In loving memory of Malca z”l

“IASI, Saturday, July 12, 1941: A DARK SOMBER, INSANE NIGHTMARE”

(Mihail Sebastion, Journal 1935-1944)

The Romanians did not need Nazi guidance for starting or initiating a pogrom. The events of the last days of June 1940 may be considered the final rehearsal for the Holocaust in Romania.

On June 28 to 29 1940 Romanian troops retreating from Cernowitz and Hotin, fleeing the Soviet Red Army, entered the City of Dorohoi. In a sharply antisemitic atmosphere, the often-repeated accusation that Jews had fired on retreating Romanian troops was heard. Soldiers in the city advised townspeople of an impending pogrom, and on many houses, walls, and fences Romanians wrote in large letters “Here live Romanians”, or sketched crosses and displayed Romanian flags. Romanian solders forced their way into Jewish homes. They raped, tortured, and murdered the inhabitants, killing almost two hundred Jews in Dorohoi (though the official number is given as 52 deaths!). Thus began the Iasi pogrom in Dorohoi, in June 1940.

From the very beginning of the “Barbarossa action” the German war against Soviet Russia, on June 22, 1941, the Jewish leadership had sensed that preparations were being made for a crime against the Jews of Iasi. The presence of thousands of German and Romanian troops in and around the town alarmed them and amplified their concern for the days ahead. No document, however, could describe the atmosphere of terror in which the Jews lived in the months, and particularly the days, that preceded the massacre on June 29th, 1941.

Not a day had passed without communiqués containing accusations against and restrictions on the Jewish community. The Romanian press in general and the local press in particular played an important role in preparing the ground for the massacre—at least in ideological terms. Radu Lecca, a Gestapo agent who would later become the master of the fate of Romanian Jewry, was seen in Iasi, and often visited the editors of the Opinia the leading antisemitic local newspaper.

Lecca was of great influence, meeting with the inspector of the Iasi police and the editors of Opinia. Opinia would publish heavily NAZI propaganda in exchange for considerable payments. The same could be said about the morning newspaper MOLDOVA, and the local printing houses connected to Christian antisemitic journalists. Other daily newspapers, like PRUTUL, fueled Iasi’s public opinion. All these newspapers had a fascist, hooligan orientation, which incited to racial hatred and violence.

According to the historian Jean Ancel, Iasi was “the capital of The Iron Guard-Fascist movement,” hence, destined to become a center of the greatest crimes in Romanian history. It also played an important role in the greatest Jewish tragedy.

On the eve of Saturday, June 28, 1941, the chilling cry of air raid sirens could be heard throughout Iasi. It was a false alarm that had been ordered beforehand by those who organized the “action.” The following day, “The Sunday that was” (Duminica aceia) became known as the bloodiest day in the history of Romanian Jewry. The Jews of Iasi were forcibly gathered and brought to police headquarters on false pretenses, and were then fired upon randomly.

The army, the gendarmes and the Iron Guard thugs fired without mercy on an amorphous mass of people. They died as a result of beatings, shootings, and being smothered underneath the corpses that covered them.

Meanwhile, the pogrom spread across the city, insane in its violence and with a cruelty that made everything that had ever happened before pale in comparison.

The Iasi pogrom, which began on the 28th and 29th of June, formally ended on the 6th of July 1941, with the Jewish corpses having been transported by train to the town of Calarasi.

On the evening of June 29, at the initiative of the local military authorities and with the approval of the superior governmental authorities, the survivors of the massacre, about 4,500 in number, were taken to the train station in savagely tormented convoys, and there they were loaded into two trains to be evacuated and confined in other cities. Crushed in overloaded wagons, with closed doors, and covered windows, without food, water, air, about two-thirds died. The official government communiqué: 500 “Judeo-Communists, spies of Soviet Russia”, were shot dead in Iasi. The exact total of victims will never be known.

Within a few days, a proud, creative and culturally rich Jewish community, over 500 years old, was destroyed. Of the 45,000 Jews that had lived in Iasi, close to 13,000 were murdered.

In the summer of 1941, black was the predominant color worn by the remaining Jews in Iasi, and yellow was the color of the star sewn onto their clothing.

ZAKOR-REMEMBER!

Sources:

1) Ancel, Jean. “The Iasi Syndrome,” (Romanian Jewish Studies, Vols. 1 and 2, Spring and Winter 1987, Jerusalem)

2) Carp, Matatias, “Cartea Neagra,” [Romanian] The Black Book – (Diogene, Bucharest, 1996.

(Baruch Cohen is Research Chairman of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research)