Treznea: Trauma, nationalism and the memory of World War II in Romania

Abstract

This essay focuses on the relationship between official and vernacular forms of remembering a mass killing of eighty-six civilians that took place on 9 September 1940 at Treznea, a village in the heart of Northern Transylvania, now part of Romania. This region was at that point in the process of being reoccupied by Hungarian troops after the Vienna Award of 31 August 1940. After 1940, the memory of 9 September remained apparently buried yet powerfully alive for those living in Treznea. Their relationship to the communist regime was shaped by the disjuncture between the official and local discourses about 9 September.This essay analyses both the official commemorative sites (an obelisk and a funeral plaque) and events and the local forms of remembering, from a frieze in the Orthodox Church to oral forms of transmission. In crafting their own interpretation of the events, people in Treznea resisted the official discourse. Yet, starting in the 1980s as their sense of victimization was incorporated in a new aggressive nationalist official discourse, the Romanians in Treznea became more confused in their relationship with the regime. To this day, they still harbour distrust for the officials who visit Treznea once a year for the annual commemoration, while they are also pleased to have their tragedy given official recognition. Such ambiguities have also translated in the narratives told by the generations born after the war, whose own sense of local and ethnic identity has been shaped powerfully by the collective memory of 9 September.