JEAN ANCEL. Preludiu la asasinat: Pogromul de la Iasi, 29 iunie 1941 [The Pogrom in Iasi, June 29, 1941]. Translated by CAROL BINES. Foreword by YEHUDA BAUER. (Historia.) Bucharest: Editura Polirom. 2005. Pp. 491. $29.50

Abstract

One week after the German and Romanian armies attacked the Soviet Union, on June 29–30, 1941, the Jewish community in Iaşi (Jassy), in Romanian Moldavia, was shattered by a large-scale pogrom, initiated and supervised by the Romanian army and the local police, with the support of German soldiers on their way to the eastern front. Jews who were arrested and survived the first day's killings perished in the subhuman conditions of the subsequent deportation on the “death trains.” Very few chapters of Holocaust history were so willfully distorted in the aftermath of the event and in the decades that followed. The official statement issued two days after the massacre—“In Iaşi 500 Judeo-communists have been executed”—was only the beginning of the official mystification that continued unaffected by the changes in the political regimes, due to a common desire to obfuscate a massacre that preceded the larger mass killings carried out by the Einsatzgruppen. The official version used by the subsequent communist regime was to reduce the crime to the proportion of mere violent incidents provoked by former members of the Fascist Iron Guard (which had been dismantled by the military dictator Ion Antonescu in January 1941 following a rebellion of his former allies), incited and supported by the German military. The “death trains,” in which thousands of Jews perished after several days of being sealed in boxcars without air and water, were presented as an effort made by the Romanian police to save the victims from the Germans. The culmination of the lies and self-delusion was Antonescu's declaration at his trial in 1946: “In my all life I didn't order the extermination against any person. In my home never a chicken was slaughtered. It's not me who ordered but the General Headquarters” (p. 293).