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German-Jewish Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust: Grete Weil, Ruth Klüger,
and the Politics of Address
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Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: From Auschwitz to Hiroshima to
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Richard Wagner for the New Millennium: Essays in Music and Culture
edited by Matthew Bribitzer-Stull, Alex Lubet, and Gottfried Wagner
Edited by
Valentina Glajar
and
Jeanine Teodorescu
LOCAL HISTORY, TRANSNATIONAL MEMORY IN THE ROMANIAN HOLOCAUST
Copyright © Valentina Glajar and Jeanine Teodorescu, 2011.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011
All rights reserved.
First published in 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
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ISBN 978-1-349-29451-0 ISBN 978-0-230-11841-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-0-230-11841-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Local history, transnational memory in the Romanian Holocaust /
edited by Valentina Glajar and Jeanine Teodorescu.
p. cm.—(Studies in European culture and history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Romania—Influence.
2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Romania—Historiography.
3. Jews—Romania—History—20th century. 4. Jews—Romania—
History—21st century. 5. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945), in literature.
6. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945), in motion pictures. 7. Romania—
Ethnic relations. I. Glajar, Valentina. II. Teodorescu, Jeanine, 1958–
DS135.R7L63 2011
940.53⬘1809498—dc22 2010035728
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: March 2011
For Irineu and Sergio (VG)
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Valentina Glajar
We would like to express our appreciation to the following for their con-
tribution: Radu Ioanid (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum) and Raphael
Vago (Tel Aviv University) for their invaluable comments and excellent sug-
gestions; William Ford (University of Illinois at Chicago) for his detailed
editorial assistance and Elizabeth Welch (Texas State University—San
Marcos) for her meticulous proofreading; Randolph Braham, Alexandru
Florian, Robert Fischer, Marianne Hirsch, Leo Spitzer, and Carmen Marino
for their support and enthusiasm; Brigitte Shull for believing in this project;
our families and friends for their unlimited patience and love.
Earlier versions of chapters 2, 5, and 6 have been previously pub-
lished and we would like to thank Routledge (Taylor and Francis Books),
Polirom Iai, and the journal Studia Hebraica for allowing the authors to
revise and reprint their work. We would also like to thank the University of
Sussex and the Arnold Daghani Trust for allowing us to reproduce several
of Daghani’s drawings; and the National Museum of Romanian Literature
for the permission to reproduce two photographs of Mircea Eliade and
Mihail Sebastian.
.
I n t roduc t ion
Valentina Glajar
To whom shall we entrust the custody of the public memory of the Holocaust? To
the historian? To the survivor? To the critic? To the poet, novelist, dramatist? All
of them re-create the details and images of the event through written texts, and
in so doing remind us that we are dealing with represented rather than unmedi-
ated reality.
—Lawrence Langer
On January 27, 2009, sixty-four years after the end of World War II,
Ruth Glasberg Gold was the first survivor of Transnistria to talk on the
International Day of Commemoration of the Holocaust organized by the
United Nations. Her emotional testimony is an affirmation for the hun-
dreds of thousands of victims of the Holocaust in Romania. Most impor-
tantly, she remembers her mother who, before perishing in Transnistria,
had advised Gold to “bear witness!”
Gold’s story illustrates a larger issue: the dynamic between the insistence on
local memory and specificity and the transnational and transcultural rec-
ollection of the Romanian events in the wider context of Holocaust stud-
ies. On the local level, Gold’s testimony points to several particular aspects
of the Transnistrian Holocaust and its rightful place within Holocaust
studies. For example, local practices differed from the German systematic
extermination process. Hannah Arendt’s assessment of Romanians, which
also speaks of the cruelty Romanians exhibited in their treatment of Jews,
comes to mind. In her seminal study Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on
2 / valentina glajar
the Banality of Evil (1963),2 Arendt states that “Romania was the most
anti-Semitic country of pre-war Europe” (1963, 190) and goes on to say
that it was also “a country with an inordinately high percentage of plain
murderers” (1963, 193). Historian Raul Hilberg mentions that during the
Romanian and German operations, Germans were appalled at the disor-
ganized way the Romanians were killing and, at times, “had to step in to
restrain and slow down the pace of Romanian measures.” He adds that
“[w]hat is significant in the case of the Romanians is not only how fast they
were going but also how far” (809).3
The primitive and barbaric methods Gold points out in her speech refer
to various episodes during what Jean Ancel called the “Balkan manual
Holocaust” (2005, 339).4 Whether it was slaughtering Jews and labeling
them “kosher meat” during the Bucharest pogrom in January 1941; exe-
cuting thousands during the Iaşi pogrom in June 1941; asphyxiating thou-
sands in sealed trains (the “death trains” from Iaşi to Călăraşi and Podul
Iloaiei); or allowing the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Transnistria,
whether by execution or due to typhus, lack of food and medication, or
poor living conditions, Romanians may have contributed to the Holocaust
in a less organized manner than the Germans, but they certainly did so
with the same resolve and determination.
While scholars now discuss the globalization of the Holocaust, and
how the Holocaust has become a “universal trope” of suffering and per-
secution—a metaphor to explain hatred and genocide in other times and
places—as Andreas Huyssen contends in Present Pasts (14),5 Romanians
are still in the beginning stages of coming to terms with their country’s
role in the historical Holocaust. The Romanian experience shows that the
Holocaust cannot become decontextualized quite yet, since genocide and
violence in the East—at the fringes—require still more research. On the
other hand, as Jeffrey Alexander explains, “Now free-floating rather than
situated—universal rather than particular—this traumatic event vividly
‘lives’ in the memories of contemporaries whose parents and grandpar-
ents never felt themselves even remotely related to it” (2009, 3).6 Recently,
several U.S. scholars, most notably Omer Bartov, Marianne Hirsch, and
Leo Spitzer, have “returned” to the East with renewed interest, for both
scholarly and personal reasons, and have revealed the complex layers of
conflicting and competing memories about World War II in Eastern
Europe.7 Eastern scholars who relocated to the West have also contributed
greatly to a better understanding of the Holocaust in the East and the
ramifications of ethnic cleansing. One example is former Moldovan politi-
cian Vladimir Solonari’s publications on Antonescu’s plans to create model
colonies, purely Romanian, in Bessarabia and Bukovina.8 Maria Bucur’s
work has drawn attention to the Romanian context in the discussions of
introduction / 3
of the treatment of the Jews in Romania long before 1969. In July and
August 1942, the United Rumanian Jews of America published the first
authentic account based upon official documents, a 59-page summary of
the events between 1938 and 1942 in The Record (News Bulletin). Under
the title Blood Bath in Rumania: “. . . an orgy unparalleled in modern his-
tory,” this issue of The Record presented alarming news about the fate of the
Romanian Jews under Antonescu’s regime, the pogrom of Bucharest, the
executions during the Iaşi pogrom, the deportations to Transnistria and
the inhuman conditions in the camps. The text is accompanied by graphic
photographs that document the murders, the looting, the humiliation, and
the terror.
Romanian historians have tackled this topic primarily after the fall
of Communism since the Holocaust and the extermination of Jews was
rarely a topic in communist Romania. As Radu Ioanid explains in his
study, The Holocaust in Romania, Communist historical writing empha-
sized Romania’s fight against Fascism alongside the victorious Russian
Army—after Romania, originally an ally of Nazi Germany, changed sides
on August 23, 1944 and joined the anti-Hitler coalition. The discussion
of the Holocaust was primarily reduced to referencing the extermination
of the Jews from Hungarian-occupied Transylvania. However, in the rare
instances when the fate of the Romanian Jews was discussed (the term
Holocaust was barely used), historical facts were distorted and the tragic
events diminished or even denied.14
Since 1989, however, Romanians have had plenty of opportunities to
educate themselves about the role their country played in the Holocaust,
as several historical studies and collections of testimonies by Jewish and
Roma survivors have now been published.15 In 2004, the International
Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania (also known as
the Wiesel Commission) published its 378-page Final Report that elucidates
the role Romania played during the Holocaust. In 2005, at the recommen-
dation of the Wiesel Commission, the Romanian government founded the
Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust, which has
also published a series of books since its inception.16 The commission also
recommended that the events of the Holocaust now be taught in schools.
On October 8, 2009, on the Romanian Holocaust Remembrance Day, the
Holocaust Memorial in Bucharest was unveiled.17
In spite of the important steps taken by the Romanian government and
better documentation of the Romanian Holocaust in historical studies,
the memory work in film and literature is still lagging in Romania. Very
few Romanian writers and filmmakers living in Romania have confronted
the Holocaust, mostly because it is still such a controversial topic and
because Romanians still grapple with the consequences of the more recent
introduction / 5
and to enrich our understanding of the events in the camps, while realizing
that none of the media could recapture the past.
Turning to the experience of Romanian Jews from the Old Kingdom,
Andrei Oişteanu focuses on life in Bucharest during the 1930s and 1940s
as documented in Mihail Sebastian’s Journal. In his article Oişteanu chron-
icles the friendship between Mircea Eliade, the historian of religions and
former professor at the University of Chicago, and the Romanian writer
Sebastian (born Iosef Hechter). Eliade’s pro-Iron Guard past has been now
scrutinized in several studies and met with fierce criticism in Romania.24
As Oişteanu shows in his essay, Sebastian and Eliade’s friendship is symp-
tomatic of the cultural, moral, and political life in interwar Romania,
especially among Romanian intellectuals. Drawing on Sebastian’s Journal
and Eliade’s Portugal Journal, Oişteanu points to the political changes
in Romania and Eliade’s sympathizing with the far-right Legionary
Movement as crucial elements in the evolution—or rather, involution—of
this friendship.
The essays in the second part of this volume turn to transnational
and transcultural literary and filmic representations of the Romanian
Holocaust. The Romanian, French, German, and Israeli cultural repre-
sentations in works by writers and filmmakers of Romanian descent are
important contributions to both the Romanian and the overall European
Holocaust memory. As James Young argues in his seminal study Writing
and Rewriting the Holocaust, fictional portrayals of this overwhelming
event have to be studied against the historical background of pogroms,
anti-Semitism, deportations, and extermination. While fictional accounts
will never have the impact of testimonies, as Inga Clendinnen explains in
Reading the Holocaust, both challenge the boundaries of representation.
However, studies on well-known Bukovinian authors such as Celan and
Appelfeld, for example, have rarely addressed these writers’ reflections on
the specific events of the Romanian Holocaust. On the contrary, some
Western scholars have struggled with the lack of translations of Romanian
sources. Celan’s continued contact with his friends in Romania while in
France, especially with Petre Solomon and Alfred Margul-Sperber, still
requires further research. Certainly, an English translation of Solomon’s
Paul Celan: Dimensiunea românească (Paul Celan: The Romanian
Dimension) is necessary.25 Also, while Wiesel has become an icon in
Holocaust literature, very few scholars have yet studied Maramureş, a
region in northwestern Transylvania, Romania, that was once home to the
Wiesel family and to a flourishing Jewish community.26 Tourists can now
visit the Elie Wiesel Memorial House, which opened to the public in the
Romanian town of Sighet (Sighetul Marmaţiei) in 2002, and learn more
about the erasure of this Jewish presence.27
introduction / 9
Notes
1. Gold, Ruth Glasberg. Statement. http://www.un.org/holocaustremembrance/2009/
statements09_gold.shtml.
2. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
3. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 809.
4. Jean Ancel, Preludiu la asasinat, 339.
5. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts, 14.
6. Jeffrey Alexander, Remembering the Holocaust, 3.
7. See especially Omer Bartov’s Erased and Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s
latest book, Ghosts of Home. In the German context, the work of Mariana
Hausleitner and Brigitte Mihok deserves special mention, as they were among
the first scholars to tackle the topic of Transnistria after 1990. Recently,
Mihok edited another important volume with Wolfgang Benz, Holocaust an
der Peripherie [Holocaust at the Periphery], 2009.
12 / valentina glajar
on Elie Wiesel in 2002. Upon this news, Wiesel returned his medal award in
protest. Several journalists of Radio Free Europe, the mayor of Timişoara, and
Holocaust historian Randolph Braham also returned their distinctions.
20. Ignorance and anti-Semitism have led to serious incidents in recent years. In
2006, for example, the synagogue of Oradea was set on fire—news which
the Romanian media mostly ignored. In October 2008, Romanian teenagers
destroyed more than 130 graves and monuments in one of the Jewish cem-
eteries in Bucharest while allegedly recording a hip-hop video. In July 2009,
vandals desecrated another Jewish cemetery in Ploieşti, which raised ques-
tions about the previous investigation regarding the cemetery in Bucharest.
In the same month, the very popular mayor of Constanţa, Radu Mazăre,
provoked the indignation of both the Jewish and Romanian communities
when he paraded together with his sixteen-year-old son in Nazi uniforms at a
fashion show in Mamaia.
21. See the Spiegel issue number 21 (2009), “Die Komplizen–Hitlers europäische
Helfer beim Judenmord.” See also Dennis Deletant’s study Hitler’s Forgotten
Ally: Antonescu and His Regime, Romania 1940–1944 (2006). In the Ukrainian
context, see studies by Martin Dean, John-Paul Himka, and Karel Berkhoff.
22. Siegfried “Sami” Jagendorf (1885–1970) was a Jewish engineer from Bukovina
who persuaded Romanian gendarmes and military to allow him to set up a
foundry run by Jewish workers and engineers. He is known to have saved
an estimated fifteen thousand Romanian Jews from death. His memoir,
Jagendorf ’s Foundry, was published in 1991 with an introduction and com-
ments by Aron Hirt-Manheimer.
23. For Popovici’s extraordinary actions, see his testimony published in Romanian
and English translation in 2001. See also “My Testimony” in Richard Levy’s
Antisemitism in the Modern World: An Anthology of Texts (1991).
24. See especially Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine’s study Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco.
L’oubli du fascisme: trois intellectuels roumains dans la tourmente du siècle (2002),
which focuses on Emil Cioran’s and Mircea Eliade’s desire and attempt not to
reveal their Fascist past. See also earlier studies on this topic: Leon Volovici’s
Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism—The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in
the 1930s (1991), which discusses the works of numerous writers who were
members or sympathizers of the Romanian Iron Guard during the 1930s, and
Zigu Ornea’s Anii 30: Extrema dreaptă românească [The 30s: The Romanian
Extreme Right] (1995), which focuses more on the anti-Semitic journalistic
media of the time and partially on Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran.
25. Felstiner has a few fragments from Solomon’s book translated into English in
his study, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew.
26. For more information on Jewish life in Maramureş, see also the book
by Rudolph Tessler, Letter to My Children: From Romania to America via
Auschwitz, especially the chapter “A Way of Life,” 1–29.
27. Wiesel returned several times to Sighet and two movies document these
returns: Sighet, Sighet and Elie Wiesel Goes Home. He was also present, along
with then Romanian President Iliescu and other officials, at the inauguration
of the Elie Wiesel Memorial House.
28. In the United States, historian Randolph Braham has written extensively on
the Holocaust in Hungary, northern Transylvania, and Romania. For his
14 / valentina glajar
Works Cited
Achim, Viorel, ed. 2004. Documente privind deportarea ţiganilor în Transnistria
[Documents Pertaining to the Deportations of Gypsies to Transnistria].
Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedică.
Alexander, Jeffrey. 2009. Remembering the Holocaust. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ancel, Jean. 2005. Preludiu la asasinat: Pogromul de la Iaşi, 29 iunie 1941. Trans.
Carol Bines. Iaşi: Polirom.
———. 1998. Transnistria. Bucharest: Atlas.
Arendt, Hannah. 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
New York: Penguin.
Bal, Mieke. Introduction. 1999. Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present.
Eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer. Hanover: University Press
of New England. vii–xvii.
Bartov, Omer. 2007. Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day
Ukraine. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Benz, Wolfgang and Brigitte Mihok, eds. 2009. Holocaust an der Peripherie:
Judenpolitik and Judenmord in Rumänien und Transnistrien 1940–1944. Berlin:
Metropol.
Berkhoff, Karel C. 2004. Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi
Rule. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Braham, Randolph L., ed. 2004. The Treatment of the Holocaust in Hungary and
Romania during the Post- Communist Era. New York: Rosenthal Institute for
Holocaust Studies; Boulder: Social Sciences Monographs.
———, ed. 1997. The Destruction of Romanian and Ukrainian Jews during the
Antonescu Era. New York: Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies; Boulder:
Social Sciences Monographs.
———, ed. 1994. The Tragedy of Romanian Jewry. New York: Rosenthal Institute
for Holocaust Studies; Boulder: Social Sciences Monographs.
———. 1983. Genocide and Retribution: The Holocaust in Hungarian-Ruled
Northern Transylvania. Boston: Kluwer-Nijhoff.
Bucur, Maria. 2009. Heroes and Victims: Remembering War in Twentieth- Century
Romania. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
———. 2001. Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania. Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press.
Carp, Matatias. 1946–1948. Cartea neagră: Suferinţele evreilor din România 1940–
1944 [The Black Book: The Suffering of the Romanian Jews, 1940–1944].
Bucharest: Dacia Traiană.
Clendinnen, Inga. 1999. Reading the Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Comisia Internaţională pentru Studierea Holocaustului în România. 2005. Raport
Final. Iaşi: Polirom.
introduction / 15
Alexandru Florian
In other words, for Romanian historians there are at least two aspects that
could contribute to the rehabilitation of Marshal Antonescu in Romanian
culture or mythology. But historian Boia does not tell us if a leader who
became a war criminal still deserves to be recognized by the culture of that
nation. It would have been far more instructive if the author had exposed the
difference between the mythical “Antonescu who unified the country and
fought against Bolshevism” and the historical Antonescu as war criminal.
At the opposite pole is the attempt of Michael Shafir to ameliorate pos-
sible inter-ethnic tensions between memories and so-called parallel histo-
ries. This kind of “dialogue of the deaf,” (Shafir 2007, 100) penetrates the
false competition between Holocaust and Gulag.4 After delineating the
main mechanisms of subjectivity that influence the different memoriza-
tions of the same event, Shafir pleads for the norm of “recognizing the
other” (2007, 100) as a premise for the dialogue of memories. In order to
achieve this goal, one has to deconstruct some prejudices or preconceptions
in the interpretation of history. In rewriting the history of recent Romania,
“a start could be the elucidation of some concepts. Otherwise,” as Shafir
explains, “I’m afraid we remain in the mythological and legendary space”
perception of the holocaust / 21
undeniable that Antonescu’s regime holds responsibility for the final stage
of the Holocaust, the extermination of the Jewish population.13
The Antonescu regime, which was rife with ideological contradictions and
was considerably different from other fascist regimes in Europe, remains dif-
ficult to classify. It was a fascist regime that dissolved the Parliament, joined
the Axis Powers, enacted anti-semitic and racial legislation, and adopted the
Final Solution in parts of its territory. At the same time, however, Antonescu
brutally crushed the Romanian Legionary movement and denounced their
terrorist methods. Moreover, some of Romania’s anti-semitic laws, includ-
ing the Organic Law, which was the basis for Antonescu’s anti-semitic leg-
islation, were in force before Antonescu assumed power. And, the regime
did succeed in sparing half of the Jews under its rule during the Holocaust
(Final Report, 115).
Holocaust uniqueness; and (3) failure in banality and the attempt to put the
Holocaust inside brackets against other genocides or to use it as a political
instrument (1998, 81–93). Only the first post-war years in Romania seem
to coincide with the manifestations of some reactions in the United States
and elsewhere toward the six million Jewish victims. Indeed, the attitude
of the surviving Jews was mainly one of silence or reticence, not one of wit-
ness. In the West, just as in the East, the predominant temptation was to
promote the image of the political actors and portray the Allies as winners
who had also suffered the biggest losses. This political slant prevailed in
historical interpretation, as a context in which the Jews were viewed as sec-
ondary victims. By the beginning of the 1950s, the comparative attitudes
of the two geopolitical spaces were radically different because of the politi-
cal impact of the Cold War, the attitude toward the state of Israel, and the
Communist ideological monopoly in the Eastern Bloc.
While the Western countries were well aware of the extermination of
the Jews and referred to it under the terms of Holocaust or Shoah, the coun-
tries from Eastern Europe adopted a silence that evolved into a negationist
distortion during the Cold War. Since 1989, Holocaust denial has taken
more radical shape in Romania than in other Eastern Bloc countries, due
to the nationalist ideology of the Ceauşescu era.15
Northern and Southern Bukovina between 1941 and 1943. After a short
period, the book was withdrawn from the bookshops and remained
available solely in libraries, in special archives, for the use of researchers
only. In the spring of 1947, a political debate took place in the Assembly
of Deputies concerning the delay in preparing the trial of those guilty
of organizing and carrying out the Iaşi pogrom. Representatives of par-
liamentarian parties and Jewish communities participated in the discus-
sions, which actually influenced the politicians’ attitudes toward the
victims of Fascism.18 In the same period, Mihail Roller, one of the ideo-
logues of the Communist Party—the one who enforced the official ver-
sion of history until the beginning of the 1960s—published the History
of Romania. The volume, a high school textbook, presents, in fact, an
amalgamated view of the tragedy of the Romanian Jewish population.
The author acknowledges some anti- Semitic policies (legislation and
economic measures) of the Romanian state. For instance, during the
authoritarian regime of King Carol II, various anti-Jewish measures
were taken:
[T]he holocaust (sic) did not take place in Romania [one of the very rare
occasions during the Communist era when the term Holocaust is used],
precisely because of the fact that, with very few and unimportant excep-
tions, the executioners wearing the swastika did not receive any help freely
offered. On the contrary, they faced rebuff in their attempts to find accom-
plices for organizing deportations or other genocidal actions (1978, 21).
on their own. The salvation of the Jews from extermination is, accord-
ing to Lustig, of Antonescu’s doing: “In a Europe brought to its knees
by Hitler, Romania was the country where the largest number of Jews
remained alive” (25).
Ion Iliescu [president of Romania] has agreed with the set of “recommen-
dations” made by the commission: “the establishing of a National Day
to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, on 9 October—although
we Romanians don’t have a national day to commemorate the victims
of Bolshevism starting with 28 June 1940, when the biggest part of
Romanians’ executioners from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina occu-
pied by Bolsheviks were Jews! The same Iliescu didn’t say a word about
“recuperations,” billions of dollars we’ll have to pay to the Jews. But Jews
don’t accept to talk about reciprocity of “recuperations,” namely: they
shall pay first for the Romanian goods they plundered and destroyed in
Bessarabia and Bukovina between 28 June 1940 and 22 June 1941, one year
before Romanians persecuted, deported, killed them.31
camps of Transnistria and also sent the Jews living between the Dniestr
and Bug rivers to camps. In addition, he barred the Jews from economic,
administrative, and cultural life, as well as from schools and hospitals,
striving to isolate them from the rest of the population. But, as Giurescu
emphasizes, Antonescu did refuse to send the Jews from the Romanian
territories (up to the Prut River) to the Nazi death camps, dissenting from
the German Final Solution. Thus, the lives of almost 300,000 Jews were
spared (Giurescu 2008, 133).
While Giurescu’s assessment of Antonescu’s role during the Holocaust
appears in chapter two of his book, readers have to turn to chapter five to
fully understand the historical events. This chapter presents statistics on
the number of victims according to regions and localities and in accor-
dance with the results of research conducted by various specialists in the
field. The author employs a style that makes the question of the number
of victims (which I personally consider of a lesser importance compared
to other aspects of the Holocaust) seem to an uninformed reader as an
incomprehensible issue, overly debatable and simply boring. It is also in
this chapter that Giurescu narrates the succession of criminal events of
the Holocaust and gives credit to Marshal Antonescu several times when
the question comes up about the renunciation of the Final Solution for the
Romanian Jews in the fall of 1942. Giurescu also claims that the respon-
sibility for mass crimes is shared among units of the Romanian Army and
Gendarmerie, German squads, and Ukrainian militia. He also presents a
diminished number of victims (those of the pogroms in Iaşi, Odessa, and
Chişinău, those deported to Transnistria, those executed in Bessarabia and
Bukovina, and so on).
Although welcome, this attempt at scientific accuracy to determine
local responsibility seems to diminish the responsibility of Antonescu’s
government, which administered these territories.41 Published four years
after the Final Report of the Wiesel Commission, the pages dedicated to
the Holocaust were intended to be, if indirectly, a reply to the conclusions
of the Final Report, attenuating their effects. This message, combined with
that of Buzatu’s introduction, adds a new controversial interpretation of
the Holocaust to Romanian historiography.
Compared to other forms of negationism, however, this can be considered
mild. One of the most vocal negationists, Ion Coja, a professor of linguistics
at the University of Bucharest, not only refuses to accept any argument
relating to the Holocaust, he also published a number of extremely anti-
Semitic papers and newspaper articles. He uses militant symbols in order
to not only negate the Holocaust but also incite action against Jews. For
example, in an “Open Letter to the President of the United States, Mr.
George W. Bush, to the Senate, the Congress and to the State Department
36 / alexandru florian
Conclusions
Western studies establish a direct link between anti-Semitism and
Holocaust denial as manifestations of hatred toward Jews. For Wieviorka
and Pierre-Andre Taguieff, Holocaust denial represents one of the facets
of post-war anti-Semitism or Judeophobia. As Wieviorka explains, the first
glimpses of the resurrection of anti-Semitism can be seen in the encounter
between the far right, which has turned again into a political force, and
negationism, which has asserted the non-existence of the gas chambers
(1998, 19). As far as the Romanian space is concerned, Shafir is right to
assert that “Holocaust denial is a reflection of a self-defensive mechanism
that is by no means confined to anti-Semites or to those striving to use
negation as a political instrument” (Shafir 2003, 25–26). Very often, radi-
cal nationalism informs the deflective or selective negationism expressed
in historiography or mass-media. This ideology is much more visible in
many of the texts that have circulated since 1990, with the goal of promot-
ing the image of an immaculate, strong Romania whose shortcomings are
always caused by foreigners. Therefore, current anti-Semitism in Romania
cannot be characterized as a new form of anti-Semitism or Judeophobia. It
is rather a contemporary way of expressing an extreme nationalism, rooted
in Romania’s interwar culture and politics.
Agressive forms of Holocaust denial, together with actions and dis-
courses aimed at rehabilitating Marshal Antonescu as a positive histori-
cal figure, have led to the conservation of an atmosphere in the public
space that is ripe for right-wing extremism. They are an expression of anti-
Semitism and extreme nationalism. Negationism is not only a part of the
cultural space and media, but it also permeates political space and dis-
course. However, it is important to note that the Final Report of the Wiesel
Commission has influenced the Romanian cultural sphere decisively. One
can easily notice a reduced number of examples of minimalization, and
radical negationism has lost some of its supporters, although repetetive
arguments are still aired on several media channels.
perception of the holocaust / 37
Notes
1. Ion Antonescu (1882–1946) was the leader of the Romanian state from
September 1940 to August 1944. He participated in World War II on the side
of Nazi Germany and its allies. In 1946 he was sentenced to death and executed
for war crimes.
2. The transfer of Bessarabia and Bukovina to the USSR, as an outcome of the
secret annexes of the Ribentrop-Molotov Pact, and the transfer of northern
Transylvania to Hungary following the Vienna Diktat, arbitrated by Germany
and Italy, took place in 1940.
3. Lucian Boia, Romania: Borderland of Europe, 210.
4. For an interesting debate on Gulag and the Holocaust in Romania, see Caietele
Echinox, vol. 13, Cluj, Romania, 2007, edition entirely dedicated to this issue.
M. Shafir, “Nuremberg II-mitul denazificării şi utilizarea acestuia în martiro-
logia competitivă Holocaust-Gulag,” 87–104.
5. Compared to the Old Kingdom, the signs of economic potential included
population growth of 220 percent, expansion of the total area of the country
by 215 percent, 215 percent increase in agricultural land, growth of 250 per-
cent in the railway network, and the main industry, according to the propel-
ling force used, by 235 percent. The growth of the general population meant
also the growth of the Jewish population, from 239,967 Jews (in 1912, in the
Old Kingdom) to 756,930 Jews (as registered in the 1930 census). These fig-
ures denote the increase of the Jewish population by more than 300 percent.
Considering the historical regions, the proportion of the Jews in the total
number of the local population was the highest in Bucovina (10.8 percent)
and Bessarabia (7.2 percent). In the Old Kingdom and Transylvania, 3.1 and
3.3 percent, respectively, of the population was Jewish—under the 4.2 percent
average country level. For a more detailed analysis, see my study, România şi
capcanele tranziţiei, 105.
6. As I discuss in “Treatment of the Holocaust in Romanian Textbooks,” 239,
after World War I, in 1923, Romania secured its first democratic constitution,
which recognized the existence of ethnic minorities and granted them specific
rights. In addition to the economic, social, political, and cultural rights that
they shared with the Romanians, the ethnic minorities were now allowed to
form ethnic political parties (the Magyar Party, the German Party, and the
Jewish Party) and had access to educational and religious institutions using
their own language. Also, they had the right to organize their cultural life in
their tongue.
7. On radical nationalism and cultural or doctrinaire anti-Semitism at the end of
the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, see Leon
Volovici, Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism; Radu Ioanid, The Sword of the
Archangel; and Zigu Ornea, Anii treizeci. Extrema dreaptă românească.
8. The path was opened by the royal dictatorship of Carol the Second. On
February 11, 1938, the decree-law for introducing the siege limited the freedom
of speech by giving the military authorities the right to censor the media (art.
IV lit. c). By the end of the same month, the newly promulgated Constitution
strengthened the power of the king and encouraged the Fascist-type corporat-
ism in important state institutions. Likewise, the political parties were banned
(decree-law for dissolution of associations, groups and political parties,
38 / alexandru florian
March 30, 1938), while the political organization led by Carol the Second,
the Front of the National Rebirth, was to become the “unique and totalitarian
party” under the name of “Party of the Nation” (June, 1940). The Jews were
not allowed to be members of this party. On September 14, 1940, the National
Legionary State replaced the royal dictatorship: General Ion Antonescu was
the leader of the Legionary State and the chief of the Legionary regime,
while Horia Sima was the leader of the Legionary Movement, the only state-
recognized movement. The alliance between the Legionnaires and Antonescu
ended in January 1941. After the legionary rebellion, general Antonescu rein-
forced his power and led a government of military and civil members. Without
the support of the political parties, the government declared its intention to
continue the ideological program of the Legionnaires. The February 1941
royal decree no. 314/14 abrogated the National Legionary State and forbade
any political action. In the Cabinet Council of February 1941, Antonescu
declared: “. . . the main lines for government, as you very well know, have been
set out during these 5 months of government . . . Since I was in prison [from
July to September, he was put under house arrest by King Carol the Second],
I’ve discussed with the Germans the whole program of government and all the
basic principles of the future Romanian State . . .” See Lya Benjamin, Legislaţia
antievreiască, 61, 291–294.
9. About the role of Orthodoxy in the Legionary ideology, see also Volovici,
Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism; Ioanid, The Sword of the Archangel; and
Ornea, The Thirties. In 1940s Romania, regulations were issued to forbid the
conversion of Jews to Christianity in order to hinder their alleged salvation
through religion.
10. See Benjamin, Evreii din România între anii 1940–1944.
11. See Jean Ancel, Contribuţii la istoria României. Problema evreiască, vol. II,
125–275; and Final Report, 168–172.
12. In Evreii sub regimul Antonescu, Ioanid notes that “the methods used during
the pogroms, the violently improvised assassinations during marches, the rush
of the Romanian authorities to push the masses of deported Jews across the
Dniester in 1941 and across the Bug in 1942, provoked protests and unfavor-
able reactions among Germans in the autumn of 1942,” 400.
13. For a discussion of Antonescu’s primitive and aggressive anti-Semitism, see
Benjamin, Prigoană si rezistenţă, 127–151.
14. This stage is characterized by the political and ideological domination of the
Romanian Communist Party as an unique ideology; and in terms of historical
research, by the narrow approach to events, limited by the Communist ideol-
ogy dogma, which defines the monolithic discourse.
15. On the reception of Holocaust in historiography, see Victor Eskenasy, “The
Holocaust and Romanian Historiography: Communist and Neo-Communist
Revisionism.”
16. See Final Report, “The Trials of the Criminals of War,” 313–332.
17. Matatias Carp, Cartea neagră. Suferinţele evreilor din România 1940–1944
(Bucharest: SOCEC Publishing House, 1946; Dacia Traiană Publishing House,
1947–1948). In 1996, Diogene Publishing House in Bucharest published the
second edition, while in 2009, Delanoe Editions in Paris published the French
edition with footnotes and a foreword by Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine.
perception of the holocaust / 39
between the Prut and Dniestr]. Scurtu and Hlihor assert the idea of the collec-
tive responsibility of Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina for the violent attacks
suffered by the Romanian Army during its withdrawal from the territories
surrendered to the USSR in 1940. Likewise, in Ioan Scurtu and Constantin
Hlihor’s study Complot împotriva României [Plot against Romania], nega-
tionism reinvents history. Transnistria, space of extermination of the Jews
by Romanian authorities, becomes in this book the place in which “those
who carried out hostile actions against the Romanian state or perturbed the
administration of the liberated territories were placed in camps, irrespective
of their nationality,” 82. The genocide of Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina
was caused by Nazi Germany, in the view of those historians who perpetuate
the Communist mythology: “The problem of the Jews from Bessarabia and
Northern Bukovina cannot be evaded. This was circumscribed on the whole
Romanian state policy and international situation, as well as on the pres-
sures the German Reich put on Antonescu’s regime,” 93. The authors do not
address the German irritation vis-à-vis the chaotic and extremely aggressive
way the Romanian authorities reacted, as discussed by Raul Hilberg, among
others.
35. In the May 21, 2005 issue of Ziua, in the “Files” column, Miruna Munteanu
explains: “What is the asymmetrical Holocaust? It’s a concept through which
the writer and journalist Teşu Solomovici tries to describe what happened to
the Jews from Romania in the dark years of World War II. Why Holocaust?
Because of the pogroms and deportations from Bessarabia, Transnistria,
Northern Bukovina—territories under the authority of the Romanian govern-
ment. Why asymmetrical? Because in the Old Kingdom the situation of the
Jews was incomparably more lenient, since an overwhelming majority survived
the war. Contrary to his declared anti-Semitic convictions, Marshal Antonescu
had a double standard in dealing with ethnic purification.” This statement
is followed by some excerpts selected by the author from Teşu Solomovici’s
book Istoria Holocaustului din România [The History of the Holocaust in
Romania]: “Marginalized, excluded from the official life of the country, men
were forced to dig ditches and build pill boxes, to clear the snow, the children
were excluded from Romanian schools but they continued to learn in Jewish
schools, there were even ‘Jewish universities.’ Moreover, Antonescu allowed the
Jewish Theatre, Barasheum, to continue to function. Jewish life was not devoid
of privations and fears, but it was a life, a curtailed life, which still cannot be
compared to what happened in Transnistria. Asymmetrical Holocaust!” The
authors omit the fact that the pogroms of Iaşi or Southern Bukovina, from
which the Jews were deported to Transnistria, belonged to Romania. Also,
they forget to mention that the diplomas issued by the Jewish schools were not
recognized by the state.
36. România Mare, March 4, 1994. For the role of the Greater Romania Party
publications in promoting the image of Antonescu and of negationism, see
Final Report, 351–352.
37. Television program, Dan Diaconescu în direct, OTV [Dan Diaconescu Live],
October 27, 2008.
38. Elie Wiesel declared: “With disappointment and sadness, I read that the
president who created the International Commission of the Holocaust in
42 / alexandru florian
Romania has decided to decorate two persons whose ideas oppose the great
mission of the Commission . . . Corneliu Vadim Tudor and Gheorghe Buzatu
are known as anti-Semites and deniers of the Holocaust. Corneliu Vadim
Tudor publishes outrageous and libelous articles against the Jewish people.”
(Interview published in the Romanian newspaper Ad evărul on December
16, 2004).
39. On Buzatu’s denial of the Holocaust and Antonescu’s rehabilitation, see Final
Report, 355–356; Victor Eskenasy, 173–236; and Shafir (2004).
40. See Giurescu, 2008, Chapter 2: “Ion Antonescu’s Regime (September, 6,
1940–August, 23, 1944),” “The National Legionary State” (Florin Muller
67–97), “The Internal Political Regime” (Giurescu 98–132); and chapter 5:
“The National Minorities during World War II” especially “The Jews from
Romania between 1940 and 1944” (Giurescu 378–455), “The Deportation
of Roma People to Transnistria” (Giurescu 499–508).
41. Concerning the bearing between politics and orders emanating from center to
territory, Giurescu uses the following expression, which suggests that people from
the field could act on their free initiative: “It was not searched and published the
way these “directions” were transmitted in the State mechanisms: army and espe-
cially gendarmerie and police. Though, the effects are known,” 409.
42. See, for example, his warning expressed in his article, “The idea of erecting
a monument for Jews and Gypsies, victims of the Antonescu ‘genocide.’ ” “A
special mention for the Mayor of Bucharest: you have promised to the electors
that you would govern Bucharest by consulting the population on the most
important issues. Now you have the opportunity, and the obligation, too, to
organize a referendum on the Holocaust Memorial, with the following ques-
tion: Is Bucharest indeed a proper place to build a Holocaust Memorial dedi-
cated to the memory of Jews and Gypsies persecuted by Antonescu? On the
other hand, the new memorial wouldn’t be the first monument fraudulently
erected in Bucharest. The fate of the other ones is known to us: they disap-
peared one by one from the landscape of Bucharest. We have no doubt that
the fate of this memorial will be the same, since its intention is to inscribe in
stone and copper the biggest lie and offense ever addressed to the Romanian
people. This warning is accompanied by an explanation: you’ll be judged,
gentlemen, for this injustice.”
43. See also Coja’s open letter to the President of Romania; negation is expressed
in similar terms, but the tone is more radical: “In Romania, enjoy the word we
bring to you, there wasn’t any Holocaust! Not even on a visit. No Holocaust,
no genocide, no pogrom! Not during Antonescu’s era or on any other occa-
sion! We missed them all! But who knows, maybe some other time we’ll do the
Holocaust, and we’ll do it right, with proper documentation!” in the newspa-
per România Mare, December 1, 2006.
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Ch a p t e r Two
Th e I a i Po g rom i n Cu r z io
M a l a pa rt e’s K A P U T T : Be t w e e n
History a n d Fic t ion
and from north to south, advancing with the invading troops along the
front lines. He variously attends receptions of high officials, is granted
private audiences with them, or talks to ordinary soldiers—all against the
background of a Europe “gone to pieces” (one of the meanings of the word
kaputt that Malaparte uses in his preface) because of war and Nazism.
Malaparte’s passage through Romania, on his way to the Eastern front (the
German-Romanian front advancing on the USSR), brings onto the stage
Romanian soldiers and inhabitants of the city of Iaşi, as well as political
figures, many of whom portray real people. The author frequently employs
Romanian words and actual places, especially from the city of Iaşi, in the
novel. Romanians are first mentioned in a scene from the front. Some
peasants, who are barely familiar with the industrial world and distrust the
Soviet propaganda, humiliate a prisoner. But, they reject the accusation
of having mistreated civilians—unlike the Germans—with the exception
of Jews, whom they pursue whenever the opportunity arises: “We only
have it in for the Jews” (Malaparte 2005, 43).2 Romanian anti-Semitism
is therefore an early presence in the book, since such scenes introduce the
central theme: the pogrom. This emerges fully when the narrator/character
recounts events at a reception given by Herr Frank, the Nazi governor of
Poland. The German officials present criticize the “uncivilized method”
used to exterminate Jews, in contrast to their own methods. The chapter
entitled “The Rats of Jassy,” and part of the following chapter, “Cricket in
Poland” contain the main scenes depicting the pogrom in Iaşi. The first
assessment of casualties is given: five hundred dead have been included
in the official communiqué, though Colonel Lupu later confirms seven
thousand people dead (Malaparte, 102).
The chapter “The Rats of Jassy”3 has a Baroque structure, as does most
of the book: Against the background of a torrid night, the writer recalls his
experiences in Paris and Italy, during which a curfew patrol interrupts and
brings him back to reality. He hears rumours about “Russian parachutists”
who might be in the city and sets out to find something to eat. He enters
the shop of Kane, a Jewish merchant who knows him and who supplies
food that is hard to find elsewhere. Princess Sturdza, a “great name of
Moldova,” enters the scene and makes Grigori, the emasculated coach-
man, beat Kane for not giving her the long-desired tea box, which had
been previously offered to the Italian officer. Malaparte is a well-known
figure in the city of Iaşi; he flirts with a pharmacist and a waitress, but his
love affairs fail because of the Soviet bombardment of the city. A delega-
tion of important Jewish people later come to ask him to use his influ-
ence with the German military authority, General von Schobert, to have
the pogrom, prepared by the Romanian authorities, stopped. The Italian
declares himself unable to act: “Perhaps you want me to sacrifice myself
iaŞi pogrom in curzio malaparte’s KAPUTT / 49
uselessly for you? Should I have myself shot in Unirii Square defending
the Jews of Jassy?” (Malaparte 2005, 124). The only thing he could have
done was flatter Antonescu in the hope of gaining his goodwill. The scene
becomes ambiguous; reality mixes with reverie, Malaparte’s strolling with
his dreams. In the description of the pogrom, the SS soldiers appear to be
the protagonists of the public executions. The Italian consul, Sartori (an
actual person), who had succeeded in providing sanctuary for several Jews,
narrates the scene. This man was indeed Malaparte’s main source of infor-
mation. The last scene of the chapter depicts the plundering of the dead
bodies by the madding crowd, which the desperate, heroic protests of the
Italian captain are unable to stop. At the same time, the princely couple
Sturdza make an entrance and are greeted by the crowd.
Part of the next chapter takes place in Podu Iloaiei,4 where one of the
“death trains” has stopped. Together with a young Italian war correspon-
dent, Pellegrini (based on an actual person and described as a “stupid
Fascist”), and the consul Sartori, Malaparte sets out in search of the body
of a Jewish lawyer who had been protected by the Italians. Despite their
caricature-like appearance, the three Italians are sincere in their defense of
the Jews when they face the assassins, personified by the representatives of
the Romanian authorities:
Then Pellegrini, the “stupid Fascist,” stood up and, clenching his fists,
said to the Chief of Police: “You are a low-down murderer and a cowardly
bastard.”
I looked at him in amazement . . . He was a stupid Fascist, but during the
night of the great Jassy pogrom he had several times risked his life to save
a handful of unfortunate Jews, and now . . . he was risking his skin for the
sake of a corpse of a Jew (Malaparte 2005, 168–169).
In one of the most noteworthy scenes of the novel, Malaparte joins the
other two Italians in their attempt to save the Jews locked in train cars, but
when the doors are forced open, the “liberated” dead people collapse over
Sartori, almost burying him under them. At the end, in a sort of epilogue
to the chapter, Malaparte contradicts the Nazi leaders, who, filled with dis-
gust, remark that the Romanian people are “lacking in culture.” Malaparte
blames the real culprits and evokes the previous pogrom in Bucharest:
“You are mistaken,” I replied. “Romanians are a generous and kind people.
I am very fond of Romanians. Among all the Latin races the Romanians
alone have given evidence of a noble sense of duty and a great generosity
in shedding their blood for their Christ and their King. They are a simple
people—a people of primitive, kind peasants. They cannot be blamed if the
upper classes, the families and the men who should be an example to them,
50 / mihai dinu gheorghiu
have rotten souls, rotten minds and rotten bones. The Romanian people
are not responsible for the slaughter of the Jews. In Romania pogroms are
organized and inspired by order or with the connivance of the authorities.
The people are not at fault if corpses of Jews, quartered and hung on hooks
like beef, have been on display for days in many Bucharest butcher shops for
the entertainment of the Iron Guard” (Malaparte 2005, 174–175).
308). Yet here is what Guerri says about Malaparte’s reports from the Soviet
front:
If the war reports having been sent up to that time were excellent, those sent
from the Soviet Union are exemplary: they are masterpieces of genuine art-
istry worthy of leaders of a school. This is easily explainable: plunged into a
very convenient situation as a writer, a tragedy, he was not required to talk
about events directly related to Italy, he was closely involved with people
in distress and he was changing locations—his writing becomes profound,
passionate and extremely endearing (Guerri 1981, 180).6
He did not witness the massacre in Jassy where several thousands of Jews
had been killed, but he would later dedicate to it a whole chapter of Kaputt,
while writing on the spot an article about the same topic for the Corriere,
in which he succeeded in skillfully concealing his compassion for the victims
while asserting the “social danger” represented by their misery (1981, 179).
52 / mihai dinu gheorghiu
In fact, if Malaparte the novelist had wanted to annul the distance between
each of the scenes—real, not invented—of the pogrom of Iaşi through his
appearance as an unrealistic character who is a savior, it does not obscure
the full empathy of Malaparte the war reporter for the victims. This is
also Pierre Pachet’s interpretation of Malaparte’s testimony regarding the
pogrom of Iaşi.
Pachet, a French writer who has been ignored by the translator and
commentator of the Romanian edition of Kaputt, would also address
Malaparte’s testimony of the pogrom of Iaşi in Conversations à Jassy . This
book, the outcome of a journey that the author made upon the invitation
of the University of Iaşi, belongs to those works published after 1990 in
which the Western intellectuals “discovered” a devastated Eastern Europe
after the fall of the Berlin Wall.7 To Pachet, Jassy is first and foremost a
city marked by the stigma of the past; his father (a Jew from Bessarabia)
and Malaparte’s novel (read early in his life) are the two sources for his
knowledge of the massacre. Although the author makes visible efforts to
avoid mistaking the past for the present and to listen to other points of
view or representations of the local history, he does not always differentiate
between past and present. He dedicates several chapters to the history of
and testimonies on the Holocaust and two central chapters to Malaparte’s
novel. After returning to Paris, Pachet undertook his own investigation.
He read Guerri, Malaparte’s biographer, and discovered Malaparte’s 1941
article on the pogrom, which he would later reproduce in facsimile in the
book and translate into French. One of his chapters makes a title out of
the question of whether Malaparte was in the city of Iaşi during the time
of the pogrom; Pachet concludes—supported by Guerri’s biography—
that Malaparte likely had not been there, since he had joined the further
advancement of the front and gone forward to the East. Pachet’s arguments
also rely on a subtle analysis of “The Rats of Jassy” in which dreams play
a leading part, since the character/narrator was more present elsewhere
(in Italy and in France) than in Iaşi. In this respect, Malaparte’s descrip-
tions of the events are more sketchy. Thanks to Guerri, Pachet is aware of
the re-writing of some of Malaparte’s correspondence from the front that
lent them a pro-Soviet and anti-Fascist orientation, but he finds that the
comparison between the journalistic version and the novel chapter is not
detrimental to Malaparte. On the contrary, the newspaper coverage of July
1941 brought to light both the social causes of the conflict and the large
number of executions regardless of any lie imposed by the Romanian and
Nazi propaganda machines. The fact that Malaparte did not reprint this
article in his anthology of 1943, using it instead as raw material for his
novel, could indicate the predominantly “fictitious” nature of the text as
well. Pachet pays tribute to the art of the novelist, who knew how to detach
iaŞi pogrom in curzio malaparte’s KAPUTT / 53
himself from the immediate history of the pogrom and his perception of
being different from the victims (a feeling he might have had while writing
the article), in order to draw out the symbolic significance of the collective
catastrophe. Pachet concludes that Malaparte has succeeded in “putting
his experience of a liar in the service of truth” (Pachet 1907, 102).
As it follows from the novel, even the Nazis, who used to boast of their
“rational” genocidal methods, felt repugnance at the barbarity committed
by the Romanians. Pachet has echoed Malaparte’s behavioral description
of a segment of the population—and some soldiers—during the massacre
in Iaşi (and throughout the war against the USSR) and the scenes related
to ominous rumors regarding the fate of the Jews of Iaşi, testifying to
the truthfulness of Malaparte’s representation. The very vague reference
to the history of the Jewish massacre in Iaşi in the Addendum of the lat-
est Romanian translation of Kaputt 8 and Sturdza’s attempt to discredit
Malaparte’s having witnessed it demonstrate that some Romanian intel-
lectuals have not yet overcome this “Malaparte complex.”
In terms of Romanian history, it would have been more useful to com-
pare Malaparte’s trajectory to the path of some Romanian writers and
actors of the same epoch who were placed in more or less comparable posi-
tions. Although several cases could be quoted here, I have only chosen
two of them, both of whom I find comparable due to their international
fame: Mircea Eliade and Virgil Gheorghiu. Both had Fascist backgrounds
that they tried to deny or to hide. Both wrote autobiographical novels in
which they revised their biographies. Gheorghiu, I would argue, is most
similar to Malaparte, since in his novel The 25th Hour he builds his profile
as a victim of multiple persecutions in a Europe ruined by nationalist con-
flicts. Less alike is Mircea Eliade, who, both in his recently published The
Portugal Journal and in The Forbidden Forest, built a duplicate self to dis-
tance himself from his former companions without denying their beliefs.
Eliade never practiced the “prostitution of beliefs,” as Sturdza claimed
about Malaparte, but he preferred to remain under the sign of mendac-
ity until the end of his life, while Malaparte, “the liar,” redeemed himself
through a testimony that deserves our gratitude.
Notes
1. See also the conversation with the historian Silviu Sanie in Pachet, Conversations
à Jassy, 74–77.
2. Although I conducted my research using the Romanian translation (1999), all
the quotations are taken from the English translation (2005).
3. The French and English translations are “Les rats de Jassy” and “The Rats of
Jassy”—not “The Mice of Jassy”—“Şoarecii din Iaşi,”—as in the Romanian
translation. The word used in Italian is topi, which can be translated both
as “mice” and as “rats.” Because of the tragic content of the story, the correct
translation in Romanian (in this context) should be şobolani (rats), instead of
şoareci (mice).
4. Erroneously located at the “frontier with Bessarabia” in the novel, this small
locality lies some twenty-five kilometers west of Iaşi.
iaŞi pogrom in curzio malaparte’s KAPUTT / 55
5. In the Romanian translation of Kaputt, “God Shave the King” has been pre-
served only as title of a chapter (64–86).
6. My translation from the French edition.
7. A well-known French intellectual, François Maspero, had his Balkans Transit
published the same year (1997). However, it was not translated into Romanian,
like Pachet’s book.
8. “What was known after the war as the Pogrom in Jassy, pogrom about which
there have been many controversies in the recent historiography,” (Malaparte,
Uricariu, 1999, 307).
Works Cited
Ancel, Jean. 2005. Preludiu la asasinat. Pogromul de la Iaşi, 29 iunie 1941. Trans.
Carol Bines. Iaşi: Polirom.
Butnaru, Ion C. 1992. The Silent Holocaust: Romania and Its Jews. Foreword Elie
Wiesel. New York; London: Greenwood Press.
Buzatu, Gheorghe. 1995. Aşa a început holocaustul împotriva poporului român.
Bucharest.
Carp, Matatias. 1948. Cartea neagră: Suferinţele evreilor din România în timpul
dictaturii fasciste, 1940-1944, vol. II-A, Pogromul de la Iaşi. Bucharest: Dacia
Traiană.
Chiva, Isac. April 2003. Le Pogrom de Iaşi de juin 1941. Les Temps Modernes.
7–20.
———. Fall 1992–Winter 1993. À propos de Mircea Eliade. Un témoignage. Le
genre humain. 89–102.
Eliade, Mircea. 2006. Jurnal portughez si alte scrieri. Bucharest: Humanitas.
———. 1978. The Forbidden Forest. Trans. Mac Linscott Ricketts and Mary Park
Stevenson. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Florian, Radu. 1997. Masacrul de la Iaşi din 29–30 iunie 1941, un prim act al
genocidului evreilor. Controversele secolului XX. Bucharest: Diogene. 45–68.
Gheorghiu, Constantin Virgil. 1950. The 25th Hour. Trans. Rita Eldon. New
York: Knopf.
Guerri, Giordano Bruno. 1981. Malaparte. Trans. Valeria Tosca. Paris: Denoël.
———. 1980. L’Arcitaliano, Vita di Curzio Malaparte. Milan: Bompiani.
Hausleitner, Mariana. 1995. Antisemitismus in Rumänien and seine Leugnung
durch die rumänische Öffentlichkeit. Juden und Antisemitismus im östlichen
Europa. Ed. Mariana Hausleitner and Monika Katz. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
50–72.
———, Brigitte Mihok, and Juliane Wetzel, eds. 2000. Rumänien und der
Holocaust. Zu den Massenverbrechen in Transnistrien 1941–1944. Berlin:
Metropol.
Ioanid, Radu. 2000. The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies
under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.
Lecca, Radu. 1994. Eu i-am salvat pe evreii din România. Bucharest: Roza
Vânturilor.
Luca, Eugen. 1989. Pogrom: Iaşi, duminică, 29 iunie 1941. Tel-Aviv.
Ludo, Isac. 1947. Din ordinul cui? Bucharest: Raspîntia.
56 / mihai dinu gheorghiu
I
The zeal with which Romanian authorities began deporting Jews in
the summer of 1941 into German-occupied territories in the Ukraine,
without express orders or requests from the Nazis, has become legend-
ary. Unprepared for the masses of deportees, the Germans sent thou-
sands of them back to Bessarabia and Bukovina, and even blocked several
bridges on the Dniester to stop the floods that were streaming in from
the Bessarabian region of the country. “German National Socialism was
schooled in Romania!” wrote Dr. Nathan Getzler in his wartime diary
of Cernăuţi1 and Transnistria (Getzler 1962, 55). The Romanian Fascist
newspaper Porunca Vremii presented the Romanian efforts to get rid of
Jews as a model to the rest of Europe as early as the summer 1941: “The die
has been cast . . . The liquidation of the Jews in Romania has entered a final,
decisive phase . . . To the joy of our emancipation must be added the pride
of [pioneering] the solution to the Jewish problem in Europe . . . Present-
day Romania is prefiguring the decisions to be made by the Europe of
tomorrow” (Quoted in Ioanid 2000, 122, 123). In a July 8, 1941 address
to the Romanian government, the interim president of the parliament and
acting prime minister, Mihai Antonescu, outlined and justified the plan:
“With the risk of not being understood by some traditionalists who may
still be among you, I am in favor of the forced relocation of the entire
Jewish element in Bessarabia and Bukovina, which must be hurled across
the border . . . It is indifferent to me whether we enter history as barbarians.
The Roman Empire committed some acts of barbarism and it nevertheless
became the vastest and most important political entity of its time . . . There
58 / marianne hirsch and leo spitzer
has never been a more propitious moment in our history . . . Shoot with
machine guns, if necessary”(Carp 1946, 96).
And yet, despite these “pioneering” efforts, despite an elaborate plan
announced in Bucharest in August 1942 to make Romania entirely “juden-
rein” by sending all Jews to Belzec, and despite a longstanding history of
virulent Romanian anti-Semitism, a majority of Jews who inhabited the
Romanian Regat—the heartland core—survived the war.
The Jews in the border regions, on the other hand, especially in those
regions like Bessarabia and northern Bukovina that had been annexed by
the Soviet Union under the Hitler/Stalin pact in 1940–1941, suffered a
much harsher fate. The Red Army, retreating from Cernăuţi in late June
of 1941, had left the northern Bukovina to Romanian troops and the rav-
ages of the German Einsatzgruppe D. In spite of the fact that, only a few
weeks earlier, approximately three thousand Jews had been deported to
Siberia by the Soviets as “capitalists” and “social/political undesirables,”
returning Romanians, inflamed by anti-Semitic propaganda, blamed Jews
here especially for facilitating and sustaining the Communist regime that
had not long ago ignominiously stripped Romania of its territory and
national glory. Many of them viewed Jews living in this region as poten-
tial, if not active, “Communist enemies of the Romanian state” and lashed
out against them.
Matatias Carp describes the night of July 6, shortly after Romanians
re-took the provincial capital:
While these murders were carried out, German and Romanian troops
set Chernovtsy’s imposing Jewish Temple on fire, destroying its cupola.
Units of gendarmes also scoured houses throughout the city and took
some three thousand Jewish men, women, and children to the central
police station under arrest. Approximately three hundred from this group,
including Dr. Avraham Mark—the chief rabbi of the city—and other
Jewish community leaders, were then transported to the banks of the Prut
River and shot.
Hedy and Gottfried Brenner, as well as Gottfried’s mother Paula, were
among those who were arrested during the first days of Romanian rule
in July 1941. They recalled how their entire street was closed off and all
Jews were marched off to the courtyard of the town’s army barracks, where
cernĂuŢi ghetto, deportations, and decent mayor / 59
the men and women were separated. The men were kept there for several
days; some were beaten and humiliated. All were then moved to the central
police station where they were held overnight with no food or water, sur-
rounded by “hungry cockroaches.” The women were freed in the middle
of the first night, but not until after they were undressed and thoroughly
searched and robbed of any valuables that could be found on them. In
the process, some of them, including Hedy herself, were sexually groped
and molested. Nevertheless, many women, Hedy recalled, came back the
next day with jewelry and cash to bribe police and gain the men’s release.
Matatias Carp provides a more specific account of this bribery: “Police
commissioner Teodorescu began by taking 60–70 dollars per released pris-
oner. But later, the price went down to 50 and 40 dollars, and those who
had no foreign currency could buy their freedom with various objects of
value, a carpet, a clock, a cigarette case, a vacuum cleaner, etc (Carp 1946,
35; Brenner 2006, 173–176).
“Despite everything,” Lotte Hirsch remembers, “we had to walk out
into the streets during those first days after the Romanians came back
because both the water and the electricity were off and we had to try to
find some kerosene and something to drink and wash with. One of those
times, Carl and I were going to get water from a well, and a non-Jew saw
us and warned us that hostages were being taken, so we went right home.
There was always danger and it was a kind of lottery.”
60 / marianne hirsch and leo spitzer
Gottfried Brenner was arrested again, not long after his initial release,
along with three hundred other Jewish men from three centrally located
streets. “As we were being walked through the city that second time,” he
told us, “we met a unit of Romanian soldiers. ‘Where are you taking these
Jews?’ they asked our guards. ‘We can kill them for you right here, and save
you the trouble.’ We feared the worst since we had already heard about the
killings on the Prut when they shot Rabbi Mark and so many others.” In
her memoir, Hedy describes the persistence with which she and a group of
other wives pursued the men’s release from the Romanian Culture Palace
on the theater square where they were being held by a German contingent
under Obersturmbannführer Finger. In an act of daring, she approached a
German lieutenant in the street and asked his intervention on behalf of her
husband. Serendipitously in this instance, it turned out that that officer,
Klaus Geppert, had studied electrical engineering in the same Prague uni-
versity as Gottfried Brenner and, even though he had not known him there
personally, agreed to help him and a few of his friends gain their release
(Brenner 2006, 77–88).
Not long after the Romanian return, an official notice was published
in the local newspapers:
“I remember how we made the stars out of yellow fabric,” Lotte told us.
“It was a really powerful experience the first time we had to put it on. I had
to overcome a strong resistance to go outside with it on. We were marked
as pariahs.”2
Carl Hirsch added, “Interestingly, the first time Lotte and I walked
outside wearing it, a Romanian priest lifted his hat and bowed to us, out of
respect to human suffering.”
“But,” Lotte specified, “on that same day two young rowdies saw us
walking down the street and they spat—on us, or on the star, I don’t
know.”
In spite of these hardships and humiliations, the situation in the city
calmed down much more quickly than in the countryside. There, local
Romanians, Ukrainians, and members of German Einsatzgruppen car-
ried out massive killings among the rural Jewish population. Those who
survived were then slated for deportation to Transnistria in the early fall
of 1941. In neighboring Bessarabia, deportations began at the end of
September. News of these killings and deportations spread into Cernăuţi.
But, despite rumors and warnings about the possible return and spread of
violence to the city, for the most part the urban Jewish population contin-
ued to live and work, trying as best they could to adjust to the increasingly
draconian restrictions on their freedom. Nathan Getzler characterized
their attitude: “We waited for a miracle that would save us” (1962, 55).
But no miracle came. Instead, on October 11, 1941, Cernăuţi Jews
were ordered to abandon their homes and congregate in a ghetto. The new
words whispered about were “deportation” and “resettlement.”
II
“In those days I worked at the railroad administration office from eight to
one and from four to seven,” Carl Hirsch told us, as we walked through
the streets of Chernivtsi with him and Lotte in 1998, during their first
return trip to the city of their birth since they had fled from it in 1945.
“Before work, on that Saturday, the 11th of October, I stopped at Lotte’s
house to say hello like I often did since we began going out together (they
were later married, in the ghetto). As I was walking along, a neighbor
stopped me and said, ‘Read this,’ and showed me an ordinance that was
posted on a near-by building. It said: ‘Anyone who harbors Jews or other
undesirables, anyone who owns firearms, etc. will immediately be put to
death.’ I told her I didn’t think that that concerned us, and I went to
work. What was I supposed to do? At 1:00 pm, when I come home for a
meal, I see that everyone is carrying knapsacks and bundles. What’s that,
I thought? When I came home to my mother’s they were all packed to go.
62 / marianne hirsch and leo spitzer
Lotte’s family had arranged for us all to go to their cousin Blanka Engler’s
apartment in the Steingasse (Rom.: Şt. O. Iosif), which was located within
the newly established ghetto. We were eleven: my mother, two sisters, my
brother, Lotte and I, her father and mother, her sister, her sister’s fiancé
and his mother.”
“The ghetto was formed and our part of the street was outside of it,”
Lotte added, “and we had to be inside the area that would be closed off
as the ghetto by six in the afternoon. Since Blanka’s place was already ter-
ribly overcrowded, Carl’s sisters arranged to go with their mother and their
brother to a friend’s apartment. But when it was time for us to be deported,
we all eleven of us left together.”
“How did you know to go—was there any order in writing, any ordi-
nance?” we asked.
“The members of the Jewish Council went from house to house and said,
by 6:00 pm you have to be within this perimeter—between the St. O. Iosif,
which was the former Steingasse [Uk.: Pereyaslavska], and the St. Mărăşeşti,
the Neuweltgasse [Uk.: Shevchenka], extending north and east and includ-
ing the Judengasse [Uk.: Shalom Alejhema] and poorer Jewish neighbor-
hood nearer to the train station,” Carl responded. “They said we should
bring warm coats, other clothing, food for a few days, as much as we could
carry. Nothing was posted. They told us to place the apartment keys in
an envelope with our names on it and that we would have to hand those
envelopes to the authorities when we arrived in the ghetto. I said, ‘We’re
leaving—we must set the house on fire.’ Do you remember, Lotte?”
“My father said, ‘This cannot be possible!’ ” Lotte Hirsch added, smil-
ing pleasurably as she recalled her father–a lawyer–and his sense of justice.
“ ‘This violates the Declaration of the Rights of Man.’ ”
We had been slowly walking a few blocks now, talking, videotaping.
“Come here, look,” Carl suddenly called to us, pointing. “Here they made
a fence and soldiers stood here. Here was the edge of the ghetto. And here,
now we are inside the ghetto.” He stepped inside the boundary he had
drawn for us in the air. “And here we moved into Blanka’s apartment, there
on the second floor.” The three-story apartment building looked neglected
and in need of refurbishing and painting, but otherwise, externally, it
had probably not changed significantly over the decades since 1941. But
the tree-lined street on which we walked was quiet as we walked there in
mid-morning September 1998—surely quite different from that fateful
cold afternoon in October so many years ago. Carl continued his narra-
tive: “The next morning we went out to talk to everyone. We could move
around freely inside the ghetto; everyone was dressed casually, in sweaters,
for the trip—to the ghetto and beyond. Word is out that the ghetto is only
temporary and that we would be taken eastwards, somewhere across the
cernĂuŢi ghetto, deportations, and decent mayor / 63
Dniester. We knew that, for us, now start the ‘Forty Days of Musa Dagh,’
(you know, that novel by Franz Werfel about the Armenians chased out of
their homes and into the desert by the Turks in World War I).
We’re on a Sunday. We’re here Monday, Tuesday. On Wednesday
[October 15] everyone living on the Steingasse (where we were staying) and
surrounding streets was supposed to go to the train station for deportation.
We had known that this was coming and, of course, we were packed to
go. It’s how we had come there to Blanka’s; we never unpacked. We met
up with my mother, brother, and sisters and we all went outside and saw
a lot of peasants with horse-drawn carts waiting for customers to trans-
port to the depot, and Lotte’s father said, ‘It’s a sunny day, a good day for
64 / marianne hirsch and leo spitzer
traveling.’ So we loaded all our things, for eleven people, onto one of these
carts and waited our turn to go.”
Lotte, gesturing, had something to add: “This is something, Carl,
which you don’t totally admit. They said, now the Steingasse is on, and we
put everything on that wagon. Everything. We had pillows, bedding, pots,
all our elderly sick relatives on foot, everyone carrying something. What
you won’t admit is that a Romanian soldier came to our door and said,
‘Ok, now you have to go.’ ”
Carl was impatient: “There’s no point. Everyone was already outside,
we all knew. We have to tell the same story. The soldier is beside the point.
The Jewish Council said, get ready.”
“Yes, the Jewish Council worked with them; they hoped perhaps to
save at least a few people.” She was ready to agree, “Yes, we knew we had
to leave.”
We were on what used to be the Steingasse, standing on the street where
they stood with hundreds of others, with carts and belongings. Did a sol-
dier come to the door to summon them to get out, or were they already
prepared to do so anyway? Did it really matter? Several others whom we
subsequently interviewed mention that some newly ghettoized Jews rushed
to leave on the trains during the first days of deportations, convinced that
they would get better lodging in Transnistria if they arrived there sooner
rather than later. Max Gottfried’s comment that “this is a sunny day, a
good day for traveling,” certainly indicated a certain resignation, at least
on his part, if not an actual willingness to recognize and accept what the
authorities had mandated.
Carl continued his narrative: “While we were standing there on the
street, a neighbor came by and pulled me aside, ‘I hear that some profes-
sionals will be allowed to stay in Czernowitz,’ she said. ‘Some waivers will
be granted.’ I asked around. My sister had heard the same thing from
another source but had not dared to believe it. About a half hour later—we
were still on that street, there were lots of carts ahead of us, and everything
was moving really slowly—a Romanian major walked by and I said to
him, ‘Domnule maior, I hear that professionals will be allowed to stay. I am
an engineer.’ He looked at me quickly and said, ‘Stay.’ That’s all.
Imagine, I was on my way to the station with eleven people: my old
mother, Lotte’s old parents, her sick sister, the old mother of my brother-
in-law. All were scared. Lotte and I had to act. So we took the carriage
and . . .”
“But wait,” Leo interrupted. “You had nothing in writing, and that
Romanian major was gone. How could you . . . ?”
“He had said only three words,” Lotte pointed to the ground. “ ‘Rămâi
pe loc. Stay right here!’ ”
cernĂuŢi ghetto, deportations, and decent mayor / 65
Following a quick decision, Carl Hirsch directed the carriage and the
group of his and Lotte’s relatives back into the ghetto, bribing a young sol-
dier manning the entrance, and re-entered it. Once back inside, the group
sought refuge in the house of distant cousins, the Lehrs, whose street had
not yet been scheduled for evacuation.
“We went on to the Lehrs. There were already about thirty to thirty-
five people there, but they took us in, eleven more. My siblings slept in the
laundry room behind the house, and for the rest of us they found some
floor space somewhere. This was on a Wednesday. On that evening, in
the Jewish Hospital, which was the seat of the Jewish Council at the time,
66 / marianne hirsch and leo spitzer
Anyone who was familiar with the topography of Cernăuţi would have
grasped from the limits provided in the “notification” what a small area
had been reserved for the ghetto. The neighborhood, to which the Jewish
population was “invited” to move before 6 PM, or face the death penalty,
could not have sheltered more than 10,000 people pressed together like in
a bazaar. It had to house 50,000, not to mention the Christian population
that was living there . . .
The accommodation capacity was minimal. Even by huddling up to
30 people or more in what rooms were available, the great majority had to
take shelter in corridors, lofts, cellars, barns, or any other shed that would
protect them from rain or snow. There were no hygienic conditions to speak
about. Drinking water was scant and doubtful; the number of wells was
insufficient. Actually, the city had water problems, as two out of three water
works had been destroyed. Almost immediately, a combined stench of rank
sweat, urine, feces, and mildew extended over the neighborhood, making it
distinct from the rest of town. It was exactly the same concentrated smell as
that emerging from a pen of sheep in a green pasture . . .
On the next morning, Sunday, October 12, I was invited to a meeting
of all public authorities at the governor’s office. We were 18 . . . I was the
only one who . . . stood up and spoke at length about the Jewish question in
our time and in that climate of racial hatred in which I said we Romanians,
were a nation too small to engage. I stressed the merits of the Jews, their
worthy contributions to the economic development of the country, their
achievements in every area of work and culture, and, in my capacity as
mayor of the city, I protested against this act . . .
I asked that those who had devoted their lives to profound culture and
fine arts be spared. I asked for the reward of the pensioners, officers, inva-
lids who had earned the gratitude of our nation. I asked if we might keep
here professionals in all branches of industry. I asked that foremen in every
branch of industry should be allowed to stay. I asked, for the sake of human-
ity, that doctors be exempted. I argued for keeping back the engineers and
architects that would be needed for the work of reconstruction. I pleaded
for exempting magistrates and lawyers, showing we owed that much to
intellect and civilization . . . The fact is that the governor partly endorsed
my views and publicly authorized me to make a list of who, according to
my arguments, were entitled to the gratitude of our nation. I was asked not
to exceed a maximum of 100 to 120 . . .
On Wednesday afternoon, October 15, Marshal Antonescu talked with
the governor on the phone and agreed to mitigate the deportation measure.
Consequently he ordered that up to 20,000 Jews should be exempted, com-
prising the categories I had mentioned . . . That’s how about 20,000 Jews
were allowed to remain in Cernăuţi.
On the evening of that very day, October 15, once General Ionescu
and I set our schedule for the next day, I took a ride to the Jewish hos-
pital, which was located on a border of the ghetto, on the main street to
the station. I had been informed earlier in the day about the outbreak
of a typhus epidemic which required some preventative measures that
involved the municipality. Besides, I wanted to convey to the community
68 / marianne hirsch and leo spitzer
leaders the message that the Marshal intended to spare part of the local
Jewry . . .
The dramatic moments when I broke the hopeful news to them I think
have been the most solemn and moving in my life so far . . . (Popovici 2001,
76–90)
How did Jews remaining in the ghetto receive the autorizaţie (authoriza-
tions) to escape deportation? The oral and written accounts of this dis-
tressing time are replete with ambiguities and contradictions. According
to Carl Hirsch:
The leaders of the Jewish community prepared lists of the Jewish population
arranged by professions and the Government issued to part of the popula-
tion authorizations to remain in the city. I got two, one as a civil engineer
from the lists of the Jewish community and one as a railway employee.
My brother got one as a mining engineer and one from his employment,
which having been issued without a first name on it, was used by another
Hirsch family . . . Many were not that fortunate and were put into trains
to Transnistria, two aunts of ours with their families, my friend Lulziu
[Israel] Chalfen who, though a doctor, did not have the right connections,
and many others . . . Approx. 12 days after we left our homes we returned
(Hirsch, 76–78).
Since the Jewish community could not figure out what was intended or who
was needed, they started registration of specialists . . . Everyone was desper-
ate and lists were made of any kind of specialty. I registered wherever they
would accept my name. You did not have to show a document that would
come up later. I was on a students list (who needed students?), on a chemists
list, nurse, anywhere. I put Father’s name on all kinds of lists . . .
In the meantime, October neared its end, the weather got colder, rains
made it very hard to stand for hours and listen for the names of people who
received the permit to return. I went daily to that military station where the
lucky ones received the reprieve from concentration camp. Those returned
to their apartments in town and those who remained behind felt more and
more desperate (Fichman 2005, 75–76).
the large house to which they retreated after turning back to the ghetto,
avoiding their scheduled deportation] one day took out pencil and paper
and made his own list of those who would need autorizaţie. Without blink-
ing, he said he would ‘take care of’ everything.” Beate Schwammenthal,
a cousin of Lotte’s, and a child in 1941, also remembers that Onkel Kubi
“took care of everything.” “I was only 21 years old, but with money you
could do a great deal at the time,” Rita Pistiner, another unemployed
Cernăuţi resident who managed to avoid being deported, confirmed.4
And yet, who took the bribes, how members of the Jewish Council might
have been involved, how the system actually worked, why some doctors
and other active professionals were deported while many without “useful
professions” were able to be exempted, remains veiled in obscurity and
suspicion.
By November 15, 1941, the deportations from Cernăuţi to Transnistria
stopped. At that point, according to Matatias Carp’s Cartea neagră, about
30,000 Jews from Cernăuţi had been deported, about 15,600 received offi-
cial exemptions from the selection committee, and the remaining 4000 or
so were given temporary permits to remain in the city by the mayor (1946,
285). The latter were referred to as “Popovici authorizations.” According to
Popovici’s account (based on a census carried out for the ministry of agricul-
ture), there had been forty-nine thousand Jews in the city in August 1941.
On December 16, 1941, 19, 521 Jews remained in Cernăuţi, while 28,391
had been deported. In total, including persons from northern Bukovina
camps and various towns in the southern Bukovina, over ninety thousand
were shipped off to Transnistria.5 Why did the deportations stop? Why
was the ghetto dissolved? How did such a significant number of Cernăuţi
Jews earn the unbelievable good fortune of being spared when in the entire
remainder of the Bukovina, only 182 Jews were exempted from deportation?
These are some of the questions surrounding the Holocaust in Romania.
The Cernăuţi Jews’ worries were not over with the halt of these deporta-
tions, however. “We had barely settled in,” Pearl Fichman writes, “when,
by the end of November, the governor issued a decree, summoning all
permit holders to have them reviewed by a military commission, to have
everything documented. That threw a new scare into everybody” (2005,
78). This commission had a great deal of power, and its work must have
been the source of the numerous categories that can be found on the iden-
tification and registration cards issued in 1941 and then reviewed again in
1943 and 1944.
Each card was marked with a large yellow star and a stamp reading
evreu (Jew), as well as with numerous signatures and numbers. “[We were
registered] in a large hall with a lot of different tables,” Carl told us, “and,
listen, this is a good story. I went together with my brother, but it got
70 / marianne hirsch and leo spitzer
late and his review was interrupted; he would have to go back the next
day to complete his documentation. He came home dejected, in despair.
‘Carl, I have to pack for Transnistria,’ he told me. What happened? When
he was about fifteen years old, he had been arrested one night for pass-
ing out Communist leaflets. Consequently, on his authorization, which
he brought home that night, it said, provine din liste de siguranţă (appears
on the lists of the secret police). This was serious. He was ready to throw
in the towel. So you know what I did?” Carl laughed when he told this
story. “I just took an eraser, and I rubbed out that sentence. Just like that.
We were lucky it had been entered in pencil. The next day he went back
and—no problem.”
When the remaining Jews returned from the ghetto, their num-
bers were severely diminished, since so many friends and neighbors had
been deported. Some of their apartments had been plundered and their
remaining belongings slowly had to be sold off or traded in exchange for
food. Gottfried Brenner had a well-known stamp collection. “One day a
Romanian knocked on our door and asked to see the collection. ‘Aren’t
you going to sell it?’ he asked me. ‘Why would I want to sell it?’ I said.
‘Well, you aren’t going to be here long; you’ll be sent off sooner or later.’
‘Thank you very much for your kind concern,’ I said, ‘but I’m not selling
right now.’ And I didn’t sell that collection!” Isaak Ehrlich tells of his high
school teacher, Professor Mandiuc, who met him on the street one day
and told him he was looking for an overcoat: “You will all be deported
to the Ukraine and you will not survive. You must give me your coat; I
was your professor.”6 Even Traian Popovici describes the Romanians who
bought, plundered, or simply offered to “take care of” the Jews’ possessions
as “sharks” (2001, 83). Nevertheless, Carl was eager to note the friendship
and respect he enjoyed at his place of work, and how much this meant
to him: “I just have to say this, that the day I returned to work from the
ghetto, the assistant manager of the office kissed me. His name was Boris
Gretzov and, years later, in Timişoara, I was able to be helpful to him as
well. Some of them were very nice to us.”
After the dissolution of the ghetto, the city’s Jewish population tried
to return to some semblance of normalcy. The authorities remunerated
some of the work (in December, 1941, the Jewish engineers even received
back pay from August), but considered most labor as the equivalent of
military service (from which Jews were, of course, excluded) or of the
agricultural or construction labor that others were forced to carry out. For
the most, however, pay was simply arbitrarily withheld. Some Jews con-
tinued to work as employees in the businesses they had previously owned.
Others were able to find occasional work for which they were paid small
cernĂuŢi ghetto, deportations, and decent mayor / 71
III
The close calls, the split-second decisions, the narrow escapes recalled in
the narratives of persons who survived the war years in Cernăuţi can lead
to the impression that the situation for Jews in the Bukovina, where they
lived under Romanian and not strictly Nazi, administration, was relatively
“easier” than in other places in German-occupied Europe. Unlike what
had taken place in Jewish ghettos in Poland or during the Holocaust years
in other parts of Eastern Europe, in Cernăuţi, personal ingenuity, presence
of mind, the use of bribery—alone or in combination—actually did save
lives. “What was important was that this was not a personal tragedy,” Lotte
told us, “but that we were all in the same boat. We were in it together.
There were also good times, intense moments of friendship. There was a
curfew, so when we got together we had to sleep at each other’s houses. We
sometimes played bridge or other card games, talked, made little snacks.
One egg, one can of sardines, could feed an entire group for many hours.”
Friendship and community enabled them to brave danger and risk: hid-
ing out in the apartment of a Romanian acquaintance away on business,
for instance, to listen to and be cheered by radio news on BBC or Europa
Liberă of German losses. Despite moments of extreme danger, need, and
uncertainty in the midst of war, something of the positive quality of their
lives together in the city they continued to call Czernowitz—their close-
ness, the thrill of living on the edge—sustained them.
It is important to emphasize, however, that the thousands upon thou-
sands of Jewish victims from Romanian-controlled territories could
hardly be viewed as fortunate, and that the impression we gain from the
situation and possibilities of the Jews remaining in wartime Cernăuţi
needs to be adjusted in this light. Indeed, in June 1942, after a seven-
month hiatus, deportations from Cernăuţi to Transnistria resumed. For
those Jews who had been exempted in 1941, a new period of terror began.
Carl and Lotte Hirsch—now living in Carl’s mother’s small second-
floor apartment on the former Franzensgasse (Rom.: 11 Noiembrie;
Ukr.: 28 Tchervnia) together with Carl’s siblings and Rosa’s husband,
Moritz Gelber—were eyewitnesses to selections that were made in the
street below. “Each Sunday, in June, several hundred Jews were gath-
ered here, right in front of the house, and they waited to be sent to the
Maccabi-Platz, and from there to the train station to board the trains for
Transnistria,” Lotte told us.
72 / marianne hirsch and leo spitzer
“You asked me once for my most powerful memory of those years,” said
Carl. “There are several, but the first that comes to mind is of our landlord
in this house. He was originally from a village near Czernowitz and in the
summer of 1942, when the second set of deportations happened, he was
taken away as we were watching. Others stood quietly, but this man cried
bitterly and screamed in Yiddish, ‘What are they doing to us? Where are
they taking us?’ I’ll never forget that; he cried so bitterly.”
Word spread quickly that the so-called Popovici authorizations issued
by the mayor in November of 1941 were no longer recognized as valid by
the governor of the Bukovina. Popovici, now out of favor for his outspoken
opposition to the earlier deportations and for his intervention, had been
replaced. Similarly, some who were considered “politicals,” like Lotte’s cousin
Dr. Arthur Kessler (who had been the head of a hospital under the Soviets),
were deported to Transnistria in early summer of 1942. Carl describes his
recollections of those fateful Sundays of June 1942 in his memoir:
The procedure was to pick up the people on Sunday early morning (on 3
consecutive June Sundays), to bring them to an open sports stadium where
they were checked in the presence of the Jewish community, release some
who were either needed, or taken by mistake, and ship them Sunday night
to Transnistria . . . The leaders of the Community used their influence to
get the release of some people who had to support their family, and prob-
ably for some of their friends who asked to be protected. On the last day
too many people were released and in order to fill the quota, the military
in charge took a number of people from two streets out of their apartments
indiscriminately . . . Interestingly, some people who knew that they were in
danger of being deported went into hiding during these days and after
the deportations were over they came back into the open without being
bothered (Hirsch, 80).
Notes
This essay is based on a chapter in Hirsch and Spitzer, Ghosts of Home. For another
account of this period in Cernăuţi, see Heymann, 2003.
1. The political history of this city is complex. Until 1918, as capital of the
Bukovina province under Austrian-Habsburg rule, it was called Czernowitz.
Under subsequent Romanian rule, from 1918–1940, it was renamed Cernăuţi.
From 1940–1941 and from 1945–1991, under Russian rule, it was called
Chernovtsi. During World War II, from 1942–1945, when the Romanians
regained control of the city with Nazi German assistance, it was again Cernăuţi.
When Ukraine became an independent Republic in 1991, the city acquired its
current name, Chernivtsi.
2. For more on the Yellow Star in Cernăuţi, see Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania,
141–142.
3. See http://czernowitz.ehpes.com.
4. Rita Pistiner, cited in Gaby Coldewey, 43.
5. Popovici, Spovedania Testimony, 87–97. In all probability, of course, the num-
ber of Jews in the city after the 1941 deportations was higher. He writes: “By
my own estimates, their [the Jews’] number must have . . . topped 20,000. It is
a noted fact that many Jews, for reasons that are not hard to figure, eschewed
both the census and the sorting process and preferred never to ask for ration
tickets”
6. Isaak Erlich, cited in Gaby Coldewey, 42.
Works Cited
Brenner, Hedwig. 2006. Mein 20. Jahrhundert. Brugg, Switzerland: Munda.
Carp, Matatias. 1996. Cartea neagră: Suferinţele evreilor din România. Vol. 3
Transnistria. Bucharest: Editura Diogene.
Carp, Matatias. 2001. Holocaust in Romania: Facts and Documents on the
Annihilation of Romania’s Jews. Trans. Sean Murphy. Safety Harbor, FL: Simon
Publications.
Carp, Matatias. 2010. Cartea neagră: Le Livre noir de la destruction des Juif de
Roumanie, 1940–1944. Ed. Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine. Paris: Denoël.
Coldewey, Gaby, et al., eds.2003. Zwischen Pruth und Jordan: Lebenserinnerungen
Czernowitzer Juden. Cologne: Böhlau.
cernĂuŢi ghetto, deportations, and decent mayor / 75
Florence Heymann
Trauma Competition
Perhaps, the most appropriate word to describe the Shoah in Transnistria is
“paradox.” I remember having been very astonished by the fact that in the
first interviews conducted in the beginning of my research (1977–1980),
when the interviewees spoke about the war, they often mixed the trauma
of the German period with that of the Soviet period—the deportations to
Transnistria with those to Siberia—without speaking of the cases in which
someone had been deported two or three times, by the Romanians or the
Germans and by the Soviets.
Another paradox (and not the slightest) is that the deportees who stayed
in Moghilev at the end of 1941 were the “lucky ones.” They were “lucky”
even on triple accounts. First, they had the “good fortune” to have been
in the ghetto of Czernowitz and not in the small surrounding villages
of North Bukovina. Second, they had the “good fortune” to have been
deported with the first waves and not with those of 1942, who were sent to
Cariera de piatră (Stone Quarry), to this place “which has a name which
does not have any,” according to the words of Paul Celan in Strette (1990,
26).10 These second-wave deportees were later transferred to camps under
German rule, places whence almost no one returned. Third, those who
80 / florence heymann
remained in Moghilev were not driven out further. Of course, one has to
understand that this “good fortune” must be expressed within quotation
marks, considering its relative nature, not to mention its participation in
the paradox.11
The majority of those who wrote our letters were deported from the
ghetto of Czernowitz. Why did I say that they had three instances of
“good fortune”? First, because in the semi-rural and rural regions of
Bukovina, during the interregnum phase between the retreat of the
Soviet army and the arrival of the Romanian and German troops, a large
number of Jews were killed with knives, hay forks, or axes by the local
peasants. The worst aspect of this was perhaps that these spontaneous
massacres took place in localities that, before the war, knew a relatively
peaceful coexistence between the various minorities, not without tension,
but basically a “normal life.” This could explain why, in these places, the
Jews did not try to flee.12
The beginning of the war against the Soviet Union, June 22, 1941,
seems to have been a much-dreamed- of occasion for the Romanian
army to avenge the retreat of the previous year. Rumors were propa-
gated that the Jews had helped the Russians. The conclusion drawn was
simple: the “Jewish- Communists” were to be regarded as “destroyers of
civilization.” The Romanian leaders, convinced of the future German
victory, transmitted to the civil administration their plans concern-
ing the Jewish population of the two “lost provinces” (Bukovina and
Bessarabia). A few days before the start of Operation Barbarossa, battal-
ions of gendarmes received “special orders.” “To clear the ground” was
the euphemism used for the operation, which comprised three points:
the extermination of all the Jews of the rural areas, the seclusion in
ghettos of the Jews from the urban centers, and the arrest of suspects
described as Soviet activists.
The Romanian armies arrived in Czernowitz on July 5, 1941, followed
by the first German units and the Einsatzkommando Zehn B, belonging to
Einsatzgruppe D (Reitlinger 1953, 398). During the first days, there were
several thousand Jewish victims, until the new governor of the province,
General Calotescu, ordered the establishment of the ghetto on October 11,
1941. A perimeter of four or five streets, which had until then been home
to ten thousand people, was surrounded by a wall built in a few hours, and
forty-five thousand others were forced to move in.
On October 14, 1941, a first convoy of deportees was organized from
the ghetto. Five thousand people left on foot toward the train station and
were piled into livestock wagons, forty to fifty per coach (Avneri 1971,
39). They were sent to the north of Transnistria. Many passed through
Ataki, one of the “gates of hell.” The conditions were terrible but, despite
“bottles in the sea” / 81
everything, each one hoped to remain there, because it was rumored that
to cross the Dniester meant certain death.
Moghilev
An agglomeration of twenty-two thousand inhabitants living under the
Soviets, Moghilev was partially destroyed during the war. Some of the
local Jews, who numbered almost ten thousand in 1926, were killed by
the Einsatzkommando Zehn B. Those men of age were enlisted in the
Soviet Forces. Only 3,733 Jews remained there when the Romanians
took possession of the territory, mainly women, children, and old men.
Many Jewish houses were in ruins. The result was that these local Jews
could not help the deportees who flooded into their city by the tens of
thousands.13
Among the Jews of Czernowitz, who arrived with those from the south
of Bukovina and Dorohoi, some still had a few possessions—in particular,
clothing—especially because they arrived by train, without having spent
months on the roads. These were the writers of the correspondence we
analyzed. The letters were intended for fathers and mothers, children, or
more distant family; Jewish or non-Jewish acquaintances; former employ-
ers; or people who were thought to have the capacity to intercede in favor
of the exiles. The period during which the letters were written corresponds
to what Avigdor Shachan called “the period of the shock” (1996, 192).
During this time, Moghilev seemed to be “a death trap and a massive
graveyard, with huge common graves” (Shachan 1996, 194). This period
was followed by one of “recovery,” thanks to self-organization, under the
command of a very effective leadership.
82 / florence heymann
The first shock was being wrenched from what the deportees named the
“homeland”: their city, their house. Spoliations were a common refrain.
The deportees were anxious about their properties left behind, because
they realized that they were victims of swindlers, who sometimes pre-
sented themselves as protectors: “[T]he companion of Carmi remained
in the apartment as occupant. I recognize now that the proposal to
occupy our apartment was a premeditated swindle” (Correspondence, 2).
“How is it at the house which was once mine? Does anybody live there?”
(Correspondence, 114) “My dear friend Oskar . . . please tell me who lives
in my house, and also don’t forget to help me” (Correspondence, 74). The
extortion of funds was another wound:
I personally gave to Mr. Vasilcu for my evacuation 1,000 dollars and also
500,000 lei, in a packet which was then sealed. In Dorneşti, I then per-
sonally gave him, from the train . . . the sum of 80,000 lei. Moreover, [he]
received from the clothes factory objects equaling a value of 200–250,000
lei, a gold wristwatch, a silver cigarette box and also several valuable articles
of the house which he was supposed to guard.14 Since I understand from
[his] silence . . . that he has bad intentions, please make all efforts . . . that I
can obtain the refunding of the money (Correspondence, 182).
fourteen days, I have not received a single piece of bread, or mămăligă for
my child. First of all, here nothing is received and, then, I don’t have money
to buy anything. I already sold all the clothing I had to buy something for
my child. Now, nothing remains to me any more” (Correspondence, 75).16
Misery grew from day to day. Some thought that it could be still worse;
for others the situation was completely desperate: “[T]he situation in which
we are, we cannot describe it with words. We are at the edge of despair.
Help us to leave from here” (Correspondence, 39). “Each day and each
hour counts, we are desperate, even if there remains to me still some food.17
With these lines, understand our terrible situation” (Correspondence, 47).
“We are completely depressed and I feel humiliated at an inexpressible
point owing to the fact that you did not write to me even some lines.
When somebody is depressed as I am and in our unbearable situation,
a word of consolation is very important and a little hope plays a great
role” (Correspondence, 58).18 “We are in a really critical situation, near to
despair” (Correspondence, 74). “In such a situation, we will not be able to
live a long time” (Correspondence, 35).
The hunger is the first of the leitmotifs. Thirty letters refer to it
specifically: “We die of hunger. We have neither money, nor food”
(Correspondence, 8). The hunger was caused by the lack of food avail-
able, the price of food, and the lack of money in general. But even money
could not buy things at a certain point; only barter could suffice. But
one had to have something to exchange: “We are in a very bad condi-
tion because we cannot obtain food even for a lot of money, we can only
make exchanges. So I write to you in the greatest urgency to ask you to
send 15 kg of Chromckolin by a messenger. This will enable me to remain
alive” (Correspondence, 66). “If they [the peasants] sell something it’s
only by barter, especially with soap” (Correspondence, 29).19 “We do not
exaggerate when we say that soon we will have nothing to eat. We are
hungry and the peasants bring absolutely nothing from the outside and
if they bring something, they want only to barter” (Correspondence, 48).
“The rubles are without any value, and the result is that the peasants don’t
want to sell anything and we already don’t have anything to exchange”
(Correspondence, 10).
To the hunger was added great cold. Indeed, the winter of 1941–1942
was extremely severe, with temperatures of -30° to - 40° Celsius: “Currently,
things do not go so badly yet, but I do not know how it will be when the
true cold of - 40° and more and the snowstorms, as the local people describe
them, will start” (Correspondence, 1).
The deportees attempted to preserve their dignity and to fight against
the egregious lack of hygiene. In the lists of precious products that they
ask correspondents to send them, soap and toilet paper are perhaps the
84 / florence heymann
most important: “Two rolls of toilet paper (don’t laugh, it is not a lack of
modesty, but since we left the homeland, we don’t have any more newspa-
pers, and we are not used to the practices of the natives, it is thus a vital
question)” (Correspondence, 5). The dirtiness, the lack of heating, and the
lack of drinking water caused epidemics, including typhus, which spread
from mid-December among the deportees weakened by hunger and cold
(Ancel 2003, 68). “Unfortunately, I am very sick, it hurts me that my child
is famished, I can deprive myself, but the child is already as green as a
lemon” (Correspondence, 9). “The children are sick, Anna is not recogniz-
able” (Correspondence, 46). “My father is very sick, he does not have any
more strength and I do not have any possibility of taking care of him”
(Correspondence, 76).
Diseases and epidemics that threatened the weakened bodies
explain why drugs became some of the most invaluable products: “Did
Carmi request all the drugs? Also the agathosan and the karillen?”
(Correspondence, 2).20 “Some drugs as follows: a) a large bottle of valer-
ian tincture, which I need for Toucia; b) a large portion of charcoal; c) a
small bottle of Laktobyl for Toucia; d) a good sleeping pill; e) a hot-water
bottle for the cold feet of Toucia and Herta” (Correspondence, 3). “For
the drugs: hydrogen peroxide, permanganate, pills against biliary pains,
vaccines against typhus, drops for the heart” (Correspondence, 13). “For
the drugs: morphine, Kaprofter, mentholated petroleum cream, Rubiasol
[antiseptic]. But send the packages only when I tell you because the pack-
ages are lost” (Correspondence, 27).
The hygienic conditions were deplorable. The houses, most made of
clay, did not have toilets. There were no public baths, no soaps; the bodies
were swarming with vermin: “We are full of lice, like almost everybody
here” (Correspondence, 10). In fact, “The lice were the second wound after
the Germans,” as reported recently by Mrs. Yehudit Terris Yerushalmi.21
The end was most of the time inescapable. The bodies of the dead, col-
lected daily, accumulated in the cemeteries until spring, when graves could
finally be dug: “People die of hunger in the streets and, each day, there are
20 to 30 deaths” (Correspondence, 42).
In addition to the epidemics, the conditions in the ghetto involved
another phenomenon: rumors (Wieviorka 1998, 29)—for example, rumors
about special treatments that must be granted to specialists like industrial-
ists, doctors, and so on. “The rumors of Ippa, I do not believe a word of
them. Each time one says something or something else, but I do not believe
anything, until I see concrete things” (Correspondence, 154).
The rumors came from the deportees. But the Romanians, the Germans,
or the Ukrainians often disseminated other ones, and their effects were
sometimes more perverse: “The Romanian officers tell . . . that South
“bottles in the sea” / 85
Bukovinians will return to their houses on the 26th. But, once again, I do
not believe anything” (Correspondence, 154). The rumors did not have
only negative impact, however. The rumors mitigate “the feeling of being
out of the world, abandoned by all” (Wieviorka 1998, 31). These rumors
were based on the single wish, which supported a number of deportees,
of being able to return home: “It is said here that we will return home.
But perhaps that is only a mirage” (Correspondence, 43). “If they don’t
authorize us quickly to return to our house, then we are finished, because
of the lack of food, the hunger and our nostalgia to be at home. We can
live in a hole, but at home” (Correspondence, 59). “Write to me as much
as possible and even lies, by saying to us for example that we will return
soon to our house. For me, that gives me the effect of a shot of anesthetic”
(Correspondence, 114).
Once again, we must speak of a paradox. Indeed, in spite of this litany
of tragedies, the town remained a relative haven compared with the other
camps of Transnistria. For example, a Jewish committee, whose most
remarkable personality was Siegfried Jagendorf, managed the ghetto. It
succeeded in setting up a network of institutions and providing for mutual
assistance (Fisher 1969, 103–104).22 But again, this relative peace lasted
only for a time. In February 1942, less than two months after the letters
were written, Colonel Constantin Năsturaş, prefect of Moghilev, ordered
the Jewish committee to prepare a plan for the evacuation of four thousand
Jews. The committee tried in vain to prevent it. Between May and June,
3,500 Jews would be sent to Scazinetz, which would become the cemetery
for most of the evacuated (Fisher 1969, 88). In October 1942, three thou-
sand other Jews would leave for Peciora (Fisher 1969, 90).23 In May 1943,
one thousand workers would be sent on their way to another death camp,
Trihatz (Trichati). Finally, another thousand would be sent to Tulcin to
extract peat. Very few of these evacuees would return.
The lawyer Twers Albert, of German ethnic origin, works in the firm of
import-export “Heinz Hellman” from Bucharest, Calea Victoriei, 208. In
this capacity, on 12 December 1941, he went with the director of the firm
to Moghilev-Transnistria, to study the possibility of opening a branch in
Transnistria. Many Jews of Moghilev asked him to take letters and to trans-
mit them to people in Rădăuţi or Cernăuţi . . . The investigator could not
establish if he received money for this service; it follows that this mode of
correspondence, which is practiced in this area, contravenes thus the mea-
sures of the postal laws in force, the measures referring to the mandatory
censorship of such correspondence.
Now we can answer most questions we have asked in the beginning : why
these letters were gathered in a file, where the replies were, and why all
the messages dated from the same weeks–, but a mystery remains: What
had pushed Albert Twers, a German, to put himself at risk and assist the
deportees? Mercy? Philosemitism? Interest?
The second document, number 616, dated April 14, 1942 and published
by Jean Ancel (2003, 709), answers this question.25 Twers’s father-in-law,
Naftali Alpern, was a Jew. Alpern had been deported from Czernowitz.
Twers tried to obtain his release, explaining the journeys to Moghilev and
Shargorod and his contacts with the Jewish community. It seems that he
succeeded in his quest. Indeed, a telegram from Alexianu, the civil gover-
nor of Transnistria, instructed the prefect of Moghilev to release Naftali
Alpern and his wife, at the request of Antonescu himself. The justifica-
tion for the release was the fact that Alpern was a retired Romanian civil
servant.
To conclude, this analysis illustrates the necessity not simply to oppose
memory to history. Our documents present the concerns of memory rather
than those of history. One might think a priori that the two terms are
entirely opposed or mutually exclusive. Memory is always carried by liv-
ing groups and, for this reason, it constantly evolves. History is on the
side of science and should thus be less prone to fluctuation. But following
“bottles in the sea” / 87
the analyses of Paul Ricœur, this old debate may be undergoing a pro-
cess of reconciliation (Ricœur 1993, 35–36). On the one hand, we are less
inclined to put so much faith in the “scientism” of history. On the other
hand, we recognize that there is history in memory. For me, as this article
perhaps confirms, it is the conjunction of these two approaches that proves
most productive for conducting our research. In combining memory and
history, our ambition remains (to quote Paul Ricœur again) “to follow the
traces of the Other” (Ricoeur 2000, 258). It is a great one.
Notes
1. I was received there by Dr. Radu Ioanid and Mrs. Michlean Amir. I thank
them for their invaluable assistance. This research has been supported by a
grant from the Fondation de la Mémoire de la Shoah, in Paris.
2. Under the reference: “Fonds 1061. Opis 1 #2. RG–31.006M Cernivtsi
Regional Archive.”
3. In this article, I use the German name of the city, although at the time it was
called Cernăuţi, and was Romanian. However, most of the Jews from the
region have continued until now to use almost exclusively the Austro-German
name. Rachel (Mitzi in Czernowitz) Ampel, is ninety-three years old. She
lives in an old people’s home in Jerusalem.
4. I once again translated passages of the letters into English for this article.
5. To facilitate the consultation, I paginated the letters, from 1 to 227. I use this
pagination in references.
6. See, for example, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies
of Yale University’s Department of Manuscripts and Archives, or the Steven
Spielberg Film and Video Archive at the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum [later USHMM].
7. Or, see more recently, in France, the trials of Paul Touvier, Klaus Barbie, or
Maurice Papon.
8. See, for example, the systematic collection of testimonies, gathered by
Emmanuel Ringelblum in the Warsaw ghetto, or the chronicle of the Lodz
ghetto. For a discussion about archives and testimonies, see Annette Wieviorka,
L’Ère du témoin, particularly pages 17–48. For the individual chronicles, cf.
Simha Guterman, Le Livre retrouvé. This last work is another type of “bottles
in the sea,” according to the title of our article.
9. The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem.
10. “Der Ort, wo sie lagen, er hat einen Namen–er hat keinen.”
11. This article is dedicated to my paternal grandparents, Paulina and Isak
Herschmann. They had only one of these three instances of “good fortune”:
They were in the ghetto of Czernowitz. But they were deported, with Paul
Celan’s parents, in 1942. They were in the same places and the same camps,
and they knew the same fate. My grandfather was shot dead on the 26th
of April, 1943, in the camp of Mikhailowka. My grandmother was assassi-
nated by a bullet in the head on the 10th of December, 1943, in the camp of
Tarassiwka (cited in Schultz and Timms, 220).
88 / florence heymann
12. On this problematic issue, see the book of Jan Tomasz Gross, Neighbors:
The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne (cited in Hoffmann,
210–15).
13. During the autumn and the winter of 1941, 55,913 deportees, of which almost
half were from Bessarabia and Bukovina, passed through Moghilev. See bul-
letin issued by gendarmerie headquarters in Transnistria regarding the period
from December 15, 1941 to January 15, 1942 (Carp 319–20, cited in Jean
Ancel, Transnistria, 1941–1942, 65).
14. Underlined in the original.
15. Letter of December 14, 1941.
16. Letter of December 15, 1941.
17. Underlined in the original.
18. Letter to Frieda Weinbach, December 16, 1941.
19. December 15, 1941.
20. December 6, 1941.
21. During the Annual Meeting of the World Association of Bukovinians, Tel-
Aviv, April 2007. Among the most traumatic experiences Yehudit Terris
Yerushalmi underwent was being shaved. She remembers with horror the oil
that was poured regularly on her body to avoid lice.
22. See also, “Transnistria,” in Hugo Gold, ed., Geschichte der Juden in der
Bukovina, 77–79.
23. Decree no. 28937, July 3, 1942.
24. Odessa Archives, 2242–4c–29 (20–20b).
25. Odessa Archives, 2242–1–1489, 15–17.
Works Cited
Ancel, Jean. 2003. Transnistria, 1941–1942. Vol. 1. History and Document
Summaries. Tel-Aviv: Tel-Aviv University.
Avneri, Arieh. 1971. Czernowitz, kehilot Israel bagola [Czernowitz, Jewish
Communities in the Diaspora]. Tel-Aviv: Beit Lohamei Hagettaot.
Carp, Matatias. 1946–1948 Cartea Neagră. Bucharest: Diogene.
Celan, Paul. 1990. Strette & Autres Poèmes. Paris: Mercure de France.
Fisher, Julius S. 1969. Transnistria: The Forgotten Cemetery. New York, South
Brunswick, London: Yoseloff.
Gold, Hugo, ed. 1962. Geschichte der Juden in der Bukovina. Vol II. Moghilew.
Tel-Aviv: Olamenu.
Gross, Jan Tomasz. 2002. Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in
Jedwabne, Poland. London: Penguin Books.
Guterman, Simha. 1991. Le Livre retrouvé. Ed. Nicole Lapierre. Trans. Aby
Wieviorka. Paris: Plon.
Heymann, Florence. 2003. Le Crépuscule des lieux. Paris: Stock.
Hoffman, Eva. 2004. After such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the
Holocaust. New York: Public Affairs.
Reitlinger, Gerald. 1953. The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews
in Europe, 1939–1945. New York: A. S. Barnes.
Ricœur, Paul. 2000. La Mémoire, l’ histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Seuil.
“bottles in the sea” / 89
———. 1993. Remarques d’un philosophe. Écrire l’ histoire du temps présent. Paris:
CNRS Éditions.
Schultz, Deborah and Edwards Timms, eds. 2009. Arnold Daghani’s Memories of
Mikhailowka: The Illustrated Diary of a Slave Labour Camp Survivor. London:
Vallentine Mitchell.
Shachan, Avigdor. 1996. Burning Ice: The Ghettoes of Transnistria. Boulder: East
European Monographs.
Wieviorka, Annette. 1998. l’Ère du témoin. Paris: Plon.
Ch a p t e r Fi v e
Su rv i va l a n d M e mory: A r nold
Dag h a n i’s Ve r ba l a n d
Visua l D i a r i e s 1
Deborah Schultz
oeuvre, this article aims to rehabilitate an artist whose verbal and visual
reflections on the Nazi period deserve to be more widely known.
The main works discussed are Daghani’s slave labor camp diary, writ-
ten in English but first published in Romanian (1947). The English text
was only published fourteen years later under the translated title The Grave
is in the Cherry Orchard (1961), while the German translation became
Lasst mich leben! (1960). Each version was presented as a small paperback
book, and the Romanian and English versions included reproductions of a
selected number of around twenty drawings and watercolors that Daghani
had made in the camp and ghetto and managed to smuggle out.2
Daghani’s achievement was to personalize events and bring them alive,
removing the anonymity of the distant camps in this under-researched
region of the Holocaust. Thus his diaries interweave the public and the
private, contrasting a Fascist system of command and control with the
experiences of individuals, giving their suffering a human face and provid-
ing telling details that build up into an indictment of the exploitation of
slave labor by the German military and civil authorities.
children’s toys, until German and Romanian troops drove the Soviets out
and occupied the region in June 1941. After that date, Jews were only
allowed to carry out menial tasks. In June 1942, Daghani and Anna
were included in a large deportation of Jews by the Romanian authori-
ties from Cernăuţi, through Romanian-controlled Transnistria, and
across the regional border of the river Bug—the border between Romania
and German-occupied Ukraine—to a slave labor camp at Mikhailowka.
The camp was run by the SS, and the inmates worked for the August
Dohrmann engineering company, part of the Todt Organisation, repair-
ing the main road (the Durchgangsstrasse IV or DG IV), a strategic supply
road linking occupied Poland with southern Ukraine. Mikhailowka was
one of a number of camps set up in the region between the river Bug and
the route of the DG IV. The work was extremely demanding. Rather than
transport machinery to the region, the firms opted to use cheaper human
labor. Daghani portrays, both in words and images, the camp inmates
working with pickaxes and shovels on the road (figure 5.1).
Daghani’s artistic skills played an important part in his experience of
life at Mikhailowka and ultimately led to his and Anna’s escape. Initially,
he had been reluctant to take his watercolor box to the camp. In What a
Nice World, an extensive collection of his writings and drawings bound
Figure 5.1 Arnold Daghani, On the way to work on the road (1974) in 1942
1943 And Thereafter (Sporadic records till 1977) (1942–1977) ink on tracing paper
(G2.054r) (Arnold Daghani Collection, Special Collections, University of Sussex
©Arnold Daghani Trust).
94 / deborah schultz
Figure 5.2 Arnold Daghani, New Year flowers for Nanino (1943) in 1942 1943
And Thereafter (Sporadic records till 1977) (1942–1977) ink and watercolor on
paper (G2.060r) (Arnold Daghani Collection, Special Collections, University of
Sussex © Arnold Daghani Trust).
transport was available to take them there every day from the camp, so
in June it was decided that they would stay in the headquarters’ garage
until the mosaic was completed. During those few weeks they came into
contact with Abrasha, a local cobbler, who offered to help them escape.
The Daghanis hesitated, not believing escape was possible, and fearing the
consequences for their fellow inmates in Mikhailowka.
96 / deborah schultz
However, one night in mid-July, the plan was carried out, described
in dramatic detail in Daghani’s diary. There were many moments when
it looked as if it would fail. Daghani and Anna were due to be sent back
to Mikhailowka as soon as the mosaic was complete, but at the last min-
ute Bergmann asked Daghani to paint some parchment as a gift for a
lampshade for Atti Grae, the secretary with whom he was romantically
involved. Painting this gave Daghani and Anna an extra night at Gaissin.
They hid that night in an empty building where, miraculously, they were
not discovered during a house-search by German soldiers. After spending
the second night in a garden and the third in a potato field, Abrasha gave
them clothes to help them look like local peasants and they joined a cart
going to the nearby town, Sobelewka. There they met a guide whom they
followed on foot for around forty miles. That night they crossed the river
Bug, carrying with them Daghani’s precious paintings. They succeeded
in reaching the Romanian-held territory of Transnistria and the relative
safety of the ghetto in Bershad.
A few months later, partisans attacked Mikhailowka. Some inmates
escaped, but the remainder were relocated to the nearby camp of Tarassiwka
until early December. Here, as the Red Army advanced, they were all shot
by their German captors and buried in the mass grave that gave Daghani’s
diary its poignant title. When he heard what had happened, Daghani was
deeply traumatized; he recalled his fellow inmates in memories and night-
mares until the end of his life. In this way, for Daghani, being an artist
became connected with his guilt of surviving the camp while the other
inmates were killed. His suffering as an artist became directly connected
with his fate, his life and work closely interwoven.
Daghani continued to draw and paint during the months of hiding
in Bershad, depicting everyday life in the ghetto’s streets and markets.
His works may appear understated, avoiding direct representations of the
crimes and sufferings of war. However, recording scenes from the camp or
the ghetto without permission was a criminal offence. If caught, he would
have faced a court-martial. Those assisting him also risked punishment.
Daghani’s detailed observations bring his narrative to life, highlighting
many unexpected moments. In late December 1943, with the assistance of
the Red Cross, he and Anna were able to return to Bucharest. Though only
a short time previously they had been working as slave laborers in a camp
and living unregistered in a ghetto, on the train journey to Bucharest, a
German senior officer offered Anna a seat. Furthermore, Daghani writes,
“on learning from Nanino that I was an artist, [he] introduced himself to
me as a fellow-artist of Bonn . . . Among the senior officers there were two
with the distinctive mark of the SS . . .” (Daghani, What a Nice World,
G1.067r). Daghani describes such moments in straightforward language,
survival and memory / 97
a small part of his output, which was a mixture of nudes, portraits, land-
scapes, abstracts, and works on musical and literary themes. He continued
to develop in new directions, in many media, commenting on his experi-
ences as an artist, often with black humor. Daghani began making collages
that he called “alienations,” in which parts of photographs, generally of
female nudes, were transformed into figures and objects. These range from
the witty and ironic to the more sharply satirical works on contemporary
life, often incorporating newspaper cuttings or using newspaper as a base
to accentuate their contemporaneity.
Having failed to comply with the conditions of their Israeli passport,
Daghani and Anna became stateless. In 1970 they were granted permis-
sion to stay in Jona, but there was no artistic scene and Daghani was even
farther, both physically and in terms of recognition, from the art world.
Finally, in 1977, Daghani and Anna received residence permits and were
able to settle in Hove, near Brighton in the South of England. The move
was facilitated by Anna’s sister Carola and her husband Miron Grindea
(editor of Adam literary journal), who had been living in England since
1939. But Daghani’s health was deteriorating. He suffered from both
depression and Parkinson’s disease, evidenced in his increasingly shaky
drawings and handwriting. However, he continued to produce and, as
in previous homes, covered not only the walls of his apartment with his
work, but also the surfaces of furniture and lampshades, bathroom tiles,
and the glass windows of doors. Moreover, his commitment to the task of
commemoration remained undiminished and he devoted endless hours
to working on the revised typewritten versions of his diary. Daghani and
his wife remained in Hove until they died—Anna in 1984 and Daghani
in 1985.
ourselves with the past” (Daghani, Let Me Live, 279). When Bergmann
died in 1977, Daghani wrote that “the news hit us like a thunderbolt”
(Daghani, Live, 286).
Daghani’s tolerance, lack of bitterness, and humanistic treatment of
others reveal a spiritual openness reflected in the motto on one of the first
pages of What a Nice World, paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln: “To make
of your enemy a friend” (Daghani, G1.009v). He was able to interact
with people as individuals, and he developed friendships with Bergmann,
Fischer, and—to some extent—Elsässer during the following years. His
artistic decisions related to his approach to people in general. The way he
responded to his fellow inmates and captors, with restraint and an effort
to understand, directly informed the unique series of works he made dur-
ing the terrible years he spent in Mikhailowka and Bershad. Since the
1980s, Holocaust studies have increasingly taken into consideration the
experiences of victims and survivors, both in oral histories and memoirs,
as well as the roles and responsibilities of the “ordinary men” on the side of
the perpetrators. Some commentators and survivors, notably Primo Levi,
have warned that attempting to understand the perpetrators and their col-
laborators may come close to justifying their actions. But a contrasting
perspective may be found in the diaries of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jew who
perished in Auschwitz. Hillesum records that she was asked by a friend:
“What is it in human beings that makes them want to destroy others?” To
this she replied: “Human beings, you say, but remember that you’re one
yourself . . . All the appalling things that happen are no mysterious threats
from afar, but arise from fellow beings close to us” (Hillesum 1983, 72).
he came to see German, his mother tongue, as the language of the enemy.
Writing his clandestine camp diary in English may have also protected
him from the risk of discovery. In the longer term, he doubtless hoped to
reach a wider audience by using that language.
The visual appearance of Daghani’s writing forms a striking contrast to
its content. For hand-written versions, Daghani employed a range of styles
from a simple freehand to an Old English form. His most dominant style
was Gothic script, which confers on the text an authority reminiscent of
sacred manuscripts. Since that was so obviously time-consuming to pro-
duce, it signals a work of particular value or significance. There are pages
upon pages of this rather labored, elaborate writing in books and albums
such as What a Nice World (see, for example, figure 5.3).
The use of handwriting demonstrates the personal nature of the endeavor
and seems to attest to the authenticity of the work. At the same time, the
aestheticized writing and ornamentation could also be a distancing device;
rather than write in his own hand, Daghani adopted a stylized form that
enhances his authority. The writing style recalls that of legal documents
or medieval manuscripts, particularly in the case of What a Nice World.
Handwritten, with illuminated first letters and a cover decorated with
metal corners, the book looks as if it could only have been produced before
mechanical printing presses were invented (figure 5.4).
A pencil on a leather string is attached to the book, emphasizing the
act of writing. For Daghani, it became the symbol of his unique authority.
When he went to Lübeck to make his deposition to the public prosecutor,
he carried this weighty volume with him.
As in illuminated manuscripts, Daghani often used gold paint, adorn-
ing his texts with decorative letters, calligraphic flourishes, and elaborate
borders. Often the first word is accentuated in scale and color to designate
a new section, while ornamental motifs mark the ends of chapters. His
decorations may seem simple compared to those of many manuscripts, but
they convey a comparable sense of the dignity of the medieval scribe.
Although Daghani saw himself primarily as an artist, his written out-
put was substantial. Aside from the diaries and memoirs, he produced a
number of poems, short stories, and other pieces of prose. In 1958, Paul
Celan wrote: “In this language [i.e., German] I have sought, during those
years and the years since then, to write poems: so as to speak, to orient
myself, to find out where I was and where I was meant to go, to sketch out
reality for myself . . . They are the efforts of someone . . . who goes with his
very being to language, stricken by and seeking reality” (Felstiner 1995,
115–116). For Daghani, the primary existential attachment was not to lan-
guage—and certainly not to German—but to the visual image. However,
in a period of unprecedented crisis, he realized that images alone were
Figure 5.3 Arnold Daghani, Untitled (woman with baskets and diary entry)
(1963) in What a Nice World (1943–1977) ink on paper (G1.023r) (Arnold Daghani
Collection, Special Collections, University of Sussex © Arnold Daghani Trust).
104 / deborah schultz
not enough. Only through pictorial narratives, involving both images and
inscriptions, was it possible to convey the magnitude of the disaster. For
Daghani, writing may have been a means of locating himself and of find-
ing his way. Although not a cathartic process, writing seems to have been
a necessary activity and a means of exploring the relationship between
survival and memory / 105
of it. For none of these representations are mimetic; all involve different
filters. Events are perceived through our subjective responses, to which
earlier memories add further layers of interpretation.
Even the most elaborate of Daghani’s written records cannot transcend
the limits of language. But he was fortunate in being able to share the task
of commemoration with his wife Anna, who had been at his side through-
out their ordeals. Their shared memories enabled him to record the fate of
the prisoners at Mikhailowka in a form that recalls the traditional Jewish
“Memorial Book.” In the folio 1942 1943 And Thereafter, he devoted five
pages to a reverently calligraphic “ROLL-CALL,” a list of the names and
responses of those who perished at Mikhailowka, Tarassiwka, and other
labor camps in Ukraine. Their fates are recalled as if they were answering
the roll-call in their own voice:
The list includes 250 persons in all, including many children. A specific
identity is indicated even for people for whom Daghani and his wife could
no longer remember a personal name: “Young Ukrainian Jewish mother
from TEPLIK or UMAN with babe newly born in the camp.” Reciting the
names of the dead became a solemn ritual, repeated by Daghani and his
wife every year at Yom Kippur. The limitations of the written record were
transcended as the names were liturgically recited within the framework of
an age-old religious tradition.
watercolors were produced in the camp, but he wrote up the text from
notes after he returned to Bucharest. As Ziva Amishai-Maisels has indi-
cated, inmates tended to make rather objective recordings due to a neces-
sary repression, for fully expressing their feelings while in the camp would
have made their traumatic experiences more difficult to survive psycho-
logically (1995, 50). In portraying the inmates as ordinary and dignified
people rather than as victims, Daghani affirms their humanity. He treats
them as individuals and records their characters with great warmth and
perception, giving a more intimate picture of the interactions between
individuals within these very particular circumstances. Daghani’s works
from the camp and ghetto are not dissimilar in style to those of other art-
ists in comparable circumstances. What makes his works strikingly unique
is that—unlike many of the other artists—as a survivor, he was able to
spend years reworking and reflecting on his experiences, thereby adding
another dimension to his works.
The inscriptions on certain visual works draw attention to this refracted
word-image relationship. On a 1943 watercolor showing the sleeping quar-
ters at Mikhailowka, Daghani later added a note about the water dam-
age that occurred when he and Anna were wading across the river Bug
(figure 5.5) (1942 1943 And Thereafter, G2.063r).
Thus, the most significant point of their escape from the danger of Nazi-
occupied Ukraine to the relatively less perilous Romanian Transnistria
left its visible and irremovable mark on the image, a unique “watermark,”
confirming its authenticity. Daghani also added a sheet of tracing paper,
which can be seen as a material metaphor for the layering of memory, on
which he noted the names of those depicted. The parallel with Charlotte
Salomon’s Leben? oder Theater? Ein Singespiel (Life? or Theatre? A Singing
Play) [1940–1942] is striking, although he probably would not have been
familiar with her work. The words inscribed on the overlay amplify the
significance of the visual image. A 1972 self-portrait of the artist painting
the watercolor adds a further layer of memory (figure 5.6). Past and present
become interwoven as the present reactivates memories of the past. In this
multiple visual reminiscence Daghani places himself within an enlarged
field of vision. This complex image within an image acts as a staging of the
processes of memory, with the earlier work acting as a prompt.
One might think that Daghani’s inscriptions unduly impinge on his
images. But there are also significant examples in which he uses isolated
images to convey unspoken emotions within the framework of his extended
narratives. An example is a drawing in ink and gold paint in What a Nice
World that represents his wife’s shoes. The image is stark in its simplicity:
an old pair of shoes against a gold background with a black border. The
title is also minimal: “Nanino’s shoes.” For the viewer or reader familiar
survival and memory / 109
Figure 5.5 Arnold Daghani, Camp interior (1943) in 1942 1943 And Thereafter
(Sporadic records till 1977) (1942–1977) watercolor on paper (G2.063r) (Arnold
Daghani Collection, Special Collections, University of Sussex © Arnold Daghani
Trust).
Figure 5.6 Arnold Daghani, Sunday morning (1972) in 1942 1943 And
Thereafter (Sporadic records till 1977) (1942–1977) ink on paper (G2.062r) (Arnold
Daghani Collection, Special Collections, University of Sussex © Arnold Daghani
Trust).
the image in the folio 1942 1943 And Thereafter, where he pasted it onto
a much larger sheet and added inscriptions to frame the image: “Nanino
at the window (in Czernowitz) awaiting full of apprehension my coming
home. Too much of a risk in the streets . . .” This inscription develops the
visual tensions inherent within the image. Daghani was absent, but the
composition is structured from a point in the room behind his wife, as if
he was watching her watching out for him. An apparently simple domestic
scene becomes representative of the sense of danger felt by the Jewish com-
munity, their fragile lives and imminent suffering. A further inscription
above the painting closes the framework by recalling that it, too, survived
“by chance”; the Daghanis came upon it unexpectedly after their return to
Bucharest in 1944.
This is what the victims were dictating me. All hermetic. Their dreams,
joys, worries, illusions, hopes, fears, sensual perception, success, failure,
tenacity. All were taken into the grave, where they were made to descend.
Their lives erased by the wanton pleasure for killing of those aiming at
them from the brink of the grave (Untitled drawing (1975), in 1942 1943
And Thereafter, G2.006v).
Conclusion
In word-image analysis, distinctive functions and modes of operating have
been attributed to the verbal and the visual. To summarize Norman Bryson,
this “is the distinction between a form of knowledge which aspires to a
smoothly comprehended world, ordered and organized, narrated through
words as a logical and completed account of the events it describes, and a
form of knowledge which is, in its dialectical capacity to hold disparate
versions of the same material simultaneously in tension, able to represent
the unknowableness of the world” (Corbett 2000, 46). While words aim
to explain events and decipher their meanings, “visual representation may
be able to reproduce for us the uncertainty, unknowableness and confusion
Figure 5.8 Arnold Daghani, Images after the encounter with a world of phan-
toms keep rushing on . . . (1973) in What a Nice World (1943–1977) ink on paper
(G1.200r) (Arnold Daghani Collection, Special Collections, University of Sussex
© Arnold Daghani Trust).
116 / deborah schultz
Notes
1. An earlier version of this article was published in Pictorial Narrative in the Nazi
Period: Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Arnold Daghani, co-authored
with Edward Timms (London: Routledge, 2009), 64–91. I am very grateful to
Edward Timms for his comments and contributions.
2. These works are now in the Arnold Daghani Collection, Special Collections,
University of Sussex and the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem.
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———. What a Nice World. 1943–1977. Unpublished book, Arnold Daghani
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———. 1947. Groapa este în livada de vişini. Bucharest: SOCEC.
———. 1960. Lasst mich leben! Tel Aviv: Weg und Ziel Verlag.
———. 1961. The Grave is in the Cherry Orchard. Adam: International Review.
Ed. Miron Grindea. 291–292–293.
———. 1980s. Let Me Live. Unpublished authorized manuscript, Arnold Daghani
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Michaels, Anne. 1998. Fugitive Pieces. London: Bloomsbury.
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Ch a p t e r Si x
M i h a i l Se ba st i a n a n d
M i rc e a Eli ade: Ch ron ic le of
a Brok e n Fr i e n d sh i p 1
Andrei Oişteanu
Figure 6.2 Mihail Sebastian (second from the left) and Mircea Eliade (fourth
from the right) surrounded by friends during a summer vacation in the Bucegi
Mountains (July 1932). The archive of the National Museum of Romanian
Literature, Bucharest.
writes, meant “to intervene in God’s free will,” which “could redeem any-
one, by any means.” In two other articles, “Christianity Facing Judaism”
and “A Last Clarification,” Eliade continues this controversy with theo-
logian Gheorghe Racoveanu, fellow contributor to Cuvântul and a friend
of both Eliade and Sebastian. There are “certain Jews,” Eliade would
nevertheless admit, who “are Devil’s sons.” These Jews “shall not find
redemption.”5
Eliade’s jump to the public defense of his friend Sebastian was obvi-
ously a laudable and courageous act. Sebastian fully appreciated it. In
August 1934, he wrote Eliade the following in a letter: “Your answer [to
Racoveanu’s article], dear Mircea, [was] excellent. You could not put it
better. I am deeply sorry you were dragged into this mess, in a way because
of me” (Handoca 1999, 32). This was written at the time when Sebastian
was being attacked from all directions, from the right and from the left,
by the Legionnaires and by the Communists, by friends and by enemies,
by Romanians and by Jews. According to the Romanian P. Nicanor,
for instance, “[Sebastian’s] intellectual profile is primarily hooliganic”
(Sebastian 1990, 239), while for the Jewish writer Isaac Ludo, Sebastian
is a “dramatic bone rodent,” a “lowlife,” a “scoundrel,” a “dejection of
the Jewish ghetto” (Sebastian 1990, 290). In short, Sebastian was too
Jewish for the Romanian nationalists and too Romanian for the Jewish
nationalists.6
But Mircea Eliade approached the issue of Judeophobia from a some-
what cold, technical, and strictly theological perspective. Consciously or
not, he largely ignored the political perspective (not to speak of the moral
one) of anti-Semitism. At that moment, in the mid-1930s, the Romanian
(and European) Jews needed physical, not metaphysical, salvation. They
needed redemption on the earth, while still living, rather than in heaven,
after death. In fact, Sebastian himself sarcastically amended this theolog-
ical controversy in his book Cum am devenit huligan [How I Became a
Hooligan]: “I do not claim any right to have a say in this debate [between
Eliade and Racoveanu], which, moreover, in its depth, is profoundly and
totally indifferent to me. I have a vague impression that after my death I
shall not be judged by Mr. Racoveanu’s texts. And if I am wrong, let God’s
will prevail” (1990, 323).7
Still, Sebastian fully appreciated the fact that his friend Eliade was
one of the few who came to his defense. On the cover page of his volume
Cum am devenit huligan, Sebastian inserted a dedication showing his
gratitude: “To Mircea, who kept me from despair while enduring the
miseries related here [in the book]—which will only survive, if they will
ever survive, because he had a say—the most beautiful.” Signed: “Mihai
1935”.8
mihail sebastian and mircea eliade / 123
The situation is becoming more and more painful. I don’t feel I can stand
the duplicity that our friendship has required since they went over to the
Iron Guard. Mircea’s recent articles in Vremea have been more and more
“Legionary.” I avoided reading some of them. The latest one I read only this
morning—though it came out on Friday and everyone has been talking
to me about it. Is friendship possible with people who have in common a
whole series of alien ideas and feelings—so alien that I have only to walk in
the door and they suddenly fall silent in shame and embarrassment? (2000,
112–13).
Sebastian stepped into the room. Only their dog Joyce—not affected by
the Legionary Movement—“shouted with joy” at his sight. “Only Joyce
reminded me of the time when I felt somehow at home in that house”
(2000, 175), Sebastian wrote on August 30, 1938. “Our friendship is rap-
idly breaking up,” he noted in his diary on March 25, 1937. “We don’t
see each other for days at a time—and when we do, we no longer have
anything to say” (120). At times, in despair, Sebastian himself would ask
Eliade to change the subject. “But is friendship possible under such cir-
cumstances?” (123), he wrote in his journal on April 4, 1937.
On December 19, Sebastian felt he was about to lose all his friends,
including “the closest friend of all, Mircea” (134). Indeed, a few days before
the elections of December 20, 1937, Eliade’s infamous text “Why I Believe
in the Victory of the Legionary Movement” appeared in the far-right pub-
lication Buna Vestire. In it, Eliade asked: “Can the Romanian people end
its days . . . wasted by poverty and syphilis, invaded by Jews and torn apart
by foreigners . . . ?” (133). Stupefied, Sebastian transcribed in his journal a
fragment of Eliade’s text. The long and vivid political disputes they had
throughout 1937 did not manage to clarify things between them. “He’s
neither a charlatan nor a madman. He’s just naive. But there are such cata-
strophic forms of naiveté,” concluded Sebastian on March 2, 1937 (114).
The two friends’ encounters were less frequent, until they ceased com-
pletely: “It’s nearly two months since I last saw Mircea,” Sebastian wrote
in his journal on January 13, 1938. “Should I let things unravel by them-
selves? Should I wrap it all up with a final explanation? I feel such revulsion
that I would prefer us both to stop speaking once and for all. I have noth-
ing to ask him, and he certainly has nothing to say to me. On the other
hand, our friendship lasted for years, and perhaps I owed it one harsh hour
of parting” (145).
Half a year later, when they eventually did meet again, Sebastian did
not know how to manage his relationship with Eliade. Out of control,
his feelings oscillated between sympathy and antipathy, between love and
hate:
Dinner at Mircea’s on Sunday evening. It was a long time since I had seen
him. He’s unchanged. I looked at him and listened with great curiosity to
what he said. The gestures I had forgotten, his nervous volubility, a thou-
sand things thrown together—always congenial, straight-forward, capti-
vating. It’s hard not to be fond of him. But I have so much to say to him
about Cuvântul, about the Iron Guard, about himself and his unforgivable
compromises. There can be no excuse for the way he caved in politically. I
had decided not to mince my words with him. In any case, there’s not much
left to mince. Even if we meet again like this, our friendship is at an end . . .”
(155) [April 12, 1938].
126 / andrei oişteanu
About one month later, Sebastian eventually went to see the play. His
comments in the Journal were less critical. He noted that “only here and
there were there annoying Legionary allusions” (328).
It has been said that, at the time, Mihail Sebastian was particularly
sensitive, suspicious, and subjective. He was, supposedly, a man who
saw “Legionary allusions” everywhere, even where they were not pres-
ent. Four decades later, however, the young scholar Ioan Petru Culianu
deciphered the play’s message in a similar way. Reading the script of
Iphigenia in 1977, Culianu discovered “with a certain amazement and
sadness” his master’s association with the ideology of the Legionary
Movement. This was an embarrassing “ideological position” that
Culianu concluded “seems to us today entirely impossible to under-
stand” (2004, 328).
Not surprisingly, a few Romanian Legionnaires published the script
of Eliade’s tragedy Iphigenia in Argentina in 1951. Eliade himself made
several changes and even added a brief foreword: “I publish with joy, but
also with sadness, this play of my youth, which was so loved, at the time
of its writing, by my friends Haig Acterian, Mihail Sebastian, Constantin
Noica and Emil Cioran.” In fact, he dedicated “this text, which we all
loved at the dusk of our youth,” to “two of my best friends,” Haig Acterian
and Mihail Sebastian.11 In 1951, when these lines were printed, Mihail
Sebastian could no longer express his reserve toward such a statement
(he had died in 1945). However, before his death, he had admitted in his
journal that, feeling embarrassed to tell his friend the truth, he feigned
some appreciation of the play’s script in February 1940: “After [reading]
128 / andrei oişteanu
I shall never find consolation for the fact that I did not see him in August
[actually July] 1942, when I went back to Bucharest for a week. I was
ashamed, at the time, ashamed of myself—cultural counselor in Lisbon—
and of the humiliations he had to stand, because he had been born, and had
chosen to remain, Iosef Hechter [Sebastian’s real name]. Now I am uselessly
struggling amidst the irreparable (Eliade 2006, 88).
I think it was only in the fragment of his journal quoted above that Eliade
confessed the truth. In fact, he felt ashamed of, and responsible for, the
actions of a regime that was discriminating and civically annihilating his
friend Mihail Sebastian.
Sebastian finished 1942 in severe personal crisis. On December 20,
1942, he reflects on his situation at the age of thirty-five, concluding that
he has “no job,” “no money,” “no escape,” and especially “no real friend-
ship.” “Everything I have done has failed miserably” (526).
Post-Mortem (1945–1980)
On December 13, 1944, Sebastian nostalgically muses about memories
with Mircea Eliade : “Our walks in the mountains, the summers in Breaza,
the games in Floria’s [Capsali] yard at Strada Nerva Traian; our years of
fraternal friendship—and then the years of confusion and growing apart,
until it all broke down in hostility and oblivion” (625). This was one of the
last entries in Sebastian’s journal. A few months later, May 19, 1945, the
writer died, run down by a mysterious truck.
Upon hearing of Sebastian’s death, Eliade was overwhelmed. Still in
Lisbon, he noted in his journal the same day:
of January 1941, the Antonescian prison camps, the American air raids,
and all that followed after the coup d’état of 23 August. He saw the fall of
Hitler’s Germany. And he has died in a traffic accident at the age of thirty-
eight! . . .
I recollect our friendship. In my dreams of the future, he was one of the
two or three persons who would have made Bucharest bearable. Even dur-
ing my Legionary climax, I felt close to him. I gained tremendously from
his friendship. I was counting on that friendship to enable me to return to
Romanian life and culture. And now he’s gone, run down by a truck! With
him goes yet another large and very beautiful piece of my youth. I feel even
more alone. The majority of those persons I loved are now beyond.
La revedere, Mihai! (Eliade, 2010, 212).
This journal entry clearly indicates that Mircea Eliade was aware of the
crimes against the Jews during the pogrom in Bucharest (January 21–23,
1941), of the Jews’ deportation to the camps of Transnistria during the
Antonescu regime, and of the suffering and trauma endured by his friend
who “had been born, and had chosen to remain, Iosef Hechter.” Eliade
does not have the excuse that, being abroad, he did not know about the
fate of Romanian Jews. Nevertheless, nowhere else in his journals, in his
memoirs, or in his letters did he note the anti-Jewish atrocities to which he
was contemporary.
Thirty-five years later, in 1980, when he had the chance to meet with
Beno, Mihail Sebastian’s brother, in Paris, Mircea Eliade gushed:
Notes
1. This article is based on a lecture delivered at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem (October 24, 2007) and UNESCO, Paris (November 24, 2007)
upon the centennial celebration of Mihail Sebastian’s birth. An earlier version
was published in Studia Hebraica 7 (2007): 142–153.
2. Mircea Eliade recalled that time as a quasi-paradisiacal, Adamic period,
which occurred before the “language mix” and the “fall of the Babel tower”:
“We spoke in turns or at the same time, and among laughter and interruptions
we heard and understood each other. Each of us, in his or her own way, found
again the holidays of their childhood and teenage. We had become such good
friends we no longer realized how good we felt together, how spontaneous
without pretense, or vulgarity. That week we spent in the Bucegi Mountains
charmed us so much that we decided to go back every summer,” Memorii
(1907–1960) [Memoirs], 248.
3. Petre P. Carp (1837–1919) was a Romanian politician and literary critic, who
served twice as prime minister of Romania (1900–1901 and 1911–1912).
While there is no exact quote recorded, he is known to have made the com-
ment above.
4. Nae Ionescu (1890–1940) was a Romanian philosopher with far-right views,
who had a powerful influence on the generation of Eliade, Sebastian, Emil
Cioran, and Constantin Noica.
5. See the three articles published by Mircea Eliade on this topic: “Iudaism
şi Antisemitism. Preliminarii la o discuţie” [Judaism and Anti-Semitism.
Preliminaries to a Debate], “Creştinătatea faţă de iudaism” [Christianity Facing
Judaism], and “O ultimă lămurire” [A Last Clarification]. The first two texts
were republished in Mircea Eliade, Textele “ legionare” şi despre “românism,”
[“Legionary” Texts and about “Romanianism”] 116–117. Mircea Vulcănescu
also intervened in this dispute in “O problemă teologică eronat rezolvată? sau
Ce nu a spus d. Gh. Racoveanu” [A Theological Issue Erroneously Solved? or
What Mr. Gh. Racoveanu Did not Say].
6. On Mihail Sebastian’s “Jewishness” and “Romanianism,” see Andrei
Oişteanu, “Criza identitară a lui Mihail Sebastian” [Mihail Sebastian’s
Identity Crisis].
7. See also, Mihail Sebastian, Cum am devenit huligan (1935) and Mihail
Sebastian, De două mii de ani . . . (1934), with a foreword by Nae Ionescu.
8. See Mircea Handoca, “Mircea Eliade & Mihail Sebastian,” in România
Literară 22 (1997).
9. Mihail Sebastian, Journal (1935– 1944). The Fascist Years, with an Introduction
and Notes by Radu Ioanid, trans. Patrick Camiller, in association with the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Ivan R. Dee: Chicago, 2000).
All the quotations from Sebastian’s Journal used in this text were taken from
this edition. I thank Radu Ioanid for sending me the book.
10. The mythical Meşterul Manole (The Master Builder Manole) was the archi-
tect of the Curtea de Argeş Monastery in Wallachia, southern Romania. The
legend describes Manole’s hardship in building this monastery and the mys-
terious events that occurred during its construction. The walls built during
the day kept tumbling during the night, so every day the workers had to start
132 / andrei oişteanu
raising the walls all over again. In his despair, Manole prayed to God for help
and found out that the only way he can finish the building is by sacrificing a
human being. Unfortunately, Ana, his pregnant wife, who came to bring food
to her husband, was the first person who appears and a distressed Manole was
forced to sacrifice her. Ana, unaware of her tragic fate, was ultimately walled
in and the building finished.
11. Mircea Eliade, Iphigenia, volume published in Romanian by a Legionary
printing house in exile (Valle Hermosa, Argentina: Cartea Pribegiei, 1951).
12. See Mircea Eliade, The Portugal Journal, translated from Romanian by Mac
Linscott Ricketts, New York, State University of New York Press, 2010, 31.
13. Mircea Eliade, Europa, Asia, America. Corespondenţă, 132, 138, 140.
Works Cited
Culianu, Ioan Petru. 2004. Mircea Eliade. Trans. Florin Chiriţescu and Dan
Petrescu. Iaşi: Polirom.
Eliade, Mircea. 2010. The Portugal Journal. Trans. Mac Linscott Ricketts. New
York: State University of New York Press.
———. 2006. Jurnalul portughez şi alte scrieri [The Portugal Journal and Other
Writings]. Ed. Sorin Alexandrescu. Bucharest: Humanitas.
———. 2004. Europa, Asia, America. Corespondenţă [Correspondence]. Vol. 3,
Ed. M. Handoca. Bucharest: Humanitas.
———. 2001. Textele “ legionare” şi despre “românism” [“Legionary” Texts and
Texts about “Romanianism”]. Cluj-Napoca: Dacia.
———. 1996. Coloana nesfârşită. Teatru [The Infinite Column. Theatre]. Ed.
M. Handoca. Bucharest: Minerva.
———. 1993. Jurnal [Journal]. Vol. 1, 1941–1969. Ed. M. Handoca. Bucharest:
Humanitas.
———. 1991. Memorii (1907–1960) [Memoirs]. Ed. M. Handoca. Bucharest:
Humanitas.
———. 1969. Le Mythe de l’éternel retour. Archétypes et répétition. Paris: Gallimard.
———. 1951. Iphigenia. Valle Hermosa, Argentina: Cartea Pribegiei.
———. August 5, 1934. Creştinătatea faţă de iudaism [Christianity Facing
Judaism]. Vremea 349: 3.
———. July 22, 1934. Iudaism şi Antisemitism. Preliminarii la o discuţie [Judaism
and Anti-Semitism. Preliminaries to a Debate]. Vremea 347: 5.
———. August 26, 1934. O ultimă lămurire [A Last Clarification]. Vremea
352.
Handoca, Mircea, ed. 1999. “Dosarul” Eliade. Cu cărţile pe masă [The Eliade
“File”. The Books on the Table]. Vol. II, 1928–1944 . Bucharest: Curtea Veche
Publishing.
Laignel-Lavastine, Alexandra. 2002. Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco. L’oubli du fascisme.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Dr. Lavi (Theodor Loewenstein). 1972. Dosarul Mircea Eliade [Mircea Eliade
File]. Toladot 1: 21– 26.
Oişteanu, Andrei. 1999. Criza identitară a lui Mihail Sebastian [Mihail Sebastian’s
Identity Crisis]. Sebastian sub vremi. Singurătatea şi vulnerabilitatea martorului.
mihail sebastian and mircea eliade / 133
[Sebastian and His Time. The Loneliness and Vulnerability of the Witness].
Ed. Geo Şerban. Bucharest: Universal Dalsi. 163– 168.
Petreu, Marta. 2009. Diavolul şi ucenicul său: Nae Ionescu—Mihail Sebastian. [The
Devil and His Apprentice: Nae Ionescu —Mihail Sebastian]. Iaşi: Polirom.
Sebastian, Mihail. 2000. Journal (1935–1944). The Fascist Years. Ed. Radu Ioanid.
Trans. Patrick Camiller. Published in association with the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.
———. 1990. De două mii de ani & Cum am devenit huligan [For Two Thousand
Years and How I Became a Hooligan]. Foreword by Nae Ionescu. Bucharest:
Humanitas.
———. 1935. Cum am devenit huligan [How I Became a Hooligan]. Bucharest:
Cultura Naţională.
———. 1934. De două mii de ani [For Two Thousand Years]. Foreword by Nae
Ionescu. Bucharest: Editura Naţională-Ciornei.
Pa rt II
Tr a nsnat iona l M e mory i n
Li t e r at u r e a n d Fi lm
Ch a p t e r Se v e n
Pau l Ce l a n’s A e st h e t ics of
Tr a nsnat iona l R em em br a nc e
Iulia-Karin Patrut
Am citit că, la un moment dat, copleşit de multe mizerii pe care le-a avut de
îndurat, s-a gândit să se întoarcă în România. Cred şi acum că i-ar fi fost cu
mult mai bine alături de noi, că nici boala lui de nervi n-ar fi căpătat formele
acute pe care le-a avut . . . [Î]n mediul ambiant de aici, cu toate relele, cu noi
alături, i-ar fi fost cu mult mai bine (Aderca 27–28).
(I have read that once, overwhelmed by the many miseries he had to
go through, he thought about returning to Romania. I think even now
that it would have been much better for him, had he stayed among us, and
that his illness would not have turned acute the way it did . . . Here, in this
atmosphere, despite all the bad things, he would have felt much better in
our midst.)
Statements in Celan’s letters also refer to his time in Bucharest very pos-
itively, especially to the poetic dialogue with both Jewish and non-Jewish
poets, a dialogue that also unquestionably included empathetic discussion
about the Shoah. The most well-known documentation of this dialogue is
surely Celan’s literary debut, the poem in Romanian that appeared in 1946
under the title “Tangoul morţii” in the journal Contemporanul. Celan
socialized not only with the surrealists Gherasim Luca and Paul Păun; he
was acquainted or even friends with many Jewish and non-Jewish poets
and personalities of Bucharest’s cultural life. In addition to Ion Caraion, his
aesthetics of transnational remembrance / 141
Îi scriu, à tes bons soins, lui Sperber; şi lui îi spun, în limba aceasta
nemţească care e a mea—et qui reste, douloureusement, mienne—că mă
aflu, cu meridianul meu—rudă cu al tău, Petrică—exact acolo de unde
am pornit.23
[I also write, thanks to your help, to Sperber; I also tell him, in this
German language that is mine—and, unfortunately, it remains my lan-
guage—that I find myself with my “meridian”—which is, Petrică, related
to yours—exactly there where I started from] (Solomon 1987, 218).
Celan writes in Romanian and French here, yet mentions that German
“unfortunately” remains “his” actual language. He emphasizes that his
“meridian”—the central guideline of his life, his coordinate system—and
everything that is most important has (again) returned to his starting point.
aesthetics of transnational remembrance / 143
principally by the Germans and their original allies. This matter was seen
quite differently—justifiably so—in Germany and Austria.
According to the testimony of his Bucharest friends, Celan considered it
a blessing that this (alleged) consensus made it possible for his poetry to be
understood as a sort of “core statement” or “message” in Romania. As Petre
Solomon remembered it, in a sentence that consciously refers to the famous
image of “Flaschenpost”28 [Message in a Bottle] that speaks to the listener
along the transnational “meridian,”29 “Paul thought it very important that
the ‘message’ of one of his poems be well understood” (Solomon 1987, 59)
Solomon and all Jewish and non-Jewish “poet friends” from Romania express
in their publications great disapproval for the discussion on “absolute poetry,”
Hermeticism,” or “poésie pure” as key concepts in Paul Celan’s work.30 This
discussion arose primarily in Germany during the 1950s and continues more
or less to the present. The reasons for this asymmetrical reception between
the two countries are surely to be found in the different memory narratives
and guilt discourses. The reception of “Todestango”/“Todesfuge” (Tango
of Death/Death Fugue) is an informative example. Meanwhile in Romania
the poem was published precisely because it dealt with the Holocaust, in
Germany during the 1950s and 1960s some scholars were still hiding politi-
cal dimensions of Celan’s poetry. For example, in his review of “Mohn und
Gedächtnis” (Poppy and Memory), Heinz Piontek speaks of the exclusively
metaphorical character of the images in Celan’s poetry.31 In the same year,
however, Helmuth von Haas spoke of the elimination of every distract-
ing objectivity in the poetry, of the lyrical alchemy, and even of a “Zen
Buddist Satori experience” as the theme of “Todesfuge” (Haas 1983, 12).
In the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, writer Wolfgang Weyrauch characterized
“Todesfuge” in 1960 as “fragmentary and harmonious” and called its subject
matter “symbol, ritual, and door opener.”
Fundamental asymmetries in transnational remembrance during the
1950s and 1960s become obvious here, those that are involved in the indi-
vidual European societies with different narratives and different assump-
tions of perpetrator and victim roles, as well as those concerning the
relation between Jews and non-Jews. Celan himself wanted his poems to
trigger reflection on what the condition humaine means and on art in light
of the objective events of the Shoah. In the first post-war years, when sur-
realist and avant-gardist literary trends were still tolerated in Romania,
this was possible. However, this understanding was based on the nega-
tion of Romanian complicity in the Holocaust, a negation accepted by
both sides. As late as 1987, Petre Solomon stated that the publication of
“Todestango” in Romania was likely only an experiment for Celan because
those actually addressed by the poem were all Europeans, though especially
all Germans. The poem was intended “to stir up the conscience of the
aesthetics of transnational remembrance / 145
Germans, who bore the guilt for the crime he [Celan] evoked” (Solomon
1987, 59). With the basis of common, society-wide condemnation of the
murder of European Jews, difficult topics such as war and death could be
contemplated, versified, and discussed at “literature festivals,” in public
readings, during private artists’ fêtes, and so on (Crohmălniceanu 1981,
213). For example, Crohmălniceanu remembers that his first memories of
Celan originated from such parties, where the poet liked to sing in a very
deep voice the old Renaissance mercenary’s song “Flandern in Not . . . / In
Flandern reitet der Tod” (Flanders in distress . . . / In Flanders rides Death)
(Crohmălniceanu 1981, 213).32 “After every stanza, he slammed his fist on
the floor and spoke, in an even deeper voice, the refrain: ‘Ge-Stor-Ben’ ”
(died) (Crohmălniceanu 1981 213). The song, which more than likely
recalls the time of the plague in the Low Countries, probably reminded
not only Celan but also others present—among them many Jews—of the
events of World War II. It is important here that the subject is widespread
deaths caused by an epidemic considered to have been a natural catastro-
phe and that the question of guilt is not brought up. The critic Caraion
also connects his first memory of Celan with a poem about death; Caraion
had published a translation of the French poem “Cris” by Henri Michaux,
verses from which are quoted here, verses he would always associate with
the image of Celan: “Ils meurent, Lazare / ils meurent / et pas de linceul /
pas de Marthe ni Marie / . . . je crie stupide vers toi / Si quelque chose tu
as appris / à ton tour maintenant / à ton tour, Lazare!” (They are dying,
Lazarus, / they are dying / without a shroud / without Martha or Mary /
stupid I am shouting at you / If you have learned something / it is your
turn now / it is your turn, Lazarus!) (Caraion 2001, 37).
Celan had Sperber give a note to Caraion (who later published his
poems in the Agora) in which he had written, “Eram eu, tu şi Michaux . . . Şi
fiindcă te-am citit, te îmbraţişez” (“It was me, you, and Michaux . . . And
because I read you, I embrace you”) (Caraion 2001, 37). Celan probably
never again experienced such a direct approach and communication in
so few words that then led to a friendship and to cooperation—and this
surely lies in the unexpressed “fundamental consensus” of the Bucharest
post-war years concerning human existence in light of the condemnable
violence, located somewhere outside. In Romania, almost everybody
agreed in strongly condemning the Holocaust, and Celan’s lyrical argu-
ment with violence was understood as such; but the questions of guilt and
responsibility remained largely unsolved, and this was felt by Celan as a
sharp barrier for his artistic work.
Later, as an increasingly strict and threatening censorship of the spirit of
proletarian art prevailed toward the end of the 1940s, only non-aesthetic,
preferably “constructively directed,” remembrance was possible at best.
146 / iulia-karin patrut
Instead, the demarcation between the “guilty” Germans and the “inno-
cent” Jews became increasingly pronounced. As a result, Celan’s attempts
at an aesthetically communicated understanding were perceived as an accu-
sation. Celan’s remarks hint at this, namely that, with his poetry, he had
approached the German-speaking public in a naïve and unprejudiced man-
ner and had given himself completely into their hands by aiming at a com-
mon “natural standpoint” (en persévérant dans le naturel) (Solomon 1987,
226). But then he says that “he was bitterly disappointed,” rejected again
and again, and greatly wounded. It is striking here that Celan, in his letters
to Solomon and Sperber, had relied on an understanding of the “natural,”
the human—a concept that for him contained a thought association of
person, art, and historical violence, just as he had experienced it during
the Bucharest years. As stated previously, this is decisively connected to
different developments of the memory narrative, namely, that the division
between “perpetrators” and victims failed to manifest itself in Romania
because of the collective identification with the Allies. Paradoxically, in
Germany, the increasingly hardened division (indispensible for coming to
terms with the past) hampered considerably the communication between
the resulting “two sides.” Celan’s letters to Romania suggest that the poet
did not comprehend exactly how and why the Holocaust memories dif-
fered, because his awareness of epistemic and power asymmetries between
East and West remained an intuition, which he didn’t analyze. He wanted,
more than anything, maximum public participation in the remembrance
communicated through his poetry. This presupposed public recognition
of his person and his individual history, which in his perception remained
absent for the most part. This lack of recognition was partially due to the
politics of the Iron Curtain and partially to the long history of asymmetrical
perceptions of the Holocaust between Eastern and Western Europe. Celan
either did not accept these reasons or, more likely, did not even perceive
them. “After I was ‘nullified’ as a person, that is, as a subject, I, perverted
to an object, am now allowed to survive as ‘topic’: mostly as a ‘bastard’
Steppenwolf with widely recognizable Jewish features . . . I am also—liter-
ally, dear Mr. Alfred Margul-Sperber!—the man who doesn’t exist” (Solomon
1987, 262). Until he committed suicide in the Seine in April 1970, Celan
believed the German-language reception of his poems systematically sup-
pressed their historical-biographical dimension in order to escape a “shared
history.”38 He viewed this as continued anti-Semitism. The developmen-
tal phases of his late works can be regarded (there is not enough space for
this here) in connection with this basic conflict. It has already been shown
that the reception in Romania and France,39 which Celan considered to
be not as problematic as the German one, could not satisfy the author,
because he wanted his work to dialogue with the Germans (this being one
148 / iulia-karin patrut
of the reasons for his choice of German as language of his poems), and their
“misunderstanding” (as he thought it to be) hurt him more than any other
controversy. He, like his Romanian “poet friends,” placed the responsibility
for the Shoah almost exclusively on (West) Germany and wanted to reach
an accord with German poets and intellectuals—indeed, with the German
public as a whole—by aesthetic remembrance based on his perspective, a
utopian hope from the very start.
Finally, I will examine the thematic spectrum and the aesthetic form of
the lyrical and prose poetry Celan wrote in Romanian. These works con-
tain numerous images and metaphors seized on in later German pieces
in new contexts. Primarily, however, these texts—each by itself, but also
together—communicate an impression of coherence that Celan saw between
the themes of violence and Shoah, love and the Other, and aesthetics and
literary communication. In general, it can be said that these poems do not
concentrate on the concept of perpetrator or victim; they concern, rather,
a widespread network of relationships that are developed between the poles
of “aesthetic concentration,” “dialogue,” “You/love/the Other,” and “Shoah/
violence.” For example, the poem “Regăsire” (Encounter40) speaks of a pro-
cess of memory of violence and death: “Pe dunele verzi de calcar va ploua
astănoapte. / Vinul păstrat până azi într-o gură de mort / trezi-va ţinutul cu
punţi, strămutat într-un clopot” [It will rain tonight on the green limestone
dunes. / The wine, held until today in the mouth of a corpse, / will awaken
the land with the bridges, a land that withdrew into a bell] (Wiedermann-
Wolf 1985, 430). The preserved heritage of the dead “awakens” the sleeping,
on whom the heritage (as art) descends (“rains”) and becomes the bell toll
of remembrance. Later in the poem, the vision of the entanglement of love,
violence, and death emerges—a central image of Celan’s lyrical poetry from
the Bucharest years, appearing in all the Romanian lyrical poetry written
there: “Cântec de dragoste” (Love Song), “Réveillon,” (Awake / New Year’s
Eve) “Ora e cea de ieri” (It is the Hour of Yesterday), “Poem pentru umbra
Marianei” (Poem for Marianne’s Shadow), and “Tristeţe” (Sorrow). The
poems reveal that Paul Celan was concerned not about the differentiation
between “good” and “bad” relationships to a literary “You,” but about varia-
tions of the entanglement of love and violence. The poems seek a common
utopian position of disentanglement, apocalyptic images of the Shoah being
almost always in the background. Embedded are reflections on the placement
and range of the artistic as, for example, in “Regăsire,” which speaks of a “lau-
rel” that bites into “your/one’s” forehead [laurul meu scund, ca să-ţi muşte din
frunte] (Wiedermann-Wolf 1985, 430). One might interpret this as address-
ing the possibilities of art to undermine the “You” in its basic convictions,
comparable perhaps to Kafka’s image of the book—that is, literature—which
“[is] to be the axe for the frozen sea in us” (Kafka 1975, 28). In the prose
aesthetics of transnational remembrance / 149
Notes
1. Zafer Şenocak 64.
2. All the translations from the Romanian, German, or French are my own
unless otherwise noted. I’d like to thank Frankie Kann [FK] for preparing
the English version of this article. Celan explained repeatedly how closely his
150 / iulia-karin patrut
lyrical creations were bound up with his person, with the Holocaust experience
playing a central role. See the statements by Klaus Werner: “The ‘reality of
genocide,’ uniquely dimensioned in the Holocaust, has become for the major-
ity of German-Jewish writers and intellectuals from Galicia and Bukovina a
fact of their own biography” (279). As Beate Tröger has pointed out, in some
cases, “Celan erased the direct relationship of the poem to the biographical
context” (262).
3. “Perhaps one can say that every poem is inscribed with its own 20 January?”
(Wannsee Conference for the “Final Solution,” 1942 – FK) “Perhaps the radi-
cally new in the poems written today is just this: that it is here most clearly
attempted to remind us of such dates? But don’t we all write about ourselves
based on such dates? And which dates do we ascribe to ourselves?” (Celan, Der
Meridian, 53, speech on the occasion of receiving the Georg Büchner Prize in
Darmstadt on October 22, 1960). Compare the collection edited by Chaim
Shoham and Bernd Witte, Datum und Zitat bei Paul Celan.
4. The chapter “Biographismus” illuminates the connection between biography,
historical date, and the interpretability of lyrical art within the framework of
hermeneutic approaches. See Bollack and Wögerbauer, 315–336.
5. On the Romanian discourse, see Holocaustul evreilor români. Din mărturiile
supravieţuitorilor. The Eastern European Holocaust discourse is critically
discussed by Michael Brenner and Stefan Rohrbacher in Wissenschaft vom
Judentum, 113–114.
6. “La Contrescarpe” also refers to a trip from Czernowitz via Krakow to France:
“Über Krau/ bist du gekommen, am Anhalter/Bahnhof/floß deinen Blicken
ein Rauch zu,/ der war schon von morgen” (Collected Works, vol. 1, 283).
See also Gilda Encarnação,184 and Alfred Kelletat, 22. Felstiner has also
pointed out this connection (34). In addition, see also Andrei Corbea-Hoişie,
Czernowitzer Geschichten, 187.
7. In a letter to Alfred Margul-Sperber dated March 9, 1962, Celan calls him-
self in the signature “Paul—Russkii poet in partibus nemeţkih infidelium”
(approximately: “Paul—Russian poet in the zone of the perfidious Germans”)
(Solomon 268). See also Christine Ivanović, “Kyrrillisches, Freunde aus
das . . . ,” 54–61 and Das Gedicht im Geheimnis der Begegnung, 233.
8. On Celan’s work in the publishing company Cartea Rusă, see Crohmălniceanu,
Al doilea suflu, 39, and Hîncu, Excurs în timp.
9. Quoted in Barbara Wiedemann, Paul Celan. Die Gedichte. Kommentierte
Gesamtausgabe, 161. The poem was written in August 1962. As Wiedemann
explains, the “Place de la Contrescarpe” in the 5th Arrondissement in Paris,
not far from Celan’s workplace, offered the starting point for the poem’s title.
Compare in the same place (notes), 710. On the poem, see also Presner 47, and
Krings, 213–238.
10. On July 25, 1967, Celan spent a day with Heidegger in his Black Forest cabin
following a reading at the University of Freiburg. Compare the note to Celan’s
poem “Todtnauberg” in Wiedemann’s Paul Celan, 806, and France-Lanord,
Paul Celan und Martin Heidegger.
11. Bertrand Badiou, et al., eds, Ingeborg Bachmann—Paul Celan.
12. Barbara Wiedemann, Paul Celan—Nelly Sachs.
13. Shmueli and Sparr, eds. Paul Celan, Ilana Shmueli. Briefwechsel.
aesthetics of transnational remembrance / 151
Works Cited
Aderca, Marcel. “Era încântător.” Ochiul meu rămâne să vegheze. Paul Celan.
Caietele Culturale Realitatea Evreiască (3) Bucharest (no year, 2001): 25–28.
Aschenberg, Reinhold. 2003. Ent- Subjektivierung des Menschen: Lager und Shoah
in philosophischer Reflexion. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
Badiou, Bertrand et al., ed. 2008. Ingeborg Bachmann—Paul Celan. Der
Briefwechsel. Mit den Briefwechseln zwischen Paul Celan und Max Frisch sowie
zwischen Ingeborg Bachmann und Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp.
Barthes, Roland. 1994. Oeuvres complètes. Tome II: 1966–1973. Paris: Éditions
du Seuil.
aesthetics of transnational remembrance / 153
———. 2000. Der Tod des Autors. Texte zur Theorie der Autorschaft. Eds. Fotis
Jannidis, Gerhard Lauer, Matias Martinez, Simone Winko. Stuttgart: Reclam.
185–193.
Bican, Bianca. 2005. Die Rezeption Paul Celans in Rumänien. Vienna: Studia
Transsylvanica.
———. 2003. Problemfelder einer rumänischen Celan-Rezeption. Südostdeutsche
Vierteljahresblätter. 52: 157–163.
Bollack, Jean and Werner Wögerbauer. 2006. Dichtung wider Dichtung. Paul
Celan und die Literatur. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag.
Brenner, Michael and Stefan Rohrbacher. 2000. Wissenschaft vom Judentum.
Annäherungen nach dem Holocaust. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Buck, Theo. 2000. Paul Celan’s Todesfuge. Gedichte von Paul Celan.
Interpretationen. Ed. Hans-Michael Speier. Stuttgart: Reclam. 9–27.
Caraion, Ion. 2001. Nu-l dureau numai amintirile, îl durea lumea. Ochiul meu
rămâne să vegheze. Paul Celan. Caietele Culturale Realitatea Evreiască 3:
33–45.
Celan, Paul. 1988. Der Meridian und andere Prosa. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp.
———. 2003 Romanian Poems. Trans. Julian Semilian and Sanda Agalidi. Los
Angeles: Green Integers.
———. 2004. Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan. Trans. Nikolai Popov and
Heather McHugh. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England.
Colin, Amy D., ed. 2009. Paul Celan—Edith Silbermann. Zeugnisse einer
Freundschaft. Gedichte, Briefwechsel, Erinnerungen. Paderborn: Fink.
Corbea-Hoişie, Andrei. 2003. Czernowitzer Geschichten: Über eine städtische Kultur
in Mittelosteuropa. Vienna: Böhlau.
Crohmălniceanu, Ovidu S. 1989. Al doilea suflu. Bucharest: Cartea Românească.
———. 1981. Bruchstücke einer Erinnerung Texte zum frühen Celan. Bukarester
Celan-Kolloquium. Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch 32 (1982/3): 213–216.
Diner, Dan. 2007. Gegenläufige Gedächtnisse. Über Geltung und Wirkung des
Holocaust. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprech.
Diner, Dan and Seyla Benhabib. 1988. Zivilisationsbruch: Denken nach Auschwitz.
Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.
Dmitrieva-Einhorn, Marina, ed. 1999. Paul Celan–Erich Einhorn: du weißt um die
Steine . . . Berlin: Friedenauer.
Encarnação, Gilda. 2007. Fremde Nähe: Das Dialogische als poetisches und poetolo-
gisches Prinzip bei Paul Celan. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
Felstiner, Paul. 2000. Paul Celan. Eine Biographie. Munich: Beck.
Fischer, Torben and Matthias N. Lorenz. 2007. Lexikon der
“Vergangenheitsbewältigung” in Deutschland. Debatten und Diskursgeschichte des
Nationalsozialismus nach 1945. Bielefeld: transcript.
France-Lanord, Hadrien. 2007. Paul Celan und Martin Heidegger. Vom Sinn eines
Gesprächs. Trans Jürgen Gedinat. Freiburg in Breisgau: Rombach.
Gellhaus, Axel, ed. 2000. Antschel, Paul. Paul Celan in Czernowitz.
Marbacher Magazin. Special issue 90. Ed. Axel. Marbach: Deutsche
Schillergesellschaft.
Glasenapp, Gabriele von. 2006. Von der “Endlösung der Judenfrage” zum
Holocaust. Über den sprachlichen Umgang mit der deutschen Vergangenheit.
154 / iulia-karin patrut
experience. This is the moment when he meets, for the first time, one of
the writers who will be central to his artistic development: the important
Israeli author S.Y. (Shai) Agnon. This is when Appelfeld finally names
Czernowitz as the place where he was born. He does so to give this infor-
mation primarily to his literary mentor, Agnon and not to us readers:
The indirect way Appelfeld provides this vital information concerning the
place of his birth, to which we are not even direct addressees but veritable
eavesdroppers, is not the only distancing device used in this passage, or, for
that matter, in the autobiography as a whole. Agnon’s manner of speech, for
example, is not, we are told, “immediately” familiar to Appelfeld. Rather,
it is only “not unfamiliar,” which is not the same thing. Only years later,
when Appelfeld comes to read Agnon’s writing, does he feel “immediately
close to him.” Similarly, the places of which Agnon speaks to him in that
earlier conversation are places that he does not know firsthand, but only
because his “[f]ather used to talk” about them. Indeed, he only “vaguely
recall[s]” them.
Not only is a “birthplace,”—as Agnon teaches him—“not a matter of
fixed geography,” which might be evoked through “literal reminiscences,”
it is also—for Agnon and Appelfeld—a largely mediated, primarily textual
place, a place that less bears the marks of direct and distinctive experience
homescapes of childhood / 159
The next morning spring sunshine flooded the broad streets. The tall trees
cast their damp shadows over the hedges and the morning lay cool and
quiet on the walls of the houses. Two days here already. The same light and
the same shade, falling from one house to the other straight and sharp as
a ruler. Even the old roofs covered in green ivy stuck up at the same blunt
angle. Only at the bottom of the gates was there a new, light mist. Apart
from this there was no change; not a single tree had been uprooted from
its place. Even the old stone posts marking the old boundaries still stood in
the places. Except for the light, for the cold reality, it would have been like
a vivid dream with all its details painted in carefully and precisely, but the
cold reality was clear and decisive; you’re here, Bruno, you’re here . . . The
low houses, lovingly tended, were modest and unassuming. A provincial
calm rested on their roofs. They were exactly as he remembered them. The
years had come and gone and they had not changed. Only the vividness was
new (Appelfeld 1981, 199–200, 208).
The extreme vividness of the scene, which makes it seem unreal and dream-
like, is a direct consequence of the inconceivable, inexplicable gap between
the unchanged town—exactly as Bruno remembers it—and the radically
altered population now inhabiting it. “Most of the day he [Bruno] spends
sitting on a bench measuring the shadows of the church spires; realizing
again that nothing has changed here, only him—he is already his father’s
age . . . None of [the neighbors] have survived but their shop is still standing
at exactly the same angle as before, perfectly preserved, even the geraniums
in their pots. Now a different man is sitting there with a different woman.
Strange—they don’t look like murderers . . . Strange, he reflected, ‘objects
survive longer; they are passive’ ” (Appelfeld 1981, 216–217, 258).
All That Remains, in which Appelfeld takes this motif to his native
Czernowitz, repeats Bruno’s experience of confronting the radical absence
of the Jews from the homes and shops they once occupied. Jews are
noticeably, startlingly missing from the scene of current-day Czernowitz,
although Appelfeld does, remarkably, meet one former classmate who
162 / emily miller budick
remembers him and his family and another villager who remembered
celebrating Purim at his home. Nonetheless, again and again in the film
(which is a relatively short twenty-five minutes), Appelfeld asks (through
an interpreter) the villagers he meets if they remember him and his family
or if they remember the Jews generally. Those elderly villagers who remem-
ber anything at all have only partial and vague memory of the events that
occurred there, and they are highly reluctant to engage in meaningful
conversation about what happened. Looking for his own home near the
old mill, Appelfeld asks one villager if he can tell him what used to be
there and if he remembers the Jews. The local man responds that yes, the
mill was here, and yes, there were Jews here. “And did you know them?”
Appelfeld inquires. “Why not?” The villager responds somewhat defen-
sively, as he begins to rattle off names, only to abruptly excuse himself.
He explains that he has a doctor’s appointment, otherwise he would tell
more; he knew all the Jews. “Do you remember the Jews?” Appelfeld asks
another villager, who also admits to recalling those terrible times but says
that though he remembers, he remembers very little. There were Jewish
homes here, but they were destroyed and new homes were built, a fact that
Appelfeld then independently confirms in relating his own experience as a
child returning from the ghetto in Dracinetz to the ghetto in Czernowitz
and seeing his own home gutted, even the windows taken out, all their
possessions stolen, the house a shell. Every house here, Appelfeld says, has
Jewish furniture and Jewish jewelry, an idea that motivates the plot in Iron
Tracks: where a protagonist named Erwin (Appelfeld’s given name) travels
through Europe collecting stolen Judaica.
Yet, there is an overwhelming and extremely powerful difference
between this undeniably haunting picture of absence and loss in All That
Remains and the earlier portrayal of the town in The Age of Wonders,
which so adequately anticipated the reality Appelfeld would find when he
returned home. This difference is the addition in the film of something
that is also pervasive in The Story of a Life. This is the presence of the
breathtakingly beautiful natural landscape that surrounds the now juden-
frei areas of the village. This natural landscape is largely free of inhabitants
altogether, although in one powerful clip, which appears in the film twice,
several lovely, enchanting young girls (too young to have any memory of
the events that transpired in their village) are holding hands, standing in
a field of wheat and flowers, which (as the second clip reveals) may well
mark the mass gravesite where Appelfeld’s mother is buried. The first pre-
sentation of the scene of the young girls is immediately preceded by the
narration of Appelfeld’s mother’s murder and his unwillingness to accept
her death. Appelfeld also tells a story about being sick in bed with the
mumps when he hears shooting and runs into the cornfields, where he
homescapes of childhood / 163
hides until his father finds him there at night. All the evidence points to
the place where his mother was buried, but the relationship between the
narrative and the physical scene is not clear until later, when the field is
identified, finally, as the likely location of the mass grave. Uncertainty
hedges every image and every bit of knowledge in this film, including the
most important facts of who were killed and where they were buried.
I will return to this scene in a moment. Now, however, I want to
stress the primacy in this film of the natural landscape itself, a feature of
the scenes shot in the Ukraine and Israel alike The landscapes alternate
between cityscapes, of which Appelfeld is less enamored, and scenes of the
Judean hills and the fields surrounding the youth village, where Appelfeld
and other Romanian youth were brought as refugees after the war. These
hills and fields Appelfeld loves with the same passion he feels for the scenes
of his childhood.
The attentiveness to the natural world distinguishes The Age of Wonders
from Appelfeld’s later works. It characterizes the texture of his undertak-
ing in The Story of a Life and in the movie, as well as to his growth as a
writer and as a person. Whereas in the earlier novel Appelfeld had to create
a fictional character in order to travel back to the scenes of his own child-
hood (there is significant overlap between the events in The Age of Wonders
and events in Appelfeld’s own life), now, despite his hesitations, Appelfeld
can travel back to Czernowitz in his own person. The film and autobiogra-
phy, as well as the novel Ice Mine (all of which explicitly depict the forced
march to the work camp with his father), evidence his development and
his ability to touch the “fire” (as he calls it in his autobiography) of those
events (Appelfeld 2004, 51).
Of course, in relation to the film, we do need to keep in mind that, even
though Appelfeld narrates sections of it, the work as a whole is put together
by a director who is interpreting Appelfeld through his own artistic lens. It
is to be hoped of course that the movie truthfully reflects Appelfeld’s posi-
tion in relation to birthplace and the memories that are for him located in
that natural setting, but we should be careful—tentative even—in assert-
ing that. What Appelfeld himself describes in the movie does seem to con-
firm the director’s visual presentation of Appelfeld’s experience.
Immediately following the conversation with the villager who claims to
have known all the Jews but is not willing to linger to discuss them, Appelfeld
(now in Jerusalem) says that what he had felt all his years in Israel was that
without a past, without parents, his personality would be lacking in some-
thing. What nourishes people, he maintains, is the ability to draw from the
“deep well” of childhood. At this point the film tellingly cuts back to the nat-
ural landscape of Ukraine, to pictures of water and birds. Appelfeld’s “deep
well” is not only figurative. It refers to, quite literally, the lakes and ponds
164 / emily miller budick
and other bodies of water that physically sustained him in his wanderings;
these are all that is left of his life with his family. An eight-year-old, Appelfeld
explains, does not remember much, but he remembers a lot. That “lot” has
everything to do with the natural world. Appelfeld describes his writing, both
in the film and in the autobiography, as an attempt at recollection. How one
remembers—in other words, whether memory is a bodily or mental activi-
ty—is very much the point of both the film and the autobiography.
In the preface to The Story of a Life, Appelfeld reminds readers that
under ordinary circumstances “memory and imagination . . . dwell
together” (2004, v). When they do reside comfortably together, they pro-
duce what we think of as stories in the ordinary sense, whether autobio-
graphical or fictional, transcribed or merely lived. When imagination and
memory, however, “compete” with one another, as they did for Appelfeld
during and after the war, a different kind of story and a different scene of
storytelling must necessarily emerge (2004, v). This sort of storytelling
requires exactly the strategies of indirection Appelfeld employs in both his
fiction and his autobiography. It requires the translocation and transmuta-
tion (what Appelfeld calls distillation in the movie) of the story from the
recognizably real world, mimetically reproduced in all of its myriad details
in the work of fiction, to the realm of the surreal and impressionist, which,
in replicating the torques of imagination attempting to get at and utilize
memory, mirror the writer’s disfigured reality.
That Appelfeld even has a story to tell is, of course, very much to the
point of his manner of storytelling. Under normal conditions all of us
always have a story. It is part and parcel of what defines us as human
beings. This is why telling a story can be so important to a Holocaust sur-
vivor. In and of itself, having a story affirms one’s humanity, one’s belong-
ing to the rest of the human world. The majority of the Jews of Europe did
not survive the Holocaust to tell any story whatsoever. If they did survive,
they did not necessarily survive with the psychological wherewithal neces-
sary for such storytelling. For a long time Appelfeld himself suffered such
a narrative lack, as he notes several times in the autobiography and in the
film (see, for example, the beginning of chapter 8; Appelfeld repeats much
of this material in the movie as well). As he also makes abundantly clear in
Ice Mine, what the Holocaust threatened to destroy (among other things)
for those who were lucky enough to survive it physically was imaginative
access to one’s memories (Budick 2005, 158–165).
Without imagination, memory can neither serve the individual psycho-
logical life, nor become the stuff of art. Without imagination, memory might
persist in the survivor—especially the child survivor—as only useless, pri-
marily physiological, traces of a horror one would do better to forget, if one
were able to forget it. As Appelfeld makes clear throughout the autobiography,
homescapes of childhood / 165
Someone who was an adult during the war took in and remembered places
and individuals, and at the end of the war he could sit and recall them, or
talk about them. With us children, however, it was not names that were
sunk into memory, but something completely different. For a child, mem-
ory is a reservoir that doesn’t empty. It’s replenished over the years, clarified.
It’s not a chronological recollection, but overflowing and changing, if I may
put it that way (2004, 91–92).
Ever since my childhood, I have felt that memory is a living and efferves-
cent reservoir that animates my being [ ].
166 / emily miller budick
When I was still a child, I would sit and visualize the summer holidays at
my grandparents’ home in the country. For hours I’d sit by the window and
picture the journey there. Everything that I recalled from previous vacations
would return to me in the most vivid way . . . This book is not a summary, but
an attempt . . . to integrate the different parts of my life and reconnect them
to the wellsprings of my being [ ] (2004 v, ix; the English
translation preserves the natural metaphor that characterizes the original
Hebrew , which, more literally translated, means the source
or root of life’s flourishing; in the film Appelfeld refers to these springs as
wells [1999, 5, 8]).
For Appelfeld it is the landscape of his youth, the place of his roots and
wellsprings, the reservoir of his self, which remains the one continuous
experience of self and of home. It is the landscape that pre-exists the loss
and horror of war. It is the landscape, therefore, that remains a repository
for his earliest memories of home and family. And it is the landscape that
attends to his needs, psychological as well as physical, during his subse-
quent wanderings. Thus, when Appelfeld opens the autobiography proper
with the question “At what point does my memory begin?” his answer
has to do, not exclusively with home and family as we might expect, but
equally with the Carpathian Mountains. “It sometimes seems to me as if
it began only when I was four, when we set off for the first time, Mother,
Father, and I, for a vacation into the heart of the shadowy, moist forests of
the Carpathians” (2004, 3). Indeed, even when he backs up further, in the
next sentence, to an even earlier memory, landscape imagery dominates
the scene of recollection: “But I sometimes think that memory began to
bud from within me before that, in my room, next to the double-glazed
window that was decorated with paper flowers” (2004, 3; the sense of
memory budding or sprouting is contained within the original Hebrew
as well). And he continues a few paragraphs later, saying that even “clearer
memories” than those of home “are the walks along the banks of the river,
on the paths by the fields, and on the grassy measures. I see us climb a hill,
sit on top of it, and gaze around. Speaking little, my parents listen atten-
tively. With Mother it is more obvious. When she listens, her large eyes are
wide open, as if trying to take in everything around her” (2004, 5).
These reminiscences virtually repeat what he has already just told us
in the preface, thus marking even more prominently their psychological
significance for Appelfeld. “It’s amazing,” he tells us in the preface,
how clear even my most distant and hidden childhood memories can be,
in particular those connected to the Carpathian Mountains and the broad
plains stretching out at their foothills. During those last vacations before
the war, our eyes would devour the mountains and plains with a fearsome
homescapes of childhood / 167
longing, as if my parents knew that these were the last holidays, and that
from now on life would be hell (2004, vi).
Needless to say, the young child cannot himself have known what his par-
ents knew, though a sensitive child like Appelfeld might well have intuited
his parents’ more informed anxieties. Therefore, the “fearsome longing”
that Appelfeld attributes to himself as much as to them must, at least to
some degree, reflect his present relation to that landscape as he projects it
backwards. This suggests also his fearsome longing not to escape from,
but to return to, that homescape, despite what is about to occur there, in
the past. He wishes to return, not to the town where anti-Semitism and
human cruelty reigned supreme,3 but to the natural setting that continues
to hold in his mind’s eye the image of him and his parents as an intact,
flourishing family.
It is his mother’s “large eyes . . . wide open . . . trying to take in everything
around her” that, throughout the early chapters of the autobiography, pro-
vide Appelfeld’s perspective on the landscape of his birth, even as later it
is his Agnon’s repeating his father’s naming of places that puts Appelfeld
into a more mature, intellectual, and cultural relation to the homescape.
Appelfeld, one might say, is reborn twice in this autobiography: once
through his mother’s eyes taking in the landscape and again through his
father’s and Agnon’s more cognitive verbalizations of geographical place.
We might think of this gesture in the autobiography as Appelfeld present-
ing a re-wedding of his mother and father, thereby recovering the family he
has lost. In this reconstruction of the lost family he recovers as well both
his lost mother tongue (which is not merely German but his particular
relation to the natural world) and his equally lost fatherland. The book
achieves a repatriation that is both linguistic and national.
As Appelfeld stresses several times in the text, using various forms
of the Hebrew word (hitbonenut), his is a craft of observation,
reflection, contemplation, and insight. All of these are possible meanings
of the word hitbonenut, which also evokes mystical, kabbalistic contexts
(Budick 2005, xi). “The pages before you,” Appelfeld says at the begin-
ning of the preface, using the very word hitbonenut, “are segments of con-
templation and memory” (2004, v; 1999, 5). In thus viewing the world
and telling his story, Appelfeld assumes his mother’s position of watchful
observer of the world. By seeing through her eyes, he not only restores
to her sight the land she so loved that so brutally expelled her, but also
restores her to that landscape as well. For, finally, Appelfeld’s various
pilgrimages back home succeed in bringing his mother back home, albeit
in a mediated and distilled way, as the scene of Appelfeld at his mother’s
graveside depicts.
168 / emily miller budick
tried to explain to me what my parents had not been able to tell me and
what I wasn’t able to learn during the war years. Every writer needs to have
a city of his own . . . a river of his own, and streets of his own. You were
expelled from your hometown and from the villages of your forefathers, and
instead of learning from them, you learned from the forests (2004, 165).
The struggle for physical survival was harsh and ugly, but that command-
ment, to remain alive at any price, was . . . far more than a commandment to
live. It bore within it something of the spirit of a mission . . . I hesitate to say
it, but one must: The apocalyptic horror of the Holocaust was felt by us as
a deeply religious experience (1994, 30–31, 45).
homescapes of childhood / 169
Mostly they were “illuminations” after days of hunger, danger, and despair,
a sense of wonder about people or objects, a kind of contact with one’s par-
ents, self-consolation. For the children it was perhaps more “primordial”—
contact with the trees in the forest, the moist earth, the straw, sucking
fluids from the roots of the trees, the night skies. These contacts with a
hostile space, for us, homeless and orphaned, had a quality that was beyond
“discovery” or curiosity . . . I remember sitting beside a pond in the forest,
looking at twigs floating on its surface, observing them with a kind of
“devotion,” as if they were not twigs but rather enchanted objects which
had come to me from a great distance (1994, 49).
I don’t remember entering the forest, but I do remember the moment when
I stood before a tree laden with red apples. I was so astonished that I took
a few steps back . . . It had been two days since any food had passed my
lips, and here was a tree full of apples. I could have put out my hand and
picked them, but I just stood in wonderment, and the longer I stood there,
the deeper the silence that took root in me. . . . Finally, I sat down and ate a
small apple that was on the ground and was partially rotted (2004, 50–51).
The sentence: “I just stood in wonderment, and the longer I stood there, the
deeper the silence that took root in me” is more literally rendered from the
Hebrew:“I stood and marveled and the longer I stood, the more I was para-
lyzed or rooted to the place” (1999, 49).
Thirst drives him on, and he goes in search of water. Here it is that his
mother is restored to his sight, if only for a fleeting moment:
The water opened my eyes, and I saw my mother, whom I hadn’t been able
to visualize for many days [more literally: who had disappeared from sight].
First I saw her standing by the window and gazing out of it, as she used to.
But then she suddenly turned to me, wondering how I came to be alone in
the forest. I walked toward her, but I immediately understood that if I went
too far I’d lose sight of the stream, and so I stopped. I returned to the stream
and looking into the same beam of light, through which Mother had been
revealed to me, but it was closed (2004, 51–52); in the Hebrew original the
beam of light is more nearly rendered as the “same small circle” (1999, 50).
Alone in the forest, threatened with death, the child’s eyes “open” (like
a circle) to see his mother’s gaze, not from the child’s normal position
next to her, looking out those same windows that contain his own earliest
memory of seeing out alongside her, but as the very object caught in her
170 / emily miller budick
circle of sight. The “small circle” that then closes is not only the circle of
her eye, closed in death (the very next paragraph deals with the murder of
his mother), but of his own eyes closing as well. He not only can no longer
see her, but he cannot afford the luxury of seeing her. To do so would mean
that he would “lose sight of the stream” on which his life now depends. He
would also be obliged, by continuing to look at her looking at him, to see
in her gaze the terror she feels for him, as he stands alone and in danger
in the woods. The circle that threatens to close is his very life. Therefore,
what he must do is to take up his mother’s gaze from behind her eyes,
begin to see with her, through her eyes, an external world of which they
can share a view. This he does, not only in this scene in the woods, but
throughout the autobiography.
The above passages from the autobiography mark the crucial transi-
tion from the forests as a place of danger to the place where the mother’s
watchful eye will abide, not so much dissipating the terror as containing it,
permitting the child to see through it, enabling him to keep his mother’s
presence with him. On the one hand, the torments of hunger, thirst, and
fear will never leave him. “More than fifty years have passed since the end
of the war,” he begins the chapter, “I have forgotten much . . . yet I can still
sense those days in every part of my body” (2004, 50). His memories do
no less than, in his words, pierce him (2004, 50). Indeed, his entry into
the forest is preserved in his body, not his mind, as is his first taste of a
rotten apple after days without food (2004, 51). On the other hand, the
wonder that is also a part of his experience of the woods—in relation to
the landscape that he inherits directly from his mother and that becomes
their shared perspective of reality—also abides within him. If we think of
trauma as the mental, bodily imprint of an experience that resists being
channeled through normal interpretive processes into consciousness, then
the literal impression of the beloved landscape of his mother is the homeo-
pathic antidote to this trauma. It reinstates the mother in the physical
world where she can, like any mother, nurse the hurt child.
By transporting or—to use a key word in the film—“distilling” his life
story into his fiction, Appelfeld achieves the distance he needs to tell his
story, the distance that he replicates in the autobiography through indi-
rection. According to Appelfeld, the text that (at least in the early 1990s)
most closely paralleled the “story of my life” was Tzili, which is subtitled in
English The Story of a Life. Appelfeld explains in an interview with Philip
Roth:
I tried several times to write “the story of my life” in the woods after I
ran away from the camp. But all my efforts were in vain. I wanted to be
faithful to reality and to what really happened. But the chronicle that
homescapes of childhood / 171
to ask someone else to say it for him. The kaddish itself, we need to real-
ize, is not a prayer to or about the dead. It is rather a prayer to God to
restore to His creation the beauty and life that the single death of the single
human being had withdrawn from it. The young girls who stand there
in his mother’s stead are not to be forgiven for the murder of his mother,
even though they are not themselves the murderers. Yet, there they are in
their youth and beauty. Their vitality cannot, nor should it, be denied or
ignored. To lay the past to rest means precisely not forgetting it, which is
why we maintain gravesites and visit them. Whether this is or is not where
Appelfeld’s mother lies, it is the place at which he says psalms and has the
kaddish recited. It is the place where a reflourishing is occurring, both for
the author and for the world of his childhood.
Appelfeld’s reconciliation with the landscape and his recovery of the
homescape of Bukovina literally restore his mother to the landscape. He is
able to mark the place where she lies buried. In this way, he can reclaim the
landscape for her, make it hers once again. Earlier in the movie Appelfeld
quotes from the diary he kept after his arrival in Israel: “Mother, Father,
home,” he reads aloud to us in that lyrical, liquid, child-like voice of his, “I
will not betray you; I will remain loyal to you.” How, we are forced to ask
ourselves, do you remain loyal to a home and family that no longer exist?
Would such loyalty include loyalty to the homeland that destroyed them?
“I am a refugee,” Appelfeld tells us in the movie, “I have two homelands.”
And then, with an aerial shot of Jerusalem as background for his narration,
he tells us that this is not his landscape, immediately adding in a somewhat
contradictory matter, “I have another landscape too, a very different one, of
water and many trees and many green fields. Jerusalem is also a homeland.
But so too is Bukovina.” The film returns to the water, trees, and pas-
tures of this other landscape as Appelfeld’s voice asks, “To which land do I
belong? Which is closer to me? I love the Judean hills,” he confesses, “The
town of Dracinetz is a ghost—without Mother and without our home it
isn’t Dracinetz. Yet, I found there something that still nourishes me, even
if it has undergone distillation. I, too,” he remarks by way of further expla-
nation, “have also undergone distillation.”
In this way we are returned to Appelfeld the writer who has distilled his
experience into his writings and who is by these writings himself distilled,
virtually transformed into a sort of landscape of self. There’s nothing there,
he says of his birthplace. What remains is what’s in me. A person, he says, is
spirit, and spirit is what you take with you, wherever you go. The film ends
on that happy note, which the autobiography strikes as well. As Agnon had
told him, geography is not a fixed location, nor necessarily a literal one.
Yet, the landscape exists. There it is, in the film, and in the autobiography
as well: quite fixed and literal. It is a place once called Romania, to which
homescapes of childhood / 173
Appelfeld travels in order not only to lay his mother to rest but to come to
see that world once again, almost literally, through her eyes.
Appelfeld tells us explicitly that one reason he wanted to go back to his
homeland was to stand quietly at his mother’s grave and, in connecting
himself to that silence, to see what was to be seen from the place where
his mother is buried. This land is Appelfeld’s home and the home of his
mother, whether they were wanted there or not. And he will claim that
place as a home for both of them. In so doing, he will continue both as a
man and as a writer to produce the story of his life, which is his legacy from
his mother. Ad 120.
Notes
1. All uncited quoted materials are approximate translations of the movie which
is in Hebrew.
2. Geography as figure and structure is a major part of Yigal Schwartz’s argu-
ment. Gila Ramras-Rauch provides useful biographical and geographical
information.
3. This violence is recorded in abundant detail in the early chapters of the autobi-
ography and features prominently in All That Remains.
Works Cited
All That Remains. 1999. Dir. Zoltan Terner. Israel.
Appelfeld, Aharon. 2004. The Story of a Life. Trans. Aloma Halter. New York:
Schocken Books.
———. 1999. Sippur Haim [The Story of a Life]. Jerusalem: Keter.
———. 1997. Ice Mine. Jerusalem: Keter.
———. 1994. Beyond Despair: Three Lectures and a Conversation with Philip
Roth. Trans Jeffrey M. Green. New York: Fromm International Publishing
Corporation.
———. 1983. Tzili: The Story of a Life. Trans. Dalya Bilu. New York: Grove
Press.
———. 1981. The Age of Wonders. Trans. Dalya Bilu. Boston: David R. Godine.
Budick, Emily Miller. 2005. Aharon Appelfeld’s Fiction: Acknowledging the
Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hartman, Geoffrey H. 1996. The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Ramras-Rauch, Gila. 1994. Aharon Appelfeld: The Holocaust and Beyond.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Schwartz, Yigal. 2001. Aharon Appelfeld: From Individual Lament to Tribal Eternity.
Trans. Jeffrey M. Green. Hanover: Brandeis University Press.
Ch a p t e r Ni n e
Nor m a n M a n e a: “I a m no t a
Wr i t e r of t h e Holoc aust ”
Jeanine Teodorescu
is connected to his Jewish identity, through “le regard d’autrui” (“the gaze
of the Other.”) (Sartre 1976, 321).
The Hooligan’s Return: A Memoir, a moving and compelling story of
critical importance in defining Manea’s authorial and personal identity,
follows a socio-political and literary itinerary in Romanian literature: from
Mircea Eliade’s The Hooligans (1935), to Mihail Sebastian’s How I Became
a Hooligan (1935), and finally to Manea’s The Hooligan’s Return (2003).
These three books, by three recognized names in Romanian culture and
literature, trace aspects of identity as perceived in 1935 and in 2003.
Manea’s book can be understood only within this political and literary
context.
Eliade2 focused, in The Hooligans, on a generation of young men who
were marginalized iconoclasts, and he presented them in an idealized way:
they did not believe in humanism, but felt that their destiny was defined
by vitalism, virility, and destruction. Although it was ostensibly a work
of fiction, critics considered it an endorsement of Fascism. Later, Eliade
himself described what he considered at the time the important mission
of the 1930s Romanian generation: “We wanted to address ourselves to
the broadest possible public and inject some vitality into Romanian cul-
ture, because it was in danger of sinking into a creeping provincialism if
we didn’t” (Eliade 1982, 182). A contemporary of Eliade and Sebastian,3
Eugène Ionesco4 would redefine these “isms” (vitalism and organicism)
as “ ‘biology’—the last refuge of the skeptics” (1992, 236). It was only
through this violent and demolishing energy that the “young generation”
put into practice their nihilism; violence and destruction are Fascist char-
acteristics, which Hannah Arendt describes in detail in her The Origins of
Totalitarianism.5 Later, Ionesco would create the metaphor of the “rhinoc-
erization” of Romanian intellectuals 6 (1968, 116–120), most of whom had
gradually become ardent supporters of the Iron Guard (a Fascist move-
ment). Eliade was not alone; other colleagues and friends, such as Emil
Cioran7 and Constantin Noica8 strongly believed in this right-wing mysti-
cal ideology.
Sebastian’s book For Two Thousand Years appeared the same year
that Eliade’s Hooligans was published (1934). Its main theme is the ques-
tion of identity, a question which confronted young Romanian Jews in a
society where anti-Semitism was becoming the norm. Its title referred to
the presumed length of time of the Jewish presence in Romania, which
Sebastian thought entitled him and his co-religionists to consider them-
selves Romanian. Without denying his Jewishness, he asked confidently:
“I would like to know, for instance, the anti-Semitic legislation which
could ever annihilate for me the irreversible fact of having been born on
the banks of the Danube and loving this land” (Sebastian 2000, 230; my
178 / jeanine teodorescu
translation). The preface to the book, written by Nae Ionescu (no connec-
tion to Eugène Ionesco), whom Sebastian considered his mentor (Sebastian
had been his student at the university and had become a great admirer
of his), was devastating for its author—because of its venomous anti-
Semitism, its rejection of Sebastian himself, and even its determination to
annihilate him—whom Nae Ionescu9 called throughout the entire preface
only by his Jewish name, Joseph Hechter (which never appeared in the
book). This harsh and irreversible condemnation was made on the grounds
that Sebastian could never be considered a Romanian because he was not
Orthodox Christian.10 Despite this appalling attitude toward his work and
person, and despite his own shock, Sebastian made a shocking decision
in turn: he determined that it was his duty and his “true revenge” to pub-
lish the preface, which thus became a testimony of the implacable Fascist
Legionary movement in Romania and its nefarious effects on Romanian
intellectuals, their new converts. Sebastian gives a detailed account11 of
this decision and of the devolution of his relationship with Nae Ionescu
in How I Became a Hooligan. Sebastian’s courage has left to posterity an
invaluable document of the Iron Guard generation, of what Julien Benda
called “la trahison des clercs” (“the betrayal of the intellectuals”), a period
which prepared the way for and made inevitable the future pogroms and
deportation of Jews.
Sebastian’s second book, How I Became a Hooligan (1935)—evidently
an allusion to Eliade’s The Hooligans—was his response to the scandal
triggered by For Two Thousand Years and its preface. This book included
quotations from the most hateful and vulgar anti-Semitic articles written
against him, both from the right and from the left. Only Eliade defended
him, but he conveniently addressed only the theological aspect of Judaism
in the preface, completely ignoring Nae Ionescu’s rabid anti-Semitism
and nihilism, probably in order not to antagonize his mentor, and also
because he in fact shared many of his ideas, as his later articles would
demonstrate.12
Sebastian realized this time that his proud confidence in his right to
be considered a Romanian and his notion of belonging to his native coun-
try were pure illusion, despite his significant literary contributions. He
was and remained, even for his Romanian friends (including his closest,
Mircea Eliade), only a foreigner, a Jew.
In this context, Manea’s memoir, The Hooligan’s Return, written sixty-
eight years later (2003), is a clear reference and follow-up to Sebastian’s
work; it reveals the same preoccupation with the problem of identity—in
his case, Jewishness within the Romanian society. To his dismay, Manea
had been himself the target of invective (in the tradition of those against
Sebastian in the 1930s) and he became profoundly disillusioned with many
norman manea / 179
to search out and reflect on old friendships that are still alive. The writer
moves in an in-between world—between the past and the present, between
the present seen through the past and between the past as reflected in
the present. Will this Proustian “remembrance of things past” and “time
regained” experience achieve its goal of liberation? In the end, the narrator
seems briefly to think so, yet the ambiguity of the memoir leaves the reader
unconvinced. The writer seems to remain an incurable patient of his past
and an accepting, and even willing, prisoner of his nomadic snail shell, his
native language. In fact, there is no possibility of escaping the past, (“the
past has a claim on us, no one escapes its summons”) (Walter Benjamin
1998).
The writer—apprehensive—prepares to travel to Jormania (a name
Ioan Petru Culianu coined17), which naturally sounds like “Germania”
in Romanian. It is from Manea’s “Jormania” of the 1940s that Marshal
Antonescu deports the Jewish population of Northern Moldavia, Bukovina,
and Bessarabia to a territory recently occupied by the Nazis and the Fascist
Romanian army. The conditions are appalling and many deportees die
either on their way to or in the labor camps of Transnistria. Although
focusing on the dreadful experience of the Holocaust, Manea succeeds in
presenting anything but a story of victimization, something for which he
has a definite aversion (as he declared in the interview, “I am not a writer
of the Holocaust”). The author’s modesty and detachment make these
descriptions of real events seem even more poignant, while at the same
time they remain an ethical reflection on the inhumanity of the Fascist
period in Romania.
In The Hooligan’s Return, Manea reflects upon his experience not
only under Antonescu’s Fascist regime, but also under Communism.
Significantly, most of these memories are connected to his Jewish identity,
since the writer concludes that he was “born under the sign of the intruder”
(2003, 28). The Jewishness and the “intruder” status cannot be defined,
however, without an understanding of the two prevalent ideologies of the
twentieth century: Fascism and Communism. Therefore, Manea remains
at the intersection of two identities: ethnic and political.
In the context of totalitarianism, Manea could definitely say, like
Bernard-Henry Lévy in “La Barbarie à visage humain”: “Je suis l’enfant
naturel d’un couple diabolique, le fascisme et le stalinisme” [I am the
natural child of a diabolic couple: Fascism and Stalinism] (1977, 7), my
translation. However, these two totalitarian ideologies are distinct, in
Manea’s opinion: “Nazism defined its purpose in clear terms, kept its
promises, rewarded its faithful, and annihilated its victims without hesita-
tion, without offering them the chance to convert or to lie. In contrast,
the Communism of universal happiness encouraged conversion, lying,
norman manea / 185
complicity, and was not reluctant to devour even its own faithful” (Manea
2003, 228–229).
Manea clearly disagrees with equating these two types of totalitarianism,
as Hannah Arendt does in her Origins of Totalitarianism. He is also very dis-
appointed by the current Romanian views that deny any difference between
Fascism and Communism, ultimately presenting a distorted image of both
ideologies. Manea’s observations underscore very important nuances that
should not be overlooked when analyzing politics and history.
Manea’s naïve enthusiasm for Communism when he was a child
and later an adolescent (first as a pioneer and then as a member of the
Communist Working Youth, when he became “a red figure of authority”)
(2003, 147) was cured when the young Manea realized the ruthlessness of
the party doctrine, inflexible towards any opposition by those who chose
to remain independent. As a university student, he withdrew completely
from involvement with political organizations, pretending that he wanted
to concentrate on his studies. Later, Manea’s vocation as a writer (after a
career as an engineer) provided him first a retreat and then the strength
to defy authority through subversive writings. Despite harsh censorship
preventing the publication of Plicul negru for almost two years, the book
(which obliquely addressed Jewishness) was finally in print in 1986.
In his memoir, Manea reflects on his permanent confrontation with his
identity. After years of rampant anti-Semitism during the Fascist period
(the 1930s and early 1940s in Romania), which was characterized by
pogroms and deportations, internationalist Communism condemned and
outlawed any type of anti-ethnic behavior. However, latent anti-Semitism
was periodically revived under Communism in several countries of Eastern
Europe, including the Soviet Union. In Romania, one such occasion was
the period of intense nationalism promulgated by Ceauşescu in the late
1970s and 1980s, which led to an intersection between Communism and
Fascism. Thus, Manea’s impression that his Jewishness was irrelevant, was
shockingly challenged in the early 1980s:
In Bernard Malamud’s words: “If you ever forget you’re a Jew, a Gentile
will remind you” (1964, 29). Manea’s compatriots kept reminding him
that he was not one of them.
186 / jeanine teodorescu
(2003, 242). Yet the answer comes abruptly, from the author himself: The
concrete covenant is not as important as Manea’s own “accreditation” as a
Jew, through his own biography. At the age of five, he had become part of
“the collective destiny” (243).
Manea was forced to be aware of his Jewishness in 1941, when he was
deported. Similarly, in 1934, Sebastian realized his irreversible condemna-
tion when he was brutally designated a “Jew” for eternity by his mentor
and his friends, members of the intellectual elite. Like Freud, a “nonre-
ligious, non-nationalist, non-speaker of the sacred language,” Sebastian
realized that Jewishness translates into a perpetual history of pogroms,
death trains, and deportations. Being Jewish seems to merit an eternal
destiny of guilt. Manea quotes the half-joking remark of a German-Jewish
writer: “We Jews will never be forgiven for the Holocaust” (2003, 243).
Paradoxically, murderers project their guilt on their victims. In this case,
they hate being reminded of the crimes of the past.
Becoming a Jew in the eye of the “other” also means being excluded.
In this respect, Cioran’s ironic aphorism fits Manea perfectly: “Being
excluded is the only dignity we have” (2003, 48). Manea’s initial exclusion
functioned as a catalyst for his finding his true identity and, by extension,
his true dignity. For him, assuming his Jewishness represented the sine qua
non of being true to himself and, through his memoir, he addressed his
own traumatic experience of the Holocaust.
In The Hooligan’s Return, the Holocaust often appears in his conver-
sations with his parents and in his own memories of the deportation,
presented in the form of testimonies by the three Maneas: each of his par-
ents and the narrator himself. Manea’s mother, the most important pres-
ence throughout the book no matter where he happens to be (New York,
Bucharest, or Suceava), accompanies and seems to protect her son; the
old lady visits him in his dreams and nightmares and appears as “a ghost,
out of the blue” (Manea 2003, 7) at the very beginning of the memoir.
During the deportation, she struggled to save her family from the trap
of resignation and despair. Her memories of the Holocaust center on the
forced departure of her family, along with the other Jews from Suceava
and its surroundings, who were pushed into “a freight train transport-
ing cattle; [we] were one on top of the other, like sardines. At Ataki, the
plunder began, screamings, beatings, shots” (2003, 94). Her story is famil-
iar; it appears in innumerable testimonies, including Malaparte’s “Cricket
in Poland” chapter in his well-known book Kaputt, which refers to the
pogrom of Jassy and the trains of death.
Manea’s mother’s ingenuity was soon at work and she succeeded in
keeping the family together, as she vividly remembers: “I was brave. I went
to him [the soldier] and told him: Mister, my parents were left behind at
188 / jeanine teodorescu
Ataki, they are old. I’ll give you 1,000 lei, please bring them here” (Manea
2003, 95). Her transactions saved the entire family—especially her hus-
band, who was demoralized and ready to give up—while inspiring her
son to fight for his life. Her stamina and will are still fresh in the author’s
mind: “Nothing is more important than survival, Mother kept saying, as
she sought to sustain her husband and son. Death was extinction, which
had to be fought at any cost” (2003, 211). Yet despite this unrelenting
struggle against seemingly insurmountable adversities, which did achieve
small victories, loss could not be prevented: her parents (Manea’s grand-
parents) died of typhus in the camp.
The writer’s relationship with his mother is complicated, because of her
exaggerated compulsive need to protect him and to make decisions in his
life. What else is this than being a proverbial Jewish mother, a Yiddishe
mame? She interferes, for example, in his romantic relationships and stops
him from marrying the woman he loves, because she is a “shiksa”: “We
are we and they are they,” she insists (17). She is guilty, in her son’s eyes,
of “the tyranny of affection, the unbearable malady of the ghetto” (214).
Although “the language of the ghetto” is not spoken at home, at the end of
her life and while in the hospital, in her dreams and nightmares, she always
speaks Yiddish, which is connected to her experience in the camp during
which the family spoke this language with the other deportees. She seems
to relive her trauma, which is deeply inscribed in the family psyche.
His father also provides a testimony of the Holocaust in Manea’s
Memoir. At his son’s request, Manea’s father writes his autobiography,
which reveals not only his extremely sensitive nature but also how badly
he had been afflicted by his loss of dignity during deportation. He ended
his life in a nursing home in Jerusalem, suffering from Alzheimer’s dis-
ease and, paradoxically, being cared for by a young German man who was
trying—as Manea believes—to redeem the Nazis’ crimes.
For the Maneas, the Romanian Holocaust also revealed the goodness of
some people, whose humanity remained intact. A young Romanian woman,
Maria, proved her deep love for those whom she considered her family. At
the railway station, she “tried to squeeze herself into the cattle car” (Manea
2003, 139) and struggled with the guards who forced her off; she simply
wanted to share her family’s fate. However, though initially she failed, she
did not give up. Realizing she could be of even more help she went from
Bukovina to Transnistria on foot, at her life’s peril, bringing food and cloth-
ing to her loved ones—not once, but twice. (The second time everything
she brought was confiscated). She even lived for a while with the Maneas in
the camp of Moghilev, taking care of them, particularly the grandparents
who were dying of typhus (182). Her luminous figure and moving spirit of
sacrifice bring warmth to Manea’s memory of the trauma.
norman manea / 189
The narrator’s father also remembers the kindness of other people (for
example, a Romanian soldier and an officer) who helped the family with
food and vital advice. At such barbaric times, when inhumanity was the
rule, some had the courage to act according to their conscience, imperiling
their own lives. In 1941, Traian Popovici (1892–1946), a lawyer and the
Romanian mayor of Cernăuţi (Bukovina), strongly opposed the deporta-
tion of the city’s Jews to Transnistria and defied the orders of Antonescu’s
Fascist regime. He fought with determination to keep at least the Jewish
professional population in Cernăuţi, arguing that these professionals were
vitally needed for economic reasons and the good functioning of the city’s
administration, and saved twenty thousand Jews by providing his “Popovici
authorizations” (as, later, Raoul Wallenberg granted Swedish passports to
Hungarian Jews in 1944). In his very moving testimony, Spovedania unei
conştiinţe [Confession of Conscience] (1945), he describes in detail the harsh
measures taken by the government against an innocent population and the
tragic fate of this population that was brutally forced to live in inhuman
conditions in the ghettos and later deported to the camps of Transnistria.
Popovici explains the reasons for his courage and tenacity, which drove him
to defy authority under extremely dangerous circumstances:
nation” (Balzac 1997, 107). According to Imre Kertész, who had another
traumatic experience in Hungary: “L’Holocauste est une expérience uni-
verselle, le judaïsme est une experience universelle renouvelée . . . elle a dû
acquérir un savoir douloureux qui fait désormais partie intégrante de la
conscience européenne” [The Holocaust is a universal experience, Judaism
is a renewed universal experience which had to acquire a painful knowl-
edge which from now on belongs completely to the European conscience]
(Lacroix 42–43). Manea is also able to see himself through the universal
perspective of the human condition: “Jewish destiny is nothing, in the
end, but the exacerbation, through suffering, of human Destiny” (Cugno
1995).
Despite the catastrophe and the trauma of the deportation, the sur-
vivor’s testimony in Manea’s Memoir is infused with a kind of equanim-
ity and generosity. Yet Manea felt compelled to tell his story Behind his
detachment and universal understanding of this uniquely tragic event, he
stands a writer of the Holocaust: in his memoir, written under the sign of
an ethical insight, the unforgettable and unforgivable live side by side.
Notes
I would like to thank Anca Munteanu (LeMoyne College) for her invaluable advice
during our long discussions, her editorial skills, and for being a source of inspira-
tion for me. I am also grateful to William Ford (University of Illinois at Chicago)
for his enlightening conversations, patient editing, and moral support.
1. After the liberation of Transnistria by the Soviet troops, Manea’s father was
enrolled into the Soviet army (but he succeeded in escaping). Manea studied
for a year in a Soviet school.
2. Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) was a Romanian historian of religions, novelist,
philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago.
3. Mihail Sebastian (1907–1945) was a Romanian playwright, novelist, journal-
ist, and essayist. His Journal 1935–1944 The Fascist Years was published in the
United States in 2000.
4. Eugène Ionesco was Romanian by birth, but he became a famous playwright
in France and was one of the founders of the Theatre of the Absurd. Ionesco
also wrote memoirs, essays, and a novel. In Présent Passé Passé Présent he remi-
nisces about the Fascist period in Romania, when his friends, one by one,
fell under the spell of the Iron Guard and turned into “rhinoceroses.” He
and Sebastian were two among the few Romanian intellectuals who remained
democrats and were appalled by this extreme right-wing movement in their
country.
5. Hannah Arendt describes the characteristics of Fascists as “violence, power,
cruelty” (28). Cruelty was considered a “major virtue because it contradicted
society’s humanitarian and liberal hypocrisy,” (29) and “terrorism [became] a
kind of philosophy” (30).
norman manea / 191
6. This theme is developed in his play Rhinocéros. In Passé Présent Présent Passé, he
explains how the metamorphosis happened: “I have seen people transformed
almost before my eyes . . . I felt how another soul, another mind germinated
in them . . . they became other.” When one friend made the first concession
to the Fascists about Jews, “they [the Fascists] seem to be right on one point,”
Ionesco recognized “the first symptom of an incubation that would go on
until he had a bad case of the disease” 116–119.
7. Emil Cioran (1911–1995) was a Romanian philosopher and essayist who
mostly wrote in French. Due to the aphoristic content (skeptical and nihil-
istic) of his essays, Cioran is considered the La Rochefoucauld of the twenti-
eth century. In his later writings, he expressed his regret for his anti-Semitic
youth.
8. Constantin Noica (1909–1987) was a Romanian philosopher and essayist who
remained in Romania and was imprisoned by the Communists. However,
towards the end of his life he was recuperated by Communists for the isola-
tionism, nationalism, anti-Europeanism, and strong critique of the Western
world found in his later essays.
9. Eugène Ionesco described Nae Ionescu in Past Present Present Past: “He is a
very nice, very refined, very distinguished man . . . He is an Iron Guard. He
tells the party militants to be ‘frightfully good.’ The ‘good’ here has either the
conscious or the unconscious role of hiding ‘frightfully.’ He thus tells them
that they must kill with ‘kindness’ ” (124). Nae Ionescu is the source of inspi-
ration for the Logician (a ridiculous demagogue) in Rhinoceros.
10. Nae Ionescu concludes in the preface to Sebastian’s book, “Judas is suffering
because . . . he is Judas . . . Judas will agonize until the end of time” (De două
mii de ani, 9, 24; my translation).
11. In 1931, Sebastian had asked his professor to write a preface for a “Jewish
book” he intended to write. At the time, Nae Ionescu (also editor of the news-
paper Cuvântul [The Word], which, according to Sebastian, was “antihit-
lerian” until 1933) had a great interest in and knowledge of Judaism, even
lectured on some of its aspects, and seemed to be a philosemite. However, in
1933 Ionescu had suddenly become a staunch supporter of the Iron Guard, the
Romanian Fascist-Orthodox movement that flourished from the 1920s until
the early 1940s (although in 1941 it was outlawed by Marshal Antonescu). The
blow of the preface triggered Sebastian’s stupefying decision. He gave several
interesting explanations for the reason of the preface publication: because he
had asked for it, because he did not want to censure any “written page,” and
because “he was indifferent about its publication.” Yet for Sebastian it was
most tragic that Nae Ionescu, his beloved and much admired professor, “could
ever conceive and write it.” Sebastian’s “true revenge” and “obligation,” he
acknowledged, was to publish Nae Ionescu’s preface (Cum am devenit hooli-
gan, 316).
12. In one of his Journal entries, when he describes his shock on hearing of
Sebastian’s sudden death in 1945, Eliade uses a vocabulary and tone in the spirit
of Nae Ionescu’s ultra anti-Semitic preface to Sebastian’s 2000 Years (7–24).
In this entry he explains (it seems to me rather hypocritically) the reason he
had avoided Sebastian during the worst years of the Iron Guard in Romania,
when he was consul in London and then in Lisbon: “I was ashamed . . . of
192 / jeanine teodorescu
his humiliations he had to stand, because he had been born, and wished to
remain, Joseph Hechter.” See Mac Linscott Ricketts, “Les Oublis d’Alexandra
Laignel-Lavastine,” Asymetria, www.asymetria.org/rickettsvslavastine3.html.
It was exactly at that time, in my opinion, that Sebastian needed Eliade’s
friendship the most.
13. Laszlo Alexandru, in his article “Mihail Sebastian pe masa de operaţie”
[Mihail Sebastian on the Operating Table], Tribuna 174 (December 2009):
13, refutes Marta Petreu’s claim in Diavolul si ucenicul său: Nae Ionescu si
Mihail Sebastian [The Devil and his Apprentice: Nae Ionescu and Mihail
Sebastian] that Sebastian’s publication of articles in Nae Ionescu’s Cuvântul
turned him almost into a Fascist. Alexandru points out that Petreu refused to
take into account the fact that most of Sebastian’s articles appeared before the
newspaper veered to the extreme right.
14. Regarding the long tradition of anti-Semitism in Romanian culture, see
Zigu Ornea, Anii treizeci—Extrema dreaptă românească. [The 1930s—
the Romanian Extreme Right]; Leon Volovici, Nationalist Ideology and
Antisemitism—The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 1930s; Vladimir
Tismaneanu, Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism and Myth in
Post- Communist Societies; and Andrei Oişteanu, Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic
Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central-East European Cultures, with a
foreword by Moshe Idel, translated by Mirela Adascalitei.
15. Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) was the founder of the (Fascist type)
extreme-right Legionary Movement, represented by the Iron Guard (The
Legion of the Archangel Michael), which was viciously anti-Semitic, mystical-
Romanian Orthodox, and ultra-nationalist. Codreanu committed and insti-
gated political assassinations, a program which his followers continued after
his death.
16. Săptămâna was a weekly journal edited by Eugen Barbu, who was in fact a
writer and journalist spokesman for the Communist Party. Corneliu Vadim
Tudor (who is currently a member of the extreme-right party, România Mare)
wrote the article “Idealuri” (Ideals) in which he attacks “the teachers of demo-
cratic tarantella,” “the foreign Irods,” and “the lazy prophets and Judases.”
17. Ioan Petru Culianu (1950–1991) was a professor of the history of religions
at the University of Chicago and a philosopher. A close disciple of Mircea
Eliade, he was later greatly disappointed by Eliade’s Fascist past. Culianu was
murdered under mysterious circumstances at the university in 1991.
Works Cited
Alexandru, Laszlo. October 16–31, 2009. Mihail Sebastian pe masa de operaţie
[Mihail Sebastian on the Operating Table]. Tribuna 171. December 1–15,
2009. Tribuna 174. http://www.revistatribuna.
Arendt, Hannah. 1968. The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego, New York,
London: Harcourt.
Balzac, Honoré de. 1997. Petites misères de la vie conjugale. Paris: Gallimard,
Editions de la Pléiade. Tome 12. 107.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip
Beitchman. New York: Semiotext[e].
norman manea / 193
Domnica Radulescu
The truth is that [the Holocaust] is an inappropriate word because no word can
express this tragedy: no word can contain the humiliation, the suffering, and the
loss of human life that it is meant to encompass. We use it only because we can
do no better.
—(Wiesel 1999, 5)
you that Marshal Antonescu was a “hero,” a “patriot”; others might even
shock you by saying that he did well to “rid” the country of many of the
Gypsies and the Jews. If you ask about Elie Wiesel, the answer is often a pro-
verbial washing one’s hands, something along the lines of: “Oh, Wiesel was
deported by the Hungarians, not the Romanians.” And yet others might
even leave you completely speechless by saying something that would seem
unlikely for the twenty-first century in a European country, namely how
they deplore the fact that Antonescu “did not finish the job.”
“How to understand the popularity of Antonescu after the fall of the
Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu?” asks Elie Wiesel in the preface
to Radu Ioanid’s book The Holocaust in Romania (2000, viii). “Streets
bearing his name, statues erected, elected officials observing a moment
of silence to honor his memory: has the nation so quickly forgotten his
bloody misdeeds, the atrocities he ordered, his crimes against humanity,
and his death sentence?”
Elie Wiesel was born in the Northern Transylvanian town of Sighet,
which in 1940, under the Second Vienna Award, was lost to Hungary.
In early June of 1944, when all the Jews in Sighet and Northern
Transylvania had been placed in ghettos, Elie Wiesel together with his
parents and sister, Tzipora, were among the very last Jews from the region
to be deported (Schoenberg, Wiesel & Franciosi 2002); he was separated
from his mother and sister, who died in the camps. His father died also
in Buchenwald, a couple of months before the camps were liberated in
April 1945.
Romanian president Ion Iliescu established the International
Commission on the Holocaust in Romania in 2003, under pressure
after making a statement denying the Holocaust in Romania. Iliescu
asked Wiesel to serve as chair of the Commission, which he accepted.
Wiesel and his family were deported under the Horthyst government
and therefore as part of the Hungarian Holocaust, not the Romanian
Holocaust under General Antonescu. Nevertheless, he is among the
Romanian-born Jews who were deported. Recognition of all deporta-
tions, placing in ghettos, and exterminations of Jews in the territories
of present or former Romania has been slow in coming. Although there
have been efforts by post-1989 governments—Iliescu, Constantinescu,
and the present Băsescu governments—to break the silence surrounding
Romania’s deliberate and sometimes frighteningly enthusiastic participa-
tion in the Holocaust (Ioanid 2000) and to teach the truth in schools
about Romania’s past alliance with Nazi Germany, sadly, anti-Semitic
attitudes, fierce denial of this dark episode in Romania’s history, and
even troubling nostalgia for Fascist movements such as the Iron Guard
still abound in today’s Romania.
elie wiesel’s NIGHT / 197
until the cold / held fast the tears and locked their lids still more” (Inferno,
Canto XXXII).
Both scenarios offer the spectacle of the freezing of humanity, the freez-
ing of all human emotion behind a mask of grief and hopelessness. Again,
however, the difference of perspective and of positioning vis-à-vis this
infernal universe is fundamental, for in Wiesel’s Night, the protagonist
is speaking from within the circles of Hell, as one of the victims, while
in Dante’s Inferno, the narrator is speaking as an observer, from outside
the world of the victims. One experiences the pain, the other analyzes,
sublimates it, and turns it into poetry. One barely survives it and gives tes-
timony to it so it may be remembered and never repeated again; the other
is a voyeur into a universe of methodically created human suffering that
he presents as a model of divine justice and as a cautionary note precisely
because it will be repeated again and again in an eternity of suffering.
At the opposite end of Western civilization and the Western humanist
thought represented by Dante, Elie Wiesel looks into an abyss of horror
that is more petrifying than anything in Dante because it is not imagined,
but real, and because of its blood-curdling reality, annihilates in one dark
night the values accumulated during the centuries in between. It shat-
ters into many broken pieces the grandiose image that man has created of
himself during those centuries: all Eliezer sees of himself in the mirror is
a living corpse. Wiesel’s look and experience of this abyss of horror shakes
from its foundation the very structure of Christian theology that holds
together the moral edifice of La Divina Commedia. How can so much
human suffering, torture, elaborate and imaginative methods of produc-
ing pain, as expressed in the elevated poetry of Dante’s terze rime, be the
expression of love? As Wiesel states in the interview with de Saint Cheron,
“For the most part, the killers had been baptized. They had been reared
under Christianity, and some of them even went to church, to Mass, and
probably to confession. Yet still they killed” (Wiesel and de Saint Cheron
2000, 68). Randolph Braham expresses similar views in his discussion of
the persecution and deportation of Jews in Northern Transylvania: “The
Christians,” he says, “even those friendly to the Jews, were mostly passive.
Many cooperated with the authorities on ideological grounds . . . Neutrality
and passivity were the characteristic attitudes of the heads of the Christian
churches in Transylvania” (2000, 128). The methodical killing of the Jews
during the Holocaust is to some extent the “perfection” of centuries of
anti-Semitism—persecutions, chases, and discriminations—that some-
how lived side by side and has been well woven into much of the religion,
art, and culture of Western humanist thought, together with the sense
of the superiority of Christian theology, practice, and morality. The Jews
in Wiesel’s Night are like the sinners in Dante’s Inferno, only punished
202 / domnica radulescu
for no precise “sin” other than that of being Jews. Wiesel stated precisely
that Fascist ideology and philosophy had a foundation in Christianity and
its theology: “[N]o thinker, no honest religious person would now deny
the Christian influence on Nazi anti-Semitic theory. Sometimes we find
an identical archetypal fanaticism. Without the foundation afforded by
Christianity, Nazism and anti-Semitism would not have attained the vio-
lence that it did, nor the paroxysm of hatred and murder” (Wiesel and de
Saint Cheron 2000, 69).
Foucault argues that the very idea of “Man” is the result of a certain
epistemic system of the modern period, a sign, a category produced by vari-
ous codes and epistemological structures or, as he calls them, “epistemes.”
To Nietzsche’s famous outcry about the “Death of God” corresponds
Foucault’s idea of the death of Man, or of the idea of Man as measure
of all things (Calinescu 1987). Indeed, at the end of Eliezer’s ordeal at
Auschwitz, the mirror only reflects a corpse. As Susan Neiman has pointed
out, with the Holocaust “the impossible became true”; Dante’s Inferno of
the trecento turned from fantasy to reality in a most ghastly way and with
the very support of the philosophical thought that inspired part of Dante’s
Divina Commedia in the first place.
What would it mean for Romania to come to terms with the Holocaust?
It would mean that offensive public acts—confusion between victims and
oppressors, conferring the same medal to a Holocaust survivor and a pro-
fessed anti-Semite—would not happen; it would mean precisely that the
Romanian government, schools, and media fully follow the recommenda-
tions of the Wiesel Commission and honestly and methodically educate
Romanian people about the role that past Romanian governments and
segments of the population itself played in the killing and extermination
of Jews. The official rhetoric and the initiatives are partly there, but the
truth is that both anti-Semitic discourses and elaborate right-wing philoso-
phies with a frightening neo-Fascist substratum still abound in a variety of
forms. By way of example, I will mention the Romanian pantomime actor
who has been quite a sensation on Romanian television, in the media, and
in bookstores: Dan Puric, whose recent book Cine suntem (Who We Are)
has been a best-seller in Romania. Though he makes no overt anti-Semitic
commentaries—at least in public, most educated Romanians know better
these days, whether willingly or not—the book continues in the footsteps
of those who had once been rightly called by the Romanian poet Tudor
Arghezi “the philosophers of anti-Semitism,” anti-Semitic intellectuals and
politicians like Nicolae Iorga and A.C. Cuza who went on and on in highly
elaborated and fiery manifestoes about the “Jewish question.” Puric’s book
develops with panache the old clichés about the Romanian people hav-
ing been born “a Christian people” and rides on dangerous and grandilo-
quently expressed views with regard to the superiority of “Christian art”
compared to the artistic expressions connected to different religious and
cultural landscapes. In fact, according to Puric, “Christian art” is the only
true and real art and Christianity the only authentic and successful path
for the Romanian people toward some kind of social, political, and cul-
tural redemption. And in case Romanians everywhere might be confused
about “who we are,” Puric has the answer for us all: we are Christian; we
are Romanian; and the soaring eagle once portrayed on the flag is the sym-
bol and model that we should follow unquestioningly. As for the young
people, Puric suggests in a recent interview in the Romanian newspaper
Adevărul (December, 2009) that all they need to find their path is to “con-
sider themselves children of God.” But even more worrisome is the joke
with which he concludes his interview, quoting a former Romanian politi-
cal prisoner—Valeriu Gafencu—who apparently told a Jewish man, “You
know, I would like for Romania to be led by Jews, only you know what
kind: Jews like the Apostle Paul, not like Ana Pauker, because then we’ll
all go to Hell.” If there was doubt that Puric’s ideology relies on some of
the same old anti-Semitic sentiments and views that Jews were respon-
sible for the creation of Communism in Romania, this conclusion and
204 / domnica radulescu
the disturbing bad taste of the joke should certainly remove even that last
shred of doubt.
This breathless and passionate call to Romanians to embrace, return,
blindly follow, and glorify its Christian heritage is more elegantly articu-
lated than, say, calls by famous Romanian writers and philosophers in the
past to close the borders against Jews and fight against the “Jewish ele-
ment,” but the essence of the discourse is quite similar: that of extolling
a would-be “superior” religion, ethnicity, culture, and race. The theories
expounded in the book Who We Are provoke the lucid and critical reader
to wonder whether Puric would not have been much wiser to have stuck
to the silent and less offensive art of pantomime. It also makes one worry
not so much about the book itself, but rather about the great success it
enjoys in Romania among even the more sophisticated of the country’s
intellectuals. The growing success, visibility, and media fascination with
and adulation of this pantomime-Christian-philosopher who sees himself
as some kind of prophetic voice for Romania’s future is cause for serious
concern. It is the same Puric who in his more recent book, Om frumos
(Beautiful Man), dismissed evolution theories as mere “stupidities.” As it
is, more than 70 percent of Romania’s population does not believe in evo-
lution, and the teaching of evolution theories has been eliminated from
most high-school curricula. The uncritical, if not blind, glorification of
Puric’s ideas and theories is disturbing, as is the fact that these views find
exuberant followers among the young and the old, the highly educated
and the less so. Gheorghe Ceauşu, the author of the book’s “Afterword,”
notes that Puric’s call for the Romanian nation to achieve “an optimum
crystallization” of its conscience is driven by “a deep love,” and not just
any kind of love, but “Christian love,” for in the process of setting the
“right hierarchy of values” for the Romanian people, only “Christian
love” is “true” love, and—in Ceauşu’s words—Puric is “a true Christian
Orthodox and a true Romanian” (Puric 2008, 170–171). The notion that
to be a “true” Romanian—whatever that might mean—one has to be also
a “true” Christian is being widely circulated in this post-1989 Romania
of the twenty-first century in which the lines between religion and state
are becoming frighteningly blurred. In this Romania of the twenty-first
century, the state supports and funds religion under the guise of “religious
education,” and students in middle and high schools are actually being
indoctrinated with Christian ideologies. An alarming number of people
of all walks of life—from the least educated, to post graduates, to profes-
sors, artists, or theater directors like Puric—are pleading for a return to
the teaching and embracing of creationism at the expense of theories of
evolution and to teaching Christianity as the “only” way to national unity
and redemption.
elie wiesel’s NIGHT / 205
And for readers who might have some knowledge of Elie Wiesel’s writ-
ings, it really brings things full circle in an area where one would only hope
the circle had been forever broken. Now let us return to Wiesel’s justified
statement and the thesis of this article, that theories of the superiority of
the Christian religion and Christians in general were tied into, or friendly
to, the Nazi ideologies that led to the extermination of those perceived
for centuries as “enemies” of Jesus and the religious institutions created
in his name. The poetic idealization of human suffering as “perfect” ret-
ribution for human flaws in light of God’s “perfect” justice, as seen in
Dante’s Inferno, has contributed to a larger tapestry of de-sensitizing repre-
sentations, aesthetic and cultural constructs that have facilitated the actual
implementation of similar forms of retribution, torture, massacres, and
genocide in reality. Renewed and reworked under different discourses and
different masks, these philosophies and mental and cultural constructs
can be just as dangerous as the philosophies and ideologies that formed
the basis of the Holocaust and other genocides. In his riveting interview
with Michael de Saint Cheron, Elie Wiesel says the following about Pope
John Paul II’s visit to Auschwitz and about his having celebrated Mass at
Birkenau:
[H]e celebrated mass in Birkenau. I find that insensitive, because the Jews
who died in Auschwitz–Birkenau were among the most pious in Europe.
He should have taken a rabbi and nine Jewish men with him and told
them to say Kaddish for the Jewish victims while he celebrated mass for
the Catholics. What was he trying to do? Convert the Jews posthumously?
(2000, 70).
For those who uncritically think and live in line with the Augustinian
theology that permeates Dante’s Divina Commedia, truly, the answer to
Wiesel’s question is a pathetic “Yes.” Didn’t Dante place Homer, Aristotle,
and the other greats of pre-Christian thought in the antechamber of the
Inferno itself and punish them with an eternity of yearning for something
they could not have, with immobility, inaction, and endless apathy? As he
did children who had died without being baptized? Truly, Augustine’s and
Dante’s judgment, or their interpretation of God’s judgment, is one such
attempt at posthumous conversion, which translates into being punished
for when and where and how one was born or died. It is not disconnected
from John Paul II’s message as he celebrated Catholic Mass in a place
where millions who were not of that religious persuasion died in atrocious
suffering and humiliation. It is not too far from Romania’s new-right phi-
losophies and discourses of the “superiority” of Christian art, of “true”
Romanian essence, of a “true hierarchy” of values and morality, which can
206 / domnica radulescu
her analysis of the Eichmann trial, that it did not take a fantastical monster
to participate so fully in the genocide of millions; it only took a dutiful,
unthinking bureaucrat who became too good at his job. Dutiful employees
who never question their “duty,” or why that duty is somehow supposed
to make them “superior,” are just like Ionesco’s rhinos. Similarly, Adorno
developed his theory of negative dialectics and intellectualism as the only
form of resisting any mass thinking and the destruction of individualism.
In his interview with de Saint Cheron, Wiesel noted that “Hiroshima
was possible because Auschwitz had occurred” (2000, 33). The very recent
genocide in the Balkans, namely the wars of ethnic cleansing against
Bosnian Muslims by Christian Serbs in the nineties, could be seen as a
scary confirmation of Wiesel’s prediction and of an even scarier possibil-
ity: that contrary to the “Never again!” slogan, and in fact because the
Holocaust happened, a new pattern of evil has been created which can be
repeated and “perfected.” Talking about the future of the world, Wiesel
notes, “Fanaticism. It’s rising, it’s gaining ground, it’s making conquests,
and in some places, triumphantly, whether it’s a matter of political fanati-
cism, or religious or ethnic fanaticism—or even of anti-fanatic fanaticism”
(2000, 225). Wiesel’s suggested solution is memory “as a way of balancing”
between the past and the future (2000, 227).
It is the erasure of national memory, promoted for decades by Romanian
governments and significant parts of the Romanian population, that is
conducive to the recurrence of the patterns of evil analyzed here. If the
memory of the suffering that was caused to hundreds of thousands of Jews
and Roma people in the Romanian territories is wrapped in silence, the
ideologies that formed its basis are more apt to proliferate and, even worse,
continue to manifest themselves in various forms of racism and anti-
Semitism, as well as to find more elaborate patterns in the “perfection” of
suffering inflicted upon those deemed as “guilty,” as “sinners,” as “other.”
That is not the kind of “perfection” that any country under the sun should
ever aspire to, ever again.
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Adorno, Theodor. 2008. Lectures on Negative Dialectics. New York: Polity.
Arendt, Hannah. 2006. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
New York: Penguin Classic.
Braham, Randolph. 2000. The Politics of Genocide. Detroit: Wayne State University
Press.
Calinescu, Matei. 1987. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant- garde,
Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. 1991. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Richard Pevear and
Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage Classics.
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Ioanid, Radu. 2000. The Holocaust in Romania. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Ionesco, Eugène. 1976. Rhinocéros. New York, London: Holt, Rinehart, and
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Lansing, Richard & Teodolinda Barolini 2008. The Dante Encyclopedia. New
York: Garland Publishing.
Marcu, Rozen. Holocaust Survivors and Remembrance Project. http://isurvived.
org/2Postings/2MarcuRozen-2book/023-Data_Tables.html.
Neiman, Susan. 2006. Evil in Modern Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Puric, Dan. 2008. Cine suntem. Bucharest: Platytera.
———. December 17, 2009. Zidul Berlinului s-a prăbuşit peste noi.” Adevărul.
http://w w w.adeva ru l.ro/la _ ma sa _ adeva ru lui/Da n _ Puric- _- Zidu l _
Berlinului_s-a_prabusit_peste_noi_0_172783205.html.
Schoenberg, Shira. Jewish Virtual Library. A Division of the American Israeli
Cooperative Enterprise. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biogra-
phy/Wiesel.html.
Wiesel, Elie. 1999. After the Darkness. Reflections on the Holocaust. New York:
Schocken.
———. 1999. And the Sea Is Never Full. New York: Knopf.
———. 2002. Conversations. Ed Robert Franciosi. Jackson, MS: University Press
of Mississippi.
———. 1996. All Rivers Run to the Sea. New York: Schocken.
———. 1982. Night. New York, London: Bantam Books.
———. 1995. The Forgotten. New York: Schocken Books.
———. 1979. A Jew Today. New York: Vintage.
Wiesel, Elie and Michaël de Saint Cheron. 2000. Evil and Exile. Trans. Jon
Rothschild and Jody Gladding. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press.
Ch a p t e r El e v e n
“TH E P E O P L E O F I S R A E L L I V E S !”
P e r for m i ng t h e Shoa h on Po st- Wa r
Buc h a r e st ’s Yi ddi sh Stag e s
Corina L. Petrescu
sociopolitical realities than with artistic considerations. The late 1940s was
not the time to confront this history in Europe, in general, as the destruc-
tion and dearth following the war made survival everyone’s main concern.3
It was even less so the case in a country whose own tumultuous past of not
too long ago had left its population ambiguous toward its Jewish fellow citi-
zens. If historical repression followed by general amnesia vis-à-vis the Shoah
were possible in Germany, the country that had engineered the Shoah
Romanian society found it even easier to exculpate itself (Adorno 2008,
10–28). After all, the Romanian authorities in power at the time of the
crimes against the Jews had been overthrown and put on trial for their alli-
ance with Hitler’s Germany. Even as allies of the Germans, Romanians did
not consider themselves responsible for the deportations or encampments,
which were all ascribed to the Germans or justified as acts the Germans
forced the Romanians to carry out. Moreover, like the National Socialists,
Romania’s wartime leaders had held ultra-nationalist views. After 1944, the
country embarked slowly but surely on the road to Communism, presum-
ably the “egalitarian” ideology, which did not recognize ethnicity as a social
denominator and hence could not discriminate against people based on it.
Therefore, references to concentration and extermination camps remained
symbolic and a confrontation with them impossible.
* * *
due to the earlier advancement of the Soviet Army in that part of the coun-
try. It improvised a theater group that performed in Yiddish in Botoşani
in the same hall where Abraham Goldfaden had acted in 1876 during his
tour. The performance was called Naht-Tog [Night-Day] and contrasted
the dark past prior to the arrival of the Red Army with beliefs in a better
future made possible by the liberators. It conveyed its message by alternat-
ing songs from the forced labor camps in Transnistria with hits of the
pre-war Yiddish repertoire (Bercovici 1998, 195). Soon after August 1944,
the IKUF gained legal status and became very active in organizing Jewish
cultural life, with a heavy emphasis on Yiddish (Bercovici 1998, 198).
In July 1945, the IKUF created the IKUF-Theater10 in Bucharest
under the leadership of Iacob Mansdorf. It premièred on October 17,
1945, with the play Ikh leb [I live] by the Soviet-Jewish author Moshe
Pinchevski (Bercovici 198; Kuller 2002, 188). Iacob Mansdorf was a
man of the Yiddish theater in the old tradition. He was a graduate of the
drama school in Warsaw and a former student of both David Hermann
and Konstantin Stanislavski. He had been a member of the famous Vilna
Troupe and other ensembles (AZAZEL, Pariser Idisher Arbeiter Teater,
GOSSET ), and had performed side by side with the star of the Jewish
theater in Moscow, Solomon Mikhoels.11 When he arrived in Bucharest,
Mansdorf was determined to craft the theater established by the IKUF
into a qualitative enterprise. In what seems to have been his first interview
in the Romanian capital on July 28, 1945, he talked about the bad reputa-
tion that the Romanian theater in general and the Yiddish one in particu-
lar had abroad due to its boulevard character. The theater was dominated
by mercantile considerations owing to the absence of endowments and the
reliance on donations from the public, which in return asked for cabaret-
style entertainment. Thus, Mansdorf argued, the theater lacked a cultural,
educational, and artistic agenda, which he was determined to bring to it.
His goal was to transform the IKUF-Theater into “an art theater.” He
affirmed: “Our agenda is the obligation to put on stage our rich heritage of
historical figures—Bar-Kokhba, Yehuda Maccabi—not some nonsensical
appearances built on pranks. As Sholem Aleykhem fought in past times
with a positive oeuvre against the shoddy literature of Shomer, so will we
replace cheap shows with true art.”12 The article was programmatically
entitled “In Goldfaden’s Footsteps” and taking into account Mansdorf’s
career before his appointment with the IKUF-Theater there is no reason
to doubt his statement. In order to put together an ensemble that corre-
sponded to his expectations, Mansdorf went outside Bucharest to recruit
young artists. This situation can be interpreted in two ways: On the one
hand, Mansdorf, like any master, might have wanted to mold his own
actors in the spirit of the tradition for which he himself stood. On the other
“THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL LIVES!” / 213
hand, given the IKUF’s ideological left leanings, actors of the pre-war era
who were already in Bucharest might have willingly kept their distance
from this troupe. In an interview with me, Anton Celaru13 remembered
that Mansdorf was also eager to avoid becoming involved in the usual
intrigues of the theater milieu characteristic of the Yiddish theater world as
well. Instead of putting up with the whimsical moods of stars and starlets,
he wanted to generate his own.14
The opening performance was a success and available reviews praised
Mansdorf for his artistic and directorial skills, as well as his determination
to see his ensemble shine.15 Present at the pre-opening alongside Mihail
Ralea, the Minister of the Arts, were important members of Romania’s
new political and cultural elite and representatives of the Jewish commu-
nity. In his address, Ralea emphasized the importance of the theater and
the historic moment unfolding before the public’s eyes. The performance
received the support of the government but it is unclear in what form
(Lemnaru).
The choice of the play was not coincidental. Mansdorf knew that if
he wanted his theater to triumph, he had to do three things: give credit
to the victorious Soviet occupiers, flatter the Romanian authorities, and
offer the Jewish audiences an experience that would both strengthen their
Jewish self-awareness and delight them artistically to ensure their return
to his theater. It seems logical that a play about surviving the Shoah could
do all of that: the Red Army had liberated the death camps in Eastern
Europe and received acknowledgment for doing so; responsibility for the
Shoah was placed exclusively on German shoulders and did not demand
that the Romanians answer for their contribution to it either inside war-
time Romania or in the territories beyond the Dniester; the Jews were
granted a chance to remember the dead but also to celebrate their survival
as a people. Under Mansdorf’s guidance, the performance achieved even
more.
The play presented the story of a group of Jewish prisoners in a German
camp in the Ukraine. Rabbi Tzala Shafir, his daughter Miriam, and singer
Hershel Klezmer were the protagonists, as the camp’s commander sends the
rabbi and the singer in the woods to spy on partisans. He keeps the rabbi’s
daughter as guarantee and pocks Klezmer’s eyes out lest he run away. The
two prisoners depart on their mission without knowing that a German
soldier named Paul follows them. One day the soldier catches a woman
partisan and wants to take her to his superior, but the rabbi prevents him
from doing so by strangling him. When the camp’s commander retrieves
the rabbi and the singer, he determines to have the rabbi executed, but the
partisans arrive and save him. Shortly thereafter, the Soviet Army frees the
camp. After the initial joyous moments, the rabbi and the singer vow to
214 / corina l. petrescu
continue the fight and the curtain falls on the rabbi shouting, “There is no
other way; it’s either live in freedom or die fighting.”
The applause of a numerous and enthusiastic audience at the end of
the show rewarded the ensemble both for its efforts and its creativity in
conveying a message that resonated with most of the spectators. The
play was undoubtedly a tribute to the Soviet Army, which had delivered
not only Romania’s Jewish population, but also liberated half of Europe
from National Socialist Germany. Contemporary reviews commended
the play for doing so.16 However, it also thematized Jewish action and
self-defense during the war without subordinating it to Communist
forces. A rabbi joining the partisan resistance in the Ukraine was
a potent image meant to empower the audience and raise their self-
consciousness. The blind singer who did not succumb to despair per-
sonified the strength of the jovial Jewish spirit enduring the galut.17
The Hebrew banner adorning the stage on the night of the première,
announcing, “The people of Israel lives!” appealed precisely to these senti-
ments, while also hinting at Jewish solidarity across class or ideological
barriers.18 The latter was Mansdorf ’s audacious statement vis-à-vis the
time in which he lived.
Shortly after the première, in Viaţa evreească (Jewish Life), Geri Spina
opened the question of the value of the IKUF-Theater beyond its artis-
tic significance, which he called upon the theater critics to evaluate. He
saluted the IKUF-Theater for its sociopolitical role, which he identified
as the carrying of the “cultural torch” put out by the war (Spina 1945).
Goldfaden’s tradition was an important aspect of the IKUF-Theater’s dra-
matic activity, not only because Mansdorf had taken the classics of Yiddish
literature as his standard, but also because parts of the public remembered
and cherished that tradition. Mansdorf praised this disposition of the
Jewish public in Bucharest in an interview with Hanna Kawa on January
5, 1946. He rejoiced at their reaction to the theater, especially since he
had been warned before arriving in Romania that Romanian Jews spoke
no Yiddish.19 He was, however, dissatisfied with the reluctance of other
Jewish cultural organizations to cooperate with the IKUF-Theater (Kawa
1946). Their reasons were political—as the IKUF stood for leftist ideals,
distance from its theater meant distance from its politics—but Mansdorf
could not accept that. For him, this theater was a site of artistic dialogue
and his choice to début with Ikh leb was also a first statement about the
theater’s potential. It would not only honor the classics, as Mansdorf had
advocated in his interview, but also enrich Yiddish theater’s repertoire by
promoting new texts that were also relevant to the audiences in view of
their recent experiences during the war. When he realized the impossibility
of engaging in such a dialogue in a country set for the Communist order,
“THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL LIVES!” / 215
Mansdorf left the country, before the authorities could misuse his passion
and idealism.20
As the Communists progressed toward full domination of the Romanian
public sphere in its political and cultural dimensions, they made the IKUF
instrumental in achieving their ideological purposes by mandating in
March 1948 that whoever wanted to perform Yiddish theater had to join
the IKUF-Theater, which by then was receiving state subsidies. Its trans-
formation into a state institution under the name Teatrul Evreesc de Stat/
TES (The Jewish State Theater) on August 1, 1948, was merely a bureau-
cratic, cosmetic shift.
On October 1, 1949, the TES presented the first autochthonous play,
Nahtshiht (The Night Shift) by Ludovic Bruckstein, an Auschwitz sur-
vivor. The event marked several major milestones: it was the first origi-
nal dramatic work to be written in Yiddish; it was the first attempt to
address Jewish existence in the People’s Republic of Romania; and it
was a direct response to the repertoire crisis that haunted the TES at the
time. The plotline was uncomplicated. Two former Auschwitz inmates,
Lana and Mira, recall their ordeal in the camp and how they were saved
through the actions of a Soviet Communist while waiting for their hus-
bands, Aron and Eli, to return from the night shift at a factory. They
remember how the National Socialist persecution began with the burn-
ing of the Reichstag and the subsequent hounding of the Communists,
the Jews, and other so-called inferior races, including—according to
the characters—the Austrians, the Czechs, the Poles, the Hungarians,
and the Romanians. In addition, the two women evoke the memory of
Ivan, a Soviet political prisoner, who coordinated acts of sabotage in the
camp and led the liberation fight against the guards presented in the
play’s last act.
If Pinchevski’s camp remained anonymous, thus ascribing a general
significance to the events unfolding on stage, the naming of Auschwitz in
Bruckstein’s play conveyed a different message. Spelling the name of the
camp out emphasized that the characters had survived not any camp but
the most atrocious one of all; the author also overemphasized the impor-
tance of the Soviet Communist prisoner Ivan and his ideologically moti-
vated deeds. The clear identification of the camp also left no doubt as to the
perpetrators—the Germans. Jews from Romania (according to its wartime
borders) had not been deported to any extermination camps in Central
Europe, but Jews from Northern Transylvania (under Hungarian rule
between 1940 and 1944) had shared the fate of their Hungarian brothers.
By making Lana and Mira former inmates of a camp undoubtedly beyond
the control of any Romanian authorities, the playwright dissociated him-
self from critiques of Romania’s attitude toward its Jewish population
216 / corina l. petrescu
during the war.21 Bruckstein’s loyalty lay with the new Romanian state,
which had no need for nuanced historical arguments.
Thus the play incorporated several obligatory elements for literary cre-
ations at the time. It condemned the past not only in terms of the war, but
also as the time of a ruthless bourgeoisie, which—irrespective of its nation-
ality—was responsible for the war. After 1948, the political discourse had
changed in Romania in the sense that the idea of ethnic unity that had been
so important in the early 1940s was reinterpreted as reactionary deviation
(Rotman 2004, 113). The new demand was for unity among the members
of the working class and for the denunciation of the so-called bourgeois
elements regardless of ethnicity. Through the figure of the Jewish mer-
chant Sacher, who betrayed his fellow inmates to the German command-
ers, the playwright rendered the new requirement artistically.
Having the female protagonists reminisce on their horrific past spent
under the motto Arbeit macht frei (Work liberates), while Auschwitz
brought predominantly death to its inmates, allowed the author to use
the remembering process as a springboard to the characters’ “rosy” pres-
ent. Through work—in the service of a Communist order—they had
reached happiness, after their liberation had been made possible by fol-
lowers of that same ideology. The play extolled the merits of Communists
and especially of Soviet Communists. If Pinchevski’s Ikh Leb had given
liberation a double meaning —physical liberation through the Soviet
Army but also, more importantly, self-liberation by overcoming one’s
passivity—such a subversion of the liberator role was no longer tolerable.
The Soviet Communists alone could fill that position and had to be
depicted as such. Feeble outbursts by Jewish inmates in Auschwitz had
to be subsumed under the leadership of Ivan, the harbinger of the new
weltanschauung.22
Another mandatory element was the description of the People’s Republic
of Romania as a haven allowing for the friendly and fruitful cooperation
between Jews and Romanians, as in the case of Aron and his co-worker
Traian, who perfected a common invention. The author thus aligned its
voice with the official propaganda slowly gathering momentum for a vig-
orous anti-Zionist campaign in the 1950s. In this sense, two notions of
work during the night shift were juxtaposed: the sacrilegious incineration
of dead bodies in the camp, which was the result of the previous bourgeois
order, and Aron and Traian’s teamwork in the factory of a Communist
republic. In line with the ideological prerequisites of the time, the latter
form was not only righteous because it was not forceful exploitation, but
also because—according to the official dogma—it paved the way for the
integration of ethnic minorities into Romanian society as long as they dis-
played the “right” class background and awareness.
“THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL LIVES!” / 217
Yiddish theater had to fulfill by the end of the 1940s: mouthpiece of the
regime among the Jewish masses. That the theater managed to subvert
this role again during its future existence and become a “parallel space”
(Rotman 2004, 121) of spiritual resistance for Romania’s Jewish minority,
was due to its dedicated actors and their artistic director, Israil Bercovici. A
passionate Yiddishist who led the theater from the mid-1950s until the late
1980s, Bercovici walked a thin line between serving the Romanian state
and serving the cause of Yiddish (as language and culture). The theater
was not simply a mouthpiece of and for the regime, but also a site for the
cultivation of a Jewish identity with a Yiddish sensitivity.
* * *
Regardless of how one judges the existence of the Yiddish theater in Romania
in the twentieth century, it is noteworthy that in the 1940s, at a time when
no other institution of its kind even attempted to tackle the horrors of the
Shoah, the Yiddish stage in Bucharest was making just such endeavors.
The fairly large number of Jews living in the city provided an audience
receptive to the topic, while the old tradition of Yiddish theater afforded
a base from which to glean creative guidance. Although in line with the
political status quo being established in Eastern Europe then, the first per-
formance, Ikh leb, from October 1945 could still claim artistic value and
express an opinion about the events it depicted and their consequences for
the Jewish community. The director even dared to stage the play as a plea
for Jewish activism and solidarity in the face of collective danger. While
the press across the political spectrum reviewed the production, true to the
mentality of the time, the play understood responsibility for the Shoah to
lie exclusively with the Germans and failed to establish any connections
between the fate of Jews in Romania (or even Bucharest, as a matter of
fact) between 1941 and 1944 and the human suffering portrayed on stage.
Consequently, its resonance quickly faded. Romanian society as a whole
was too preoccupied with the daily realities of the lost war to be willing to
question its recent past, despite available knowledge about such gruesome
events as, for example, the Bucharest pogrom of January 1941.28
By 1949, when the second play was staged, the political context in the
country had changed so dramatically—the Soviet occupation was solidi-
fied, the king had been forced to abdicate, and Romania was a People’s
Republic on its way to Communism—that the performance’s ideological
character can hardly surprise. Class struggle replaced ethnic solidarity;
Jewish self-empowerment through active confrontation with the perpetra-
tors was completely lacking in the play; and the “good,” anti-Fascist German
emerged—all in a perfect social realist dramatic text and performance.
“THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL LIVES!” / 219
Bruckstein put his pen and his lived experience of Auschwitz at the dis-
posal of the regime to assist with what he thought to be the solution to the
ethnic problem that had sparked so many conflicts during the twentieth
century. Condemnable as this may be, his decision to make Auschwitz a
part of his political agenda also allowed him to bring the Shoah back on
stage and thus into people’s consciousness. While it certainly served the
interests of the Romanian state, his play was at the same time and in a
twisted manner also a memorial and cenotaph for Europe’s fallen Jews.
For Romania, it was both too late and too soon to examine its own role
in the Shoah. Too late, because the Communists had written off responsi-
bility for the crimes of the early 1940s to the previous regime and perceived
their coming to power as a historic caesura that had delivered society of
any accountability for its unwanted past. Too early, because Romanian
society as a whole for the next forty years had no interest in questioning its
past or contemporary anti-Semitic tendencies. This remained a desidera-
tum until the new millennium.
Notes
1. Research for this article was possible due to the generous support of the New
Europe College Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in Bucharest,
Romania, whose fellow I was between October 2005 and July 2006.
2. Compare to Elvira Grözinger, Die jiddische Kultur im Schatten der Diktaturen.
Israil Bercovici—Leben und Werk, 242–243; and Liviu Rotman, Evreii din
România în perioada comunistă 1944–1965, 117.
3. Images of Auschwitz published by the American occupation forces soon after
Germany’s capitulation or the forced sightings of dead bodies from camps did
not initiate a confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with this reality. They forced
Germans to visualize or witness certain consequences of the regime they had
first supported and then not opposed between 1933 and 1945. It was not until
the Auschwitz Trials in Frankfurt am Main (1963–1965) that German society
began to confront its past. In Romania, such a process did not begin until after
the fall of Communism in 1989.
4. By the end of World War II, the number of Jews living in Romania was esti-
mated at about 353,000 (compared to 800,000 prior to the war), making the
Romanian Jewish community the second largest after that in the Soviet Union.
Liviu Rotman, “Romanian Jewry: The First Decade after the Holocaust,” 287.
5. Compare to: “The staging of a theatrical text requires the physical presence of
the actor, that ‘other’, that ‘impostor’ who was not in Auschwitz. How can that
actor, who lives in the same world as us, who performs in the same space which,
we, the audience, inhabit, how can that actor effectively convince us that he
is a camp inmate, a Nazi officer, or even a survivor from those days?” (Claude
Schumacher, Introduction, 4).
6. A maskil is an adherent of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment)
movement.
220 / corina l. petrescu
7. Letter from Felix Aderca to the General Director of the Romanian Theaters
and Opera Houses of October 16, 1940 referencing Authorization No. 9335
from October 8, 1940, which allowed the existence of a single Jewish theater
under its leadership. ASR, Ministerul Artelor, Direcţia Generală a Teatrelor şi
Operelor Române, Dosar 12/ 1941, 95.
8. For the text of the Decree-Law No. 2650 of August 8, 1940, see Lya Benjamin,
ed., Evreii din România între anii 1940–1944, 46.
9. “Stenograma şedinţei cu conducerea CDE din ziua de 16 martie 1953,” ASR,
Comitetul Democrat Evreesc, Dosar 23/1953, 15.
10. Invitation to a meeting discussing the Yiddish theater, ACSIER, Dosar 79, 1.
11. (Author unknown), “Pe urmele lui Goldfaden . . . O convorbire cu Iacob
Mansdorf ” Viaţa evreească 28.07.1945: 2. N.B. Many of the reviews cited or
simply referenced in this article display incomplete bibliographical data and I
apologize to the reader for this. In the course of my research so far I have been
unable to locate complete collections of the newspapers I use, so that I had to
rely on fragmentary holdings or clippings without annotations. Throughout
the article, the missing information will be listed as: (——— unknown).
Furthermore, many artists and public figures in those days did not use their
full name in public: some initialled their first name, some both name and
surname. When I could find the full name behind the initials, I completed
the names, sometimes inserting them into [ ] to suggest that the original
text I quoted or referenced did not include the full name. When I could not
trace the initials back, I left the names as they appeared in the press in those
days.
12. Ibidem.
13. Anton Celaru was born Iosif Faerstein in June 1919 in Huşi. He worked as an
editor-in-chief first for the IKUF-Bleter, later for the newspaper of the Jewish
Democratic Committee (CDE) Unirea (Unity)—called Viaţa Nouă (New
Life) as of January 1951. In 1953, when the CDE ceased its existence, the
newspaper was also suspended. Celaru changed to Informaţia Bucureştiului
(Bucharest’s Information) from where he took an early retirement in 1974 due
to his disappointment with the political and social situation in Romania. As
a young man, Celaru had truly believed that Communism would deliver the
world of injustice and ethnic discrimination. Interviews with Anton Celaru at
his residence in Bucharest, July 1 and 2, 2006. See also, Alina Darie, “Presa
şi suferinţa. Interviu cu Anton Celaru, cel mai in vârstă ziarist din judeţul
Vaslui,” 3.
14. Interview with Anton Celaru, July 1, 2006, at his residence in Bucharest.
15. Oscar Lemnaru, “Teatrul Baraşeum: ‘Ih leb’ piesă în 3 acte de Pincewski”; i. fl.,
“Teatrul Baraşeum: ‘Trăiesc!’. . . Trei acte de Pincewsky”; (author unknown),
“Teatrul de artă idiş ‘I.K.U.F.’ a câştigat bătălia. Spectacolul ‘Trăiesc’ o mare
biruiţă artistică”; C.F., “Ansamblul de artă IDIŞ ‘IKUF’ ‘Ih leb!’ (Trăiesc), 3
acte de M. Pincewscky”; St. T., “Ih leb . . .”
16. Lemnaru and G[eri] Spina, “Sensul ne-artistic al teatrului IKUF,” page
unknown.
17. Galut is the Jewish exile or Diaspora.
18. I am thankful to Anton Celaru for informing me about the banner. Interview
with Anton Celaru, July 1, 2006, at his residence in Bucharest.
“THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL LIVES!” / 221
19. Hanna Kawa, “Tewie der Milchiger. În dialog cu Iacob Mansdorf,” page
unknown.
20. According to Anton Celaru, Iacob Mansdorf left Romania in 1947 and died
not too long thereafter in South Africa. Interview with Anton Celaru, July 1
and 2, 2006, at his residence in Bucharest.
21. The most notable example was Matatias Carp’s Cartea neagră. Fapte si docu-
mente. Suferinţele evreilor din România 1940–1944.
22. Weltanschauung refers to a comprehensive conception of the world from a par-
ticular standpoint, in this case Communism.
23. Compare to Jost Hermand, “ ‘Der häßliche Deutsche wird wieder schön!’ Das
westdeutsche Wandlungsbild in den Nachrichtenmagazinen der Luce-Presse
(1947–1955),” 73–87.
24. Mioara St. Cremene, “Începutul unei literaturi dramatice noi de limbă idiş,”
page unknown; and I. G. Voinescu, “Cronică dramatică: Schimbul de noapte,”
page unknown.
25. Sara Feuer, “La Teatrul Evreesc de Stat se repetă piesa ‘Schimbul de noapte’ de
L. Bru[c]kstein,” 2.
26. Ion Marin Sadoveanu, “Teatrul Evreesc de Stat: ‘Schimbul de noapte’ de d.
Ludovic Bruckstein,” page unknown.
27. Valentin Silvestru, “O piesă şi un spectacol care arată odată mai mult dece
luptăm pentru pace,” 5.
28. The two most important books of the 1940s documenting the rise of anti-
Semitism and anti-Semitic acts in Romania were: Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu,
Problemele de bază ale României (1944), which was written between 1942 and
1943; and Matatias Carp.
Works Cited
Arhiva Centrul pentru Studierea Istoriei Evreilor din România [Archive of the
Center for the Study of the History of the Jews in Romania]:
Dosar 79: Oscar Lemnaru, “Teatrul Baraşeum: ‘Ih leb’ piesă în 3 acte de Pincewski,”
Facla (October 2, 1945): 2; i. fl., “Teatrul Baraşeum: ‘Trăiesc!’. . . Trei acte de
Pincewsky,” Timpul (October 26, 1945): (page unknown); (Author unknown)’
“Teatrul de artă idiş ‘I.K.U.F.’ a câştigat bătălia. Spectacolul ‘Trăiesc’ o mare
biruiţă artistic,” Eră Nouă (November 8, 1945): (page unknown); C.F.,
“Ansamblun de artă idiş ‘IKUF’ ‘Ih leb!’ (Trăiesc), 3 acte de M. Pincewscky,”
Victoria (November 28,1945): (page unknown); St. T., “Ih leb . . . ,” Libertatea
(December 6, 1945): (page unknown); G[eri] Spina, “Sensul ne-artistic
al teatrului IKUF,” Viaţa evreească (October, 1945): (page unknown);
Hanna Kawa, “Tewie der Milchiger. În dialog cu Iacob Mansdorf,” (news-
paper unknown), (January 5, 1946): (page unknown); Mioara St. Cremene,
“Începutul unei literaturi dramatice noi de limbă idiş: ‘Schimbul de Noapte’ de
L. Bru[c]kstein la Teatrul Evreesc de Stat,” Contemporanul No. 164 (date, page
unknown); I. G. Voinescu, “Cronică dramatică: Schimbul de noapte” (news-
paper, date, page unknown); Sara Feuer, “La Teatrul Evreesc de Stat se repetă
piesa ‘Schimbul de noapte’ de L. Bru[c]kstein” (newspaper, date unknown): 2;
Ion Marin Sadoveanu, “Teatrul Evreesc de Stat: ‘Schimbul de noapte’ de d.
Ludovic Bruckstein,” Universul (October 13, 1949): (page unknown); Valentin
222 / corina l. petrescu
Silvestru, “O piesă şi un spectacol care arată odată mai mult dece luptăm
pentru pace: ‘Schimbul de noapte’ de Ludovic Bruckstein pe scena Teatrului
Evreesc de Stat,” Flacăra (October 15, 1949): 5.
Arhivele Statului Român (ASR) [Archives of the Romanian State]:
Ministerul Artelor. Direcţia Generală a Teatrelor şi Operelor Române. Dosar
12/1941 (Ministry of Art. General Direction of Romanian Theaters and Opera
Houses. File 12/1941).
Comitetul Democrat Evreesc. Dosar 23/1953 (The Democratic Jewish Committee.
File 23/1953).
Petrescu, Corina L. July 1 and 2, 2006. Interviews with Anton Celaru at his resi-
dence in Bucharest. Recordings in possession of the author.
Valentina Glajar
Holocaust map” (Rotman 2003, 214).4 Since 1989, however, Romania has
made great strides in acknowledging the suffering of the Romanian Jews.
The report of the Holocaust Commission led by Elie Wiesel has eluci-
dated the role that Romania played during the Holocaust and the country
established a National Institute for Holocaust Studies in 2005.5 Moreover,
a Holocaust Memorial for the Jewish and Roma victims was unveiled in
Bucharest on October 8, 2009.6
In spite of the important steps taken by the Romanian government and
the now well-documented Romanian Holocaust in historical studies, the
memory work in film is still lagging behind. Very few movies confront
the Holocaust in Romania, in part because film directors grapple with
the impossibility of representing such atrocity, horror, and suffering, but
mostly because the Holocaust is still a controversial topic in twenty-first-
century Romania. As filmmaker Lucian Pintilie contends, fundamental
questions have to be asked and a nation has to face its past in order to
move into adulthood.7 However, minimalization, denial, and trivialization
still hinder an honest confrontation with the role Romania played during
the Holocaust. Michael Shafir brilliantly analyzes the various negationist
attitudes in his study “Between Denial and ‘Comparative Trivialization’:
Holocaust Negationism in Post-Communist East Central Europe,” which
includes various forms of denial and deflection of the Holocaust in Romania
and other Eastern European countries. In the Romanian context, he finds
that the legacy of “organized forgetting”8 during Communism has contin-
ued into the post-Communist years, when Romanian politicians such as
Corneliu Vadim Tudor or academics such as Gheorghe Buzatu still deny
the existence of the Holocaust in Romania. Under Ceauşescu, as Shafir
explains, Jewish extermination referred mainly to the Jews in Hungarian-
occupied Northern Transylvania, while Antonescu’s extermination of Jews
in Transnistria was never mentioned (Shafir 2004, 52).9 Furthermore,
deflecting responsibility onto the Nazis, the Iron Guard, and even the
Jewish victims themselves is still common practice in Romania. Even in
2009, the question among many Romanians is still, “Was there or wasn’t
there a Holocaust in Romania?”10
In the following, I review several documentaries and three feature films
that deal with aspects of the Romanian Holocaust and anti-Semitism. As
Peter Haidu’s quote above so eloquently describes meanings of silence, I am
most interested in silence as a production of meaning that can be framed
culturally, politically, ideologically, or aesthetically. I focus on three fea-
ture films to touch on this silence in the context of re-presenting or refer-
ring to the Romanian chapter of the Holocaust, which certainly shares
the Nazi goal of exterminating Jews and Roma, but, at the same time,
exhibits an autochthonous Sonderweg that Jean Ancel called a Romanian
framing the silence / 227
I
“Where is our Holocaust?”: Romanian and
Israeli Documentaries
In recent years, various Romanian TV stations have aired programs that
address the Holocaust in Romania, including the pogroms of Iaşi and
Bucharest, the “trains of death,” the Struma,12 and the Romanian camps
in Transnistria.13 Roundtable discussions with Holocaust scholars and
historians have also been televised; while very informative, the broad-
casts elucidate the ignorance and misinformation of the interviewers or
moderators, as well as the lack of interest on behalf of a large segment of
the population, which still grapples with the long-lasting effects of the
Communist dictatorial regime and the seemingly unending transition to
democracy and a free-market economy.14 As Liviu Rotman specifies in
a broadcast from January 21, 2008, that commemorated the pogrom of
Bucharest, the younger generation exhibits a completely different attitude
than that of their parents; younger Romanians seem to be openly willing
to confront the history of their country.15 Rotman refers specifically to col-
lege students, who take his Holocaust class, which is an elective, in larger
228 / valentina glajar
memories of the siblings. There is little doubt in their minds about who was
responsible for their suffering; Mărioara curses Antonescu for all the pain
and the killings in Transnistria. Transnistria, and the fear that they might
be taken away again, resurfaced in their nightmares after their weeks-long
return on foot. There is little emotion directly expressed, with the exception
of Ion’s breaking down when he remembers having carried his little sister
on his shoulders from Bucharest to their home in Transylvania. However,
the picture of two generations, grandmother Mărioara telling her survi-
vor story and her young granddaughter leaning lovingly against Mărioara,
captures an important message of Calciu’s film: the suffering of Romanies
during Antonescu’s regime must transcend the silence imposed by tradition
or prejudices. It is part of Romania’s past, and this memory must be trans-
mitted to the new generations of Roma and Romanians. Calciu’s documen-
tary certainly provides an excellent point to begin the discussion about this
marginalized group of Holocaust victims in Romania.
II
Among feature films, there are very few movies that address directly or
even touch obliquely on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust and pogroms in
Romania. In fact, there are just four, of which three were made by film-
makers who left Romania: Radu Mihaileanu, who left Romania in 1980
and now lives in France; Radu Gabrea, who left Romania in 1974 and
since 1989 divides his time between Germany and Romania; and Manole
Marcus, whose film was released in 1974 during the Ceauşescu era. Radu
Mihaileanu’s award-winning film, Train de vie (Train of Life) [1998], is a
multinational co-production that features a most original story about an
East European shtetl whose inhabitants decide to deport themselves during
World War II.22 Radu Gabrea’s two films, Cocoşul decapitat (The Beheaded
Rooster) [2006] and most recently, Călătoria lui Gruber (Gruber’s Journey)
[2008], address more specifically the Romanian context of the Holocaust.
The Beheaded Rooster, a film adaptation of Eginald Schlattner’s eponymous
autobiographical novel, focuses precisely on the involvement of the German
minority of southern Transylvania with National Socialism and the dete-
rioration of the relationship between the Transylvanian nationalities dur-
ing this period—a topic that deserves significant attention on its own and
would exceed the boundaries of the project at hand. Gruber’s Journey is
based on the character of the Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte who
witnessed and wrote about the Iaşi pogrom in June 1941.23 Mihaileanu’s
and Gabrea’s films have received more attention outside of Romania than
within it and have failed to spark a public debate about Romania’s role
during the Holocaust.24
230 / valentina glajar
hands him the valuable manuscript of the Hitler act, while at the same
time it allows some insight into the larger picture of anti-Semitic perse-
cution that targets Fridman’s entire family, especially his ten-year-old son.
The homogenization of Romania and the purification of the nation by
removing all the “foreign” elements were high priorities of the Iron Guard.
As Radu Ioanid contends in his study The Sword of the Archangel, Romanian
Fascism had several autochthonous characteristics, although it shared quite a
few with German National Socialism and Italian Fascism. The exaggerated
veneration of the Romanian Orthodox Church, mysticism, irrationalism,
the cult of death and sacrifice, and ultra-nationalism led to anti-Semitism
and racism.29 Through an effective and suggestive mise-en-scène, the film
evokes the premises of the Iron Guard in the scene in which members of the
Iron Guard keep Caratase and Fridman prisoners. A large, mostly empty
whitewashed room is adorned with an enormous cross on one of the walls
and a fire underneath—both elements that symbolize fundamental charac-
teristics of this Fascist movement. Caratase, tied to a chair in the middle of
the room, against the background of the cross and the “holy purifying fire,”
gives an important monologue exposing the danger of this Fascist move-
ment for the Romanian people. A central point of his monologue refers to
the simple pleasure of laughing at and ridiculing the absurd—a pleasure
that the Legionnaires have forgotten in their religious fervor and murderous
attempts to cleanse the Romanian nation, and now they forbid Romanians
to laugh as well. The definitions of laughter as understood by the editors
of Lachen über Hitler seem relevant in explaining Caratase’s pleading, as it
is exactly the anti-authoritarian laughter that invokes irony and self-irony,
and the subversion of overcoming one’s predicament that Caratase proposes
against the fanatic Iron Guard.30 The only laughter that the Legionnaires
emit sounds irrational and evil and suggests dementia, which seems a way
to explain their unquestioned following of their leader, “The Captain.” On
the other hand, it also conveniently excuses them. The scene culminates
with the murder of Fridman, who fights the Legionnaires but is ultimately
stabbed to death under the cross and in front of the “holy purifying fire”
of the Romanian nation. Fridman’s death against this background alludes
to his Jewishness, although the immediate reason for his death is his bold
provocative statement that he will distribute leaflets with the Hitler act all
over Bucharest. However, the symbolism of the background suggests oth-
erwise; his martyr’s death has a sacrificial character because he ultimately
saves Caratase’s life (for the second time) and the show—a metaphor for the
fight against the “savages.”
The much-awaited Hitler act, which Carol II attempts unsuccessfully
to ban, illustrates the consequences of a Hitler coalition for Romania.
Disguised as Hitler playing Santa Claus, Caratase, speaking half German
232 / valentina glajar
and half Romanian with a German accent, comically explains the tragedy
of a Hitler-occupied Europe. The comic act does not elicit any laughter
from the audience; on the contrary, a complete silence envelops the specta-
tors as they recognize the subversive character of Caratase’s comedy. Santa
Claus Hitler distributes Christmas gifts to five children, of which one is
the Romanian leader of the Iron Guard, Corneliu Stelea Modreanu (a
slightly changed but undoubtedly recognizable version of the leader’s real
name, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu). Czechoslovakia receives an SS Gauleiter
and Poland “one hundred pianists to execute the polonaise and the Poles,”
according to the old German saying rewritten here to describe Hitler’s
practices: “Ein Mann, ein Wort, ein Mord” (“a man, a word, a murder”).
When it comes to Romania, Santa Claus Hitler offers an “advantageous”
deal that foreshadows the historical reality of the pact between Hitler and
Antonescu: Romanian wheat and oil in exchange for the German Gestapo
and a little cage: “In diese colivie, punem micutz Românie” (“In this cage,
we place little Romania”).31
The humor and satire end abruptly when Caratase feels suddenly sick.
He slips out of the role by removing the Hitler moustache and wig and
turns to the audience as the actor Caratase, who admits that laughter is
not enough to fight the Iron Guard and to oppose “selling” Romania to
Hitler. The last part of his monologue is problematic, as it represents com-
mon deflections from assuming any historic responsibility that have been
perpetuated until today. In a grave tone, underlined also by the knowledge
of his serious heart problems and his potentially imminent death, Caratase
warns: “Opriţi să facă din ţara asta a noastră, frumoasă şi bună, un lagăr de
concentrare. Din poporul român o victimă sau un călău.” (Stop them from
transforming this good and beautiful country of ours into a concentration
camp, and the Romanian people into a victim or an executioner). Written
in the 1970s, the script reiterates the myths that ethnic Romanians, kind
and generous as they are, could not commit any atrocities; leaders such
as the Iron Guard and/or Hitler are responsible for the crimes of ethnic
Romanians against Jews (Romanies are predictably ignored as victims
in this film).32 The image of Romania as a concentration camp evokes a
country controlled by Hitler and the Iron Guard and transfers responsibil-
ity for atrocities to Nazi and Fascist leaders who have the power and the
followers to decide the fate of an entire people. One has to wonder about
the specific context in which the people become victims or executioners in
a concentration camp called Romania. Does the film suggest an ever so
slight responsibility from the perspective of the 1970s?33 So long as Hitler
and the Iron Guard are portrayed as the sole perpetrators, following the
Communist line of thought, the film was unlikely to spark any serious
debate about Romania’s role during the Holocaust. Nor was it meant to stir
framing the silence / 233
re-create the shtetl of his ancestors, to delve into the absurd35 as he knows
it from Eugène Ionesco, and into the philosophy of Emil Cioran, whom he
considers the most amusing and most desperate philosopher.36
Mihaileanu’s movie inscribes itself into what Josefa Loshitzky, draw-
ing also on Slavoj Žižek, calls the liminal spaces of Holocaust represen-
tations—a new radical form, a hybrid space where tragedy, comedy, and
melodrama meet.37 The train that in Holocaust literature and film sym-
bolizes a tragic finality becomes in Mihaileanu’s film a refracted image of
the Nazi (or Romanian) deportation trains, creating a space that allows
comedy and tragedy to converge. Mihaileanu acknowledged that his title
alludes also to the Romanian “Trains of Death”—the focus of Gabrea’s
movie, Gruber’s Journey, in which thousands of Jews died from suffoca-
tion and dehydration after the wagons were sealed and the inmates were
locked up for days without water in unbearable heat. When the Romanian
soldiers finally opened the wagons, at least half of the inmates were dead.38
Mihaileanu’s train becomes a fable of imagined possibilities, in which peo-
ple reclaim their agency and challenge the limits of the possible, even if
only in a fairy tale imagined by the village fool.
Sander Gilman questions the emergence and the prospect of a new
genre, the Holocaust comedy, in his article “Is Life Beautiful? Can the
Shoah be Funny? Thoughts on Recent and Older Movies.” Gilman only
briefly mentions Train of Life, as it had not yet been released in the United
States, and focuses primarily on the other two Holocaust comedies that
were released during the late 1990s and met with various degrees of suc-
cess: Life is Beautiful created a controversy but received two Oscars, while
critics almost unanimously dismissed Peter Kassovitz’s Jakob the Liar,
pointing to Robin Williams’ uninspired and subdued performance and
to Frank Beyer’s Jakob der Lügner as the better of the two films. In his
analysis of Benigni’s, Kassovitz’s, and Beyer’s movies, Gilman arrives at
two conclusions. He claims that “Benigni’s laughter is proof that whatever
else will happen, the promise of the film, the rescue of the child, must take
place. Our expectations are fulfilled, and we feel good about our laugh-
ter” (2000, 304). And second, most importantly, Gilman concludes that
“laughter is again possible in the 1990s” as the Shoah has become history
rather than memory (2000, 305) and Jewish authenticity is not required
anymore, mentioning, of course, that Benigni was the first non-Jewish
director to produce a Holocaust comedy.39
Mihaileanu’s movie still has the imprint of Jewish authenticity, though
his perspective is that of a second-generation Holocaust survivor growing
up in Communist Romania. His father escaped from a camp, returned
to Romania, and changed his name from Mordechai Buchman to Ion
Mihaileanu. Born in 1958, Radu Mihaileanu belonged to the postgeneration
framing the silence / 235
that felt the responsibility to keep the memory alive but relied on what
James Young calls “received history.” The problem for artists of the second-
generation, as Young explains, “is that they are unable to remember the
Holocaust outside of the ways it has been passed down to them, outside of
the ways it is meaningful to them fifty years after the fact” (At Memory’s
Edge, 3). Their experience is necessarily mediated through “[p]hotographs,
film, histories, novels, poems, plays, survivors’ testimonies” (Young 2000,
3). Marianne Hirsch coined the term postmemory to describe “the relation-
ship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences
that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them
so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right” (2008,
103). More specifically, in Family Frames, Hirsch refers to the impossibility
for the postgeneration to return to the world of their parents (1997, 242–
243). Mihaileanu, who was born in Bucharest, never experienced the shtetl
of his family that he tries to re-create in Train of Life. In an interview with
Stefan Steinberg, Mihaileanu addresses the discrepancy between mediated
fictional representations and the remembered world of the parents and
grandparents as he replies to the criticism of an elderly Jewish woman in
Berlin, who could not recognize her shtetl in Mihaileanu’s film: “She came
to see Rembrandt; my exhibition is Chagall.”40
The allegorical fairy-tale frame allows Mihaileanu not only to re-create
the shtetl and its inhabitants but also to employ Jewish humor because—as
Omer Bartov and others have remarked—the film does not pretend to
reflect reality in any way (Bartov 2005, 135). It is therefore only fitting
that Train of Life is framed as a fairy tale that begins with the formulaic
“Il était une fois un petit shtetl” (“Once upon a time, there was a little
shtetl”) and is narrated by Shlomo, the village idiot. Film director Dani
Levy also emphasizes the power of humor in defense of his latest movie
Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler—Germany’s first
Nazi comedy. As he claims, “[C]omedy is more subversive than tragedy. It
can assert things that aren’t possible in an authentic, serious portrayal.”41
To follow Gilman’s arguments in his analysis of comic Holocaust films,
Mihaileanu’s humor, just like Beyer’s in Jakob der Lügner, does not imply a
feel-good laughter that has to be followed by a hopeful and positive resolve,
as in Benigni’s movie. On the contrary, the expectations of the audience
are crushed at the end of the movie when viewers are faced with the freeze
frame of Shlomo, the village idiot and narrator of the story, behind barbed
wire in a concentration camp.
While Mihaileanu’s movie was criticized for too much slapstick humor
or too much music (although the soundtrack by Goran Bregović was cat-
egorized as excellent),42 it did receive some praise for including another
victim group (the Romanies) that has been mostly ignored or marginalized
236 / valentina glajar
any assumptions about the journey and, ultimately, about the story’s opti-
mism. The positive relationship between the shtetl Jews and their neigh-
bors—who actually lament the Jews’ departure in the film—is suddenly
removed, giving way to the more realistic probability of the anti-Semitic
attitudes of many Eastern Europeans. The depiction of Romanies as broth-
ers in suffering—which would carry so much weight, especially in the
Romanian context—remains then also suspended in the realm of imag-
ined possibilities. By allowing Shlomo, the village idiot, philosopher, and
camp inmate, to tell the story of his shtetl through the prism of a unbeliev-
able fairy tale, the movie projects and simultaneously explains its hopeful-
ness against the tragic history of the East European Jewry, instilled into
one single suggestive freeze frame: Shlomo behind barbed wire.
Malaparte in Iaşi on the afternoon of June 29, 1941. Malaparte, the wit-
ness who describes the carnage in Kaputt, becomes in the film a detective
of sorts who tracks down the events in his quest for Gruber. Thus Gabrea’s
movie avoids the graphic scenes in Kaputt and instead re-creates the pogrom
at Iaşi by pointing to the visual and olfactory evidence that suggests the
extent of the “operation.” There are no comments on Malaparte’s part;
the camera points out the clues Malaparte sees in his investigation. Before
arriving at the Iaşi train station, for example, Malaparte’s train is stopped
and crosses paths with a freight train. When Malaparte’s companions open
the window to let in air as they complain about the heat, the smell ema-
nating from the freight train is unbearable, suggesting in hindsight that it
was the first “train of death” going to Călăraşi. When Malaparte drives
through the streets of Iaşi on the way to the Italian Consulate, he is faced
with the results of the devastation of Jewish stores that are inscribed with
the Star of David, while the unscathed shops are marked with a cross. At
the police headquarters, several soldiers are cleansing the pavement of what
appears to be blood and whitewashing the walls, an activity that reflects
the bureaucratic cover-up to follow. Two coats are required to cover up the
red stains.46
The establishing shot of a beautiful landscape filmed through the win-
dow of the racing train ascertains the perspective of the film as it creates
distance from what is depicted and at the same time a certain transparency,
though blurred by the speed of the train and certainly by the passing of
time. The window, which becomes an important trope in the movie, not
only allows insight into the events but also provides a precarious emotional
and physical shield for Malaparte. Following him as he goes door to door
and window to window through Iaşi, the camera becomes a silent wit-
ness and Malaparte a tacit observer. His allergies prompt him to have the
windows closed, which seems counterproductive as a metaphor since his
quest for Gruber allows increasing insight into the events that transpired
before his arrival.
While perpetrators are individually mentioned by name and portrayed
in a light resonating with their recent or future actions, the portrayal of
the victims shows no individuation.47 As Ezrahi contends in her analysis
of Train of Life, the fact that there is no attempt at individuation makes it,
ironically, the most mimetic aspect of the film. Gabrea goes one step fur-
ther as he plays on the capacity of vision and sound to evoke other senses,
most notably that of smell. The victims in Gabrea’s film remain outside
the frame or unrecognizable. The presence of living victims is reduced
to muffled voices, coming from the train of death, that ask for help and
water. The closest that the viewer comes to seeing the dead is the scene in
which Malaparte and Sartori stand in front of a mass grave.
framing the silence / 239
While the sheer size of the mass grave suggests the very high number of
victims, their faces are not recognizable because lime is spread over the bod-
ies like a symbolic white shroud of innocence. One can only recognize forms
of body parts until the camera lingers on the shape of a beautiful woman’s
face, resembling a rigid white statue. In the absence of the familiar window
shield, Malaparte’s olfactory functions are returning, triggered by the smell
of the corpses, and so is the emotion expressed at the sight of “the meadow
of death”48 and the news that Josef Gruber is one of the lime-covered vic-
tims. At this point, Gruber’s journey and the tragedy of the Jews from Iaşi
have become Malaparte’s story, visually rendered in the scene depicting
Malaparte and Sartori’s return to Iaşi: in this sequence of frames, the reflec-
tion and transparency of the car window allow the camera to superimpose a
close-up of Malaparte over the image of the train of death.
Gabrea’s Malaparte is certainly not the heroic correspondent of Kaputt
who, together with Sartori, sheltered one hundred Jewish victims in the
Italian Consulate and even kicked a police officer to save some of the flee-
ing people.49 In the movie, Malaparte does not succeed in opening the
door of the sealed wagons, as he is in the book when the dead bodies rolled
out of the train.50 His search for Gruber is a vehicle that allows viewers
to uncover the tragedy, but it also seems at times that the protagonist is
only interested in one person for his selfish benefit, though he does go to
considerable lengths to bring Gruber back in case he is still alive. In a twist
of fate, it turns out that Josef Gruber, the allergist, is still alive after all.
Niculescu-Coca, the new garrison commander, finds Gruber, who is actu-
ally the son of the Josef Gruber who died on the train and was buried in the
mass grave.51 In his search for Gruber, Malaparte tries to save, but actually
might just endanger Gruber’s life. While Gruber had been away on the
days of the pogrom, most likely trying to avoid the killings and deporta-
tion, he now is subject to close attention from the garrison commander and
the police chief. As a result, Gruber’s house and office are guarded by two
armed soldiers when Malaparte arrives, and the viewer is left to imagine
where Gruber’s journey might eventually end.
In a Romanian review of the movie, Andreea Chiriac concludes that
Gabrea’s film presents the story of the Iaşi pogrom in a very elegant way,
refraining from vitriolic and demonstrative revelations and without the
sensationalism of a bad talk show. There are indeed several aspects of the
film that would fit Chiriac’s characterization: One is the absence of images
of the victims, which allows the viewer to avoid the uncomfortable posi-
tion of looking into their eyes. The other “elegant” characteristic of the
movie is the distance created through the perspective of foreigners—Mala-
parte’s, Freitag’s, and Sartori’s. While Freitag alerts Malaparte, during
their trip from Bucharest to Iaşi, of the excesses of the Romanians in Iaşi,
240 / valentina glajar
mentioning that four Jews were hanged, it is difficult for any informed
viewer to understand Freitag’s disbelief, considering the situation of the
Jews in German-occupied Europe by 1941. One other “elegant” point is
the blame placed on a few officials, especially Constantin Lupu, who was
indeed one of the people in charge of solving “the Jewish problem” in
Iaşi following the direct orders of Antonescu. The officials’ indifference,
arrogance, incompetence, and lack of responsibility—blaming it all on
the war—allow the viewer to feel safe in his or her perceived conviction
of moral superiority, knowing that the responsibility lies out there, as it
always does, with some officials or bureaucrats. The last “elegant” point
is the scarce encoding of history. The historical context of the film would
create a much-needed frame of reference, and the last frame, in which the
twelve thousand Jewish victims of the Iaşi pogrom are mentioned, comes
too late and does not have the effect of Mihaileanu’s freeze frame (causing
the viewer to rethink the entire movie). Gabrea’s movie presents, indeed, a
sanitized version of the story, but nevertheless it begins a long overdue dis-
cussion of the controversial role Romanians played during the Holocaust.
Both documentaries and feature films dealing with the Romanian
chapter of the Holocaust reflect the end of a prolonged silence about the
suffering of Romanian Jews and Roma that has heretofore placed their
story at the edges of Holocaust and film studies. In presenting the story
of Constantin Tănase, Manole Marcus found an excellent angle through
which to speak about the 1930s and push the Communist censorship ever
so slightly into allowing a discussion about anti-Semitism and the historical
context of Romania’s joining the Axis Powers. Moreover, many Romanians
viewed it as a parable of the Communist dictatorship, and consequently,
for many years Actorul şi sălbaticii disappeared from Romanian screens;
it was released again after 1989. One has to wonder what kind of movie
Marcus would have produced in a censorship-free Romania or whether
the movie would have had the same impact in another time. Mihaileanu
fled the Communist dictatorship of Ceauşescu and produced Train de vie,
profoundly influenced by the shtetl he never experienced and the relatives
who died during the Holocaust in Romania. Train de vie allows Romanian
viewers not only to follow the adventurous journey of the shtetl Jews, laugh
with them, sit on the edge of their seats when Nazis appear to stop their
ghost train, and hope for a successful escape, but also to face questions
about the absence of this once flourishing Jewish culture in Romania.
Train de vie also touches a nerve with Romanian viewers because it forces
them to confront the suffering of Romanies—a minority group that con-
tinues to endure discrimination at every level in Romania.52 The veteran
film director Radu Gabrea, who was four years old when the pogrom was
unfolding in Iaşi, has produced the first Romanian Holocaust film, whose
framing the silence / 241
Notes
1. I would like to thank Ileana Marin for reading an earlier version of this article
and Camelia Lazăr for having procured all the Romanian movies, even those
that had not been released.
2. Peter Haidu. “The Dialectics of Unspeakability: Language, Silence, and the
Narratives of Desubjectification,” 278.
3. Sighet, Sighet, dir. Harold Becker, 1967.
4. Marianne Hirsch also notes in Family Frames, “I can still conjure the cognitive
disjunction in which my friends and I grew up, hearing at home that we are to
disregard most of what we are told at school” (219).
5. The Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania
can be read on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
in Washington, DC. A complete copy was also published in Romanian in
2005.
6. As recently as May 6, 2009, several non-governmental organizations were try-
ing to move the project to another location because of the destruction of the
green space where the five constructions of the memorial (the memorial, the
Star of David, the column, Via Dolorosa, and the Roma wheel) are to be
placed.
7. Quoted in Anne Jäckel’s article, “Too Late? Recent Developments in
Romanian Cinema,” 106.
8. See also, Paul Connerton’s discussion about organized forgetting and his-
torical reconstruction in totalitarian regimes: “When a large power wants to
deprive a small country of its national consciousness it uses the method of
organized forgetting” (14). Connerton also refers directly to the Holocaust
as he suggests that Elie Wiesel’s writings are examples of oppositional histo-
ries that “preserve the memory of social groups whose voice would otherwise
have been silenced” (15) because one horrifying aspect of totalitarian regimes
constitutes “the fear that there might remain nobody who could ever again
properly bear witness to the past” (15).
9. Shafir refers also to president Ion Iliescu who, in his speech on the sixtieth
anniversary of the Iron Guard pogrom in Bucharest, lamented the fact that
it was “unjustified to attribute to Romania an artificially inflated number of
Jewish victims for the sake of media impact” (quoted in Shafir, 79). Moreover,
Iliescu expressed hope that this distorted image of Romania will be corrected
once Romanian historians begin work on the topic (Shafir, 79). In Iliescu’s
view, non-Jewish Romanian historians would restore Romania’s image that
Jewish historians tarnished.
10. In the national newspaper Cotidianul, Alexandra Olivotto interviews the
Romanian actor Florin Piersic Jr, the protagonist of Radu Gabrea’s Gruber’s
242 / valentina glajar
Journey (2008). Olivotto’s first question for Piersic is: “A existat Holocaust
in România?” (Was there a Holocaust in Romania?) The answer was equally
disappointing: Piersic does not deny the Holocaust, but refers to those who
claim that Jews “milk the Holocaust for all it’s worth” as not necessarily anti-
Semites, but rather people who cannot understand the trauma of the Jews in
that historical period.
11. In Preludiu la asasinat, Jean Ancel refers to a “Balkan manual Holocaust,”
which he thinks Romanians could have patented after Iaşi, Bessarabia, and
Transnistria (339).
12. The forgotten maritime disaster of the Struma drew the attention of two
film directors in recent years: Radu Gabrea released his documentary in
Romania in 2001 and Simcha Jacobovici in Israel in 2006. The Struma left
the port of Constanţa for Palestine on December 12, 1941 with 769 Jewish
refugees on board and sank in the Black Sea in the dawn hours of February
24, 1942, torpedoed by the Soviet submarine SEI133. David Stoliar was the
only survivor of the Struma. Stoliar’s story of survival and the tragedy of the
Struma is also the subject of D. Frantz and C. Collins’s book Death on the
Black Sea: The Untold Story of the Struma and World War II’s Holocaust at
Sea (2003).
13. In 2005, TVR (Televiziunea Română, Romanian Television) aired several
episodes on the history of the Romanian Jews from 1938 to 1944. This was
the first part of a new series titled “Minorităţi sub trei dictaturi” (“Minorities
under Three Dictatorships”). Many survivors were interviewed as well as
Holocaust historians such as the late Jean Ancel and Radu Ioanid. Two of
the interviewed survivors, Esther Gelbelman and artist Benno Friedel, had
been previously interviewed for the Israeli documentary Transnistria, the
Hell. Ruth Glasberg Gold, a survivor from Czernowitz and author of Ruth’s
Journey, describes her life in Transnistria where she lost her parents and older
brother within three weeks.
14. During a special edition program on the anniversary of the Bucharest
pogrom, Angela Avram, a successful TV moderator, confesses her ignorance
on the topic of the Holocaust in Romania—an ignorance shared by many
Romanians who grew up during Communism and never learned anything
in school about the Holocaust. While listening to her distinguished guests
and Holocaust scholars Lya Benjamin, Liviu Rotman, and Mihai Ionescu,
Avram creates a clear distance between her Romanian Jewish guests and
herself as she attempts several times to speak for ethnic Romanians and
explain to her guests what Romanians really think or fear about assum-
ing responsibility for the Holocaust (Televiziunea Română Internaţional,
January 21, 2008).
15. This was a special edition broadcast by Angela Avram that aired on Televiziunea
Română Internaţional on January 21, 2008.
16. For information on the introduction and treatment of the Holocaust in
Romanian public schools, see Tomas Misco’s study “ ‘We did also save peo-
ple’: A Study of Holocaust Education in Romania after Decades of Historical
Silence.” It analyzes collected data on teacher autonomy and training, institu-
tional support, controversies (especially Antonescu and Roma history), class
time, textbooks, and parental involvement.
framing the silence / 243
17. For an insightful study on the complex territories of silence, see Ronit Lentin’s
Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying the Territories of Silence.
18. In 2002, Alexandra Isles produced the important documentary Porraimos:
Europe’s Gypsies in the Holocaust, but Romanian Roma survivors of Transnistria
are not represented.
19. I would like to thank Tumende TV for entrusting me with a copy of the
movie and for allowing me to discuss it in this article. While I am aware that
there exists one other Romanian film made by Luminiţa Cioabă called Roma
Tears, which was screened at a conference on Transnistria in Jerusalem in
2007, my repeated attempts to procure the movie from the director have been
unsuccessful.
20. For a discussion of Romani Law, see Walter Weyrauch’s edited collection,
Gypsy Law: Romani Legal Traditions and Culture, especially Ronald Lee’s arti-
cle, “The Rom-Vlach Gypsies and the Kris-Romani,” 188–230.
21. For a comparative discussion of the Jewish and Roma Holocaust in
Transnistria, see Jean Ancel’s “Tragedia romilor si tragedia evreilor din
România: asemănări si deosebiri,” 3–32, an introduction to Luminiţa
Cioabă’s collection of testimonies Lacrimi rome/Romane iasfa.
22. The fact that the language of the movie is mostly French confused the
American distributors, as the case of the U.S.-released VHS tape reads: “a
small French village.”
23. For a discussion of the Iaşi pogrom and Malaparte’s depiction of the event in
his novel Kaputt, see Gheorghiu’s essay in this book.
24. None of them have achieved the profound response that the much criticized
NBC’s Holocaust (1978) television miniseries received in Germany when it
aired in January 1979. On the reaction of Germans to the NBC miniseries,
see, for example, Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism:
Notes on the German Reaction to ‘Holocaust’,” New German Critique 19
(Winter 1980): 97-115. In the same issue of New German Critique, see also
Jeffrey Herf ’s article “The ‘Holocaust’ Reception in West Germany: Right,
Center, and Left,” 30–52, and Andrei Marcovits and Rebecca Hayden’s
“ ‘Holocaust’ Before and After the Event: Reactions in West Germany and
Austria,” 53–80.
25. In Ioan Massoff and Radu Tănase’s biography, Constantin Tănase, the actor
and writer N. Stroe is mentioned as one who was affected by the anti-Semitic
measures of the regime in power. Stroe’s name, for example, could not appear
as the writer of one of the shows because he was Jewish. Tănase, however, con-
tinued to pay him until Stroe found a job at the Barasheum Theater, a Jewish
theater in Bucharest (211).
26. Among Romanian historical films of the 1970s, one category comprises films
about celebrated rulers of Romania such as Mihai Viteazu (1970), Dimitrie
Cantemir (1973), Ştefan cel Mare (1974), Vlad Ţepeş (1978), and Intoarcerea
lui Vodă Lăpuşneanu (1979). The other category refers to films about the fight
against Hitler (it was never referred to it as the fight against Nazi Germany,
but always the anti-Hitler fight, even the adjective “antihitlerist” was often
employed) and the illegal Communist movement, such as Stejar, extremă
urgenţă (1973), Porţile albastre ale oraşului (1973), Pistruiatul (1973–1977), Pe
aici nu se trece (1974), Ediţie specială (1977), and Duios Anastasia trecea (1979).
244 / valentina glajar
27. Toma Caragiu was one of the most successful comics in the 1960s and 1970s
and played his most important role in Actorul si sălbaticii. He died during the
earthquake of 1977.
28. Constantin Tănase himself strongly criticized Hitler in couplets that he per-
formed in 1939. According to Massoff and Tănase’s biography, Constantin
Tănase and his writers were inspired by the Munich Treaty of 1938 and the
subsequent occupation of Czechoslovakia to write and perform a satirical
scene called “Don’t say, I didn’t tell you.” He describes the Munich Treaty as a
marked game of poker during which three were paying and one was taking all,
alluding also to the fact that no Czechoslovakian representatives were present
at the treaty. The show was censored after just a few performances (Massoff
and Tănase, 204–205).
29. See especially Part 4, “Characteristics of Rumanian Fascism,” 98–174.
30. Margrit Fröhlich, Hanno Lewy, Heinz Steinert, “Lachen darf man nicht,
lachen muss man.”
31. As Radu Ioanid explains in The Holocaust in Romania, Romanian oil had been
a priority of the Berlin authorities since at least 1935, and in 1940, delivery of
oil to support the anticipated war effort against the USSR became a condition
for the improvement of relations between the two countries (52).
32. For an elaborate discussion of Holocaust denial and deflection in East Central
Europe, see Michael Shafir’s study, “Between Denial and ‘Comparative
Trivialization.’ ”
33. On March 4–5, 1971, a conference under the title “Against Fascism: Critical
Analysis and Exposure of Fascism in Romania” reduced Romanian Fascism
to the Legionary Movement; Jews were mentioned only in a series of vic-
tims, including the proletariat, peasants, worker’s movement, and others.
The papers were published in Împotriva fascismului. Sesiune ştiinţifică privind
analiza critică şi demascarea fascismului în România, Bucharest, 1971 (quoted
in Rotman, 209).
34. See, for example, Rotman’s assessment of the survivors’ situation in post-
Holocaust Romania in “Memory of the Holocaust in Communist Romania,”
205–16. While Olga Lengyel’s Five Chimneys: The Story of Auschwitz (1947)
was probably the first book by a survivor from Romania, it referred to the fate
of the Jews from Hungarian-occupied Northern Transylvania. Her story is
presented in the documentation center of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.
Survivors from Transnistria wrote their experiences very late, in part because
many returned to Romania; Ruth Glasberg Gold’s Ruth’s Journey, for exam-
ple, was published in 1996 in the United States.
35. See Géraldine Kortmann’s excellent article on the absurd in Mihaileanu’s
Train de vie.
36. “Interviu cu Radu Mihaileanu,” http://www.cinemagia.ro/filme/trenul-vietii-
train-de-vie-2917/articol/2802/.
37. See also Žižek’s discussion of the end of comedies and tragedies in “Camp
Comedy.”
38. According to the Final Report of the Wiesel Commission, 1011 out of 5000
survived in the train from Iaşi to Călăraşi; in the second train to Podul
Iloaiei, 2000 out of 2700 lost their lives. See also, Jean Ancel, Preludiu la
asasinat: Pogromul de la Iaşi, 29 iunie 1941, especially chapter 5, “Trenul
framing the silence / 245
in Odessa later that year. He was responsible for the deaths of twenty-two
thousand Jews, most of whom were burned alive in the village of Dalnic near
Odessa on October 23, 1941 (Preludiu la asasinat, 41–42).
48. The meadow at Podul Iloaiei was called “cîmpia morţii” (“meadow of death”)
because of the 1194 dead from the train who were left there for two days until
they reached an advanced degree of putrefaction (Ancel, 339).
49. During the night of the pogrom, Malaparte reports that he and Sartori saved
about one hundred Jewish people as they were trying to flee from the perpe-
trators (Kaputt, 142).
50. In Malaparte’s Kaputt, Malaparte and Sartori convince the officer to open
the train by invoking their connection with Mussolini. Once they opened the
door, they witnessed corpses dropping “in masses” from the train (174).
51. The script writers, Rădulescu and Baciu, are either unaware of, or choosing to
ignore for the sake of the plot, the Jewish custom of not naming children after
living relatives.
52. President Traian Băsescu’s much-publicized racist remark, accidentally
recorded on a cell phone he snapped from a journalist and forgot to turn off,
reflects the attitude of many Romanians toward Romanies. Băsescu called
Andreea Pană a “ţigancă împuţită” (“filthy/stinky Gypsy”). He later apolo-
gized in a press statement claiming that this unfortunate private incident made
public does not reflect his attitude toward the Roma minority. Unfortunately,
this is an all-too-common occurrence in Romania; obviously, the president is
no exception (D. Mihai).
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Emily Miller Budick holds the Ann and Joseph Edelman Chair in
American Literature in the Departments of English and American Studies at
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Her major publications include:
Emily Dickinson and the Life of Language (Louisiana State University Press,
l985); Fiction and Historical Consciousness (Yale University Press, l989);
Engendering Romance (Yale University Press, 1994); Nineteenth- Century
American Romance (Twayne/Macmillan, 1996); Blacks and Jews in Literary
Conversation (Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Aharon Appelfeld’s
Fiction (Indiana University Press, 2004). She also edited Modern Hebrew
Fiction by Gershon Shaked (Indiana University Press, 2000) and Ideology
and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature (SUNY, 2001). She is
currently working on a book-length study of Holocaust fiction.
Alexandru Florian is the executive director of the Elie Wiesel National
Institute for Romanian Holocaust Studies and professor of political science
at the Dimitrie Cantemir University. He is the author of Fundamentele
doctrinelor politice [The Fundaments of Political Doctrines] (Bucharest,
2006), Modele politice ale tranziţiei [Political Patterns of Transition]
(Bucharest, 2004), Romania si capcanele tranziţiei [Romania and the Traps
of Transition] (Bucharest, 1999), Cunoaştere si acţiune socială [Knowledge
and Social Action] (Bucharest, 1987), Procesul integrării sociale [The
Process of Social Integration] (Bucharest, 1983), and the co-author of
Cum a fost posibil? Evreii din România in timpul Holocaustului [How was it
Possible? Romanian Jews During the Holocaust] (Bucharest, 2007), Radu
Florian: Evocations (Bucharest, 2005), Tranziţii in modernitate [Transitions
to Modernity] (Bucharest, 1997), and Ideea care ucide: Dimensiunile ide-
ologiei legionare [The Idea that Kills: The Dimensions of the Legionary
Ideology] (Bucharest, 1994).
Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu is a professor of sociology at the Alexandru
Ioan Cuza University in Iaşi, Romania, and associate member of Centre
de Sociologie Européenne (Paris), Centre d’Etudes de l’Emploi (Noisy le
Grand, CNRS), and Réseau Acteurs Emergents (Fondation Maison des
260 / contributors
Sciences de l’Homme, Paris). Since 2004, he has also served on the scien-
tific council of the Elie Wiesel National Institute for Romanian Holocaust
Studies in Bucharest. He is the author of Intelectualii în cîmpul puterii.
Morfologii si traiectori sociale (Iaşi, 2007), and co-editor of Mobilitatea elite-
lor în România secoluluii al XX-lea (Bucharest) and Littératures et pouvoir
symbolique (Bucharest, 2005).
Valentina Glajar is an associate professor of German at Texas State
University—San Marcos. She is the author of The German Legacy in East
Central Europe (Camden House, 2004), and co-editor (with Domnica
Radulescu) of “Gypsies” in European Literature and Culture (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008) and Vampirettes, Wretches, and Amazons: Western
Representations of East European Women (East European Monographs, dis-
tributed by Columbia University Press, 2004). She also translated (with
André Lefevere) Herta Müller’s novel Traveling on One Leg (Northwestern
University Press, 1998, 2010). Currently, she is working on a book-length
study on generational tales of expulsion and is co-editing a volume on
Herta Müller.
Florence Heymann is ingénieur de recherche at the CNRS in the Centre de
Recherche Français in Jerusalem. Her publications include Le Crépuscule
des lieux (Paris, Stock, 2003) and Un Juif pour l’ islam (Paris, Stock, 2005).
She also co-edited Le Corps du texte: Pour une anthropologie des textes de la
Tradition juive (Paris, CNRS Editions, 1997); L’ historiographie israélienne
aujourd’ hui (Paris, CNRS Editions, 1998); and Lettres choisies de Martin
Buber 1899-1965 (Paris, CNRS Editions, 2004).
Marianne Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English
and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and co-director of the
Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Her recent publications
include Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (1997),
The Familial Gaze (1999), a special issue of Signs on “Gender and Cultural
Memory” (2002), and Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust (2004).
She has also published numerous articles on cultural memory, visuality,
and gender, particularly in respect to the representation of World War II
and the Holocaust in literature, testimony, and photography. Her latest
book is Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory, co-
authored with Leo Spitzer (University of California Press, 2009).
Andrei Oişteanu is a researcher in the fields of cultural anthropol-
ogy and history of religions and mentalities at the Institute for History
of Religions (Romanian Academy) and the president of the Romanian
Association of the History of Religions. He is also an associate professor
at the University of Bucharest, Department of Jewish Studies. He is the
contributors / 261
author of several books, including Mythos and Logos: Studies and essays of
cultural anthropology (Nemira, 1998); Cosmos vs. Chaos: Myth and Magic
in Romanian Traditional Culture (The Romanian Cultural Foundation
Publishing House, 1999); Das Bild des Juden in der Rumänischen
Volkskultur (Konstanz: Hartung- Gore, 2002); Imaginea evreului in cul-
tura românescă (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2004); Religion, Politics and
Myth: Texts about Mircea Eliade and Ioan Petru Culianu, (Bucharest:
Polirom, 2007); Il diluvio, il drago e il labirinto: Studi di magia e mito-
logia europea comparata (Verona: Edizioni Fiorini, 2008); Inventing
the Jew: Anti- Semitic Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central-East
European Cultures, Foreword by Moshe Idel (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2009); Konstruktionen des Judenbildes: Rumänische und
Ostmitteleuropäische Stereotypen des Antisemitismus (Berlin: Frank und
Timme, 2010); Narcotics in Romanian Culture. History, Religion, and
Literature (Iaşi: Polirom, 2010). His books received prestigious prizes in
Romania, Italy, and Israel.
Iulia-Karin Patrut is research collaborator at the University of Trier,
Germany. She is the author of Schwarze Schwester—Teufelsjunge. Ethnizität
und Geschlecht bei Paul Celan und Herta Müller (Cologne, 2006) and co-
editor of Zigeuner’ und Nation. Repräsentation—Inklusion —Exklusion
(Frankfurt am Main, 2008); Minderheitenliteraturen: Grenzerfahrung
und Reterritorialisierung (Bucharest, 2008); Fremde Arme—arme
Fremde‚ Zigeuner’ in Literaturen Mittel- und Osteuropas (Frankfurt
am Main, 2007); Europa und seine‚ Zigeuner’ (Sibiu, 2007); Ethnizität
und Geschlecht. (Post-)koloniale Verhandlungen in Geschichte, Kunst und
Medien (Cologne, 2006); and Die andere Hälfte der Globalisierung.
Menschenrechte, Ökonomie und Medialität aus feministischer Sicht
(Frankfurt am Main, 2001).
Corina L. Petrescu is assistant professor of German at the University of
Mississippi. Her teaching and research interests include National Socialist
Germany, representations of 1968 in the German and Romanian imaginary,
protest movements, transnational/transcultural literature, German-Jewish
relations from the eighteenth century to the present, and Yiddish theater.
Her first book is titled Against All Odds: Models of Subversive Spaces in
National Socialist Germany (Peter Lang, 2009). Her new project focuses on
Romanian-born ethnic German writer Eginald Schlattner and highlights his
contribution to the process of coming to terms with the past in Romania.
Domnica Radulescu is professor of French and Italian literatures at
Washington and Lee University. She is the author of André Malraux: The
“Farfelu” as Expression of the Feminine and the Erotic (Peter Lang, 1994);
262 / contributors
Sisters of Medea (University Press of the South, 2002); and the novels Train
to Trieste (Knopf, 2008) and Black Sea Twilight (Doubleday, 2010). She also
edited Realms of Exile (Lexington Books, 2002) and co-edited Vampirettes,
Wretches, and Amazons: Western Representations of East European Women
(East European Monographs, distributed by Columbia University
Press, 2004); Theater of Teaching and the Lessons of Theater (Lexington
Books, 2005); and “Gypsies” in European Literature and Culture (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008). For her first novel, Train to Trieste, she received the
2009 Fiction Prize from the Library of Virginia.
Deborah Schultz is a research fellow in the Department of History,
University of Sussex, and assistant professor of art history at Richmond
University and Regent’s College, London. Her primary areas of study
focus on word-image relations, historiography, and memory in twentieth-
century and contemporary art. Her major publications include Pictorial
Narrative in the Nazi Period: Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and
Arnold Daghani, co-authored with Edward Timms (London, 2009);
Arnold Daghani’s Memories of Mikhailowka: The Illustrated Diary of a Slave
Labour Camp Survivor, co-edited with Edward Timms (London, 2009);
Marcel Broodthaers: Strategy and Dialogue (Bern: Oxford, 2007); and
“ ‘The Conquest of Space’: On the Prevalence of Maps in Contemporary
Art” (Leeds, 2001). She is a regular contributor to Art Monthly and other
contemporary art journals.
Leo Spitzer is the Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor of History Emeritus at
Dartmouth College and visiting professor of history at Columbia University.
His recent publications include Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a
Refuge from Nazism (Hill & Wang 1998); Lives in Between: Assimilation
and Marginality in Austria, Brazil and West Africa (Cambridge, 1990; Hill
& Wang, 1999) and the co-edited volume Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall
in the Present (University Press New England, 1999). He has also written
numerous articles on the Holocaust and Jewish refugee memory and its
generational transmission. He also co-authored, with Marianne Hirsch,
Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (University
of California Press, 2009).
Jeanine Teodorescu is assistant professor of French at Columbia College in
Chicago. Her teaching and research interests include theatre, the arts, com-
parative literature, Francophone studies, history, and politics. She has writ-
ten articles on Eugene Ionesco and Eastern-European cinema. Her book,
Ionesco, Politics, and Literature: Romania and France, is in preparation.
I n de x
Note: Please note that page numbers appearing in bold indicate illustrations.
Abrasha (member of resistance in Gaissin), 35; Eliade and, 121–122; films and,
94–96, 109 226, 229; Greater Romania Party and,
Acterian, Haig, 119, 127 202; Holocaust denial and, 36;
Actorul şi sălbaticii (The Actor and the Hooligan’s Return and, 175; identity
Savages) (film), 10, 227, 230–233, 237, and, 177; Ioanid and, 231; Manea and,
240 179, 180, 185, 186; media and, 13n20,
Aderca, Marcel, 140, 141 226, 229; present-day Romanian, 219,
Adev ărul (newspaper), 203 228; Puric and, 203–204; state-
Adorno, Theodor, 197, 206–207 sanctioned, 22–24, 26; Tudor and, 33,
Age of Wonders, The (Appelfeld), 160–163, 42n38
171 Antonescu, Ion Marshal, 20, 37n1, 67, 73, 86;
Agnon, S. Y., 158, 159, 165, 168 anti-Semitism and, 28, 34–35, 39n20;
Agora (journal), 141 Communism and, 27; deportations/
agrarian reform of 1921, 21–22 exterminations during regime of, 5–6,
Alexander, Jeffrey, 2 23–24, 41n35, 180, 195; Eliade and, 128;
Alexandru, Laszlo, 179, 192n13 fall of, 25; Fascism and, 182; Goma on, 32,
Alexianu, Gheorghe (governor of 40n29; Greater Romania Party and,
Transnistria), 86 12n19; Iaşi pogrom and, 240; Iron Guard
Aleykhem, Sholem, 212 and, 10; “Jormania” and, 184; Legionary
allies, 25 Movement and, 28, 33, 38n8; praise for, 5,
allies of Nazi Germany, 4, 22, 210 30, 33–36, 40n29, 196; responsibility of,
All That Remains (film), 160, 161–162 29, 31, 229; revisionist history and, 19;
Alpern, Naftali, 86 silence on, 226; Solomovici and, 33;
Amishai-Maisels, Ziva, 108 Solonari on, 2; trials of, 6, 25; Yiddish
Ampel, Rachel, 77–78, 79, 87n3 theater and, 211
Ancel, Jean, 2, 85–86, 226–227, 245n47 Antonescu, Mihai, 57
Andreescu, Gabriel, 30–31 Antschel, Paul. See Celan, Paul
Anii de ucenicie ai lui August Prostul (The Appelfeld, Aharon, 8, 9, 11, 157–173, 176;
Years of Apprenticeship of August the Age of Wonders, 160–163, 171; Beyond
Fool) (Manea), 176 Despair, 168; Ice Mine, 163–165, 171;
Anti-Defamation League, 202 Iron Tracks, 162; mother of, 160,
anti-Fascist Communists, 27 162–163, 166–167, 169–173; Sippur
anti-Semitism, 40n29, 181; Antonescu Haim: Story of a Life, 157, 162–164, 169,
regime and, 28, 34–35, 39n20; 170–171, 176; Transnistria, the Hell,
Appelfeld and, 167; Celan and, 146; 228; Tzili: The Story of a Life,
Christianity and, 202, 206; Coja and, 170–171
264 / index
Arendt, Hannah, 1–2, 177, 185, 197, Black Book (Carp), 3, 25–26, 69, 78
206–207 Blaga, Lucian, 9
Arghezi, Tudor, 9, 203 blame. See responsibility
Aristotle, 205 Blanchot, Maurice, 101
Armata, mare şalul şi evreii (The Army, the Blood Bath in Rumania: “. . . an orgy
Marshal, and the Jews) (Stoenescu), 31 unparalleled in modern history” (article
art. See Daghani, Arnold by United Rumanian Jews of
Artists’ Union, 97 America), 4
August Dohrmann engineering company, Bogdan, Radu, 97
93, 94, 98 Boia, Lucian, 20
Auschwitz, 10, 205, 207; Dante’s Inferno Bolshevik Revolution, 21
and, 198, 202; images on, 219n3; Bosnian Muslims, 207
Nahtshiht and, 215, 219 bourgeoisie, 216
authenticity, 91, 100, 102 Braham, Randolph, 201
Avram, Angela, 242n14 Bregović, Goran, 235
Bremen Literature Prize, 138
Bachmann, Ingeborg, 139 Brenner, Gottfried (Cernăuţi survivor), 58,
Baciu, Alexandru, 237 60, 70
Bal, Mieke, 3 Brenner, Hedy (Cernăuţi survivor), 58–59,
Balzac, Honoré de, 189–190 60
Banuş, Maria, 141 Brenner, Paula (Cern ăuţi survivor), 58
Barasheum Jewish Theater, 33, 41n35, 211, bribery: exemptions/autoriza ţie and,
243n25 68–69; of police, 59
“Barbarie à visage humain, La” (Lévy), Bruckstein, Ludovic, 10, 209, 219
184 Bryson, Norman, 114
barter, 83, 94 Bucharest, Romania, 209, 218
Barthes, Roland, 146 Bucharest pogrom, 4, 27, 130, 218
Bartov, Omer, 2, 235 Buchenwald, 199, 200
Bă sescu, Traian, 196, 246n52 Buchman, Mordechai, 234
“Before the Law” (Kafka), 140 Büchner Prize, 138, 143
Beheaded Rooster, The (film), 229 Bucovina (newspaper), 63
Belzec camp, 23, 29 Bucur, Maria, 2–3
Benda, Julien, 178 Budick, Emily, 9
Benigni, Roberto, 234, 235, 245n39 Bug (river), 73, 93, 96, 106, 108; in
Benjamin, Walter, 113 Daghani’s art, 114
Bercovici, Israil, 218 Bukarester Tagesblatt (journal), 128
Bergmann, Werner, 94, 96, 100–101 Bukovina region, 57, 69, 71, 92, 172;
Bergson, Henri, 114 northern, 58; rural, 80
Bershad ghetto, 96 Bunaciu, Avram, 73
Bettelheim, Bruno, 105 Buna Vestire (far-right publication), 125
“Between Denial and ‘Comparative Buzatu, Gheorghe, 12n19, 33, 34–35,
Trivialization’: Holocaust Negationism 42n38, 226
in Post-Communist East Central
Europe” (Shafir), 226 C ăl ătoria lui Gruber (Gruber’s Journey)
Beyer, Frank, 234, 235 (film), 10, 227, 229, 234, 237–238
Beyond Despair (Appelfeld), 168 Calciu, Laurenţiu, 228–229
Birkenau, 199, 205 Calinescu, Matei, 181
birthplaces, 157–158 Calotescu, Corneliu, 66, 73, 80
index / 265
“Camp interior” (Daghani), 108, 109 74n1, 87n3; Popovici and, 66–68, 72,
“Cântec de dragoste” (Love Song) (Celan), 73; troops in, 58, 80, 93
148 Chagall, Marc, 183
Capsali, Floria, 119 Chalfen, Lulziu (Cernăuţi Jew), 68
Capsali, Sylvia, 119 Chekhov, Anton, 140
Captivi (Captives) (Manea), 176 Chernovtsy, 58
Caragiu, Toma, 230, 244n27 Chiriac, Andreea, 239
Caraion, Ion, 140–141, 145 Christianity, 201–202, 203–207;
Carol II, King of Romania, 26, 38n8, 230 Catholicism and, 198, 205; Christian
Carp, Matatias, 3, 25–26; on Cernăuţi, 58, Serbs and, 207; Daghani’s art and,
59, 69, 72 106–107, 112; Orthodoxy and, 23, 198
Carp, Petre P., 119, 131n3 “Christianity Facing Judaism” (Eliade), 122
Carpathian Mountains, 166, 168 Cine suntem (Who We Are) (Puric),
Cartea neagr ă : Suferin ţele evreilor din 203–204
România 1940–1944 (The Black Book) Cioran, Emil, 127, 177, 180, 187, 191n7, 234
(Carp), 3, 25–26, 69, 78 Clendinnen, Inga, 8
Cartea Rusă (publishing house), 138, 140 “Cloth of our time bearing impression of
Caruth, Cathy, 165 suffering Man” (Daghani), 112
Cassian, Nina, 141, 142 Cocoşul decapitat (The Beheaded Rooster)
catharsis, 105 (film), 229
Catholicism, 198, 205 Codreanu, Corneliu Zelea, 180, 192n15, 232
Cazan, Ileana, 39n25 Coja, Ion, 35–36, 42n43
Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 25, 27, 32, 185, 196; Comarnescu, Petru, 126
nationalism and, 181; Shafir on, 226; Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des
Tudor and, 40n33 Lettres, 176
Ceauşu, Gheorghe, 204 commemoration, Daghani’s art and, 100,
Celan, Paul, 8, 73, 79, 102, 137–149, 105–106, 112–113
181; death of, 147; departure from Communism, 58, 80, 214, 218; Actor and
Romania by, 11; friendships of, 139, the Savages and, 240; Celaru and,
140–149; language and, 9, 138, 220n13; censorship and, 181, 225, 233;
139–140, 141, 142, 147–149, 176; effects of, 227; external evils and, 19;
reception of in West Germany, IKUF, 215; Manea and, 9, 175, 176, 179,
151n30; signature of, 150n7; 182, 184, 185; Marcus and, 230; media
translations of, 140 during, 6, 27–30; Nahtshiht and, 216;
Celaru, Anton, 213, 220n13 1944–1947, 25–27; post-Communist
censorship, 3, 37n8; Celan and, 142; negationism and, 30–36; as “red
Communism and, 181, 225, 233; Plicul Holocaust,” 180; responsibility for, 203–
negru and, 185 204, 240; Romanian Communist Party
Cernăuţi/Czernowitz, 57–74, 58–60, 77, and, 26; Sebastian and, 122; silence and, 3
189; Appelfeld and, 9, 157–163, 168; community, 71
Carp, Matatias and, 58, 59, 69, 72; competition, 20–21
Daghani in, 92–93; deportations from, Complot împotriva României (Plot against
57, 61, 63–69, 71–73, 79, 80–81, 93; Romania) (Hlihor), 41n34
ghetto of, 61–71, 79–80; Jewish Council concentration camps, 143, 227; Belzec, 23,
of, 62, 64, 65; Jewish Hospital of, 65, 29; Buchenwald, 199, 200; Mikhailowka,
67–68; Jewish Temple of, 58, 59; Jews 72, 87n11, 93–96, 98, 106–108;
spared in, 5–6; mail to, 86; Tarrasiwka, 87n11, 96, 106. See also
multiethnicity of, 119, 138; name of, Auschwitz; Birkenau; Moghilev camp
266 / index
Dniester (river), 57, 63, 81 saving from, 5–6, 13n22, 29, 30, 35,
documentaries, 227–230, 240 195–196
Dră gan, Iosif Constantin, 33 extortion from deportees, 82
Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven, 233, 238
education, 4, 30, 39n25
Ehrlich, Isaak (Cernăuţi Jew), 70 Family Friends (Hirsch), 235
Eichmann, Adolf, 207 fanaticism, 207
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Fascism, 4, 24, 184, 206; Antonescu and,
Banality of Evil (Arendt), 1–2 182; blame on for Holocaust, 19;
Einhorn, Erich, 139 Eliade and, 177; Ioanid and, 231;
Einsatzgruppe D, 58, 80 Manea and, 9, 175, 181, 185, 186;
Einsatzkommando Zehn B, 80, 81 Marcus and, 230; media and, 25–27;
Eliade, Mircea, 8, 9, 54, 120, 121, nostalgia for, 196; Popovici and, 189;
131n2; defense of Sebastian by, Sebastian and, 178, 179, 180; Wiesel
121–122, 178; Manea and, 177, 180, and, 202
186; right-wing political stance of, Felix culpa (Happy Guilt), 180
179; Sebastian’s death and, 129–130, Fichman, Pearl (Cernăuţi survivor), 68, 69
191n12. See also Eliade/Sebastian films. See Holocaust films
friendship Final Report (of Wiesel Commission), 4,
Eliade, Nina, 126, 128 23, 34–35, 36, 39n22, 180, 244n38
Eliade/Sebastian friendship, 8, 119–130, Final Solution, 22–24, 35; in Romania, 29
179; Eliade in defense of Sebastian and, fire, 199–200, 231
121–122, 178; Eliade’s avoidance of Fischer, Martha “Atti” (Grae) (secretary at
Sebastian and, 128–129; Eliade’s right- August Dohrmann company), 96,
wing political stance and, 123–124; 100–101
Iphigenia and, 126–128; oscillating Fisher, Julius, 3
nature of, 124–126; Sebastian’s death Flacăra (The Flame) (journal), 217
and, 129–130, 191n12. See also Eliade, “Flaschenpost” (Message in a Bottle)
Mircea; Sebastian, Mihail (Iosef (Celan), 144
Hechter) Florian, Alexandru, 6
Elie Wiesel Goes Home (film), 13n27 Forbidden Forest, The (Eliade), 54
Elie Wiesel Memorial House, 8, 13n27 “Forbidden Laughter” (Loshitzky), 236
Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study forgetfulness, 10, 39n20, 197, 225, 241n8
of the Holocaust, 4 For Two Thousand Years (Sebastian), 177,
Eliezer, 198–202 178
Elsässer, Josef, 94, 100–101 Foucault, Michel, 202
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Ionescu), 180 Foxman, Abraham, 202
Engler, Blanka (Cernăuţi Jew), 62 fragmentation, 99–100
Erll, Astrid, 3, 225 Freud, Sigmund, 181, 186–187
Essays (Montaigne), 181 Frisch, Max, 139
ethnic cleansing, 180
ethnic minorities, 21–22 Gabrea, Radu, 10, 227, 229, 234, 237–241,
evolution, 204 242n12; departure from Romania by, 11
“Excursion into the Mountains” (Kafka), Gafencu, Valeriu, 203
140 “Gastmahl, Das” (The Banquet) (Celan),
exile, 182; of Manea, 186 141
extermination of Jews, 22–24; Holocaust “Geheimnis der Farne, Das” (The Secret of
denial and, 29; recognition of, 196; the Ferns) (Celan), 141
268 / index
Solomon, Petre, 8, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, testimonies, 5, 8, 91, 98–100; letters as,
147 77–79
Solomovici, Te şu, 33, 41n35 Theodorescu, R ă zvan, 39n25
Solonari, Vladimir, 2 “Todestango”/“Todesfuge” (Tango of
southern Romania, 5–6 Death/Death Fugue), 144–145, 152n30,
Soviet Army, 79–80, 212–214, 218; in 176
Cernăuţi, 58, 93; Fascism and, 4; Todt Organisation, 93
Nahtshiht and, 217 totalitarianism, 22, 175, 176, 184, 185. See
Spielberg, Stephen, 233 also Communism; Fascism
Spina, Geri, 214 Totok, William, 32
Spitzer, Leo, 2, 6–7 Train de vie (Train of Life) (film), 10, 227,
Stalin, Joseph, 27 229, 233–238, 240, 245n39
Stanislavski, Konstantin, 212 translations, 8, 142; of Celan, 140; of
Star of Romania award, 12n19, 34, 41n38, letters, 77–78; of Manea, 176
202 transnationality of Celan, 137–138
Stasia (introduced Daghani to Abrasha), 109 Transnistria, the Hell (documentary), 228
Steinberg, Stefan, 235 Transnistria 1941–1942 (Ancel), 86
Steingasse (Rom.: Şt. O. Iosif; Uk.: Transnistria: The Forgotten Cemetery
Pereyaslavska) (Cernăuţi), 62, 63–64 (Fisher), 3
Stoenescu, Alex Mihail, 31, 33, 40n28 Transnistria/Transnistrian Holocaust, 1–2,
stories, 164 3–5, 69, 73, 96, 225–226; Antonescu’s
story (as term), 159 orders and, 35; Communism as compared
Story of a Life, The (Appelfeld), 157, to, 180; deportations to, 184; Eliade and,
162–164, 169, 170–171, 176 130; Hlihor on, 41n34; letters and, 7,
Strette (Celan), 79 77–89; media addressing, 227; paradoxes
Struma disaster, 242n12 in, 79–80; silence and, 226, 228–229;
Sturdza, Dimitrie, 6 Zile însângerate la Iaşi and, 28
Sturdza, M.D., 50 Transylvania, 10, 26, 29, 215, 226
“Sunday morning” (Daghani), 108, 110 Tricolorul (newspaper), 33
survival: art and, 93–94, 109; in Cernăuţi, Trihatz (Trichati), 85
71 “Tristeţe” (Sorrow) (Celan), 148
survivors, 25, 164, 228; guilt of, 96, 105 Tröger, Beate, 150n2
Sword of the Archangel, The (Ioanid), 231 Tudor, Corneliu Vadim, 12n19, 32–34,
40n33, 42n38, 202, 226
Taguieff, Pierre-André, 6, 36 25th Hour, The (Gheorghiu), 54
Tănase, Constantin, 230, 244n28 Twers, Albert (German), 85–86
Tănase, Radu, 243n25 Tzili: The Story of a Life (Appelfeld),
“Tangoul mor ţii” (Celan), 140, 143 170–171
Tarassiwka camp, 87n11, 96, 106
Teatrul Evreesc de Stat (TES) (Jewish State Ukraine, 91, 92, 98, 105–106
Theater), 10, 209, 215 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Teich, Meir (deported from Suceava to (USSR), 25
Transnistria), 81 United Rumanian Jews of America, 4
Teodorescu (police commissioner of United States Holocaust Memorial
Cernăuţi), 59 Museum, 77
Teodorescu, Jeanine, 9 “Untitled (woman with baskets and diary
TES. See Teatrul Evreesc de Stat (TES) entry)” (Daghani), 103
(Jewish State Theater) Uricaru, Eugen, 6, 50
index / 275