A father and his sons: Wilhelm Filderman’s efforts to find information and shelter his sons during the Holocaust
A father and his sons: Wilhelm Filderman’s efforts to find information and shelter his sons during the Holocaust

Summary/Abstract: Wilhelm Filderman is a towering figure in the history of Romanian Jews. Despite a plethora of mentions in Holocaust and Jewish history studies, there are significant parts of his biography still unknown. This article examines one such unknown aspect – his desperate efforts to locate, communicate with, and save his two sons, Ronetti and Gabriel, who were caught in France and United Kingdom as the Second World War started. The situation was more worrying in the case of Ronetti, who was deported in spring 1944 from Southern France to Germany and, according to rumors at the time, to occupied Poland. Filderman’s pleas to various international Jewish and non-Jewish organizations, to the German embassy in Bucharest and the Romanian government, are a testament to wartime hardships in finding information in general and information about deportees in particular. They also show Wilhelm Filderman, the father, who, at the same time he was doing everything in his power to protect the Jewish community of Romania, was also passing through a profound tribulation in his private life.

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