I am of Romanian background from my dads side and he comes from the Sephardic community in Bucharest, very few Jews live in Romania today. If you aren't familiar with Romania or the Jews that lived there, there are two ethnic groups, the Ashkenazi or came from Ukraine and Galacia. and the Sephardic who came from the Balkans and Turkey.
First of all, no one in my family died in Romania or the holocaust, they left in 1905 to the US. Other people however were not so lucky.
Romania is a Latin country identical to France, Italy, and Spain, they are not Gypsies or Slavs as people think, they speak a Latin language and are descendants of the Romans who killed and mixed with the Dacian tribes in the area.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust#By_country
Romania committed many more murders than a lot of the European countries including Croatia but Romania still denies it's role in this to this day.
After Romania entered the war at the start of Operation Barbarossa atrocities against the Jews became common, starting with the Iaşi pogrom, where over 10,000 Jews were killed in July 1941.
In July-August 1941, the yellow badge was imposed by local initiatives in several cities (Iaşi, Bacău, Cernăuţi). A similar measure imposed by the national government lasted only five days (between September 3 and September 8, 1941), before being annulled on Antonescu's order.[56] However, on local initiative, the badge was still worn especially in the towns of Moldavia, Bessarabia and Bukovina (Bacău, Iaşi, Câmpulung, Botoşani, Cernăuţi, etc.).[57]
According to the Wiesel Commission report released by the Romanian government in 2004, Romania murdered in various forms, between 280,000 to 380,000 Jews in Romania and in the war zone of Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transnistria.[58][59] Until 2004, when researchers made numerous documents publicly available, many in Romania denied knowledge that their country participated in the Holocaust.[60] Some deny it to this day.
In 1941, following the advancing Romanian Army after Operation Barbarossa, and alleged attacks by Jewish "Resistance groups", Antonescu ordered the deportation to Transnistria, of all Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina (between 130,000 and 145,000), who were considered en mass "Communist agents" by the official propaganda. "Deportation" however was an euphemism, as part of the process involved killing many Jews before deporting the rest in the "trains of death" (in reality long exhausting marches on foot) to the East. Of those who escaped the initial ethnic cleansing in Bukovina and Bessarabia, only very few managed to survive "trains" and the concentration camps set up in Transnistria. Further killings perpetrated by Antonescu's death squads (documents prove his direct orders) targeted the Jewish population that the Romanian Army managed to round up when occupying Transnistria. Over one hundred thousand of these were in massacres staged in such places as Odessa (see the Odessa Massacre, when Romanian troops shot tens of thousands of Jews during the autumn of 1941), Bogdanovka, Akmecetka in 1941 and 1942.
Antonescu did halt deportations despite German pressure in 1943, as he began to seek peace with the Allies, although at the same time he levied heavy taxes and forced labor on the remaining Jewish communities. Also, sometimes with the encouragement of Antonescu's regime, thirteen boats left Romania for the British Mandate of Palestine during the war, carrying 13,000 Jews (two of these ships sunk, and the effort was discontinued after German pressure was applied).
Half of the estimated 270,000 to 320,000 Jews living in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and the former Dorohoi County in Romania were murdered between June 1941 and spring of 1944. After a wave of random initial killings, Jews in Moldavia were subject to pogroms, while those in Bessarabia, Bukovina and Dorohoi were concentrated into ghettos from which they were deported to concentration camps in Transnistria, including camps built and run by Romanians. Romanian soldiers also worked with the German Einsatzkommando to massacre Jews in conquered territories east of the Romania's 1940 border. The total number of deaths is not certain, but even the lowest respectable estimates run to about 250,000 Jews (plus 25,000 deported Roma, of which half perished). At the same time, 120,000 of Transylvania's 150,000 Jews died at the hands of the Fascist Hungarians later in the war (see Northern Transylvania). Also, Antonescu's government made plans for mass deportations from the Regat to Belzec, but never carried them out.
Nonetheless, in stark contrast to many countries of Eastern and Central Europe, the majority of Romanian Jews (if restricted to rump Romania, outside the territories occupied in 1940 by Hungary and the Soviet Union) survived the war, although they were subject to a wide range of harsh conditions, including forced labor, financial penalties, and discriminatory laws. The number of victims, however, makes Romania count as, according to the Wiesel Commission, "Of all the allies of Nazi Germany, [responsible] for the deaths of more Jews than any country other than Germany itself".[59]
Romanian Fascism had been all too viciously and murderously antisemitic; however, unlike its Nazi ally, it had not formulated a "Final Solution" of systematically hunting down and killing every single Jew, and there was no Romanian equivalent to the Wannsee Conference. The killing of Jews was unsystematic, taking place in some places and times but not in others - especially, far more intensively where the Romanian Army was acting as an occupying force rather than in Romania's own sovereign territory. Fortunately for the Romanian Jews, the Nazis never got a chance to take direct control of the process and "systematise" it, as they did in Hungary at mid-1944
Topic: Romania Holocaust (Read 602 times)