The Impact Of The Holocaust On Society

Teacher: Daniela Bălțatu Children sPalace, Piatra Neamț

Testimony of the architect Simion Simion, one of the witnesses of the Pogrom against the Jews from Iași, from 1941: "It was about 400-500 meters from the Prefecture. And what should I do, I thought? I still had a German ausweis (permit) for the car and I said with that maybe I can pass. And we left ... We reached about 100-150 meters from the Prefecture and we were stopped by a cordon of Romanian soldiers - they were all Romanians from the front and rear trucks. I stopped there. They didn't let us go any further. After about half an hour, three-quarters of an hour, there was a large group of citizens, surrounded by the army, coming; they had entered the courtyards, in front of the Prefecture, and took out the Jews ... There were women, children, shouting, screaming, and the cordon of the Romanian army was pushing them aside and crowding (the men) on the road to put them in the Prefecture. At one point they stopped, I heard a machine gun rumble of about ten or fifteen minutes and there was silence ... It took about half an hour before I could go farther. Before the Prefecture, I saw that there were corpses on the pavement, on the sidewalks, and some people pulling these corpses to take them to the edge ... And on the ditch flowed the blood of those who were shot. They were also in the courtyard of the Prefecture - where corpses were gathered - but there were also living people ... I went on, to go to Vaslui. I was told that the unit is to Vaslui. Before on the road, about 400-500 meters, when I had to take the road on the right, in front was a shop with shutters pulled. We were walking very slowly and at one point a citizen, a civilian, was walking forward and behind him was a German soldier whom I had not seen since. He had arrived in front of the store, and in front of him was a citizen who wanted to raise the shutter. The other, who was coming with the German, at one point showed it to him and said: "that is ..." The German pulled out his revolver and shot him in front of the store. He was the only German I saw and I went on. We had a hard time, and by the time we reached the Prut, the unit had already passed. And they didn't let us, we couldn't pass. With a sigh, I returned to Bacau ... That's what I saw there. " In the pit of the dead: “On the way to Transnistria, the summary executions of the Jews, which began in July-August 1941, continued, and some miraculously escaped, such as Shabs Roif. We were headed to the Dniester, in Soroca County, in a forest by the river. It was raining hard and there I was in the grave with the dead for one night. There were some pits there that had already been plugged by the time we arrived, and a third pit wasn't quite full. I was 11 years old at the time and I ran there with other children, at that age I didn't really understand everything that was happening.

They were now looking for people to fill the pit. They lined them up on the edge of the pit and opened fire. We all fell into the pit, and I was full of blood, but it was not mine, but that of a man with whom I had fallen in the pit. I remember addressing the "Lieutenant" to the officer. Later I read that it was about Roșca and another one who declared that they shot 500 Jews”, Shabs Roif remembers. In the two examples above, I tried to report only a tiny part of the crimes committed against humanity and in this case on the Jews in Romania and beyond. The Romanian Holocaust was officially recognized by the Romanian state in 2004, when the Final Report of the International Commission for the Study of the Romanian Holocaust was published, a report prepared by a commission chaired by Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor from Sighetul Marmației and winner of the Prize Nobel Peace Prize 1986. The report, which has 424 pages, concluded that the Romanian state is responsible for the deaths of 280-380,000,000 Jews and 11,000 Roma between 1940 and 1944. But 16 years after its publication, this report is either very little known or its conclusions are being challenged. Opinion polls show that only about a third of Romanians accept the fact that a Holocaust took place in Romania, ie the genocide of the Jewish population. Ignorance - to a large extent, but also bad faith - especially in the nationalist area of public opinion, which does not accept that Ion Antonescu and his regime, along with legionnaires to a lesser extent, had an active role in initiating and implementing The Holocaust in Romania. Apart from the Pogrom from Iași and the Death Trains (June - July 1941) - a partially known episode from the communist period, but whose real balance (over 13 thousand deaths) is either minimized or attributed to the German military in the city at the beginning of the war against the USSR - other massacres and pogroms committed in the territories under Romanian administration are practically unknown. In this paper, I want to refer, exclusively, to the events that took place in Romania, namely, the Pogrom of Iași. It is estimated that between 1,000 and 14,000 Jews from Iasi were massacred, and another 3,713 perished in the death trains; official reports cannot specify the exact number of victims and prevent the formation of a clear picture of the criminal behavior of German forces and the incompetence of the Romanian military authorities. The Jews of Moldova were the target of the measures taken by General Antonescu, against the background of the army's doubts about the attachment of the Jews to the Romanian state. The city was crossed twice by two air raids (June 25 and 26). The bloody events started from the fact that some people transmitted signals to Russian planes with the help of radios (later the radios of the Jews were confiscated and they were persecuted because they were the suspects). Three Jews were shot dead on June 26 by Sergeant Mocanu at the garrison's retreat. Police were ordered to mark the locations of unexploded bombs following Soviet air raids; the pyrotechnicians called to deal with this were later arrested on charges of marking unexploded bombs with white lime. The same Sergeant Mocanu, executed the 5 pyrotechnicians without having received any order from somewhere, but only because he considered it so.