The Holocaust in the post-communist memory discourse in Romania: the case of the monuments and memorial sites to the victims of the Iasi pogrom of June 1941 (original) (raw)
Related papers
INSHR EW, 2019
Our interdisciplinary colloquium focuses on the contemporary memorialisation of the Holocaust in Central and Eastern European Countries through Memory-Work and Heritage Mechanisms. The objective is to deepen the understanding of the Holocaust memory-making mechanisms, including both state and non-state agencies of memorializing the Holocaust with the emphasis being put on the role of memorial vectors in directly engaging the audience with Jewish and Romani histories, in an attempt to critically analyse and challenge the concept of shared history and memorializing the atrocities of the past.
Justyna Budzinska, Edyta Glowacka-Sobech, Bernaette Jonda (eds.), Niepamięć wojny. Europa Środkowo-Wschodnia w XX/XXI wieku (Oblivion of War. Central and Eastern Europe in the XX / XXI century), Instytut Historii UAM, 2017: 389-401., 2017
Remembering World War II has always been controversial in Romania. It was controversial during communist times, as the official propaganda discourse did not fit most people's attitudes and memories of the war. It remained controversial at the end of Ceausescu era, when important figures of the war, such as Ion Antonescu, head of State during World War II, an ally of Hitler and artisan of fascist policies in Romania, were officially rehabilitated when Ceausescu himself denounced the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as illegitimate. It stayed controversial during the post-communist period, which has witnessed both continuity in discourse in line with the national communism of the Ceausescu epoch and a new narrative which condemns the genocidal actions of the Romanian government toward Jews and Roma. The aim of this study is twofold; on the one hand, I shall describe and interpret the public memory of World War II in Romania from the end of the war until today, and, on the other, I will try to see to what extent the public discourse has mingled with personal experience in the life stories of people who experienced World War II as either participants or witnesses.
Holocaust commemoration in Romania: Roma and the contested politics of memory and memorialization
Journal of Genocide Research, 2014
In 2009, the Romanian government unveiled a $7.4 million Holocaust memorial to commemorate over 280,000 Jews and 11,000 Roma who died as victims of the Ion Antonescu regime. Located in central Bucharest, the monument is part of a national agenda, outlined by an international commission, to study the crimes of the Holocaust in Romania and to help the country come to terms with historical atrocities. Under communism and in the early post-communist period, the Romanian state denied its role in the Holocaust. In this article, we explore the representation of the Holocaust and, in particular, Roma victims in the dominant historical narrative and the Holocaust memorial. We delve into discourses around this monument, which feed into a larger dialogue of victim recognition and contested national narratives about the Holocaust. We highlight the construction and contestation of the Holocaust memorial, considering in particular the paradox of Roma victims and suggesting that Roma are simultaneously represented, unrepresented and misrepresented in the historical story and memorial of the Holocaust in Romania.
Yad Vashem Studies, 2023
One of the most interesting cases of political instrumentalization, selectiveness, and distortion of historical memory under the Romanian Communist regime was the case of the public remembrance of the Fascist/Nazi era and its atrocities in conjunction with the over-emphasis on the Communist resistance to it. The authors examine these aspects by means of Jewish Communist Matei Gall’s autobiographic narratives focusing on World War II violence over a forty-year time span. These include Masacrul, published as a novel in 1956, in Communist Romania, based on two articles that initially appeared in the Communist party’s newspaper România liberă in September 1944; and Eclipsa, published as a memoir in post-Communist Romania in 1997. The authors also consider two interviews Gall gave in 2009, and what they added to his previous life narratives as well as how generally his narratives, spanning from the immediate postwar context to the 2000s, contribute to Communist and post-Communist mnemonic frameworks of the Holocaust in Romania.
THE ODESSA MASSACRE AND ITS PERPETRATORS: MEMORY AND "VICTIMHOOD" TOWARDS THE HOLOCAUST IN ROMANIA
THE ODESSA MASSACRE AND ITS PERPETRATORS: MEMORY AND "VICTIMHOOD" TOWARDS THE HOLOCAUST IN ROMANIA, 2021
The academic study of the Odessa Massacre and its impact on the memorial process of post-1989 Romania has not produced a research cluster of its own. As part of the Holocaust in Romania, the massacre is one of the pivotal moments in the study of the Romanian-orchestrated genocide, yet no comprehensive study currently exists on how the post-communist Romanian public perceived the Odessa crimes. In this paper, I examine the relation between the way in which historians have discussed the Odessa Massacre through the use of archival sources and the process of memory dissemination related to this event after 1989. Recent attempts at "recovering" the memories of convicted war criminals such as Nicolae Macici have shown that the idea of political justice has had a certain negative connotation in post-totalitarian Romanian public memory. Still, other figures such as Constantin Trestioreanu and Ovidiu Anca have been treated as having various "motivations" for their actions, ranging from just military responses to the impossibility of military refusal. Building upon my previous article published in "Holocaust-Studii și cercetări" on Romanian postwar memory, I argue that the post-1989 attempts at rehabilitating the names of convicted war criminals are linked to the lack of study of lesser-known figures of the Odessa Massacre. Thus, I examine the way in which focusing on the "big names" from this chapter of the Holocaust has undergirded a memorial process by which certain perpetrators can be classified as victims in the memory related to the Holocaust by appearing as symbols of oppressed "political prisoners". Overall, this article looks at the relation between archives and memory within the post-1989 era.
Review Essay: New Research on the Holocaust in Romania
Sehepunkte, 2018
Over the last three decades and after many decades of near complete silence, research on the Holocaust in Romania has become a growing and increasingly diverse field. [1] The 1990s and early 2000s saw the publication of a range of ground-breaking works, including a number source collections, the first comprehensive overviews of the topic, and the Final Report on the Holocaust in Romania, assembled by an international team of scholars.