With this new publication dedicated to the Romanian Holocaust, the editor and seven contributors add another brick to what looks more and more like a painstaking, Sisyphus-type process of constructing an adequate public memory of it. For the last thirty years, the public memory of the Holocaust in Romania has been on a roller coaster, with ups and downs that are not always easy to explain, sometimes verging on sheer stupidity, as was the case with some Romanian nuns who celebrated the 90th anniversary of a fellow priest by singing a interwar far right song because apparently he had been a member of the Legionary movement in his youth, and posted the clip on YouTube; other times on black humor, irony and sarcasm, as was the case with Radu Jude's film “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians,” or Florin Iepan's “Odessa,” which were more successful abroad than in Romania, because Romanians don't like to be faced with their lack of logic and consistency (but then who does?) Like all over eastern Europe, the “war of memories,” or as Michael Shafir calls it, “the competitive victimhood/martyrdom,” that is, the competition between the cult of the anti-fascists, who were not all communists, and the cult of the anti-communists, who were not all fascists, is present here too, although because Romania was a Nazi-allied country there were no partisans to further complicate the matter. There are constant attempts to make heroes out of fascist anti-communists, but also official slips, such as the decoration by the Romanian President of a (self)-declared legionnaire sympathizer, for his anti-communist past.
Despite over twenty years of mandatory Holocaust education and the endorsement by the authorities, in 2004, of the Final Report of the Elie Wiesel International Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania; despite the annual official commemorations through public events on the Holocaust Remembrance Day (October 9), including special Parliamentary sessions and local cultural manifestations, and the obligation for schools and high-schools all over the country to organize specific activities to mark the day (which do raise some awareness on the topic), opinion polls show that the lack of specific knowledge continues to be widespread and that many still accept the Holocaust only as a German product. At the grass roots level, information about the Holocaust is scarce and denial is rampant, not least because of the clash between official policy and the conflicting notion of the Romanian people's “great past and hospitable nature,” which though not invented by the communists, was highly exacerbated under their rule. The problem with Romania is that it is doing great in terms of official public policies but lousy in terms of the reality on the ground.
Not everything is bleak, however: a slow but steady improvement can be felt, especially in comparison with other east European countries. There are examples of “good practices,” or positive developments, such as the relevant contributions to Romanian historiography by some young Romanian historians who have taken, in the last twenty years, an accurate and responsible look at the Romanian Holocaust and the circumstances and mechanisms that made it possible (such as Mihai Chioveanu, Adrian Cioflanca, and others), or the outstanding educational projects carried out by a number of history teachers (in Bucharest, Arad, Lugoj, and elsewhere), which may have not turned the tables, but have still had some impact. Moreover, the manner in which the church has been dealing with its own “dark legacy” (many of the interwar far right adepts were clergymen and theology students) has started being questioned, among others by Ion Popa in his brilliant recent work The Romanian Orthodox Church and the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2017).
In this context, this newly published volume (consisting of an Introduction and eight chapters divided into two sections, “Competing Memories and Historical Obfuscation” and “National Heroes, Outstanding Intellectuals, or Holocaust Perpetrators?,” respectively) brings some interesting insights into this “war of memories” in a stated attempt to find some explanations for this intricate phenomenon, which is not uniquely Romanian, but in the evolution of which Romania does stand out through some particularities.
In the introductory remarks, entitled “Memory under Construction,” the editor, Alexandru Florian, makes it clear that this work is the result of a research project. That explains why important aspects of Holocaust public memory, such as its reflection in visual and performing arts, or in memorials and museums that often have more impact (either way, if we were only to recall Sergiu Nicolaescu's 1993 film “The Mirror”) than any other type of educational approach, was left aside (although the reason why they were not included in the original research remains obscure). This research effort was apparently prompted by the worrying findings of five national surveys conducted by the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania between 2007 and 2015, which aimed to assess the public perceptions of Marshal Ion Antonescu, the Holocaust in Romania, and the social distance separating the Romanian majority and the ethnic minorities. The project team's interpretation of these findings led to the creation of an analytical model in which “three factors were considered most relevant in minimizing the tragedy of the Jews: ethnocentrism, nationalism, and anticommunism” (xxi).
Thus, in the first chapter, “Ethnocentric Mindscapes and Mnemonic Myopia,” Ana Barbulescu finds, through a thorough analysis of a significant part of Romanian historiography, that the answer to the question “why is it difficult for Romanian society to acknowledge the Holocaust of the Romanian Jews?…lies in a deficient historiographic socialization where due to the dialectic relation between identity and memory, the Holocaust is presented in a distorted manner in order to remain consonant with the generic image ascribed to the Romanian people” (5), that of a heroic and hospitable nation, in which minorities have no place (even the textbooks were called for a long time “history of the Romanians,” and not “history of Romania”).
In chapter 2, “Postcommunist Romania's Leading Public Intellectuals and the Holocaust,” George Voicu unsurprisingly finds that in the last thirty years, the Holocaust has not once been the topic of choice in Romanian intellectual debates, but only came up as an aside in the discussion of communism and its crimes (perhaps also due to the fact that for various understandable reasons, there has so far been no trial of communism similar to Nurenberg in any east European country). Holocaust distortion in elite circles is thus also a result of a “competitive victimhood” resentment that there is too much Holocaust memory and too little communist remembrance (despite the fact that nothing prevents them from enhancing the latter).
In chapter 3, “Law, Justice and Holocaust Memory in Romania,” Alexandru Climescu examines “the relationship between Holocaust memory and law during the postcommunist period” (75). To this end he focuses on the acquittal in the 1990s of those convicted for war crimes after 1945 and on the dismissal of most cases falling under the provisions of Emergency Ordinance 31/2002, banning Holocaust denial, fascist propaganda, and the cult of war criminals, showing that having a law is a good cover up for working toward the opposite effect.
In the lengthy chapter 4, “Romania, Neither ‘Fleishig’ nor ‘Milchig’: A Comparative Study,” Michael Shafir provides a very detailed, down-to-earth, and critical incursion into the evolution, during the last thirty years, of Romanian antisemitism and Holocaust memory (or lack thereof) seen in a larger, east European perspective, with the additional advantage that he was a direct participant in some of the events he describes (and as such benefits from “inside intel”). While revisiting some of the notions that he himself previously coined, such as double genocide, Holocaust obfuscation, and competitive martyrdom, he also comes up with a new and very expressive categorization of antisemitism into six different classes, and concludes that Romania is not faring the best but neither is it doing the worst among the former communist countries.
In chapter 5, “‘Wanting Not to Know’ About the Holocaust in Romania: A Wind of Change?,” which closes the first section of the volume, Simon Geissbuhler makes an interesting theoretical and practical incursion into the dichotomies of remembering—forgetting, knowing—not-knowing and wanting-to-know—not-wanting-to-know. He adds a third dimension: Paul Ricoeur's concept of “wanting-not-to-know” in a comparative regional perspective that includes Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova.
The volume's second part takes a more applied look at the manner in which the image of historical interwar figures who became far right adepts is reconfigured in the public space today in an attempt to reinvent, once more, the recent past by stepping up nationalistic and chauvinistic feelings and by refusing to take a realistic approach to the real ideological and cultural values of the Iron Guard. To this end, Alexandru Florian analyzes the controversial case of Mircea Vulcanescu; Marius Cazan examines Ion Antonescu's image in postcommunist historiography; and Adina Babes dwells on the students’ perceptions of perpetrators, bystanders, helpers, and victims in an attempt to see where things are going.
All in all, the variety of perspectives, thoroughness of approaches and new insights, as well as the constant comparison with what is happening in the neighbors’ backyards, recommend the volume as a welcome and necessary step on the road to understanding the Romanian Holocaust and the e/in-volution of its memory, in a European context. Although its scope could have been broader, the absence of certain aspects does not make this work any less important as a useful tool for both researchers and students in the field of Holocaust studies.
