The Altshuler report left me with an open question. I "repatriated" in
April 1945 together with about half the Jewish population of
Czernowitz the other half following in Spring 1946.
The report brings ample documentation about the situation in Bucovina
along the war years but there is a gap in the description of the
causality for the repatriation. The documents describe the antecedents
of the 1946 period but take no note of the already performed transfer
in 1945.
Except for this annotation No 21 of the Beria letter to Molotov that
is not further commented by Altshuler.
21. On Jan. 13, 1945, Lavrenrti Beriia sent a letter to Foreign
Minister Viacheslav Molotov which read, in part: "In regard to the
issue of the resettlement in Romania of Romanian citizens who are
Jewish and at present are residing on the territory of the Ukrainian
and Moldavian SSRs, the NKVD of the USSR states the following: During
the German-Romanian occupation, a number of ghettos and concentration
camps were set up on the territory of Viortitsa, Kamenets Podoisk, and
Odessa provinces of the Ukrainian SSR where Jews, including those who
had formerly lived in Romania, were imprisoned. After the liberation
of these provinces by the Red Army, those Jews who were Romanian
citizens who had been liberated from the ghettos and camps began to
arrive in Chernovtsy Province of the USSR with the intention of
returning to Romania. Furthermore, in the border provinces of the
Ukrainian and Moldavian SSRs there are now Romanian citizens who are
Romanians, Poles, Ukrainians, Moldavians, and Germans, who arrived in
these provinces during the occupation. The NKVD of the USSR believes
it necessary to resettle in Romania all Romanian citizens (with the
exception of the Germans among them) who are now on the territory of
the Ukrainian and Moldavian SSRs, It would be useful to carry out
their transfer across the border on the basis of lists [of them
compiled] by the NKVT) of the Moldavian and Ukrainian SSRs.. ." (GARF,
ibid., ci. 103, p. 14).
It is clear from the last part of the letter that repatriation was
meant by the NKVD only " inter alia" for the Jewish population. That
the Rumanian rural population did not jump on the occasion is another
matter. Also the NKVD might have at that time sent quite a lot of
agents to Rumania this way. The use of lists mentioned would give to
that last motive a rational explanation.
No matter how strongly we, as being a part of all that, consider the
move to be central to the Soviet decision - it makes more sense to
believe that overall population changes for internal and partly
external Soviet policy were the dominant factors that were in play.
[Berti Glaubach]
On Sun, Jun 26, 2016 at 11:18 AM, Edgar Hauster <bconcept_at_hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hardy...
>
> You asked: "Why did they let us go?" - Well, while Mordechai Altshuler stated (p. 62/63 [9/10])
> http://hauster.de/data/SovietTransfer.pdf
> http://radauti.blogspot.de/2009/12/repatriates-at-ussrromanian-border.html
>
> "To the best of our knowledge, the reasons that led the Soviet government and Stalin personally to decide in August 1945 an the transfer of thousands of Jews from Chernovtsy Province to Romania were not connected with a change in the negative Soviet attitude toward the Jewish community in Palestine (the yishuv). There are also good grounds for assuming that the decision was not motivated by concern for the suffering of the Jewish population. Rather the decision appears to have been primarily influenced by consideration for the hostility of the local population toward the Jews and the general tendency to Ukrainize areas that had been annexed to the Soviet Union."
>
> personally I tend to share Svitlana Frunchak's opinion, when she's stating in her dissertation (p. 342/3 [352/3])
> http://hauster.de/data/FrunchakSvitlana.pdf
> http://czernowitzbook.blogspot.de/2016/01/the-making-of-soviet-chernivtsi.html
>
> "Ideology was only one important dimension of the 1945-1946 "evacuation." Another was the practical issue of expropriating the evacuees' possessions. Although often impoverished and having been deprived of many of their belongings during the first Sovietization of 1940-1941, the Romanian occupation, and the second Sovietization of 1944-1945, many Jews who survived the Holocaust in the city still occupied prestigious apartments - a commodity that was becoming more and more precious with the continuous arrival of Soviet in-migrants."
>
> However that may be, that's how it goes!
>
>
> Edgar Hauster
>
>
> ----------------------------------------
>> From: hardy3_at_bezeqint.net
>> To: bconcept_at_hotmail.com; czernowitz-l_at_cornell.edu
>> Subject: RE: [Cz-L] Repatriates at the USSR/Romanian Border - March/April 1946
>> Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2016 17:04:05 +0300
>>
>> EXODUS 1946.
>> I REMEMBER TOO WELL !
>> Why did they let us go?
>> South of the border - where nobody wanted us !
>> But Romania was a conquered land and had to comply.
>> "South of the border" - crossing the mighty Siret ,
>> And then to the railroad terminal of Dorohoi.
>> By horse driven carriage by Mihaileni.
>> I remember it all.
>>
>> Hardy
-snip-
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Received on 2016-07-06 06:10:19