Romania, which has long denied taking part in the Holocaust, on Wednesday paid tribute to thousands of Jews killed during a 1941 pogrom in the northeastern city of Iasi.
An unprecedented meeting of parliament was convened in the presence of the massacre’s last survivors.
“We, as a nation, must openly admit that our past was not always glorious,” said Romanian Prime Minister Florin Citu, recalling the “unimaginable suffering, cruelty and savagery” inflicted on the orders of pro-Nazi marshal Ion Antonescu.
Some 15,000 victims, almost a third of Iasi’s Jewish population, were killed in what historians call “one of the most documented massacres of the Second World War.”
On June 29, 1941, thousands of Jews were taken to the Iasi police headquarters while being beaten and humiliated by Romanian police and civilians.
They were then shot dead by army troops.
Between 7,000-8,000 people were crammed without water into two “death trains” comprised of sealed, overheated freight cars where most died of suffocation.
Around one hundred pictures of the massacre remain, along with about 600 portraits of victims.
“We have not completely fulfilled our mission,” lamented Silviu Vexler, head of Romania’s Jewish community in reference to “praise for war criminals” by elected officials of the nationalist AUR party who won seats in parliament in December.
Between 280,000 and 380,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews died in the Holocaust in Romania and territories under its control, according to a commission headed by Nobel Peace laureate Elie Wiesel, himself a Romanian-born Jew.
And though the commission’s report was validated by the Romanian government, Antonescu, sentenced to death for war crimes and executed in 1946, remains a hero in the eyes of many Romanians.
“By commemorating this massacre, the worst in modern Romanian history, the parliament is laying the foundations for a truth-based reconciliation,” said Alexandru Muraru, the government’s top representative for fighting antisemitism and xenophobia.
Eighty years on, around two hundred people laid flowers on mass graves where some of the victims are buried.
Source: AFP via TOI
Header: The Iaşi death trains are estimated to have killed between eight and fourteen thousand Jews in the summer of 1941. Over 100 people were stuffed into each car, and many died of thirst, starvation, and suffocation aboard two trains that for seven days travelled back and forth across the countryside, stopping only to discard the dead (as photographed).
After the Iasi pogrom events, Jews were forcibly loaded onto freight cars with planks hammered in place over the windows and traveled for seven days in unimaginable conditions. Many died and were gravely affected by lack of air, blistering heat, lack of water, food or medical attention. These veritable death trains arrived to their destinations Podu Iloaiei and Călăraşi with only one-fifth of their passengers alive.