Vladimir Solonari's new book situates Romania's Holocaust within the larger framework of Ion Antonescu's vision of an ethnically homogenous Greater Romania that was free not only of Jews and Roma, but of all ethnic minorities categorically. The author considers the important question of agency and the relationship between the formulation of official policy at the highest level and the ways in which those policies were understood and carried out by their executors at the lowest level. Accordingly, Solonari considers the extent to which ordinary Romanians were sympathetic to and complicit in the state's effort to cleanse the nation of ethnically foreign elements.

The author begins by discussing the ideological provenance of Romania's wartime racial policies. Most important was the emergence of eugenic concepts of a biological, rather than a cultural nation, which transformed the liberal constitutional understanding of the nation as a legal or political community into a spiritual, organic one based on “the law of the blood” (55). Laws against Jews were formulated on this basis in 1940. However, whereas Jews were by far the most widely and deeply affected by exclusionary policies, they were not the only object of the state's efforts at ethnic homogenization. Greater Romania inherited substantial minorities in 1918 that collectively constituted nearly a third of the country's population. Primarily composed of Bulgarians in Dobrudja and Hungarians in Transylvania, Romania endeavored to repatriate these populations to Bulgaria and Hungary in exchange for Romanians living in those countries. More important than the results of these short-lived exchanges were what they revealed about the nature of ethnic identity and the specious assumptions on which Romanian policy was based. Contrary to state-espoused theories that identity was objective, solid, and immutable, responses from many Romanians slated for repatriation showed that identity was in fact malleable, appropriative, subject to individual perception, and informed by a range of factors of which biological kinship was only one (105).

Once Antonescu joined Hitler's war against the Soviet Union in June 1941, he sought to use the dislocating wartime conditions in the recovered territories of Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia to put his plan of ethnic cleansing into action. Jews in major urban areas were to be herded into camps or ghettos, whereas those in the countryside were to be executed summarily. Romanian forces on the ground had the authority to execute Jews without prior approval from above and routinely did so knowing both the fundamentals of state policy, as well as the will of the Romanian high command (171). Although the recovered territories may have been Antonescu's laboratory for a new, ethnically pure Romania, Romanianization, according to which Jews were to be displaced in urban professions by ethnic Romanians, was neither complete nor thorough. Apologists today use the survival of many Jews from Moldavia and Wallachia as evidence to exculpate Antonescu's role in the Holocaust. However, as Radu Ioanid (The Holocaust in Romania, Chicago, 2000) and Dennis Deletant (Hitler's Forgotten Ally, New York, 2006) do in their respective works on the subject, Solonari argues that these Jews' survival owes entirely to the arbitrary way in which Romanianization was applied, as well as to their indispensable skills in many key sectors of the war economy.

Solonari's book is perhaps most important and most problematic in its exploration of the implications of ordinary Romanians' responses to the Holocaust in their country. The author maintains unequivocally that “Christian indifference to Jewish fate allowed the policy of ethnic cleansing to succeed … Had this population …protested in any substantial numbers … none of this could have happened … protests were very rare and this greatly facilitated the Romanians' murderous actions” (199). To what extent ordinary Romanian citizens' protests could have fundamentally altered what constituted an integral part not only of official state policy, but also of Antonescu's broader war strategy, is speculative at best. Although there is little question that most Romanians supported an initial alliance with Hitler to restore the borders of Greater Romania, Antonescu's decision to carry the effort beyond the Dniester in a crusade against Bolshevism was his own. Accordingly, the author's concluding accusation that Romanians' silence was by itself tantamount to collective acceptance of the “necessity” and “ultimate justice” of ethnic cleansing (340) and by extension, of the destruction of Romanian Jewry, is hardly convincing.