In the 1930s, a nationalist current reshaped Romania, fragmenting an entire era. The filmmaker Radu Jude captures this in his 2017 documentary The Dead Nation (Tara Moarta), drawing on photographer Costica Axinte’s decade-spanning images. The narrative is anchored by a diary entry from Emil Dorian, a Jewish physician of the time, which reveals aspects that photographs alone cannot convey: the ascent of anti-Semitism and a painful portrayal of local persecution, topics that have often faded from collective memory in Romania. Later, in the 1980s, a written confession from a high-ranking official in Nicolae Ceaușescu’s communist regime surfaced, exposing a grim episode in which Romania purportedly traded its Jewish population for livestock or money. Romanian-French journalist Sonia Devillers (Lilas, 1975) revisited these dark pages of European history, producing an immersive examination titled Los Exportados.
Devillers’ account transports readers into the world of his maternal grandparents, a Jewish bourgeois family in Bucharest that thrived before the war. They were cultured, multilingual, and fond of music. Among artists, businessmen, and academics, there was a reluctance to abandon Jewish identity entirely, with many choosing to keep names that reflected their heritage while striving to assimilate as much as possible. The interwar era witnessed a surge in anti-Semitic Romanian fascism, followed by World War II. The ascent of Ion Antonescu’s regime during the conflict left the fate of the Shoah within Romania open to manipulation after the war. Fearing a backlash from Allied powers, the postwar government wavered in deporting the large Jewish population in Bucharest, allowing a significant portion to survive under conditions harsher than in neighboring states. Consequently, Romania’s Jewish community grew in the early communist period, perhaps more than anywhere else in Eastern Europe outside the Soviet Union. Though outwardly rooted in communism, Devillers’ grandparents were judged for cosmopolitanism. In 1962, authorities discovered a way to monetize Jewish citizens by exchanging them for goods such as pigs or money, with a notable preference for Denmark’s Belgorod pig lineage as a symbolic remedy.
Exported translation of Sonia Devillers Eduardo Berti Impedimenta 240 pages / 22.95 euros INFORMATION
As Leo Tolstoy observed in Anna Karenina, every unhappy family has its own sorrow, yet the story of the Romanian Devillers, exiles in Paris, stands apart. It left a lasting imprint on the second half of the twentieth century. Devillers presents a story of deliberate coercion that aims to erase human ties, yet the author also notes that the grandparents were not forcibly expelled in a single moment of loss; instead, there came a time when departure seemed possible, though the process involved coercive pressures and human trafficking. In the early 1960s, the Deleanu family, formerly Greenberg, left Romania bound for France. They did not simply emigrate; they received exit visas after a staged exchange in which the state gained purebred livestock and modern farming equipment. After Ceaușescu’s rise to power, the pace of such exchanges shifted yet grew more expansive, culminating in large numbers of Jewish citizens being repatriated or traded for hard currency.
In December 1961, Harry and Gabriela Deleanu, their daughters Lena and Marina, and their grandmother Roza Sanielevici departed by train to Paris. This represented only a fraction of the nearly quarter-million Jews affected by state-driven movements, often leaving Romania under the shadow of humiliation and compelled to relinquish citizenship and property in exchange for new passports. The historical record suggests that communist authorities found ways to mirror, and in some respects surpass, the coercive tactics once characteristic of fascism.