The Case of German-Speaking Jews in Bukovina ( 1920-1960)
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Regime Changes, Public Memory and the Pursuit of Justice: The Case of German-Speaking Jews in Bukovina ( 1920-1960) Submitted by Petru Weber for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the University of Sussex Supervisor : Prof. Dr Edward Timms School of Humanities, Centre for German-Jewish Studies November 2005 Introduction ____________________________________________________________________ 2 Chapter I: Bukovina, “lieu de memoire” for the Romanian German-speaking Jewry _________ 8 1. Ethnic and religious co-habitation in Bukovina under Romanian rule _________________ 8 2. German-Jewish identities in Bukovina before the Second War World ________________ 18 Chapter II: Human destinies in the shadow of the racial and xenophobic ideology __________ 31 1. Particular aspects of the anti-Semitism in Romania (1920-1944) _____________________ 31 2. Second class citizens in the “national unitary” Romania: From the disguised discrimination to the institutionalised persecution ___________________________________ 43 A Jewish Invasion? _____________________________________________________________________ 46 The Discriminatory Legislation of the 1930s _________________________________________________ 48 The Antonescu Era ______________________________________________________________ 54 Chapter III: The days that changed their fate; narrative and artistic testimonies from beyond the barbed wire ___________________________________________________ 62 1. Eyewitness testimonies as source of a historical analysis of the deportations to Transnistria (1941-1944) ___________________________________________________________________ 62 2. Beyond the river Bug: Mapping the testimony of Arnold Daghani against other sources _ 84 Daghani’s testimony ____________________________________________________________________ 87 Nathan Segall’s report ___________________________________________________________________ 91 Oral history ___________________________________________________________________________ 95 The testimony of Philippe Kellmer _________________________________________________________ 95 The testimony of Tvi Zemmel_____________________________________________________________ 98 Arnold Daghani’s artistic testimony ________________________________________________________ 99 The testimony of Shoshana Neuman _______________________________________________________ 104 Chapter IV: The “new age” in the old homeland ____________________________________ 108 1. The repatriation and a new beginning in the post-war Romania ____________________ 108 The Antonescu Regime Confronted with its Collapse: Time for Political Opportunism (December 1943- August 1944) _________________________________________________________________________ 108 The Arrival of the Red Army: A New Beginning? ____________________________________________ 115 Life Must Go on: Reintegration and Post-War Romanian Democracy (August 1944-December 1947) ___ 119 The Eve of a New Dictatorship: Staying or Leaving Romania? __________________________________ 124 2. Perceptions of the domestic Holocaust in the post-war Romania _____________________ 127 3. The public memory of Holocaust in the post-war Romania _________________________ 154 Chapter V: Dealing with war crimes ______________________________________________ 165 1. The judicial aftermath of the domestic Holocaust: trials against Romanian war criminals165 2. A Personal Struggle for Justice and Reconciliation: Arnold Daghani and the Investigations at Lübeck____________________________________________________________________ 187 The crimes in Mikhailovka ______________________________________________________________ 191 The liquidation of the camp in Tarassivka __________________________________________________ 197 The Dohrmann Company and the slave labourers of Mikhailovka / Tarassivka _____________________ 202 Reconciliation ________________________________________________________________________ 203 Conclusions __________________________________________________________________ 207 Why Romanian Fascism and the Romanian ‘Domestic Holocaust’ were different ________ 207 Regime Changes and the Rise of Anti-Semitism ____________________________________ 208 Public Memory and the Pursuit of Justice _________________________________________ 214 Bibliography: ________________________________________ Hiba! A könyvjelző nem létezik.217 Appendix ____________________________________________________________________ 223 2 Introduction The fall of communism in Romania in December 1989 inaugurated a new period in the country’s history that would impact on public memory as well as on historiography. Romania’s history had to be rewritten or reinterpreted unveiling the abuses, the persecution and the crimes of the communist regime during the last 45 years. Several publications and mass media products took over the task to re-establish for the Romanian people the historical truth. However, little was done to come to terms with the period that preceded the Communist domination marked by the pro-fascist dictatorship of Marshal Antonescu, a period during which the country’s leadership was responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands Romanian and Ukrainian Jews. Since Communism in Romania had a pronounced national character based on the mythologisation and the glorification of national history, such atrocities that occurred on Romanian territory and in the occupied south-western Ukraine called by that time Transnistria could not fit into the pattern of the “innocent” Romanian people fighting always for its own rights and freedom. Refusing to make a distinction between individuals and the nation as a whole, the ideologists of the Romanian national-communism preferred to keep the silence over the “forgotten Holocaust” as if had never happened. The establishment of the democratic political system after 1990 offered new opportunities for coming to terms with the suppressed past. However, this process turned out to be a very difficult and a highly disputed one. Many post-communist societies in Eastern Europe had to re-define their national identity by searching for historical figures in order to replace the “false heroes” created by the communist regimes during the last fifty years. The favourite “new heroes” became those former statesmen who were known for their anti-communist but also nationalist attitude, regardless of the political and moral values they promoted. As in the early 1990s Jozef Tiso became a national hero for many Slovaks, 2 3 so in to the same way did Miklós Horthy for Hungarians, Ante Pavelić for Croatians and Ion Antonescu for Romanians. Even if one ought to distinguish between the different roles they played during the Second World War, they most certainly share one common feature between all of them: they represented autocratic regimes and were involved in the physical destruction of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. After the Communist regime had been overthrown in 1989, not only nationalist, but also moderate politicians and even historians began to emphasise the ‘patriotic’ and ‘anti-Communist’ character of the Romanian military dictator during the Second World War. Paradoxically, the construction of a democratic society based on tolerance and respect for human rights started by regarding an oppressive military dictator as an acceptable model for the function of head of state. However, the voices of those who experienced the ordeal of Transnistria and other atrocities during the domestic Holocaust could not be silenced any longer. The commemorations organised by the local Jewish community opened the process of coming to terms with the domestic Holocaust in Romania. The international press reported how “Romanians are told of their nation’s role in mass killing of Jews”.1 Even if the new post- communist Romanian officials attended the commemoration in order to gain international support for Romania, their attitude was very controversial fitting into the patterns of the reflective denial of the Holocaust i.e. they recognised the Holocaust as a general phenomenon but they refused to accept that Romania had also its part of responsibility in it.2 This process of coming to terms, similar to the entire democratisation process in 1 In an article by Henry Kahm the New York Times underlined: “The facts widely known elsewhere, were never acknowledged here: that a great number of Jewish men, women and children were killed in pogroms of a brutality that sometimes shocked even the Germans, pogroms carried out by the Romanian military and the police. The Jews worked, starved or froze to death in concentration camps established and ran by Romanians… As a result, many Romanians have professed unawareness that the killing of the Jews was also a Romanian matter. New York Times, Tuesday, 2 July 1991. A photocopy of the article is available in the Centre for the Reseach of the History of the Romanian Jews located in Bucharest (CSIER), fileVII/125. 2 The Jewish Chronicle from London reported in an article “Romanians lied for fifty years about Holocaust” by Joseph Finkelstone that the democratically elected new president of Romania condemned those who denied the Holocaust and spread anti-Semitism. However, in a message to the participants to the commemoration in the memory of the victims of the Holocaust in Romania, Iliescu himself denied the existence of a domestic Holocaust, stating that “the Final Solution could not be carried out in Romania because its citizens opposed to it”. Jewish Chronicle, No.6376, July 5, London, 1991 3 4 Romania, is an