The Destruction and Rescue of Jewish Children in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria (1941–1944)* Radu Ioanid Approximately one-half of Romania’s prewar Jewish population of 756,000 survived World War II. As a consequence of wartime border changes, 150,000 of the original Jewish population ended up under Hungarian sovereignty in northern Transylvania. In 1944 these Jews were deported to concentration camps and extermination centers in the Greater Reich and nearly all of them—130,000—perished before the end of the war. In Romania proper more than 45,000 Jews—probably closer to 60,000—were killed in Bessarabia and Bukovina by Romanian and German troops during summer and fall 1941. The remaining Jews from Bessarabia and almost all remaining Jews from Bukovina were then deported to Transnistria, where at least 75,000 died. During the postwar trial of Romanian war criminals, Wilhelm Filderman—president of the Federation of Romanian Jewish Communities—declared that at least 150,000 Bessarabian and Bukovinan Jews (those killed in these regions and those deported to Transnistria and killed there) died under the Antonescu regime. In Transnistria at least 130,000 indigenous Jews were liquidated, especially in Odessa and the districts of Golta and Berezovka. In all at least 250,000 Jews under Romanian jurisdiction died, either on the explicit orders of Romanian officials or as a result of their criminal barbarity.1 However, Romanian Zionist leader Misu Benvenisti estimated 270,000,2 the same figure calculated by Raul Hilberg.3 During the Holocaust in Romania, Jews were executed, deported, or killed by forced labor or typhus. Their children also were not spared. MASSACRES OF JEWS IN MILCORENI AND DOROHOI The massacre of Jews in Romania started before it allied itself with Nazi Germany and declared war on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Massacres of Jews occurred during the Romanian withdrawal from Bessrabia and northern Bukovina in early July 1940, when the Soviet Union occupied both provinces for one year. Although typically the killings were carried out by soldiers, occasionally they were conducted by Romanian or Ukrainian mobs. The ugliest massacres accompanied the withdrawal from Bukovina; * This article contains material previously published in Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2000). Reprinted with permission. 78 • THE DESTRUCTION AND RESCUE OF JEWISH CHILDREN the first occurred in Milcoreni (department of Dorohoi). Following orders by an officer named Goilav, soldiers seized and abused the family of Sloime Weiner, including his son User and his daughters Roza Weiner and Fani Zekler who was carrying an infant. Leading this group to the Tureatca Forest, the soldiers also caught the lame shoemaker Moscovici, his wife, and their two children, as well as the wife of Isac Moscovici (who was apparently unrelated to the shoemaker and his two young daughters). The mob lined them up in front of a ditch and shot them. Isac Moscovici fell into the soldiers’ hands shortly thereafter and was beaten so badly that he died on the way to the hospital.4 During the same period, a massive pogrom took place in Dorohoi, Moldova, in which over 100 Jews were killed. Children were among the victims: Freida Rudik (aged seven), Tomy Rudik (aged six), Moise Rudik (aged two), and Simion Cohn (aged two), all of whom lived on Regina Maria Street and were shot in the head, chest, or abdomen.5 One hundred twenty Jews were killed in January 1941 when a huge pogrom that was organized and carried out by the Iron Guards engulfed Bucharest. Many Jews died in their own homes. For example, several members of the Fringhieru family— including four children—were murdered in their house at 15 Intrarea Colentina. Two children (Aron and Haia) who were in bed at the time miraculously survived even though several bullets were fired at them.6 The bullet aimed to kill little Rodriques Honores Brickman of 9 Mihai Voda Street, however, did not go astray.7 THE IASI POGROM It is difficult to determine the total number of victims of the Iasi pogrom of June 28–July 2, 1941, but sources vary in estimating between 3,200 and 13,000 victims. Hilberg cites German diplomats in Bucharest who estimated 4,000 dead.8 Curzio Malaparte, a fascist Italian war correspondent who initially justified the pogrom but later condemned it, reported 7,000 victims. 9 Communist historian Gheorghe Zaharia cites documents from the archives of the Ministry of the Interior of the Romanian People’s Republic indicating more than 8,000 victims.10 The indictment of the Antonescu trial accused the pogrom organizers of responsibility for 10,000 deaths, yet a July 23, 1943, Serviciul Special de Informatii report―based on lists of the dead prepared by the Jewish congregations of Iasi―indicated that 13,266 (including forty women and 180 children) died. Cited recently by scholars working in Romania, this figure does not seem exaggerated.11 Radu Ioanid • 79 When the Jews of Iasi were rounded up by Romanian soldiers and civilians and escorted in columns through the town to Central Police Headquarters, men constituted the majority but the victims also included women and children. Beaten and bruised, they were forced to march in step with arms raised above their heads. Their Romanian and German captors and the mobs lining their path spat on the victims, pelted them with rocks and bottles, and struck them with sticks, bars, and rifle butts. Those who could not walk because of injuries or ailments were shot, causing the streets to be strewn with corpses. 12 Survivors of the march later recorded the visions that accompanied their passage. Those who left the 5th Police Precinct at 5:00 p.m. were greeted by the corpse of an old man on Apeduct Street. A few paces beyond was that of a child of the plumber Suchär. In front of the Chamber of Commerce and the Ghemul Verde Store on Cuza-Vodä Street were two heaps of dead people in which they discerned the bodies of women and children.13 Men in military uniforms assembled eighteen or twenty Jews in Sfantu Spiridon Square, forced them to lie on the ground, and then murdered them with a tank’s machine gun.14 Some of the victims are known to us: Kunovici, owner of a hat store on Stefan cel Mare Street; Filip Simionovici, a baker from I. C. Brätianu Street; the engineer Nacht; and the tavern keeper Mille. A rare surviving photograph captures the body of a four- or five-year-old child, a girl, lying among a half-dozen older victims with blood running from her head.15 Thousands of survivors from the Iasi massacre were then loaded onto two “death trains,” so named because more than two thousand people died due to the lack of air and water resulting from the overcrowded conditions. The first train, which left Iasi on the morning of June 30 with 2,530 Jews, arrived at Cälärasi on July 6 with 1,011. The captives had covered approximately 500 kilometers during six and one-half days of tropical heat, for most of that time without water. The train had yielded ten corpses at Märäseti, 654 at Tîrgu-Frumos, 327 at Mircesti, 300 at Säbäoani, 53 at Roman, 40 at Inotesti, and 25 at Cälärasi.16 The total deaths on the first death train thus amounted to at least 1,519 victims. Nathan Goldstein describes the scene that he witnessed from his cattle car in Tîrgu-Frumos. Being so close to water and thirsty for so long, most could not resist: they would jump out through the small opening of the car to go drink the water. Most were murdered by the soldiers: . an eleven-year-old child jumped out the window to get a drink of water, but the [deputy of the train’s military commander] felled him with a shot aimed at his legs. The child screamed: water, water! Then the adjutant took him by his feet, shouting “you want 80 • THE DESTRUCTION AND RESCUE OF JEWISH CHILDREN water? Well, drink all you want!” and lowered him head first into the water of the Bahlui River until the child drowned, and then threw him in.17 One of the survivors of the first death train, Israel Schleier, testified later that only eight children and three old men disembarked from one of the cars in Tîrgu-Frumos. The corpses of the victims remained, however, stiffened in the positions in which they died; “intertwined and immobile, they seemed to form a single . uninterrupted mass.” The stench, Schleier recalled, was unbearable, “a horrible blend of blood, corpses, and feces.”18 The second death train had a briefer history. On June 30 at 6:00 a.m., 1,902 Jews boarded eighteen cars. The last car contained eighty corpses removed at the station in Iasi that showed evidence of killing by gunfire, disemboweling with bayonets, or bludgeoning with sledgehammers. The transport took eight hours to reach its destination at Podul Iloaiei, twenty kilometers from Iasi; it moved so slowly that the guard was sometimes able to follow it on foot. Some cars arrived with as many as 100 dead and as few as three or four half-dead survivors. A prisoner had died (on average) every two or three minutes in some of the wagons. On arrival in Podul Iloaei, the 708 surviving passengers were locked in synagogues or assigned to Jewish residences in the community. The 1,194 dead were buried in the local cemetery.19 The late Radu Florian—who was fourteen years old at that time—survived the journey, but his brother and his father died in the same suffocating cattle car.