing of history, for decades on end,
is burdened with the weight of suspicion.
The first collection of archives and testimonies on the Romanian Shoah and
Transnistria was built up during the war by Matatias Carp, lawyer and secretary
of the Union of Jewish Communities in Romania. Aware of the historical stakes,
Carp undertook, in Bucharest, the meticulous and dangerous task of collecting
documents on the Romanian policy of repression and extermination of the Jews,
some of which were exfiltrated directly from the administrations: These are the
proofs, administrative documents, photographs and testimonies that he managed
to publish, in three volumes, between 1946 and 1948, with a confidential print
run, entitled Cartea neagra. Fapte și documente. Suferințele evreilor din
România în timpul dictaturii fasciste, 1940-1944 – The Black Book. Facts and
documents. The suffering of Romania’s Jews during the Fascist dictatorship,
1940-1944. Matatias Carp’s book appeared in Bucharest in the immediate post-war
period, just as an abridged Romanian version of Ilya Ehrenburg and Vassili
Grossman’s Black Book had appeared in 1946, even though it had been banned from
publication in the USSR; but it was quickly withdrawn from the market and
buried, until its reissue in 1996. Fifty years of silence lay between the two
editions, and between the updating of documents produced in the heat of events
and the work of historian Radu Ioanid, who wrote the history of the Romanian
Shoah. His book – The Holocaust in Romania – was published in English in 2000,
in a first French version in 2002, then in an expanded version in 2019. Radu
Ioanid was also in charge of the archive collection program for the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. We should perhaps add the name
of Jean Ancel, to whom we owe the constitution of an important documentary
collection. But, as I said, half a century elapses between the work of Matatias
Carp and that of Radu Ioanid. It’s essential to know what this half-century is
made of, in terms of writing or erasing the history of the Shoah (bearing in
mind that erasure also has a history).
EG: In 2005, the Elie Wiesel National Institute for Holocaust Studies was
founded in Bucharest. With its support, a Memorial to the Victims of the Shoah
was inaugurated in the Romanian capital on October 8, 2009, to mark Holocaust
Memorial Day in Romania. Do you feel that, along with these advances, the
memorial situation is improving?
MC: The International Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania was
set up in 2003, at the request of the Romanian government, chaired by Elie
Wiesel and directed by Radu Ioanid, with the collaboration of a large team of
Shoah historians, with the aim of establishing the “truth about the tragedy of
the Holocaust in Romania during the Second World War”. The 400-page text
resulting from the commission’s work, known as the “Elie Wiesel Report”, is a
well-documented sum on the subject, articulated around a historical analysis of
the antisemitic policies of the 1930s and an examination of state-sponsored
Holocaust denial writings in Communist Romania; above all, it formulates a
well-founded project for national education and proposes a line of political
action (calling, for example, for a halt to the rehabilitation of war criminals
by the Supreme Court, the introduction of legislation against Holocaust denial
and the public celebration of Antonescu, etc.). This report is much more than a
study of the history of the Shoah in Romania. It is the first official act of
political and public acceptance of the Romanian state’s responsibility for the
genocide of Roma and Jews. In 2005, the “Elie Wiesel” National Institute for
Holocaust Studies in Romania was born in Bucharest.
Commemoration, Transylvania Holocaust Museum.
We can therefore say that, over the last twenty years, there has been a growing
political awareness, energetically supported by researchers, some of whom are
active in the public arena. I’m thinking, for example, of a historian like
Adrian Cioflâncă, whose approach to fundamental research and the updating of
dormant archive collections is accompanied by a project of transmission to a
wide audience (see, for example, his film, in collaboration with filmmaker Radu
Jude, “Ieșirea trenurilor din gară – The Exit of the Trains”, 2020, around the
Iași pogrom, in 1941) and popularization. But impregnation in the collective
memory is slow. My hypothesis is that this slowness of the memorial process of
awareness of the Shoah as a simple fact already, then as a national
responsibility, is perhaps due to the absence or scarcity of narratives: I mean
individual stories, testimonies, life stories. For the political reasons
explained above, there is no Romanian “Shoah literature”, no culturally
recognized testimonial writing.
For the past twenty years, there has been a growing political awareness,
energetically supported by researchers, some of whom are active in the public
arena. But impregnation into the collective memory is slow.
EG: On reading your essay, one senses a kind of reticence, an understandable
reluctance to visit the site, even though you know that it was Covid and then
the war in Ukraine that prevented you from working in the field. Does this
apprehension still exist? Is it the same as it was at the start of your
research and writing?
MC: In 2020, at a time when the world was becoming more confined, I was
supposed to make the trip to Odessa and, further afield, to Berezovka (now
Berezivka), the town where my grandmother and mother spent the war under false
identities and which, between 1941 and 1944, served as a military cantonment
for Romanian troops and as a distribution point for deportation convoys to the
extermination points in southern Transnistria.
Deportation of the Jews of Czernowitz
But the idea of going to Ukraine was older. I had tried to make the trip with
my mother in the early 2000s, when she still had the strength and lucidity to
accompany me. I thought it was a good idea to suggest it to her. Her reaction
was virulent: an outright rejection. We understand the impossibility of
returning to the scene of the massacres and deportation, the impossible
confrontation with the trauma. But her categorical rejection above all allowed
me to question more seriously the reasons why I, for one, wanted to see these
places, sixty years on, and the memorial complacency that could be involved in
this genealogical tourism approach. I think it’s important to clarify this need
both intellectually and psychologically. What do we want to see? To obtain what
kind of response, sensation or narcissistic satisfaction? To find anchorage in
a place, stabilize a memory or follow a compassionate thread? My decision, in
2020, to go to Ukraine, had matured a little. My mother had been dead for four
years. In the meantime, I had undertaken extensive research, consulted
archives, delved into the details of the family story, formulated hypotheses
and sought factual information. I was going to Odessa imbued with all this
research, with the sum total of sources, readings and stories: the accumulated
emotional charge was perhaps more intense, but it was backed up by knowledge,
by targeted questions. In the Odessa archives where I intended to visit, I was
looking for a specific document, for example: the nominal list of the second
wave of deportees from Odessa, some 30,000 people, in January-February 1942.
But this document – I’m now certain – doesn’t exist, and probably never did,
apart from the military orders to carry out a personal census at the same time
as the systematic inventory of confiscated property. The census was limited to
recording numbers; day after day, we find the exact number of deportees loaded
onto the wagons. Writing down the names of the deportees would have given them
an existence: this trace, which it was important for me to find, was important
for the forces of extermination not to leave behind.
The war in Ukraine – the possible reading of wars in palimpsest – further
changed my desire to see the Bug, to see Mostovoï and Berezovka, to make the
road from Odessa to there, to physically understand these plains and ravines.
The reactivation of the ideological reading grids, vocabulary, categories of
thought and imaginaries of the Second World War in the narrative of the current
conflict changes the perspective of an eventual journey.
EG: How do you feel about this Romanian heritage now that the book has been
published? Has the publication of the book brought about any significant
changes?
MC: My relationship with Romania was determined by my exile from Bucharest to
Switzerland in 1981, fuelled by adolescent nostalgia for the fact that
returning was forbidden and that, in the mid-80s, it was impossible to think
about the fall of the Communist regimes; then, after 1989, by my regular return
to a country that believed in democracy while refusing to come to terms with
its history, both Fascist and Communist. I also grew up in a family where the
memory of suffering was limited to the communist terror, the years of political
imprisonment of my parents (but especially of my father, who was a writer and
has a long and complicated life story and political trajectory), while the
memory of the Shoah (my mother’s) never had a frontal existence. This
predominance of the memory of Communist atrocities, passed down through the
family, is in fact that of Romanian society as a whole. It’s this shared weight
of memory that writing the book has enabled me to shift, with a new balance
that is not without impact on my relationship with present-day Romania. The
political events of the last few months in Romania, with the rise of an
outspoken extreme right, appear to me in this light.
EG: What does the name Transnistria evoke for you today ?
MC: I know nothing more about Transnistria today than what the media say about
it, in France or sometimes on the Radio Europa Liberă Moldova website. This
separatist territory of Moldova, whose independence is not recognized by
anyone, is not geographically identical to the Transnistria of the Second World
War: the latter extended, east of the Dniester, southwards to the Black Sea, as
far as Odessa, which was its capital at the time. But it’s interesting to note
that this place remains a geopolitical montage, a territory threatened and
threatening, in tension and under sway, militarily under Russian domination,
torn between three languages – Russian, Ukrainian and Romanian – and between
two worlds, two cultures or sensibilities, two histories too, between its
allegiance to the Russian Federation and its attachment to pro-European
Moldavia.
EG: Is a Romanian translation of your book planned or expected in the near
future?
MC: The book is currently being translated into Romanian by Polirom, to be
published in 2025.
Interview conducted by Elena Guritanu
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This moderated discussion group is for information exchange on the subject of
Czernowitz and Sadagora Jewish History and Genealogy. The opinions expressed
in these posts are the opinions of the original poster only and not necessarily
the opinions of the List Owner, the Webmaster or any other members
or entities connected with this mailing list. The Czernowitz-L list has
an associated web site at http://czernowitz.ehpes.com that includes a
searchable archive of all messages posted to this list. Beginning in 2021,
archived messages can be found at:
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