Due to the growing nationalist wave, the waters of a whole era were broken in Romania in the 1930s. Radu Jude describes this in his 2017 documentary The Dead Nation (Tara Moarta), using photographer Costica Axinte’s collection of photographs taken from that decade. The quote is taken from the diary of Emil Dorian, a Jewish doctor of the time. It shows us things that photographs cannot: the rise of anti-Semitism and a heartbreaking representation of the local Holocaust, a subject rarely mentioned in current Romanian society over time. Much later, in the 1980s, a written confession by a high-ranking official in the communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu came to light; Here something hitherto secret was revealed: that Romania sold its Jewish population in exchange for cattle or money. Romanian-French journalist Sonia Devillers (Les Lilas, 1975) recently investigated one of the dirtiest pages of 20th century European history. The result is an impressive book titled Los Exportados.
The story Devillers tells immerses us in the world of his maternal grandparents, a member of the Jewish bourgeoisie in Bucharest that was on the rise before the war: cultured, polyglot, music-loving. Artists, businessmen, academics, and Jews are reluctant to change their names in order not to completely break away from Judaism, despite their efforts to be as less Jewish as possible. The rise of deeply anti-Semitic Romanian fascism in the interwar period, followed by World War II. The rise of the pro-Nazi regime of Ion Antonescu during World War II left the recording of the Shoah in its domestic version open to all kinds of manipulation after the war. However, fearful of the failure of the Third Reich, the Government’s decision to side excessively with the Allies meant that the large Romanian Jewish population in Bucharest was not finally deported for fear of generating hostility towards friendly Western powers. In this way, the majority of the Jews in the country managed to survive, being subjected to much more persecution than in neighboring countries. As a result, there were more Jews in post-war Romania, already communist, than anywhere else in Eastern Europe outside the Soviet Union. Although outwardly staunch communists, the Devillers’ grandparents were convicted of “cosmopolitanism”. And in 1962, the rulers of this impoverished dictatorship discovered that they could ransom their Jews and exchange them for goods such as pigs or money. They had a particular predilection for Denmark’s native pig breed, seeing it as a panacea.
As Leo Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but unlike the even more unfortunate of other exiles, the story of the family of Romanian Devillers, refugees in Paris, is unlike any other. It left its mark on the second half of the 20th century. There is a heartbreaking, premeditated imposition, said the French journalist’s magnificently written story, and there is no reason to continue it. In reality, the author’s grandparents, as he himself said from the beginning, were not forcibly “expelled” like others after losing their privileges: there came a time when they also wanted to leave Romania, thinking it was possible to leave. clearly sinister human trafficking. In the early 1960s, when the Deleanu family, formerly Greenberg, left Romania to settle in France, they did not emigrate, but instead received exit visas after an exchange in which the Romanian State received purebred pets and automated or modern agricultural facilities in return. machines and tools. After Ceaușescu came to power, things stopped temporarily, but then they reached even greater proportions: The socialist state sold a large part of its citizens of Jewish origin to the State of Israel. Like raw materials, they were valued and traded abroad for hard currencies.
In December 1961, Harry and Gabriela Deleanu, their daughters Lena and Marina, and their grandmother Roza Sanielevici left Romania by train for Paris. They represented a small fraction of the almost quarter-million Jews sold by the communist state and left Romania humiliated, often forced to give up their citizenship and property in the country in exchange for passports. It can be said that communism succeeded where Romanian fascism failed.
Source: Informacion
Brandon Hall is an author at “Social Bites”. He is a cultural aficionado who writes about the latest news and developments in the world of art, literature, music, and more. With a passion for the arts and a deep understanding of cultural trends, Brandon provides engaging and thought-provoking articles that keep his readers informed and up-to-date on the latest happenings in the cultural world.