The Holocaust Diaries: Book Iv: Saviors of the Just

By Leo V. Kanawada

Book Four

SAVIORS OF THE JUST

The Holocaust in Romania during World War II

Throughout the war, Roosevelt backs the transfer of "Joint and US funds to Joint and WEJ contacts in Europe to assist Jews anywhere even if the funds fall into enemy hands or pad their bank accounts. What also follows the cash to Europe is Roosevelt's Riot Act -- his assurance to all pro-German and pro-Nazi governments and their leaders in the specific countries of Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, France, Slovakia, and Croatia that American air power and bombing raids on their cities and industrial complexes will be matched by other threats of retribution and war crime trials after the war for those who do not protect their Jews. These threats begin to have an immediate effect on the powers-that-be inside of Romania.

The dictator of Romania, Ion Antonescu, embarks early on in the war on a plan he calls Romanianization -- a calculated scheme to deliberately rid his nation of over a half million Jews. During this period, he ships hundreds of thousands of his Jews to Transnistria where many are slaughtered. However, stiff opposition to his policies emerge, primarily led by Antonescu's deputy prime minister, Mihai Antonescu, and a powerful coterie of his friends and pro-Allied associates which include the young King Michael and his family.

With the intervention of Pope Pius XII and the Vatican through his papal nuncio in Bucharest and with the onset of American air power, Roosevelt's Riot Act, and the news of Hitler's defeat at Stalingrad, Ion Antonescu vacillates and capitulates to the opposition. He brings a halt to the deportation of Romanian Jewry to Poland and agrees to transport the Jews who still remain alive in Transnistria back to Romania proper.

Leo V. Kanawada, Jr.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 18, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452057941

Leo V. Kanawada

Dr. Leo V. Kanawada, Jr. was born in 1941 in Flushing, Long Island, New York, and educated at Bucknell University, where he received his Bachelor of Science Degree in Secondary Education. His Masters of Arts Degree in American History was awarded by The Maxwell School at Syracuse University, and his Ph.D. in History by St. John's University, Jamaica, New York. After serving as a decorated captain of Infantry, United States Army, with the Second Infantry Division in 1966 in South Korea and in the Vietnam War in 1967 with the 71st Assault Helicopter Company and as a platoon leader with the 196th Light Infantry Brigade, Americal Division, Kanawada returned to his hometown and taught in the Hicksville Public Schools for thirty years. In the Department of History at Hicksville High School, he created and taught a Humanities Honors Program for the Gifted and Talented and was later honored and inducted into the Hicksville Hall of Fame. He was also cited in Who's Who in New York, in Who's Who Among America's Teachers, and in the Directory of American Scholars. His first book, authored in 1982, was a scholarly work on the presidency and American foreign policy entitled FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT'S DIPLOMACY and American Catholics, Italians, and Jews (UMI Research Press/Pro Quest). And later as an elder and president of his Church, he published SOMETHING WORTHWHILE: The Life and Times of The Parkway Community Church, 1628-1981 (Exposition Press). The five volumes in THE HOLOCAUST DIARIES (AuthorHouse) were a labor of love, realized after more than a decade of research, writing, and devotion. Lee Kanawada lives with his wife, Carol, in Long Island, New York.

Book preview

Table of Contents

PROLOGUE

TRANSNISTRIA, ROMANIA

ON THE TRAINS IN TRANSNISTRIA

PART ONE

1

SUNDAY, AUGUST 20, 1944

BUCHAREST, ROMANIA

PART TWO

2

OCTOBER 2, 1942

BUCHAREST, ROMANIA

3

OCTOBER 11, 1942

BUCHAREST, ROMANIA

4

NOVEMBER 18, 1942

NEAR BUCHAREST

5

NOVEMBER 20, 1942

BUCHAREST

6

DECEMBER 6, 1942

BUCHAREST

7

DECEMBER 7, 1942

BUCHAREST

8

DECEMBER 10, 1942

WASHINGTON, D.C.

PART THREE

9

EARLY JANUARY 1943

BUCHAREST

10

JANUARY 10-12, 1943

RASTENBURG, GERMANY

11

JANUARY 19, 1943

ROME, ITALY

12

FEBRUARY 23, 1943

BUCHAREST

13

APRIL 2, 1943

BUCHAREST

14

APRIL 16, 1943

BUCHAREST

15

APRIL 20, 1943

ROME, ITALY

PART FOUR

16

MAY 1, 1943

ISTANBUL, TURKEY

17

JUNE 5, 1943

ROME, ITALY

18

JULY 1, 1943

ROME, ITALY

19

JULY 28, 1943

BUCHAREST

20

AUGUST 2, 1943

BUCHAREST

21

AUGUST 29, 1943

BUCHAREST

22

SEPTEMBER 16, 1943

BUCHAREST

PART FIVE

23

LATE OCTOBER 1943

24

NOVEMBER 2, 1943

WASHINGTON, D.C.

25

NOVEMBER 10, 1943

BUCHAREST

26

NOVEMBER 17, 1943

BUCHAREST

PART SIX

27

LATE JANUARY 1944

BUCHAREST

28

JANUARY 29, 1944

WASHINGTON, D.C.

9:55 P.M., THE WHITE HOUSE, THE MAP ROOM

29

FEBRUARY 4, 1944

BUCHAREST

30

FEBRUARY 14, 1944

BUCHAREST

31

MARCH 13, 1944

ANKARA, TURKEY

3:00 A.M., IRA HIRSCHMANN’S HOTEL

32

MARCH 14, 1944

ANKARA, TURKEY

10:45 A.M., SIMOND’S HOME

33

MARCH 16, 1944

WASHINGTON, D.C.

34

MARCH 20, 1944

CENTRAL PARK SOUTH, NEW YORK CITY,

PART SEVEN

35

LATE MARCH 1944

BUCHAREST

36

LATE MARCH 1944

BUCHAREST

37

MARCH 21, 1944

ANKARA, TURKEY

9:55 P.M., SIMOND’S HOME

38

APRIL 3, 1944

BUCHAREST

39

APRIL 4, 1944

ISTANBUL, TURKEY

11:00 A.M., RONCALLI’S RESIDENCE

PART EIGHT

40

MAY 1944

BUCHAREST

41

MAY 23, 1944

WASHINGTON, D.C.

8:15 P.M., THE WHITE HOUSE, ROOSEVELT’S QUARTERS

42

JUNE 18, 1944

BUCHAREST

43

JULY 31,1944

ISTANBUL, TURKEY

PART NINE

44

JULY 1944

BUCHAREST

45

BERLIN, GERMANY

PART TEN

46

SUNDAY, AUGUST 20, 1944

BUCHAREST

47

TUESDAY, AUGUST 22, 1944

BUCHAREST

48

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 23, 1944

BUCHAREST

49

SEPTEMBER 1944

50

AUTHOR’S NOTE ON SOURCES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PROLOGUE

TRANSNISTRIA, ROMANIA

ON THE TRAINS IN TRANSNISTRIA

AND IN THE ACMECETKA CAMP

The frozen corpse of her two-year-old just rolled into the ditch, Vasile, my wife whispered as she tried to cradle and console Mrs. Sulimovici in her arms.

She was hysterical, kicking and wailing and waving her arms and legs as if she were out of her mind. She clawed and struggled and ripped at my wife’s clothing. Her instincts gnawed at her, beckoned her to follow her boy down into the deep recesses of the muddy, rain-soaked pit nearby.

You’ll never find him, not among all of those bodies down there. The water’s too deep.

It was a miracle that we all weren’t in her condition. These camps and ghettos, these hovels of inhumane treatment, these holding pens before the trains arrived, they served their purpose. I can vouch for that. They buried our humanity, dragged us down and stripped us of any self-worth that still remained in our souls. They functioned just like the pit at the loading dock that rose up to consume Mrs. Sulimovici’s son.

For over a week now, on one forced march after another, she had carried his frozen little form, his lifeless body, from one place to another, hoping and praying, and praying and – But for the rest of us, we prayed openly for only one thing – an early arrival of the trains.

She died in my wife’s arms. She had sold everything. Now she owned nothing. Her clothes and her son were all she had.

Starvation was commonplace at Cernauti and at the other camps – at Chisinau and Secureni and at Rascani and Soroca and Vertujeni – commonplace not only after the trains evacuated us, but also before we even left for Transnistria. On a daily basis – no, on an hourly basis – I listened to the horrid tales of criminality directed toward my people, outright atrocities concocted by our guards and the gendarmerie, by our own soldiers and officers, and by the very same townspeople who we lived among for all these past years and decades.

Tens of thousands of my people died in these camps, died before the trains arrived. Some committed suicide, most just gave up. The children – they were always the first to go. With little or no food available, the guards would call to us or to me, Vasile Weiss! Vasile Weiss! What gives? What gems or jewelry or gold or shekels do you have for me today?

I usually got my bread, but others were systematically fleeced or swindled and then robbed of their other valuables. Thousands performed forced labor for scraps of food. Potato peelings became a real delicacy. The very poor Jews among us flung themselves like animals upon this garbage. In some camps, many even ate grass. Gold watches lined the pockets of many of the gendarmerie after feeding time.

In the beginning before the hunger and starvation took hold, representatives from the National Bank of Romania arrived in the camps. Someone usually read Marshal Ion Antonescu’s order, number 8507. It stipulated that all jewelry and precious metals owned by Jews who were to be evacuated from Bessarabia and Bukovina to Transnistria must be surrendered. It was our payment for our train ticket.

Many officers pocketed the money. Some bank officials even paid peasant women a handsome sum to conduct body searches of our women for possible additional hidden treasure. Later, we heard that most of the cash that was confiscated would wind up in the coffers of Antonescu’s wife, Maria.

From previous reports, we knew she had received about five million lei from Jassy’s Jewish community so that they wouldn’t have to live in a ghetto. Apparently, Lecca arranged that. The General Director of Jewish Affairs in Romania, Radu Lecca, always seemed to have his hand involved in these types of transactions. Corruption was rampant through and through, from top to bottom.

Bank and government officials didn’t just work their way through the camps. Far from it. After they dealt with us, they looted our abandoned homes.

They gathered millions of lei from what we believed were secure hiding places. Many of our Christian friends put their lives on the line for us by saying nothing when it came to the priceless goods that we left with them. Someday, our grandchildren, we hoped, would become the beneficiaries of what we stashed away.

In addition to the money, our captors also shipped by train to Bucharest many valuable pieces of furniture and art and clothing and household wares that could turn a profit. When we left for Transnistria, all of our luggage and remaining goods – or so we were told – were also sent by local authorities to our favorite first lady, Maria Antonescu, for distribution to her national charity, Comisiade Patronaj, probably better known as Maria’s private bank account at the National Bank of Romania.

Possibly, the worst example of money changing hands occurred when some of the camp guards or gendarmerie would execute those Jews – my people – those who wore the best clothes. Peasants had come to expect these killings and waited patiently like crows outside the gates ready to steal something. The guards would then sell the corpses to these townspeople and receive in return several thousand lei as payment.

This also happened whenever our train stopped at various places in Transnistria. There, beside the railroad tracks, the peasants even scavenged and dug for clothes and shoes among our dead in the ditches. No doubt, if Mrs. Sulimovici’s son were in one of these pits, his clothes, too, would find their way into their hands.

As we waited for our deportation into Transnistria, the horrors inside the ghettos and the camps only intensified. Their portraits convulsed us all.

Epidemics came. Typhus. Tens of thousands of us forced to live in abandoned houses or alleyways or crumbling hovels or barracks with no bedding.

No soap. We were as filthy as our new homes. Our rooms reeked of stale sweat, urine, fecal matter, mildew, dampness.

We drank rainwater from culverts and puddles and ate edible plants that grew nearby. In our camp, sixty-to-seventy died each day.

Most of us lay naked or in rags, covered with parasites. The skin on our arms and hands and faces became scale-like and shriveled up. It flaked and peeled off easily.

Mumps, scarlet fever, dysentery were prevalent everywhere. Imagine, thousands of us concentrated in indescribable overcrowding – women, children, young girls, men, the sick, those who were dying, and women in labor – all having no way to feed ourselves. No funerals. One day, when I went to the ditches to move my bowels, I heard moaning. As I got closer, I saw men, dying men, who were thrown alive into the latrines.

When we eventually began our trek to the trains, many of us had to carry our people – the dead, the sick and the dying. Others were forced to march or haul cartloads of our folk to the railway pick-up points. And it was there that we learned of the horror of the word, Alexianu.

Those of us, who could not keep up or who refused to submit, heard this code word loud and clear. The cry Alexianu triggered an immediate, on-site execution – swift and efficient and complete.

Forest roads and ditches were littered with those of us who no longer possessed the strength to reach or to crawl to the next crossing point. My people lay murdered, beaten, robbed, raped, and disemboweled by these local gendarmerie who pledged their loyalty to this madman – this Alexianu.

As we trudged through the mud up onto the loading docks at the train stations, horrific scenes unfolded. Forty-to-fifty of us were packed into each car. In some boxcars, sixty to seventy infants were shoved together. Members of families were separated. Children were dragged there, parents staying here. Brothers losing sisters, husbands losing wives. And the air – it was the air that I’ll never forget – the air that was filled with wails, filled with painful, excruciating, heartbreaking wails.

Because it was very late one very, very blessed evening, my wife and I survived. All of us on our train were to be unloaded and processed by Governor Modest Isopescu’s thugs at Bogdanovka, but our train never stopped.

For days, we plodded on. Still, our train never stopped.

About a month before Christmas, we bypassed yet another camp, this one at Dumanovka. It wasn’t until the first week in December that we finally arrived at Acmecetka.

When I heard my name blasted over the loudspeaker, Vasile Weiss –hospital, I withered. My legs felt like two old, discarded rubber bands. They’d experiment on my body, I thought, tear me limb from limb, pump this in here and pull that out of there. I was convinced that the new year would be the year that I’d never see.

Luckily, however, my wife and I proved indispensable. We were not only efficient and tireless at the hospital, but were compassionate and well-liked – well-liked and respected not only by our people who suffered and died there, but also by the thugs who formulated and filled the prescriptions. It was from this unique vantage point that I witnessed how Isopescu exterminated my people.

The order came down from Alexianu to Isopescu just a few days before Christmas. All of the Jews in the Golta district camps, those at Bogdanovka, Dumanovka, and Acmecetka, were to be eliminated. My people were to die before Christmas.

The massacre, the mass murder of the entire camp population of 48,000 Jews at Bogdanovka, began on the morning of December 21. Isopescu brought in Ukrainian policemen and Romanian gendarmes to implement his orders.

All of the Jews were herded into numerous wooden stables. The sick and the disabled and the dying, about four to five thousand, were piled into two of the stables.

Straw and hay were then scattered on the roofs and around the entranceways. Gasoline was sprayed onto both buildings. And when the order rang out Light the fire!, the two tinderbox stables burst into flames. Within minutes, the walls and the ceilings and the billowing flames crumbled, collapsing in on the corpses. Their harrowing screams tormented the others, the 43,000 or so locked in their own stables. They watched helplessly, helplessly awaiting their turn.

Soon enough, their time came. For the 43,000, a more secluded site was selected for their execution and incineration, a precipice adjacent to the Bug River, a ravine about two miles from Bogdanovka. While the two stables burned, they were led away to the ravine, to the bog.

In a forest nearby, they were robbed of all of their remaining belongings and stripped naked. Their ring-fingers were chopped off if the rings couldn’t be removed easily. Even their gold teeth were forcibly extracted.

In groups of three to four hundred people, they were led to the edge of the ravine. There they were forced to kneel. Mothers took their children into their arms and pleaded to be spared. Fathers encouraged their children and their wives to be brave, to be – whatever.

Kneeling stark naked in temperatures of forty degrees below zero, they were shot at close range with explosive bullets. Their bodies tumbled haphazardly down into the ravine. The massacre proceeded in this manner for a week, interrupted only briefly so that the policemen could celebrate the Christmas holidays with their wives and children. Some Christmas! Some holy day!

When they returned, the cremation began. Hoping to erase all traces of what had happened to the 43,000, Modest Isopescu gave the order to cremate. The corpses burned for days.

Layers and layers of straw and wood were set in place. Then two hundred inmates laid the bodies in rows upon the straw and wood. On top of the corpses, another layer of straw and wood, followed by more layers of bodies and more layers of straw. Tens and tens of stacks reached two meters high and five meters wide. A fat corpse was placed next to a thin corpse so that the former’s fat would help burn the thin corpse more quickly.

Similar executions and tortures occurred here at Acmecetka. Starvation was also Isopescu’s favorite method of extermination. Our Jews – my people – remained for days stretched out on the ground or on make-shift beds, mired in sub-freezing temperatures, unable to move. Periodically, Isopescu would come by, most of the time drunker than drunk. He’d order his gendarmes to give the Jews a cup of corn flour to eat every day.

He relished tormenting the starving inmates and their children. Even photographed them, always took photographs. From our figures at this time, we showed that the Jews who followed us – those who were brought directly from the ghettos of Transnistria and Romania – that approximately five thousand of them succumbed to the slow and horrible extermination resulting from Isopescu’s pre-ordained process of starvation.

Isopescu wasn’t the only Romanian or Romanian prefect to implement starvation policies in Transnistria. In the Vertujen camp, over 23,000 Jews were starved to death or shot. And when starvation was coupled with the outbreak of numerous epidemics among our people in Transnistria, our Romanian military and police agreed on only one solution – push the typhus-infected and disease-ridden Jews eastward, across the Bug River, into the hands of the German military and the German SS. The German Volksdeutsche SS, the German colonists in Transnistria and in Ukraine, they’d settle the matter.

And push they did. Romanian gendarmes deported 10,000 Jews across the Bug in the area of Vosnesensk. The word was that 60,000 more would soon follow. All tolled, the 70,000 Jews still alive in the Odessa area were on their way east. Typhus, they claimed. But the Germans would have none of it.

Stopped at the border, tens of thousands of my people were shipped back – brought back by train, actually – transported back into the middle of Ukrainian and ethnic German settlements north of Odessa. There the killing operations began anew. German Volksdeutsche SS, German troops, and the SS, they all participated. They marched thousands into the countryside and shot them. 28,000 in all. Inzwishen wurden sie Liquidiert was the message we received at the hospital – they’ve all been liquidated.

That was yesterday. Today in our hospital, my wife overheard Isopescu boast that, of the 175,000 Bessarabian and Bukovinian Jews who were deported to Transnistria, about 125,000 had been eliminated. Incinerated, that was his word. That two-thirds of all the Jews in Transnistria were now dead, were now fertilizer in the mud of Transnistria, Romania’s greatest killing center. Again, his phrase.

But what really shook my wife, what really unnerved her down to her very soul, was Isopescu’s offhand comment he snapped off coldly in front of one of our doctors, that the Judani of Old Romania, that they were next.

*

TRANSNISTRIA, ROMANIA

ON A REFUGEE TRAIN

The piercing sound of the screeching iron wheels braking against the steel rails always caused everyone to jerk and shudder and cry out, especially our babies.

We’d automatically move and reach out in the darkness to clutch each other, to huddle against one another, for we all knew that it would only be a matter of minutes before gendarmerie would come to slide the door open. And true to form, today was no different.

The early morning slivers of light crept sparingly through the outline of the door of our boxcar. However, it was the wind this morning, the biting cold wind that was blowing particularly hard today. The wind, coupled with the subzero temperatures, forced even more of us into new human piles.

Now, ten or twelve huddled groups crushed into each other and competed for the four sheltered corners of our freight car. Our dead and dying and our feces and waste were all piled in the center of the car, near the door opening.

We spent days without food or water. Hundreds, half-dead, were lifted into the freight cars even before we departed, some victims of gunfire, some disemboweled by bayonets, others bludgeoned with sledgehammers. Because of these conditions, some drank their own urine or blood.

Many were thrown off and buried along the way or left to die along