MATATIAS CARP THE BLACK BOOK THE SUFFERINGS OF THE JEWS IN ROMANIA DURING THE FASCIST DICTATORSHIP 1940–1944 Vol. II-A THE POGROM IN IASI THE NATIONAL PUBLISHING AND GRAPHIC ARTS SOCIETY BUCHAREST – CONST.MILLE STR. 5-7-9 1948 1 I dedicated these pages of Jewish suffering to the pious memory of my father, Horia Carp. He was an example of Jewish virtue and pride and during his entire life his thoughts and feelings were aimed at achieving justice and liberty for his people. 2 EXPLANATIONS The following pages contain the first part, i.e. the first chapter of the second volume of the "BLACK BOOK", a documentary synthesis of the sufferings of the Jews in Romania, during the years 1940–1944. Generally speaking, this second volume comprises all the persecutions endured by the Jews during the war (June 22, 1941 – August 23, 1944) in the territory situated in the west of the Prut river while the third volume "TRANSNISTRIA" published at the end of the year 1947, comprises the same period of time but in the invaded territories in the east of the Prut river. These two volumes were to appear simultaneously. However, things did not happen as planned due to technical reasons, so that I had to invert the order of the volumes. For the time being, I have published this first chapter because of financial difficulties. Should it be possible, the other six chapters will be also published, either in succession or simultaneously, namely: Chapter II – General measures of oppression Chapter III – Evacuation, hostages, camps, the yellow star Chapter IV - Forced labor Chapter V – Romanianization (Labor, goods, economic enterprises) Chapter VI – Exceptional contributions Chapter VII – The Central of Romanian Jews Being consistent with the unbiased conduct I proposed myself to keep within the entire book, I also refrained in this volume from any literary preoccupation and I avoided as much as possible to have personal opinions. I left this task to the future historians to whom I endeavored to supply the essential elements without which the chronicle of those times, the most horrible ever in the history of mankind, cannot not be achieved. In choosing the documents, I paid special attention to those that date back to the occurrence of the told events. Those documents comprise the entire and true succession of criminal actions. They make it possible to define all those who had been guilty for that huge crime. But they also reveal the criminal mentality of all heads of authorities, especially that of the former police quaestor Constantin Chirilovici who thought that they would be absolved of any responsibility in front of the people and history by propagating the untrue version according to which the pogrom was caused by the pressure of the population or only by German savageness. I have reproduced all the documents – excepting two special ones, according to the original texts which were first checked by me. I also kept as such, without any corrections, the style, spelling and punctuation of the authors of statements. 3 When the original documents were missing, as was the case of the role of pogrom initiator and organizer played by the Special Information Service (S.S.I.), or as a completion of them, I used the declarations or testimonies of both the guilty parties and the witnesses investigated by several Judicial authorities. I tried to present them in a spirit of perfect objectivity and correctness. According to the available space, I published those testimonies as such even though they also comprised some obvious insincerities or considerations based on outdated mentalities. If, however, I had to publish only extracts due to the length of the texts, I selected them in such a way as not to appear intentional cuts or truncations. As for the photos, they were all collected by me during the course of years, as of July 1941. Almost all have a German source. From the heap photos, I chose and reproduced only those that could be identified and checked up. Nevertheless, there is a printing error that has to be corrected: the bottom photo of illustration Nr. III as well as the photos of illustrations IV and V refer to robbery and transport of the corpses to the Tg. Frumos station and not Mircesti. I also added 8 pages comprising photographic reproductions referring to the general persecution of the Jews in Romania during the war. They were meant to illustrate the rest of the chapters in the second volume of the book. However, as the pogrom in Iasi is the first link in the chain of war persecutions, I considered it appropriate to place those illustrations at the end of this volume. 4 General Historical Review During the first week of the war started by Germany under Hitler's regime and its satellites against the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics, the most horrifying pogrom in the recent history of humanity was committed in Romania. The large number of victims, the barbaric methods of torture and killing, the immeasurable robbery and destruction, the active participation in the pogrom in Iasi of every representative of the administrative authorities entrusted with the protection of citizens‘ lives and property on a local level, signify the culmination of those evil efforts which had been poisoning the minds of Romanians for three quarters of a century; on a universal level, it opened history‘s most tragic chapter. It served as the signal for starting the massacres not only in legionary Romania or under the Antonescu regime but also throughout fascist or fascized Europe, which was to kill six million Jewish lives in the following three years. It was not until June 1941 that the Teutonic extermination of Jews had begun. The plans for crematoriums and gas chambers were only germinating in the most savage minds ever to appear on the face of the earth. Therefore, Iasi, the monstrous symbol of persecution, robbery and slaughter has no equivalent; Odessa, Golta, Katyn, Kiev, Maidanek, Auschwitz, Belsen, etc. could be listed as comparisons, but Iasi preceded these by months or even years. In order to find in the past pale resemblances to what happened, we would have to turn back a large number of pages in the history books, taking giant leaps back in time. A stop in the 20-th century or in the preceding one, could lead to some comparisons, which would however prove to be unsuited. Thus, for example, a comparison between the Iasi pogrom to any of the 275 pogroms organized by the Tsarist oligarchy and police during the years 1905 and 1906 would be unfair. In those pogroms perished only some hundreds of people while the Interior Ministry of the Tsar claimed to have such a perfect system of pogrom organizing that he can produce 10 to 10.000 victims on demand1. As unfair would it be to compare the big pogrom in Kishinev of 1903 which shattered the world, devastated public conscience all over and set in motion diplomatic cabinets; nevertheless, the total number of victims amounted to 59 dead people and about 80 wounded. Nor would it be fair to compare the Iasi pogrom to any of the 350 massacres facilitated by the chaos of the war end and committed by the atamans Petliura, Kozyr-Zyrko, Semensko and their hooligans, the most horrifying of which was that of 1 N. Leven. Cinquante ans d'histoire. Ed. Felix Alcan Paris 1911, p. 472 5 Proscurow on February 15, 1919, whose number of victims amounted to 1,500 dead people, an impressive number at that time.2 Prior to those events, not even that fierce Dominican monk, the inquisitor Thomas de Torquemada, a shameful stigma in the history of Catholicism who in his 13 years of activity hardly succeeded in killing 2000 Maranos and Jews, can be compared to the Iasi torturers. Similar killers to those of Iasi pogrom should be looked for in their natural hiding place, in Germany, many hundreds of years before. There, in the XIV-th century can we find those "kings with leather arms" (Armleder) together with their "Judenschlaeger" (Jew batterer) gangs who used to roam the Rhine bank destroying and killing everything which was Jewish. There can be also found the gangs of Frankonia, Bavaria and Austria that, like Graetz said "destroyed in six months 146 communities and killed more than 100.000 Jews."3 And there, in the damned hideout of hatred, in that huge factory of cunning, greed and savageness, in that Germany which has given or will still give Kant, Goethe, Beethoven and so many other titans of the spirit to human civilization, will yet never compensate the fact that in Germany's history there were Hitler, Himmler Rosenberg, Streicher and many others of the endless gallery of the thrid Reich monsters; it is there that the germs must be looked for, the germs which after years and centuries prepared the horrifying European bloodbath, started by the Iasi massacre. It is from there that venom burst out and for many years spread all over Europe into all the corners of a sick and unbalanced continent. The roots of the pogrom in Iasi lie deep beneath the rotting system of Romanian pseudo-democracy. This was not an outbreak of isolated passions, neither was it some sort of momentary lapse of reason. It did not come about through spontaneous generation, in the beastly depths of some criminally disposed beings. It did not start on ―that Sunday‖, June 29, 1941; nor did it start three days earlier, when the first murders were committed; not on June 22, when the hostilities broke out; nor on September 6—one year earlier—when Ion Antonescu and his legionnaires came to power, not even on December 27, 1938, when Charles II abandoned his political hypocrisy, and left the fate of the country in the hands of the anti-Semitic government of Octavian Goga and A.