Hitler’s Romanian ally led an utterly barbaric regime — that while often protecting Jews inside Romania’s borders, murdered them indiscriminately just outside those borders.
The Jewish cemetery of Jassy, in northeastern Romania, occupies one of the highest spots in the city. It is quite literally vast, crowded with graves for hundreds of yards in different directions.
This army of gravestones — wide rows and rows of them — marked the burial sites of local Jewish military heroes who died fighting for Romania in World War I. Adjacent were four long rows of massive cement slabs with Stars of David, symbolically marking the graves of the victims of the Jassy pogrom, which took place in late June 1941 and left thousands dead. As a plaque read: The victims were starved and suffocated in the “train of death” and elsewhere “butchered” by frenzied Iron Guardsmen and others: “… the moon shall be confounded, and the sun ashamed.” (Isaiah 24:23) Also nearby, amid the assemblage of mottled and weather-stained tombs of a whole Jewish civilization going back centuries here, was a monument of more recent vintage: to the 36 Jews — 15 men, nine women, and 12 children — murdered in the nearby Vulturi forest, during the same pogrom.
When I visited in late 2013, I was almost completely alone among the graves. An old woman with a dirty ball cap, who seemed a bit deranged, guarded the cemetery, helped out by a gang of dogs. It was so overgrown with weeds that, except for certain areas, it left a scandalously derelict and frightening impression. There are Jewish cemeteries, like the one in Prague, that are constantly celebrated and memorialized by virtue of them being on the international tourist circuit. Others, like the synagogues and Jewish graveyards of the Kazimierz district of Krakow in Poland, are now undergoing intensive restorations. But this towering and ruined city, at least at the time of my visit, still demanded its just recognition. With few survivors left, life in the once great Jewish magnet of Jassy had been reduced to silence.
Some basic facts about Jewish life in Jassy, as supplied by the small museum adjoining the city’s Jewish community center near downtown: Some 43,500 Jews lived in the city in 1921; 350 in 2013. Before World War II, Jassy had 137 synagogues; now there are two. In fact, though World War II was, to say the least, difficult for Jews in Romania, the end of Jewish life here came mainly during the Communist era, when the regime charged the West in hard currency to buy out the Jews who desired to go to Israel or elsewhere. And of course they wanted to go — who wouldn’t have wanted to leave the Romania of Communist tyrants Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Nicolae Ceausescu?
“Antonescu was not as bad as Gheorghiu-Dej,” the elderly Jewish woman, who had opened the museum for me, offhandedly and flatly remarked. She was referring to Marshal Ion Antonescu, who ruled Romania from 1940 to 1944. It was an extraordinary statement on the face of it, given that Antonescu had killed hundreds of thousands of Jews during his World War II pro-Nazi dictatorship. Yet, the remark was also, in a certain sense, understandable: Antonescu was, as we shall see, among the most ambivalent central personalities of the Holocaust.
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