From “Captive” Narratives to a Necessary Reinterpretation: Jews Executed for Antifascist Activities during World War II in Romania
From “Captive” Narratives to a Necessary Reinterpretation: Jews Executed for Antifascist Activities during World War II in Romania

Summary/Abstract: This article analyzes several cases in which Jewish ethnics were indicted, convicted, and executed by the authorities of the Antonescu regime. In most cases, the facts of which they were accused were assimilated by the prosecutors and judges to the sphere of conspiratorial illegal communist activity, without sufficient or clear evidence to prove this. The method entailed at least two benefits for the authorities: on the one hand, it supported the idea of the predominance of Jews in the communist movement, thus justifying the correlation of Jewishness with the “Bolshevik danger”; on the other hand, it justified the antisemitic policies and anti-racial laws of the Ion Antonescu regime. From this point of view, my article’s objective is an analysis of these stories based on historical sources, which seeks to unveil and reinterpret such “captive” histories.

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