World Jewish News

Romania whitewash of Transnistria invasion angers Holocaust survivors.

According to a Romanian court, the country's 1941 invasion of Pridnestrovie - then called Transnistria - was legitimate. Relatives of more than 300,000 Jews who died as a result disagree, and the whitewash has Holocaust survivors in tears. The Bucharest Court of Appeals delivered the decision in December 2006. As a consequence of the ruling, members of the Romanian government who had been condemned in 1946 for their decision to attack Pridnestrovie (Transnistria, in Romanian) together with the Nazis were pardoned of any war crime of invading foreign territory.
The name Transnistria was decreed into existence by the Romanian dictator, Marshal Ion Antonescu, in the summer of 1941.
Territorially, Transnistria was the largest killing field in the Holocaust. Many authors refer to it as "The Romanian Auschwitz". The name of that territory was in existence until the spring of 1944, when the Soviet Army re-conquered southern Ukraine.
Despite the evidence, Romania today feels that what Ion Antonescu did in Transnistria was OK. The decision by the Bucharest Court, in justifying the invasion, is in line with how most Romanians feel about Antonescu and his actions. Antonescu made it to number 6 in the Top 10 of the Greatest Romanians in a vote on a Romanian TV show last fall.
Thanks to Romanian government attempts to cover up its killings of Europe's third-largest Jewish population, knowledge of the killings fields of Transnistria is absent from most official histories of World War II war crimes.
" - Today Transnistria is a historic phantom, having vanished without a trace. But in Jewish history it is inscribed in blood and tears; it will never be forgotten. Transnistria spells horror - horror that defies description; savage revolting acts of cruelty and bestiality; ... in which one group of men torture, rob, and destroy their helpless victims in cold blood. Transnistria symbolizes genocide," writes Julius Fischer in his book "Transnistria, The Forgotten Cemetery."
With the latest decision by Bucharest, new legitimacy has been given to Holocaust denial and Romanian whitewashing of World War II atrocities which were carried out both against Jews as well as against the non-Romanian Slavic majority of Pridnestrovie at the time.
Unlike Nazi Germany, which targeted for annihilation the Jewish population of an entire continent, Romania's Fascist regime was concerned with "solving the Jewish Problem" only within its own borders, reports Dr. Felicia Steigman Carmelly, another Transnistria survivor. Whereas the Third Reich prepared, and conducted each stage of the "Final Solution" plan with scientific and administrative precision, the Romanian approach was less organized and less methodical. However, whatever the Romanian perpetrators lacked in planning and technical means, they made up with fervor and determination in their brutality.
Even German Nazi officials who were not known for their compassion were disgusted by the activities of the Romanians. Reporting on the deportation and killings of Romanian Jews in 1941, the Italian journalist, Curzio Malaparte, describes the following exchange between Hans Frank, the Nazi-appointed Governor General of Poland, and his subordinate, Fischer, the Governor of Warsaw:
" - The Romanian people are not a civilized people," said Frank contemptuously.
" - That's right, they have no culture," said Fischer.
Carmelly, now residing in Canada, says that during the last five decades Romania's governments did not assume responsibility for the annihilation of about half of its Jewry. That chapter in the country's history was constantly ignored. Some Romanian politicians, historians, and writers are currently trying to whitewash the atrocities inflicted on the Jews by altering, or even entirely denying certain historical facts.
The whitewashing is done, says Carmelly, by attempting to attribute the wartime abominations to a fringe of the population. In fact, anti-Semitism was a widespread historical phenomenon in Romania. During the Holocaust, Romanians of all socio-economic strata became willing and active participants in the persecution and killing of Jews.

Источник: tiraspoltimes.com