FOREWORD TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

You have just opened the pages of an extraordinary document. It sheds a piercing light into the most obscured, most hidden, most forgotten corner of the crime of our century, the Holocaust. It is the largely unknown story of the wholesale slaughter of close to 400,000 Jews by the wartime Rumanian government and the fascist of that country. Without this book, the story of the Holocaust is incomplete.

It is not a coincidence that this story has remained hidden for so long. Ever since the war and to this day, all the Rumanian governments and most of the country's historians were united in a tacit conspiracy to deny, to obscure, to hide the truth about Rumania's contribution to the Holocaust. And for good reasons, as that truth is abominable.

Rumania has had the distinction of completing its own indigenous Holocaust, without much prodding from their German allies. In fact, as evidenced by this volume, mass butchering of Rumania's Jews started well before the Endloesung was unleashed on the Jews of Germany and of the countries under German occupation.

No German prodding was needed as the methods of the slaughtering reached such incredible level of savagery that sometimes even German authorities felt compelled the protest the barbarism. Think about it. What it could take [8] during the war to have Nazi German officials to protest the mistreatment of Jews.

In recent years if became fashionable in certain extreme right-wing circles to deny that the Holocaust ever took place. There are "experts" around the globe who spend a great deal of time and effort on denying the undeniable. In some countries such propaganda violates the law, in others its practitioners are simply dismissed as crackpots.

What we witness in this case is a monstrous, and so far largely successful, attempt of official Holocaust denial. The four volumes of this book were published in Bucharest between 1946 and 1948. Shortly after publication the Rumanian authorities confiscated every available volume and fed them to the pulp ,ills. Rumanian agents since have stolen and destroyed even most of those copies that found their way into foreign libraries. This book, until now, was practically unavailable for the outside world.

Into this enforced silence in stepped official Rumanian propaganda with perfect continuity through half a century. What this propaganda aided by Rumanian "historians", has trumpeted around the world was their peculiar version of World War II history in which Rumania was the only country under German influence or occupation that largely spared the Jewish population under its jurisdiction. This volume shows the opposite to be true. If there was any distinction, it lay in Rumania's preceding and occasionally surpassing Nazi Germany's brutality. What they lacked in the cold calculation of the diabolically systematic German death machine, the Rumanians made up in the sheer savagery of their human slaughterhouses, the mass rapes of their victims wives and daughters, or the burning alive of 20 000 of Odessa's Jews.

[9] This is not an easy book to read and not only because of its horrific content. Matatias Carp was no great writer and made no pretension of being one. Although at the time of publication he was the General Secretary of the Association of Rumanian Jews, he stated in his own foreword that he wrote this book as a simple archivist, a chronicler of the sufferings of Rumania's Jews. "I wrote this book of blood and tears with blood and tears..." he states elsewhere.

His deed has been of enormous significance. What he did was to bear witness in the real biblical sense. His prose may be simple, the marshalling of his data awkward, but he has recorded, for us all that was to be recorded, and all good men and women dedicated to remembrance as one way of preventing new holocausts will remain in Matatias Carp's debt forever.

The original work comprises four volumes. The first one describes the anti-Semitic pogroms by the Iron Guard, a fascist Rumanian organisation trained in part by the Gestapo. The Iron Guard originally started as an extreme right-wing student movement but is soon grew into an SA type paramilitary terror gang. After Rumania's wartime dictator Ion Antonescu took power in September 1940, the Iron Guard was unleashed on the political opposition and especially on the Jewish population of the country. During the following month thousands of Jewish homes and businesses were looted and destroyed, thousands of Jews tortured and killed in a whole series of the most brutal pogroms. The carnage was ended, temporarily, only by the suppression of the Iron Guard itself by Marshal Antonescu, not for their unspeakable crimes, of course, but because by that time the Iron Guard became a rival of the dictator [10] himself. Another apt parallel with the ultimate fate of the German SA.

The second volume deals with the mass murder of the Jewish population in and around the Rumanian town of Iasi. These events took place after Rumania entered the war against the Soviet Union on the side of Nazi Germany in June, 1941. Iasi was a town with a large Jewish community in close proximity to the Soviet front. In this instance the Jews served - as so often in their tragic history - as scapegoats. Scapegoats for any failure or the Rumanian army against the Soviets, for the evacuation of Bessarabia due to a Soviet ultimatum, for any successful Soviet attack or bombing raid. During the next few weeks tens of thousands of Jews were killed and deported. "Deported" meaning not some semi-orderly transfer, but methods that in themselves amounted to a way of mass killing. Very few of these "deportees" had a chance to reach any kind of destination.

The third volume is a chronicle of similar mass killings on territories that were temporarily occupied by Rumania during the war, including Transnistria, Bukovina, Bessarabia and the Black Sea port of Odessa. The Jews of Bessarabia, the strongly anti-Semitic region that became part of Rumania in 1918, died by the tens of thousands in such interment camps as Edineti, in death marches and ghettos. In Bukovina, more than 100 communities were uprooted and driven eastward. Most of the atrocities were committed in Transnistria, a territorial unit unfamiliar to most students of history of geography. This was an artificial province declared by Ion Antonescu, and carved out of Ukrainian territory between the rivers Dnyester (Rumanian: Nistru) and Bug. It was possessed by Rumania for 2 years and 7 [11] months, plenty of time for the Rumanians to butcher over 200 000 Jews there.

The above three volumes by Matatias Carp are included in the present edition. The fourth volume is omitted for the following reasons. This volume described the deportation of the Jews of Northern Transylvania in 1944. This however was not done under Rumanian jurisdiction. The Second Vienna Arbitration of August, 1940 returned the Northern half of Transylvania - awarded to Rumania as a result of World War I - to Hungary. After Germany occupied Hungary in March, 1944. Eichmann was dispatched to Hungary to administer the deportation of Hungarian Jewry, largely spared until that time.

Eichmann found plenty of Hungarian accomplices, parts of the gendarmery, and Hungarian Nazi thugs. What is important, however, is that no Hungarian government since the war, or no Hungarian historian of any significance, ever tried to conceal from the world what happened to the Jews of Hungary, including, at that time, Northern Transylvania. to ease Hungarian guilt, they often point out that the deportations started only after the German occupation of the country, (March 19, 1944) which is factually true. But there is no official Holocaust denial, no attempt to hide the complicity of some Hungarians in Eichmann's dirty work. In fact, the Hungarian Holocaust is well documented historically and even in literature. As this volume is about that part of the Holocaust that is "credited" to the fascist regime of Ion Antonescu, Matatias Carp's fourth volume has no place in it.

Since the first publication in 1946, Matatias Carp's Holocaust in Rumania has all but lost relevance. Traditional Rumanian chauvinism and xenophobia have since [12]compelled hundreds of thousands of Germans, Jews, and Hungarians to leave their homeland, bringing about a sharp drop in the percentage of German, Jewish, and Hungarian minorities to the Rumanian majority. Such turn of events would be to the liking of Ion Antonescu, whose spirit seems to roam Rumania's political establishment these days. Indeed, the fascist dictator and "Marshal" has been rehabilitated by Rumanian Parliament; streets in Rumanian towns have recently been renamed after him. With his statue erected in Slobozia, it was for the first time in post-war history that a war criminal and mass murderer should have been honoured with a monument in a "democracy". This happened October 22, 1993. with the assistance of Rumanian government officials and members of parliament.

The revival of the Antonescu cult in today's Rumania and the resurgence of institutionalised anti-Semitism only make the publication of Carp's book more timely. The weekly Rumania Mare and the daily Europe regularly incite anti-Semitic feelings; such openly xenophobic groups as those called "Pro Bessarabia and Bukovina Cultural Association" and "League for Marshal Antonescu" unfortunately have political space in Rumania to organise. By not looking, the world cannot repeat the old mistakes. Rumania must come clean on the events of its past and admit its profound guilt. Acknowledging guilt is bound to lead to a new awareness of the rights and wrongs of today as well. Such awareness, in turn, shall provide a solid foundation for the aspirations of Rumania's true democrats.