Reviewed by: Jewish Forced Labor in Romania, 1940–1944 by Dallas Michelbacher Paul A. Shapiro Dallas Michelbacher. Jewish Forced Labor in Romania, 1940–1944. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. 174 pp. The Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, issued in 2004, made it clear that the Romanian state, recognized as Nazi Germany's most significant military ally on the Eastern Front, was also a major perpetrator of Holocaust-era crimes. The Final Report provided a platform for what since has become a significant outpouring of new scholarship on the Holocaust in Romania, most of which has concentrated on topics that were the focus of the Final Report. These fell into five broad categories: Romanian antisemitism; anti-Jewish legislation and crimes committed by the fascist Iron Guard during the "National-Legionary State" (September 1940–January 1941); the effort of Ion Antonescu's wartime regime to rob and rid the country entirely of its Jewish population; Jewish response; and postwar obfuscation and denial. Barely five pages of the four-hundred-page Final Report were dedicated to forced labor,1 and the topic languished largely unaddressed for years. Dallas Michelbacher provides the first monograph in English on Jewish forced labor in Romania.2 He makes ample use of the major document collection published in Romanian by Bucharest's Elie Wiesel Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania3 as well as other published documents. To this he adds in-depth research in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archives and in major oral history collections. The result is a much more granular study of Romanian forced labor than previously available. The book provides a review of the orders and guidelines issued by the multiple civil and military authorities which administered the forced labor regime. But to this Michelbacher adds a nuanced picture of the corruption that permeated the administration of forced labor, with officials at every level encouraging and accepting payments against labor exemption certificates, preferential retention at one's traditional job, assignment to a particular locality, etc. He describes the varying degrees of risk of verbal [End Page 216] or physical abuse faced by forced laborers according to the personality and motivations of the civilian and military officials overseeing laborers performing tasks that ranged from heavy rail, road, and defense construction work in so-called "external" labor detachments, to humiliating snow shoveling duty assigned to Jews able to remain in their home towns. He captures the antagonistic attitude of local non-Jews toward Jewish laborers and the resentment that the need to keep some 75,000 Jews in technical, managerial, and administrative jobs in order to keep the national economy running created in both official and civil society circles. He provides a glimpse of the impact that removing able-bodied men for labor, under threat of deportation to Transnistria, had on Jewish community organizations and Jewish families left vulnerable to intimidation and blackmail, often lacking in basic necessities, and uncertain as to what would come next. A picture of forced labor at the ground level emerges most vividly in Michelbacher's chapters 4 and 5, which trace developments leading up to Romania's planned mass deportation of Jews to the Nazi death camp at Belzec, and then following Antonescu's decision to abandon the deportation plan. In these chapters the author moves beyond reliance on published sources and draws heavily on previously untapped archival and testimonial source material. He introduces survivor voices, largely absent from earlier studies, and provides graphic detail regarding several well-documented and painfully remembered labor sites—railroad track repair, a canal, defense works, a quarry, etc. Given the power of this new material, it is unfortunate that the book's footnotes provide only partial information, clarifying where a document can be found, but not the precise nature of the cited document. There is an aspect of Michelbacher's approach that leads the author to some problematic conclusions. The difficulty stems from the geographic limitation of the study, for the most part, to forced labor inside the borders of the Old Kingdom (Regat) and Southern Transylvania, isolated from the broader context of what was taking place in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria. It...
Read full abstract
Aug 5, 2024
Matthew Aguirre + 1
Open Access