In memory of Hannah and Mendel Lift z''l who perished in Transnistria, and Sophie, Haim, Paula and Fanny, who survived Transnistria. In honour of the new generation: Hannah, Benjamin, Vicky, Ella and all the great grand-children.

World War II encapsulated the most debasing aspects of the human soul. As in every war, it carried the abominable germs of human savagery. The principle victim of its unspeakable cruelty was the Jewish population of Europe.

The history of the Holocaust of the Jews living in Romania, as that of Jews residing in other European regions, encompasses both the perpetrators and the victims.

The Holocaust of Romanian Jews took place in the region of Transnistria. Prior to July 1941, the geographic entity called Transnistria did not exist. No region, province or country had ever been mentioned by this name, nor was the name to be found on any map.

During World War II, the term Transnistria was coined for a part of Ukraine, a strip of rich and fertile land stretching north from the Black Sea and bounded by the Dniester and Bug Rivers. Jewish life had flourished here for several centuries. It was where the mystic Baal Shem Tov brought hope and joy as he wandered from one town to the next. It was from this area that Sholom Aleichem drew inspiration for his many literary heroes, including Fiddler on the Roof’s Tevye the Milkman. Odessa, Transnistria’s largest city and one of Eastern Europe’s richest Jewish cultural hubs, brought the world famous Jewish personalities such as Chaim Nachman Bialik, Achad Ha’am, Mendele Mocher Sfarim, S.M. Dubnov, Menachem Usiskin, as well as the group of thinkers and writers involved with the distinguished publications Ha’Shiloach and Ha’Olam.

The territory of Transnistria had been ceded to the Romanian government, led by war criminal General Ion Antonescu, to be exploited and administered. Beginning in August 1941, Antonescu ordered the deportation to Transnistria of close to 400,000 Romanian Jews from Bessarabia, Bukovina, Dorohoi and other areas. Until April 1944, the Romanian Jews were under constant threat of deportation to Transnistria.

During those three years Transnistria would become known as the killing field for Romania’s Jews. Although there were no gas chambers in Transnistria, and the killing there wasn’t as organized as it was in the immense death-factories of Maidanek, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz, two-thirds of the deported Jews were murdered.

Close to 350,000 Jews were murdered, and the killings were carried out by assassination, massacres, extermination, brutal persecution, torture, plunder, misery, disease and famine. The killing methods were extremely various and included almost everything the evil human mind could conceive.

But the suffering endured by the Romanian Jews was not due to German pressure. The massacres were carried out by soldiers and officers of the Romanian forces. The death marches throughout northern Bukovina and Bessarabia, the internment camps of Edinetti, Secureni, Vertujeni and Marculesti, as well as the deportations of the summer and autumn of 1941, were authorized by the Romanian army and approved by higher civil authorities.

In 1944, when Romania was liberated by the Soviet Union from Antonescu’s fascist government, approximately 300,000 Jews living within Romania’s borders, as well as roughly 68,000 Jews residing in nearby regions, had managed to survive. This was truly a Jewish miracle.

The survival of these populations was a result of various factors. The most significant, I believe, are the following:

* Romania was not under German military occupation.

* Romania’s national economy could not function without the necessary services of Jewish merchants and businesses.

* The Romanian leaders were of fickle temperament and character.

The soviet army’s swift attack on Romania in March 1944 eliminated the danger surrounding Transnistria and saved Jewish lives. The physically and emotionally weary survivors of the Transnistria killing field were finally free. Zakor! Remember!

As writer Ahron Appelfeld, a survivor of Transnistria, explained, “after the war, the first strategy for many survivors was oblivion, an attempt to escape the past, the camps, the ghettoes, the tortures, the humiliation – but I realized that without my past, what am I? Without the dimension of my past, life would be only on the surface.”

We must resist letting our past be forgotten. The more we understand and remember our history, the better our future and the futures of our children and subsequent generations will be.

While the name Transnistria may only have been coined in the last century, the memory of Transnistria, of the endless and terrible suffering of hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives, will remain a horrible chapter in history. Zakor! Remember!

(Baruch Cohen, Research Chairman of CIJR, is a Holocaust survivor)