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The Kishinev Ghetto, 1941â?"1942

A Documentary History of the Holocaust in Romania's Contested Borderlands

The University of Alabama Press

The Chisinau (Kishinev) Ghetto, 1941–1942

Creation, Administration, Liquidation

Paul A. Shapiro

Prologue: Documenting the Tragedy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because "the periphery" to which Munteanu had referred had remained under Soviet control at the end of the war, archival research on the Holocaust in Romania extended beyond Romania's borders. In Moldova and Ukraine — in Chisinau, Chernivtsi, Mikolaiv Odessa, Vinnitsa, and other places where Romanian forces operated or where Romanian and German zones of occupation met — largely untouched archival collections from the wartime administration of Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and Transnistria added pieces to complete the puzzle. Bit by bit, a well documented picture emerged of the intentions and directives of Romania's wartime regime — the bureaucratic structures, civil-military sharing of responsibilities, and reporting requirements put in place to implement and document the Romanianization of personnel and property, forced labor inside Romania and in Romanian-administered territory, and the concentration in camps and ghettoes, deportation, and death visited upon Romanian and Ukrainian Jewry by the Antonescu regime. The names and fates of victims, fortunate survivors, heroes, and villains filled lists and memos, official communiqués and reports, Jewish community records, property receipts and travel passes. All of these documents have been copied and preserved at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a resource for scholars and lest the names be forgotten.

Archival missions after 1991 have made more than two million pages of previously inaccessible records on the Holocaust in Romania available at the museum to interested researchers, resulting in the publication of important new studies in the United States, Israel, Western Europe, and Romania itself. Reflecting the tragic enormity of the crime, there is a remarkable richness of documentation — from orders to military units and reports back up the chain of command, in the Ministry of National Defense materials; to the formal stuff of government bureaucracy, in the papers of many ministries in Bucharest; to name lists of Romanian Jews put to forced labor in Romania proper or in camps and villages with non-Romanian names, in records located in Ukrainian archival repositories in the former Transnistria; to communications between Romanian authorities and local collaborators as well as German authorities in German-occupied Ukraine beyond the Bug; to chilling reports on innocents liquidated when they could not keep up the pace during forced marches eastward from their homes.

Each archival collection from "the periphery" has a unique quality, or at least some particular fond or focus that adds a new perspective on what happened in those places in those years. From the Chernivtsi (Cernauti) collection one can see the careful consideration, principally on economic grounds, of who would be allowed to remain in the ghetto during the summertime deportations of 1941, and one also samples the flavor of hundreds of denunciations, by individual private citizens, of Jews seen outside the ghetto after curfew, or seen in a coat that had the required Star of David, but sewn on the wrong side. In the Mikolaiv archive one comes face to face with the fate of Jews (and Roma) in Golta province, at the outer reaches of Transnistria, caught between misery and likely death in the Romanian zone, and for those whose names appear on long, carefully assembled name lists, more certain death in the German zone just across the river. In Odessa, one encounters the mass killing of virtually the entire Jewish population of that great city, and mass death in the transit camps and ghettoes of Berezovka, Acmecetka, Domanovka, Bershad, Bogdanovka, and Golta. And in Vinnitsa, like Mikolaiv a spot where Romanian and German occupation zones met, one can see agonizing records of the forced resettlement, forced labor, and starvation of Romanian and local Jews in places like Vindiceni, Moghilev, Ladijin, Iampol, Sargorod, Djurin, Vapniarka, and Copaigorod, all place names that became graveyards for individuals whose names we now know.

In Chisinau, where the State Archives and later the National Assembly and even the successor authority to the former Soviet KGB opened archives for review, the materials also proved to be unique and powerful. The provincial capital of Romanian Bessarabia between the wars and of Soviet Moldavia and then independent Moldova after the war, Chisinau was the center of administration of Romanian-ruled Bessarabia from mid-1941 to mid-1944. As an administrative "capital," the seat of the provincial governor and the regional Inspectorate of the Gendarmerie, Chisinau received communications directly from the central government in Bucharest and reported directly to Bucharest. The city hosted civilian and military occupation authorities that shared direct responsibility for the treatment of the Jews of Bessarabia and of Chisinau itself. It became a principal records repository then and remained so after the war. Because of the rapid Red Army advance into the city in 1944 and Soviet archival practices thereafter, a significant body of original and first copies of government records of the Romanian Commissariat for Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria (Comisariat pentru Basarabia, Bucovina si Transnistria — CBBT) regarding the fate of the Jews of Bessarabia remained there, or were deposited there, after the war. A large volume of central files from Bucharest, including records relating to the Jews, were turned over to Soviet authorities during implementation of the armistice, and some of these record collections came to rest in Chisinau as well. All together, this documentation reveals a clear policy, implemented step by step and on a priority basis, directed and watched carefully by Romania's Conducator (Leader), Ion Antonescu, at the center. The policy focused on entirely eliminating Jews from Chisinau as well as from the rest of Bessarabia. The documentation shows clearly that "on the periphery" in Bessarabia, as elsewhere, Antonescu was in control and proved himself a war criminal and murderer.

The creation and liquidation of the Chisinau Ghetto was a part of the policy Antonescu directed in this region. The Jews of Chisinau had known antisemitic actions in the past, most notably during the Easter Pogrom of 1903 under Tsarist rule, and after the union of Bessarabia with Romania in 1918 had felt the heat of Romanian antisemitism, fueled in this region by Alexandru C. Cuza's League of Christian National Defense and Corneliu Z. Codreanu's Iron Guard. But they never had experienced anything to prepare them for the summer and fall of 1941.

Chisinau Reoccupied

From the summer of 1941 through the spring of 1942 the Jewish population of Chisinau, at one time nearly half the population of the city, and briefly during 1940–41 perhaps even more than half, was eliminated. A year after the Soviet Union occupied Bessarabia and its capital as a consequence of a twenty-four hour ultimatum by the Soviets to the Romanians in mid-1940, Romanian forces, accompanied by units of the Wehrmacht Eleventh Army and Einsatzgruppe D, reoccupied Chisinau with bloody massacres of Jews along the main routes of approach and vicious killings in the city itself. German units reported finding only about four thousand Jews when they entered the city. But many Jews who had fled as Soviet forces prepared to withdraw from Chisinau on July 13 soon found their way blocked by rapidly advancing Romanian-German forces and subsequently returned to the city. During their occupation, the Soviets had deported thousands of people from Bessarabia — Jews and non-Jews. Men of military age had been recruited and taken away. Additional Jews had fled Chisinau between the joint Romanian-German attack across the Pruth and the final Soviet pull-back from the city, during which time the departing Soviet forces had mined and set fire to most of the city center. Picking up the anti-Communist/anti-Jewish fervor of the first days of occupation, one Romanian commander who arrived in Chisinau at the beginning of August reported that "with the exception of suburbs and a few of the more important buildings in the center of the city, everything had been turned to ruin by the wildness of the judeo-communist armies." A commission of inquiry, appointed some months later by Ion Antonescu to investigate irregularities in administration of the Chisinau ghetto, described the city as "consumed by fire, shaken to its foundations, dynamited by the retreating Red Army. ... Smoldering ruins and scattered corpses of people and animals lay everywhere, bands of robbers and good-for-nothings, ... deserters and armed elements, remnants of the communist army, [were] still in control in the periphery of the city." The commission accused the Jews who withdrew with Soviet forces of destroying their own properties before leaving. German reports confirmed the widespread destruction they found in the wake of the Sovet withdrawal, noting that "on account of fires and explosions the majority of public buildings are destroyed."

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Excerpted from The Kishinev Ghetto, 1941â?"1942 by Paul A. Shapiro, Angela Jianu. Copyright © 2015 the University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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