Over the past two decades, a new field of study has been created almost entirely from scratch: the Holocaust in Romania. Most of this scholarship has been produced by scholars living outside the country, but researchers from Romania have joined this effort in increasing numbers. Despite the vast accumulation of academic knowledge, facing one of the darkest pages of its history has not been without difficulty in Romania. The main obstacle to recognizing the Holocaust in Romania has been an “asymmetric” mode of tackling memory about the Holocaust: in Romania, political factors have been the driving force pushing for the acceptance of responsibility for past crimes, while intellectual elites and the general public have mostly oscillated between indifference and varying degrees of reluctance, if not hostility.

Broadly speaking, the way Romania has dealt with the issue of the Holocaust over the last three decades has attracted both criticism and praise. In the 1990s, Romania's search for a “usable past” was marked by its embrace of ethnic nationalism, which brought back the ethos of the interwar era, including its xenophobia, racism, and antisemitism. Ion Antonescu, the country's Prime Minister and Conducător directly responsible for the orchestration of the Holocaust was rehabilitated and elevated into the pantheon of Romania's national heroes. Leading legionaries, members of a fascist paramilitary group involved in violence and persecution of Jews, became acclaimed anti-communist fighters. This development took place with the direct support of the Romanian intellectual elite (including prominent personalities in exile), whose championship of the equalization of fascism and communism as “two genocidal twins,” led in turn to the Holocaust's trivialization, obfuscation, and, at times, outright negation.Footnote ¹

Political factors took center stage in the early 2000s, when external pressure forced Romania's government to reconsider its attitude towards the country's past, and specifically its role in the Holocaust. Eyeing NATO membership and EU accession, Romania set up a special commission on the study of the Holocaust in Romania under the leadership of Romanian-born Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel. In 2004, the Wiesel Commission pronounced the Romanian state responsible for the death of 280,000–380,000 Jews and over 11,000 Roma in what it explicitly called the Romanian Holocaust. Since then, a flurry of actions have been implemented by the Romanian government: a national Holocaust Remembrance Day was established and has been commemorated annually; teaching about the Holocaust became part of the national school curriculum; the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania was established; aHolocaust monument was unveiled in Bucharest; laws to combat antisemitism were introduced; and legislation favoring the restitution claims of Holocaust survivors were put in place. While a Holocaust Museum is currently being planned, for various reasons the initiative has stalled.

At this stage, the main challenge to the memory of the Holocaust no longer comes from the Romanian government, but from individuals and groups who disregarded the proliferation of knowledge by deploying a strategy of avoidance and “wanting-not-to-know” about the crimes committed by the state and many of its citizens.Footnote ² As in many other countries, a number of factors have been wrestling with the memory of the Holocaust. Issues of guilt, competing victimhoods, and the Romanian church's position have all played a role in hindering a national coming-to-terms with this painful chapter of its history.Footnote ³ These countervailing forces have limited the impact of many of the state's initiatives and many specialists find the transformation at the level of the general public frustratingly slow and still unsatisfactory. Suggestively, a 2015 poll revealed that 69% of the Romanian public viewed Nazi Germany as primarily responsible for the Holocaust in Romania, and only 19% attributed culpability to the government of Ion Antonescu. When recently evaluating the state of affairs of the public memory of the Holocaust, Alexandru Florian, director of the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania concluded: “For a majority of Romanians, the Holocaust is not seen as an event that has any relevance to them and to Romania, an attitude aided by the fact that the Holocaust perpetrated by Romania happened mostly in areas that are no longer part of the Romanian state.”Footnote ⁴

Despite this slow transformation among the general public, change in how the Holocaust is viewed and approached in Romania is evident in several areas, especially within education. For example, there is a clear spill-over effect from international research on the Romanian Holocaust that has affected Romanian scholarship; there is increased Holocaust education in universities, along with the state-mandated additions within secondary schools; and there are educational efforts by various civic society organizations, which have worked creatively to share information more broadly with the public.

The vast accumulation of knowledge about the Holocaust in Romania has also begun pouring into other areas, including Romania's film industry. Romania's “New Wave Cinema,” mostly galvanized by the political changes resulting from the process of European Union integration and access to public funding, has been propelled to fame by the early 2000s.Footnote ⁵ Frequently concerned with the country's troubled recent past and a shared “quest for truth,” the filmmakers of this generation provided sobering accounts of past and present injustices and crimes. Many of these productions received prestigious national and international film awards, generating the moniker “Cannes moviemakers” for this genre's various teams. In addition, a new type of cinema activism took shape in the form of the One World Romania International Human Rights & Documentary Film Festival, a forum aimed at raising a historical consciousness among Romania's younger generations. Under the direction of the cinematographer Alexandru Solomon since 2008, the festival has attracted considerable national attention, in part because it became a venue for many controversial films.

The changing cinematic landscape and contemporary filmmakers’ broader desire to break taboos from the past have resulted in a number of movies about the Holocaust. These films tapped into a collective memory that had, until then, been conveniently shielded by competing remembrances of more recent communist-era crimes. Feature films such as Train of Life (Radu Mihăileanu, 1998), Gruber's Journey (Radu Gabrea, 2009), I Do Not Care if We Go Down In History as Barbarians (Radu Jude, 2018) and documentary films like Struma (Radu Gabrea, 2001), Odessa (Florin Iepan, 2013), and The Dead Nation (Radu Jude, 2017) have touched upon various aspects of the Holocaust. Romanian-born French director Radu Mihăileanu, in his tragicomedy Train of Life, unfolds as the story of an east European Jewish village, whose residents plan to escape the Holocaust by organizing an imitation deportation train. Radu Gabrea, in Gruber's Journey, tackled the horrors of the Iași pogrom, while his documentary, Struma, tells the tragic story of a ship used to transport Romanian Jews to safety during the Holocaust that was ultimately torpedoed in 1942 killing all but one of its passengers. Moldovan filmmakers also joined the list with two documentaries that addressed the destruction of Jews that occurred on the territory of today's Moldova: The Exile from Bessarabia (Natalia Ghilașcu, 2012) and The Massacre from Home (Oleg Brega, 2019). Several of the above-mentioned movies, while documenting the Holocaust, depict in parallel the attitudes of contemporary Romanians toward this problematic past. Florin Iepan's Odessa, for example, is perhaps the most daring Romanian documentary of this era. The film describes the massacres of tens of thousands of Jews in Odessa by the Romanian army while simultaneously revealing the indifference and obstinate refusal of Romania's contemporary society to integrate this page into its collective memory. Suggestively, after the film's screening, several historians accused Iepan of “manipulating the numbers” and claimed it is difficult to conclude what exactly happened in Odessa, given the existence of “multiple opinions” and lack of “very strict documents.”Footnote ⁶ The 2018 feature film by Radu Jude, which is a reenactment of the Odessa massacre, once again exposed in full force both the vitality of Romanian nationalism and its malign influence on the memory of the Holocaust. Provocative and sarcastic, the movie can be viewed as an invitation for Romanian audiences to come to terms with its problematic past.

Radu Jude's recent documentary, The Dead Nation (a more exact translation from Romanian would be “The Dead Country”) attempts to offer a view of what Romanian society (may have) represented during the Holocaust. Jude's narrative is woven chronologically, by carefully assembling three groups of primary sources: 1) still photos taken by a Romanian photographer in his studio in Slobozia (in southeastern Romania) during the 1930s and early 1940s; 2) excerpts from the diary of Jewish doctor and writer Emil Dorian; and 3) audio material from Romania's National Archive of Films. Each group of sources carries separate messages and meanings, and under the director's masterful combination, they come together to relate—in a somewhat pedagogical manner—the story of a continuously deteriorating situation for Jews in Romania between 1937 and 1945 accompanied by the death of human solidarity in the society that they had participated in.

The film succeeds on a number of fronts, and some of the most powerful moments stem from the original audio materials. Legionaries’ songs, official speeches of Ion Antonescu and King Carol II, and excerpts from Romanian propaganda newsreels brilliantly illustrate the aggressive force of Romanian nationalism, with its mobilizing energy that resided in exalted views about ethnic Romanians, blatant distortions of fact, and brazen denigration of those depicted as “the other” or “the enemy.”

The main narrator, Emil Dorian (the diary excerpts are read by the filmmaker himself), painstakingly details his anxieties and reflections as progressively worse elements of anti-Jewish policies begin being rolled out with crushing force. Dorian, similar to other European Jews acculturated to gentile cultures, is taken aback by the violent tearing away of Jews from Romania's social fabric. The narrator's inclination for introspection and his astute observations on the changing nature of Jewish-gentile interactions opens a unique window into Jewish life in Bucharest during the Holocaust. However, despite the film's power and its ability to convey the tragedy of Jewish life through the story of Dorian, for a less knowledgeable audience there is a real risk that this protagonist's experience might be interpreted as the epitome of the Holocaust in Romania. Here, greater context from the film's producers might have helped to avoid misperceptions. It is extremely important for the audience to correctly understand that the film does not depict an overall Jewish experience, but rather captures exclusively the Holocaust “at the center,” in a part of the country where most Jews were Romanian-speaking and highly integrated. The film does not represent the Holocaust that occurred in other parts of Romania's territory to the east.

The specificity of the Holocaust in Romania is that the regime's anti-Jewish policies displayed significant regional variations. Jews from the Old Kingdom, which included most of today's central and north-eastern Romania, lost their property, professions, civil and political rights, and were forced to undertake physical labor for public needs, as dictated by the state. The majority of them, however, did not experience ghettoization, deportations, and mass massacres, which all befell the Jews from Bukovina, Bessarabia, and parts of Ukraine (Transnistria) that were under Romanian control during the Second World War. The diary that provides the backbone of the film's narration is not equipped to deal with this variation and no additional information is provided by the film's authors. As a result, the audience walks away without being exposed to information about the systematic massacres of Jews in rural areas of Bessarabia and Bukovina, the Odessa massacre (despite the diary's brief discussion of the situation within occupied Odessa), or the Bogdanovka massacre—one of the largest mass executions to take place during the Second World War. This last omission is especially jarring given the excerpt used in the film about Bucharest's Jews in January 1942, when they were forced to shovel snow during a terrible frost, resulting in many of them being frostbit. Viewers remain unaware that during the same period of time, just to the east in Transnistria, the Romanian authorities and their Nazi ally were concluding the execution of over 50,000 Jews in Bogdanovka.

One could certainly argue that the film intended to present just one dimension of the Holocaust in Romania. Yet, it is difficult to avoid noticing that the author's choice included the territory of today's Romania, where the majority of Jews survived, and excluded the territories that now belong to other countries, where Antonescu's regime killed hundreds of thousands of victims. If the contemporary memorialization efforts will prioritize such clear-cut cases, confined by the geography of Romania's contemporary territory and the interest towards “its own” Jews, the Romanian public may end up believing that the Holocaust implemented by the Antonescu authorities was not, in fact, so lethal.

The juxtaposition of photographs and diary readings is also a feature of the film that is both effective but not without its drawbacks. The photographs, taken in the 1930s and early 1940s in a private studio in Slobozia, are displayed as the film's background, which melts into the imagery of jubilant men, women, and children, many of them smiling defiantly, or posing to look distinguished, important, or serious, all during a time when terrible policies were being implemented by the Romanian government against its Jewish residents. While the intended broader message of this contrast raises no objections, the use of these photos will leave some historians with an uneasy feeling. The disquiet is the result of an awareness that the pictures were taken for personal purposes—to memorialize various events from people's lives. As such, what we are seeing is a staged setting with specific and deliberate looks on people's faces, rather than a natural setting captured spontaneously. Proud hunters with rifles and their prey, cattle owners with their calf (inside a studio), happy parents and guests at the celebration of children's baptisms, saddened parents beside their children's coffins, weddings, individuals with fruit, flowers, or pitchers of wine, and many other faces and situations are paraded in front of us. To what extent is this random group of people from a provincial town (and not those from Iași, for example, where thousands of Jews were killed in a large pogrom in 1941) the best fit to embody Romania's callousness and recklessness towards its Jews? With the exception of a group (most of them children) with their arms raised in the Nazi salute, nothing is suggestive that they were ardent supporters of anti-Jewish policies. How would we react if it was discovered that some of the individuals photographed were actually Jews? The question is not entirely irrelevant, given that Slobozia's Jews made up only 1.4 percent of its pre-war population.

Despite the above-mentioned concerns, the documentary is undoubtedly worth seeing. The original material, creative juxtapositions, and the effective simplicity used to demonstrate the tragedy that occurred to much of Romania's Jewish population were emotive and haunting. The dangers posed by the discourse of hate in the era of mass politics also reveals itself in all its hypnotic might and populist appeal, making one wonder, once again, if we have learned enough from history.