Balkan Anti-Semitism: The Cases of Bulgaria and Romania before the Holocaust

Author(s): William I. Brustein,Ryan D. King / Language(s): English Issue: 03/2004

The considerable difference between Bulgaria and Romania with regards to Jews and anti-Semitism makes for an intriguing case study, and the available evidence thus far appears to challenge prominent theories of European anti-Semitism. Why did Bulgaria protect its Jews despite its alliance with Nazi Germany during WWII, while anti-Semitism flourished in Romania? Were these countries equally as distinct with regards to anti-Semitism prior to the rise of European fascism? If so, how great was the difference in popular anti-Semitism in the two countries, and how might the differences be explained? In this article, the authors attempt to address the latter two questions by examining Bulgarian and Romanian anti-Semitism prior to WWII. They seek to show that popular anti-Semitism in Bulgaria was noticeably scant between 1899 and 1939 while rather extensive in Romania during the same period, attempt to illustrate where existing theories of anti-Semitism have trouble explaining the cases of Bulgaria and Romania, and propose an eclectic theory to account for societal variation in anti-Semitism.

The Romanian Holocaust: Family Quarrels

Author(s): Irina Livezeanu / Language(s): English Issue: 03/2002

The review of: 1) Randolph Braham, ed. The Destruction of Romanian and Ukrainian Jews During the Antonescu Era. Holocaust Studies Series. Social Science Monographs. Boulder, Colo.; New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 413 pp. 2) Randolph Braham. Romanian Nationalists and the Holocaust: The Political Exploitation of Unfounded Rescue Accounts. Holocaust Studies Series. Social Science Monographs. Boulder, Colo.; New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. 289 pp. 3) Radu loanid. The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies Under the Antonescu Regime, 1940-1944. Chicago, Ill.: Ivan R. Dee, 2000. 352 pp.

Jedwabne: Will The Right Question Be Raised?

Author(s): Ilya Prizel / Language(s): English Issue: 01/2002

The review of: Jan Gross. Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Apologies for Jedwabne and Modernity

Author(s): Andrzej W. Tymowski / Language(s): English Issue: 01/2002

The review of: Jan Gross. Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, Princeton University Press, 2001.

PARADIGMA ITALIJANSKOG DRUŠTVA U ROMANU CRVENI KARANFIL ELIJA VITTORINIJA

Author(s): Mirza Mejdanija / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 1/2020

Following 1925, Italy was facing a downright fascist dictatorship. The ruling politics imposed dictatorship starting with oaths of faithfulness to the regime, all the way to newspapers and school textbooks censorship. The first novel by Elio Vittorini, The Red Carnation, was confiscated by fascist censors, then revised and edited by a Florentine official. The edited and censored novel was published for the first time in 1948 by Mondadori publishing and the version published was not the original version the author himself no longer possessed. The novel tells a story of a local youth, Alessio Mainardi, and his initiation into adult life. He lives in a student dormitory together with other boys of his age. He falls in love with a classmate, Giovanna, and even manages to kiss her on one occasion. As a token of her affection, Giovanna presents him with a red carnation that he keeps and holds dear. He is constantly holding onto this illusion of love and confides in his best friend, Tarquinio. The story in the novel takes place by the end of spring 1924, the days which are in Italy known for the Matteotti affair. Alessio and his friends consider themselves fascist. They attend protests against the Matteotti commemoration organised by antifascists. It is in this novel that Vittorini is trying to resort to a mythical transfiguration owing to which the narrative reality becomes fairytale-like, distant from time and space, without losing anything from its actual heaviness of the balance achieved between myth and reality. By means of a stylistic quest, Vittorini is trying to transfer history into a literary dimension in an allusive and symbolic way. He understands that his duty, as an author, is to transfer historical reality into symbols while the historical events depicted in the novel are the rise of fascism in Italy and Matteottiʼs murder. By means of fairytale imagery, myth and symbol, the author is trying to portray the reality in Italy at the time.

The Holocaust in Romania: Murderous or Providential Anti-Semitism?

Author(s): Dennis Deletant / Language(s): English Issue: 01/2001

The review of: Radu loanid. The Holocaust in Romania. The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940-1944. Chicago, Ill.: Ivan R. Dee, 2000. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 352pp. Notes. Index. Maps.

Attitudes of Young Poles Toward Jews in Post-1989 Poland

Author(s): Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs / Language(s): English Issue: 03/2000

For over nine centuries before the outbreak of the Second World War, Poland was a multiethnic country. Jews in Poland constituted the largest Jewish community in Europe, the second largest in the world, and 10% of Poland's population. Their history on Polish soil goes back as far as Poland's history does. The destruction of European Jewry took place in Poland, and Jewish Polish citizens were victims of the Holocaust. Later, communist ideology denied the existence of ethnic differences between people. History was suppressed; many sites and events were erased from the collective memory. New narratives were supplied; new history books were written. [...]

Double Memory: Poles and Jews After the Holocaust

Author(s): Piotr J. Wróbel / Language(s): English Issue: 03/1997

Contemporary Polish-Jewish relations resemble a vicious circle. On the one hand, most Poles firmly believe that Poland has always been one of the most tolerant countries in the world and that anti-Semitism has existed only on the margins of Polish society. As far as they are concerned, there has been no such phenomenon as Polish anti-Semitism, for Poland has always been a true paradisus Judeorum. On the other hand, most Jews, especially those on the American continent and in Western Europe, claim that Poland is one of the most anti-Semitic countries in the world. Jews have often shared the former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir's belief that virtually all Poles received their anti-Semitism "with their mothers' milk." Often, this unfortunate polarization makes any reasonable communication, let alone consensus, quite impossible. [...]

Ionesco and Rhinoceros: Personal and Political Backgrounds

Author(s): Matei Calinescu / Language(s): English Issue: 03/1995

Eugène Ionesco's conscious and unconscious memories of the Romanian 1930s and early 1940s accompanied him throughout his life and directly inspired one of his major plays, Rhinoceros, written in 1958. The rise in Romania of the extreme right-wing Iron Guard or Legionary movement and Ionesco's distressing experience of growing fanaticism among Romanian intellectuals, and even among his closest literary friends, was acknowledged by him as one of the sources of the play. [...]

The Cold War and the Appropriation of Memory: Greece after Liberation

Author(s): Mark Mazower / Language(s): English Issue: 02/1995

Everywhere in Europe the obsessions and polarities of the cold war era imposed themselves upon people's understandings and memories of the Second World War, but in few, if any, countries can they have done so with greater force or speed than in Greece. Well before the Truman Doctrine revealed Greece's importance as a locus for the cold war, perhaps even before the December 1944 fighting between the British and the National Liberation Front/Greek People's Liberation Army (EAM/ELAS), the left-wing resistance movement, the conflict between communism and anticommunism had overlaid and superseded the struggle against fascism. [...]

The Romanian Participation in the Holocaust by Bullets

Author(s): Marius Cazan / Language(s): English Issue: 13/2020

This article continues to follow the 6th ‘Vânători’ Regiment’s itinerary from the summer of 1941, after the slaughtering of the Jews in Sculeni. Its advancing in Bessarabia meant the crossing of a territory where large Jewish communities lived. The entire edifice of ideology and propaganda that equated the Jewish identity with the affiliation to communism, one that the military supported earnestly, was used to bring the Romanian troops to and keep them in the right state of mind. The article aims at describing in detail the operating mode, the criminal actions, and the subordination and coordination relationships from within one of the units of the 14th Infantry Division, that committed mass murders during the first few months after the launching of Operation ‘Barbarossa’.

From What Is a Jew to Who Is a Jew for the Romanian State?

Author(s): Nicolae Drăguşin / Language(s): English Issue: 13/2020

The present study aims at exploring how the question of Jewish emancipation was managed by the Romanian State. Our analytical quest aims at unveiling the double approach of the Romanian authorities. While the first phase revolved around the question: “What is a Jew for the Romanian State?”, the second phase revolved around a different question: “Who is a Jew for the Romanian State?” Consequently, the paper consists of two parts. First, we are interested to investigate the quest for citizenship up to 1919/1923; second, we are interested to see how the Romanian authorities approached the Jewish minority after naturalization was granted. This second part, corresponding to the years 1923 to 1938, has two complementary facets: revising the citizenship (1924-1938) and legally defining the Jew (1940-1942), in order to introduce a whole range of discriminations. These complementary facets are interlinked, since the legal identification of the Jews was meant, in certain situations, to deprive them of the rights associated with citizenship and, in other situations, to exclude them from society and nationalize their properties. The paper focuses on the legal documents (treaties, constitutional laws, organic laws, and decree-laws) to explore the status ascribed to Jews by the Romanian State and the dynamics of the legal definitions associated to them in the early nineteen-forties.

Vintilă Horia: Between a Fascist Past and an Embellished Posterity

Author(s): Alexandru Florian / Language(s): English Issue: 13/2020

There were moments in Romanian culture, after 1990, when the interwar cultural heritage was evaluated in a counter-motion as to the way it had been during the communist regime. Everything that had been rejected then became apt for recognition and furthering. Cioran,Eliade, Noica, Vulcănescu, or Vintilă Horia, who had been forbidden during this or that period of communism, now had their public memory glorified. Although some of those authors had been found guilty of war crimes or others had shared the values of Romanian fascism and had been their active supporters, there are public intellectuals nowadays who think that their cultural role was far more important and have therefore turned them into idols. Right-wing extremists have symbolically called “saints of the prisons” those who haddied as detainees during the communist regime. The case of Vintilă Horia aims at proving that the support given to his memory by certain intellectuals lacks ethical and ontological arguments, since the essayist partook of the anti-democratic values to the very end of his life.

Nicolae Iorga and the Jews

Author(s): Ana Bărbulescu / Language(s): English Issue: 13/2020

This paper turns toward the image ascribed to the Jewish minority by one of the most prolific representatives of Romanian culture, Nicolae Iorga. The analysis starts with the identity pattern proposed by Iorga and moves to the cluster of attributes that he ascribed to the Jewish minority, as well as the social roles associated to the latter. On a final approach, our interest moves towards the political solutions envisaged by Iorga to solve the “Jewish problem”.

Outrageous Rehabilitations: Justice and Memory in the Attempts to Restore the War Criminals’

Author(s): Andrei Muraru / Language(s): English Issue: 13/2020

Starting from the most recent rehabilitation request in Romanian justice (General Nicolae Macici, one of the coordinators of the 1941 Odessa massacre), this study examines the case of the rehabilitation of war criminals during the communist regime and after the 1989 Revolution. In 1945, the post-war trials, in which many members of the Antonescu regime were tried, disappeared as subjects from the public sphere, though the trials went on. The series of rehabilitations began in the mid-1960s, when the communist regime put in practice a thaw and the release of political prisoners. Analyzing concrete cases of Romanian military, intellectuals, and dignitaries who obtained legal and social rehabilitation during communism, the present study shows that those rehabilitations were made with the tacit consent of the Romanian authorities. However, the trials were not retried and the convicts were not considered not guilty. The collapse of communism paved the way for the legal rehabilitation of many war criminals by the justice system through retrying the trials and acquitting those guilty of war crimes and genocide. In general, the legal rehabilitations were aimed either at honoring the memory and restoring the honor of those considered to have been victims of the Soviet occupation, or at allowing their heirs to reclaim the confiscated property of the convicts. The study shows that these posthumous post-communist rehabilitations were made possible due to the general current within Romanian society in the 1990s. This trend, maintained by a political and historiographical agenda, was stopped in the 2000s,with Romania’s access to NATO and the European Union. Although public campaigns to rehabilitate war criminals have continued, the justice system has not allowed any rehabilitation of those convicted of war crimes and genocide after 2000.

The Reparations Game

Author(s): Petre Matei / Language(s): English Issue: 13/2020

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Romania tried to obtain West German compensation for its Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Unlike other states, Romania’s attempts failed. This can be explained not only by the dynamic of the Cold War (which imposed certain restrictions on how West Germany related to the communist states in Eastern Europe), but also by the superficial approach Romania adopted towards compensation. Generally speaking, the Romanian authorities viewed the Jewish victims in Romania merely as a number of people whose persecution could be capitalized on, following a rather rudimentary strategy. Aware of the existence of certain legal obstacles, Romania acted unofficially (through Jewish proxies) between 1967 and 1970, but formalized its actions in 1970, when it started to discuss the compensation issue directly with West Germany. During both phases, the institution in charge was the Securitate, the notorious Romanian secret police. Its representatives made serious mistakes, such as misinterpreting the German compensation legislation and wrongly assumed that they could negotiate with West Germany from a position of strength. Until the collapse of communism, West Germany refused to even begin negotiations with Romania on the compensation issue.

Agency and the Holocaust: Essays in Honor of Debórah Dwork

Author(s): Loredana-Andrada Iordache / Language(s): English Issue: 13/2020

A Sattelite Empire: Romanian Rule in Southwestern Ukraine, 1941-1944

Author(s): Andrei-Florin Spiridon / Language(s): English Issue: 13/2020

Polskie. Żydowskie. „Pożydowskie”. Nazistowska grabież dzieł sztuki i problemy restytucji w Polsce 1945–2020

Author(s): Nawojka Cieślińska-Lobkowicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 16/2020

Institutionalized and unauthorized looting of works of art and other cultural assets constituted an integral element of Nazi persecutions in occupied Poland. It affected not only public and church collections, but also a relatively large number of private ones. With respect to Jewish property the looting had a total character. That fact has not found its reflection in the narrative about the wartime losses incurred by Polish culture, which has somewhat automatically been treated as Polish national culture. What is more, this narrative has continued since the first years after the war. This article concerns the influence of this notion, which has been cultivated by successive Polish authorities, and the practice of the restitution of works of art looted by the Nazis, those looked for abroad and those which were incorporated into public collections in Poland.

Lokalne struktury Narodowych Sił Zbrojnych wobec ukrywających się Żydów w świetle powojennych materiałów śledczych i procesowych – przypadek powiatów miechowskiego i pińczowskiego

Author(s): Dariusz Libionka / Language(s): Polish Issue: 16/2020

This paper deals with the activities of members of the local structures of the National Armed Forces (Narodowe Siły Zbrojne, NSZ) in Pińczów and Miechów counties aimed at hiding Jews, and the murder of several men, women, children committed by a partisan detachment that for some time operated in this area. In the area in question, 34 people died at the hands of the NSZ. A further 11 were identified by people who admitted to be members of this organization to the German police and were subsequently murdered. The starting point for this analysis were investigation and trial documents concerning former NSZ members tried on the basis of the so-called “August decree”. The author’s purpose was to reconstruct these bloody events that took place from late 1943 to the spring of 1944 and to determine how the crimes against Jews were treated by county investigators from county and provincial security offices and by military courts and courts of law; finally, the author deals with the controversial issue of witness credibility and the testimonies given at that time by the defendants and witnesses.