Holocaust Memories Dim in Romania

Sixty years on from the Second World War, Romania remains confused about the part it played in deporting and killing Jews. A recent scandal in which President Ion Iliescu was forced to retract controversial remarks about the Holocaust underlines the ambiguous feelings of many Romanians.

“The Holocaust was not unique to the Jewish population in Europe. Many others, including Poles, died in the same way,” said Iliescu in an interviewed with a leading Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz in July. “In the Romania of the Nazi period, Jews and communists were treated equally.”

He recounted how his father – a communist – died shortly after being released from a concentration camp, and insisted that Romania was just too poor to consider paying out restitution to Jews dispossessed of their property. "Does that mean the wretched Romanian citizen of today has to pay for what happened then?” he asked. “I don't find that appropriate."

Iliescu’s comment that the Holocaust was not unique sparked a diplomatic protest from Israel, which demanded an apology for his “miserable statement” – and duly received one. At the same time, the president admitted that his government had been wrong when the previous month it denied that Holocaust events took place in Romania as well as elsewhere.

The government’s June 13 declaration was all the more embarrassing because, only the day before, it had opened its archives to the Washington-based Holocaust Memorial Museum. Although the retractions succeeded in defusing some of the anger of outraged historians, Jewish communities abroad and Israel itself, the scandal re-ignites fundamental questions about why perceptions of the country’s past differ so widely.

Adrian Cioroianu, a young historian from the University of Bucharest, believes that many Romanians, including the country's political elite, have an incomplete rather than prejudiced view about what happened during the Second World War.

“Iliescu - like most of the population here - is not anti-Semitic,” said Cioroianu. “But they belong to a generation which is not very well informed about the events of the war. Some perceptions of Romanian behaviour during the war are mere illusions and have nothing to do with what actually happened."

Broadly speaking, there are two versions of Romania’s wartime history. That of some nationalists is that despite an unfortunate alliance with Hitler, Romania managed to save many of its Jews from deportation through the intervention of wartime leader Ion Antonescu. This diverges sharply with the story documented by historians – the killing of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Romania as well as parts of the Soviet Union it occupied.

According to Andrei Oisteanu, a researcher into the history and traditions of local Jewish communities, the facts about what happened to the Jews are available - the problem is that people prefer not to know about them.

"Historians have undoubtedly documented the Holocaust on Romanian territory, starting with the anti-Jewish legislation of the early Thirties and ending in mass deportations and pogroms, including one in June 1941 in the north-eastern city of Iasi, where up to 12,000 people are believed to have died,” he told IWPR.

“The problem is that Romanians appear largely indifferent to their wartime past, or else are unable to come to terms with this unpleasant chapter in the country’s history."

Romania is not the only East European country to have found it difficult to come to terms with its past. According to Cioroianu, the discussion about the Holocaust started a decade later here than in Hungary and Poland. “The situation is probably different because of [Communist-era leader] Nicolae Ceausescu's national-communist inheritance, and a tradition of nationalistic propaganda that can be traced back to the 19th century," he said.

“For Romanians to understand their past, the country's historians must present an accurate examination of the events that took place, and they need to become more rational and self-critical.”

But telling the truth to the public means finding better ways of presenting history, especially to younger generations. Romanian school textbooks remained largely unchanged from the end of the communist period until 1999, when study of the Holocaust became a compulsory part of the history curriculum.

At the same time, the government gave teachers more leeway in choosing what history books to use. "However, some of the new high-school textbooks do not mention Romania’s involvement in the Holocaust at all,” said Lia Benjamin of the Centre for the Study of Jewish History in Bucharest. “Others, while speaking of atrocities committed during Antonescu's rule, estimate the number of victims [only] in tens of thousands without clearly stating who was responsible for the killings."

There are signs that official attitudes are now changing, given the work that needs to be done to meet the standards for NATO and European Union membership. Last year, the government passed laws banning expressions of fascism or racial hatred. And earlier this month, Prime Minister Adrian Nastase announced plans to increase awareness of the Holocaust by setting up an international commission to examine the country's wartime role and instituting official observance of Holocaust Day.

Cioroianu believes that even with anti-racist legislation in place, Romanians’ views of the Holocaust will only change if there is a more critical public debate about the past. “From now on, it is the duty of historians, intellectuals and the media to change Romanian’s perception of the past,” he said.

Marian Chiriac is an IWPR contributor in Bucharest.