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5190655] 12/03/2008 04:38 PMROMANIA AND THE HOLOCAUSTReviving Memory in
a Killing Field
By Michael Scott Moore <http://www.radiofreemike.com/blog/> in Berlin
Holocaust education is normal in Germany. But in some parts of Europe,
where much of the killing took place, the past is buried under layers of
politics and history. A Moldovan group is installing monuments to the
ill-remembered slaughter of Romanian Jews.
As an 11-year-old boy, Alexander Bantush watched Fascist soldiers beat a
Jewish fiddler in the village of Brichevo with sticks. They forced him
to play his violin and dance barefoot on broken glass. The scene is so
iconic of the Holocaust it might be from a war film, or a painting by
Chagall, an image of theshtetl where the details fill in themselves. But
the soldiers weren't Nazis. Bantush is Moldovan, born in Romania, and
the Romanian soldiers were acting on orders from their own dictator, Ion
Antonescu, instead of Hitler.
This year a small organization in Moldova has been reviving memories
about the Holocaust in a corner of Eastern Europe where it's in danger
of being forgotten. Nemurire, a nonprofit run by a local historian named
Iurie Zargocha, has installed a number of stone monuments across the
northern Moldovan countryside to commemorate the path of death marches
and the sites of mass Jewish graves during World War II.
"You hear about the Holocaust on a mass-number scale, six million," said
Daria Fane, an officer at the US embassy in Moldova who has helped
Nemurire. "But here it's village by village." Locals like Bantush, who
remember watching the atrocities as children, are invited to speak at
the ceremonies. "They've lived with these memories for years, and nobody
cared," said Fane. "It was taboo in the Soviet era."
On Sunday, Nemurire dedicated its sixth Moldovan monument in Frasin,
not far from Brichevo. It commemorated a death march that stopped here
one day in 1941. Romanian soldiers decided to kill 300 of the Jews they
were marching from the town of Edinet. They forced the prisoners to
undress, and started pulling gold-filled teeth from their jaws with
pliers while they were still alive, said Alexander Bantush, who gave a
statement. Bantush isn't Jewish, but for some Moldovans it's a source of
pride to distance themselves from official Romanian wartime policy.
"The Jews that lived in Brichevo were good people," he said on Sunday.
"I remember people sneaking milk to the Jews (who) marched through the
village ... People were risking their lives and gave the last milk they
had." He added, "The people of Frasin will respect this monument, will
guard it and teach our children what 'Holocaust' means. The Jews were
our friends and they deserve for this history to be known."
Layers of History
Romania and the now-independent state of Moldova have suffered so much
grim history since 1945 that the Holocaust is rarely discussed. But
Romania was allied with Nazi Germany in the war. When the Nazis crossed
through here to invade Russia in 1941, Romania took the opportunity to
move its Jews to a region across the Dniester River, which now separates
the Romanian-speaking part of Moldova from its Slavic part known as
Transnistria. This ethnic-cleansing policy is one of the most
ill-remembered chapters of the Holocaust.
"Once they had gotten a taste of the license which prevailed in the
first days of the war (among the Germans)," writes Avigdor Shachan, a
witness and historian of the Romanian Holocaust, in his book Burning
Ice, "Romanian soldiers embarked on operations at their own initiative,
engaging in murder and torture in every Jewish settlement which they
passed." Shachan quotes an address to the Romanian government by the
country's dictator, Ion Antonescu, who argued in favor of "expelling
the Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina (now, roughly, Moldova) to the
other side of the border
There is nothing for them to do here and
I don't mind if we appear in history as barbarians."
The result of this policy was a series of death marches behind the front
line of German and Romanian soldiers. The number of dead and deported is
impossible to determine, but a 2004 report by the Romanian government
estimates the range at 280,000 to 380,000.
The Holocaust was taboo in post-war Romania because Jews weren't
remembered in official Soviet history as Hitler's main victims:
communists were. In Soviet history books, it was communists across
Eastern Europe who helped Russia beat back the Nazis. A whole generation
of Romanians were raised to believe they and their parents were heroes
for participating in Russia's great struggle with Hitler.
"These small countries don't feel any responsibility," said Judit
Miklos, a Romanian living in Berlin, referring to Eastern Europe. "They
were on the victim side (of history)
Small countries always have
such a complex, and they use it as an excuse -- that they always were
part of the game of larger powers. The arguments tend in this direction
in Romania."
For Romania, the 2004 government report marked a tentative departure
from consistent denial. Following mid-2002 statements by then-President
Ion Iliescu to the effect that there had been no Holocaust in Romania --
and the resulting outcry -- a commission was appointed to look into the
country's World War II treatment of Jews. The 2004 report resulted, and
on October 9 of that year, the country marked its first ever Holocaust
Commemoration Day.
...
Alexander Bantush said that on the day he remembered, in 1941, about 300
Jews were ordered to stand naked beside a trench. After the soldiers
took their jewelry and pulled out their gold teeth, he said, they "began
to push people, still alive, into the ditch ... People were trying to
climb out. Understanding they were being buried alive, they began to
scream, 'Kill us! Kill us!' ... The ground breathed, up and down -- I
had never seen anything like it in my life and wish for no one to ever
see what I saw that day."
The image of shifting, breathing soil also occurs in Burning Ice, which
is the definitive history of the Romanian Holocaust. Live burial seems
to have been a method in a number of mass graves, sometimes just to save
ammunition. The image also appears in more than one witness account
collected by Nemurire. "The ground," as Dunayevich puts it, "was moving
all over the north of Moldova in 1941."
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