Narratives of Survival. Tracing the Living Memory of the Holocaust in Romania (1944–1947)
Narratives of Survival. Tracing the Living Memory of the Holocaust in Romania (1944–1947)

Summary/Abstract: The article adopts a predominantly descriptive approach, seeking to recover the manifestations of the “living memory” of the Holocaust in Romania from 1944 to 1947, as they can be found in documents, testimonies, investigative volumes, journals, memorial prose, visual representations and early fictional or theatrical works. This mapping aims to identify how survivors, communal institutions, and cultural milieus attempted, in the immediate aftermath of the war, to inscribe the experience of persecutions, deportations, and massacres into a plural, heterogeneous corpus not yet subjected to ideological filtering. The descriptive undertaking is designed to observe how this direct memory was subsequently blocked, rewritten, or marginalized, primarily through its incorporation into a strongly ideologized discourse aligned with the Soviet model, which subsumed Jewish suffering under the generic paradigm of “anti-fascism.”The central conclusion is that, between 1944 and 1947, a genuine “mnemonic community” of the Holocaust in Romania emerged in a spontaneous and multifaceted manner ways, grounded in the voices of survivors and in the ethical imperatives of testimony. This living memory was, however, rapidly marginalized, selectively archived, filtered, and resemanticized by successive ideological regimes, a dynamic that explains the fragile integration of the Holocaust into Romanian cultural memory up until the post-2004 period.

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