The Kishinev Ghetto, 1941–1942: A Documentary History of the Holocaust in Romania's Contested Borderlands

By Paul A. Shapiro, Radu Ioanid and Brewster Chamberlin

The Kishinev Ghetto, 1941–1942 offers a wealth of primary sources and insightful commentary about the little-known slaughter of Jewish residents of Kishinev (Chisinau) under the military occupation by Romania under Marshal Ion Antonescu, a Hitler ally.​

The Kishinev Ghetto, 1941–1942 sheds new light on the little-known historical events surrounding the creation, administration, and liquidation of the Kishinev (Chisinau) ghetto during the first months following the Axis attack on the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) in late June 1941. Mass killings during the combined Romanian-German drive toward Kishinev in Bessarabia, after a year of Soviet rule in this Romanian border province, were followed by the shooting of thousands of Jews on the streets of the city during the first days of reestablished Romanian administration. Survivors were driven into a ghetto, persecuted, and liquidated by year’s end. The Kishinev Ghetto, 1941–1942 is the first major study of these events.
 
Often overshadowed by events in Germany and Poland, the history of the Holocaust in Romania, including what took place in Bessarabia (corresponding in large part with the territory of the modern Republic of Moldova), was obscured during decades of communist rule by denial and by policies that blocked access to wartime documentation. This book is the result of a lengthy research project that began with Paul A. Shapiro’s missions to Romania for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to negotiate access to these documents.
 
The volume includes:
·        A preface describing the origin of the project in the immediate aftermath of the Ceausescu regime in Romania.
·        A hundred-page study setting the events of the book within the historical context of Eastern European antisemitism, Romanian-Soviet conflict over control of Bessarabia, and Romania’s alliance with Nazi Germany.
·        A thoughtfully curated collection of archival documents linked to the study.
·        A chronology of related historical events.
·        Twenty-one black and white photographs and a map of the ghetto.
 
Students and scholars of Holocaust history, Judaic studies, twentieth-century Eastern European history, Romania, Moldova, and historical Bessarabia will want to own this important, revealing volume.
 
Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9780817388126

Book preview

documents.

The Chişinău (Kishinev) Ghetto, 1941–1942

Creation, Administration, Liquidation

Paul A. Shapiro

Prologue: Documenting the Tragedy

In June 1991, fifty years after Romanian forces fighting alongside the military machine of Hitler’s Third Reich poured across the Pruth River, the director general of the State Archives of Romania asserted in an interview with an archival research delegation from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Whatever happened to the Jews out there, in Bessarabia and Transnistria, on the periphery, was done by the Germans and a few wild men, Legionnaires, acting on their own.¹ The director general’s view echoed many similarly comfortable, ill-informed, or intentionally misleading views expressed inside and outside Romania during the postwar decades. At one extreme these views portrayed Romania as an oasis for Jews during the Holocaust (e.g., for Hungarian and Transylvanian Jews fleeing deportation to Auschwitz). Or they focused on Romania’s refusal to consign the Jews of the Old Kingdom (Regat) to German extermination camps in late 1942 and 1943, while passing over the murderous 1941–1942 period as if it had not existed and making little of the massive expropriation of Jewish property or of the forced labor regime imposed on Jews throughout the country during the war. The existence of a carefully laid out plan, drafted by Romanian authorities, to deport the Jews of the Regat and Southern Transylvania to the Nazi death camp at Bełzec was passed over in silence, while attention was focused on the complicity of Hungarian authorities in the deportation and murder of the Jews of Northern Transylvania. Other nuances of denial placed responsibility on the Germans for any crimes that may have been committed in areas under Romanian administration, or, at most, blamed sympathizers of the Romanian fascist Iron Guard movement and lack of central government control at the periphery for antisemitic violence and war crimes committed in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria during the war.

These views were widely held and reflected an obfuscation of historical fact, and, ultimately, denial of the Holocaust in Romania. This approach had taken on similar broad outlines in four successive political eras. It began during the last year of the pro-Nazi regime led by Ion Antonescu, when preserving a Jewish community in the country was considered expedient in case of defeat. It was maintained during the period following the ouster of Antonescu by the military, mixed-party, and finally communist-dominated governments that concluded the war and represented Romania at the Paris Peace Conference. It was adopted by the Communist regime that followed and lasted until 1989. Then it continued, essentially unchanged, during the first decade of the post-Communist period. Official denial that the Holocaust had affected Romania hinged on a scenario that wrote out of Romania, and thus out of consideration, the contested territories of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, which had been Romanian territory between the two world wars and from 1941 to 1944, but became part of the Soviet Union after World War II. By similar logic, it was possible to disregard the atrocities perpetrated by Romanian civilian and military authorities in Transnistria, the territory in southwestern Ukraine between the Dniester and Bug rivers, occupied and administered by Romania from 1941 to 1944. The survival of a significant part of the Jewish population of the Regat also was cited to support the denial claim, and none of the political leaderships in control of the country after 1946 allowed serious research to uncover the truth.²

All of these interpretations tended to exonerate wartime dictator General Ion Antonescu, who, one always was reminded, had driven the antisemitic Iron Guard (or Legion of the Archangel Michael) from power following the Legionary Rebellion of January 1941. Antonescu, this version of history proclaimed, saved the Jews, and in the absence of broad access to archival records of the wartime period this interpretation was widely accepted. When the director general of the State Archives authored a series of apologias for Antonescu in România Mare, a newspaper of the xenophobic Right, and identified himself in that publication as acting president of the Marshal Ion Antonescu Foundation, his motivation became clearer and the challenge of archival discovery greater.³

The director general did his best to impede access to the wartime holdings of the State Archives, while at the same time challenging those who would write about the Holocaust in Romania to cease and desist until they obtained archival materials to underpin conclusions that challenged the ones he preferred. In a July 1991 article in Europa entitled Toward the Truth, he referred to the museum delegation’s visit, stated boldly that those who were guilty of the killing of thousands of Jews were not Romanians but Germans and Legionnaires sent to the front, and called it unimaginable that the authors of books, presentations, and studies would do their work without documents.⁴ The acting president, of course, was denying the validity of early documentation provided in Matatias Carp’s Cartea Neagră, drawn largely from the records of the Romanian Jewish Community and the postwar trials of Romanian war criminals,⁵ as well as the rich documentation assembled under the auspices of the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation in Jean Ancel’s massive Documents Concerning the Fate of Romanian Jewry during the Holocaust,⁶ both well-known published sources that were essentially unavailable until recently in Romania. More to the point, however, he was protecting a false image of Ion Antonescu that certain nationalist political and ideological circles in Romania in the early post-Communist years were seeking to ride to power.

History is not written in a vacuum anywhere, but especially not where it has been grossly misrepresented or suppressed. In Southeastern Europe, where so much history was off limits for nearly half a century, submerged in Titoist Yugoslavism or obscured by Ceauşestian proletarian nationalism, debate over historical fact on the one hand and the practice of politics (and war) on the other emerged from the communist shroud intimately intertwined and passionately pursued. In Romania, control of the historical record—of the fascist period, as of the Communist—was perceived to be directly linked to control of everything.

Director General Munteanu, since deceased, understood this and set a tone for access to archival holdings in the State Archives of Romania that continued, only somewhat abated, under his successors for well over a decade. Important collections held by that institution—relating to the police, gendarmerie, the Romanianization (românizare, roughly equivalent in the Romanian context to aryanization in Germany) of staff and property, and Antonescu’s presidency of the Council of Ministers, for example—trickled into the open slowly, usually after contentious discussion regarding the availability, state of organization, and even existence of archival fonds clearly housed there. Other Romanian institutions were under leaderships less wedded to preserving the myths and secrets of the wartime period. They were more prepared or even anxious to tarnish the Antonescu mystique; ready to enhance their own post-Communist legitimacy through international discourse that Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu had denied to everyone but himself; willing to assume some risk in uncertain times in order to achieve improved relations with the United States; and, in some cases, simply more susceptible to high-level intervention. These institutions were more forthcoming in their archival cooperation, quite often discovering together with representatives of the museum the full extent of what transpired in their own country between 1940 and 1944. The Ministry of National Defense (Ministerul Apărării Naţionale), the Romanian Information Service (Serviciul Român de Informaţii), and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ministerul de Externe) all provided massive access to materials regarding military command and operations, surveillance and postwar trial records, and diplomatic records and document collections regarding the