“Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening

we drink it at midday and morning we drink it

at night we drink and we drink.” – Paul Celan.

I was 21 years old. I was there. I am a witness. “No one bears witness for the witness” (Paul Celan).

The pogrom in Bucharest on Jan. 21, 1942 took the life of 130 Jews. Gangs of Iron Guard-Legionaries looted hundreds of Jewish homes and dragged their inhabitants away, beat, tortured and killed them. They demolished and burned to the ground hundreds of Jewish stores. They desecrated and torched 25 synagogues, including the majestic ancient Spanish & Portuguese temple, and destroyed Torah scrolls.

These are the images with which I live to this day. The Iron Guard-Legionary criminals looted and devastated the Jewish neighborhood of Bucharest during the three days of Romania’s terrible, but seldom mentioned, “Kristallnacht,” from Jan. 21 to 23, 1941. They took away innocent people from their homes, their workplaces and places of worship, only to kill them mercilessly and to hang them, like cattle, from hooks in slaughterhouses with tags reading “Kosher Meat.”

Emil Dorian, a witness as I am, recalls the devastation in his memoir The Quality of Witness: A Romanian Diary 1937-1944:

What happened in Vacaresti, Dudesti (Jewish populated areas) and surrounding neighborhoods remains indescribable. Suffice it to list the destruction, the looting and the bestial crimes. But even that is impossible. The fury of the looters has not spared anybody or anything. Shop after shop with shutters wrenched off their hinges, windows smashed, walls burned, rooms emptied – made it impossible to guess what had been seen before.

The great beautiful Sephardic synagogue has been completely destroyed. They set [it] on fire with cans of gasoline placed in four corners, and looters danced by the flames. The list of beaten and tortured people is endless, and crimes cover the complete range of a demented imagination, Jews forced to drink gasoline with EPSOM salts, crosses cut on the skin of their backs, torture and killing, on and on….[i]

The Chief Rabbi of Romania at the time, Alexander Safran, recalls in his memoirs: “During these days, the Iron Guard Legionaries also occupied the Malbim Beith Hamidrash and tortured many Jews there. They killed the cantor of the Coral Temple, while he was conducting the Minhah services. They also killed Jews who had come there to say Kaddish. Dozens of Jews were first tortured and transported to the Jilava forest. All men were shot.”[ii]

In his recent book, Radu Ioanid describes: “Severe beatings and other forms of humiliation usually preceded the murders, and indeed it was the physical abuse that constituted the favored medium by which the Legionaries and their friends expressed their aptitudes. Many Jews were abused at the Bucharest prefecture of police. The women were, by and large, released after physical abuse, which explains the small number of women’s names that appears on the list of murdered victims.”[iii]

Today’s Romania finally acknowledged its atrocities during the Holocaust years of 1940 to 1944, and its government promised to ensure that the crimes committed will be taught in high schools and universities. However, education of the Holocaust in Romania is said to be optional. But this course must be mandatory, and taught as an integral part of Romania’s history.

Before World War II, some 800,000 Jews lived in Romania. They were a community proud of its rich creative contribution to all fields of Romanian society. Today, a mere 6,000 to 8,000 elderly Romanian Jews still live in the country (who are well taken care of with financial help not from the Romanian government, but from the Canadian and American Jewish communities).

In 2004, the former Romanian president, Ion Iliescu, rewarded two known Holocaust deniers and devout anti-Semites, Corneliu Vadim Tudor and Ghorghe Buzatu, with the country’s highest medal of honor.

Today, there are still reports of vandalism and desecration of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in Romania. There are also reports of graffiti denying the Holocaust and the publication of anti-Semitic books and anti-Semitic statements in state-owned, as well as private, media, without the objection or the interference of the government. Despite solemn promises by Iliescu and current Romanian president, Traian Basescu, nothing has changed in Romania. Financial reparations for the confiscation and theft of Jewish properties during the Holocaust have not been given, and the educational system still has not made the history of the Holocaust an essential part of its curriculum.

Zackor! Remember!