Regarding the Dumitru book described in the partial article from Balkan
Insight, I am guessing it may be a matter of a European edition of this
one, published in English (hardcover 2016; paperback 2018)??
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/state-antisemitism-and-collaboration-in-the-holocaust/25212B1D1C3666C0A3E428A9D51AFB5C#fndtn-information
[contains description of contents, with review excerpts]
See also this review:
[obviously, the 1969 review date for a book published in 2016 is the
result of a computer calendar error]
Diana Dumitru. The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the
Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2016. 268 S. $99.99 (cloth), ISBN
978-1-107-13196-5.
Reviewed by Markus Bauer
Published on H-Soz-u-Kult (December, 1969)
D. Dumitru: The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust
The structure of this book derives directly from Diana Dumitru’s thesis:
Comparing civilians’ im-plication in robbing, denouncing and killing
local and deported Jews in Bessarabia and Transnistria following German
and Romanian troops’ attack on the Soviet Union in summer 1941, she aims
to prove that in Ukrainian Transnistria, local people were more willing
to help the Jews than they were in Romanian Bessarabia. Starting from
this hypothesis, Dumitru unfolds arguments and observa-tions that
meticulously examine possible backgrounds and aspects of civilian
attitudes towards Jews during the “silent holocaust” between Pruth and
Bug in today’s Republic of Moldova and southern Ukraine.
Dumitru’s focus is not on police, militias, Einsatzgruppen or army
units, but on civilians – simple citizens, neighbors and fellow
villagers who voluntarily or under coercion took part in atrocities
against local and deported Jews when German and Romanian soldiers
“re-occupied” Bessarabia and conquered the territory between Dniester
and Bug, which became part of Romania. The then Trans-nistria was
territorially much bigger than today’s Transnistria, a small strip of
land on the river Dniester that claims independence from Moldova. During
World War II, more than 200,000 Jews and Roma died of killings, disease
or starvation in Transnistria and Bessarabia. Most of these peo-ple had
been deported from Bukovina and northern Moldova, but a significant
number of local Jew-ish communities in Bessarabia and Odessa also fell
victim to Romanian forces commanded by Mar-shal Ion Antonescu, the
dictatorial head of the Romanian state.
To prove the basic hypothesis, Dumitru examines the history of these two
territories in three steps. First, she looks at the history of
Gentile-Jewish relations in Bessarabia and Transnistria in the Tsar-ist
Empire. Bessarabia and South Russia (today part of Ukraine) were part of
the Pale of Settlement where most Russian Jews were forced to live from
the end of the 18th century. Dumitru discusses the general development
of Russian Jewish communities, which faced pogroms, economic
under-development and social discrimination, in the light of various
policy approaches to “the Jewish question,” as it was called by the 19th
century.
Bessarabia “came back” to Romania after World War I, when the Paris
Peace negotiations doubled the size of the small Carpathian kingdom by
incorporating Bukovina, Bessarabia, Transylvania and Dobrogea into what
was now called “Greater Romania.” Although integration of these
multiethnic territories was an important issue in Romanian politics for
the next twenty years, Romanian authori-ties often found little
acceptance – especially in Bessarabia, where half of the population
spoke Russian and a new neighbor state, the Soviet Union, disputed its
loss of this territory. Homogeniza-tion policies were mingled with
antisemitism, and some Jewish intellectuals looked to the Soviet state
as a less threatening authority than Romania. Economic and social
relations between peasants and Jews were tense, as Jews had been
stereotyped as usurers, exploiters and rich people since Tsar-ist times.
Dumitru emphasizes that Romanian authorities did little to curb these
tensions and some-times adopted the perspectives of antisemitic parties
and movements like the Iron Guard.
After the Hitler-Stalin pact, when Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia had
been part of the Soviet Union for only a year, the 1941 German and
Romanian attack on the Soviet Union led to pogroms and killings of Jews
in Bessarabia, in which civilians participated. Jews were regarded as
promoters and supporters of Bolshevism and enemies of the Romanian state
– a prevalent suspicion in the Romanian administration in Bessarabia
before World War II.
Dumitru contrasts the Romanian administration policy in Bessarabia with
the Soviet minority poli-cies in the Odessa region and Transnistria. She
stresses the Soviet interest in establishing equal so-cial conditions
for all minorities, including Jews. Antisemitism was regarded as an
“anti-socialist” and a “wrong and old-fashioned ideology.” With policies
of “affirmative action,” the authorities inculcated an integrationist
view of Jews among workers and peasants, aiming at korenizatsiia
(in-digenization). Once the communists came to power, Jewish culture was
supported for the first time in Russian history. Some schools offered
instruction in Yiddish, the famous Jewish republic of Bi-robidzan was
founded in the East, and Jewish departments were established in Party
structures. Jews saw chances for advancement in the Soviet
administration. Statistics show that educated Jews were soon able to
enter the higher echelons of the Party and administration. Furthermore,
the struc-ture of professions in Ukraine changed significantly: besides
holding a high percentage of white-collar jobs, Jews became industrial
workers in cities and even turned away from state supported Yiddish
language to Russian. Although victims of collectivization, starvation,
etc. may take a criti-cal view of Jewish identification with the new
socialist system and its aim to emancipate them, the overall result –
Dumitru claims – was integration, less visible antisemitism, and
slackening of na-tionalism. Meanwhile, the author does not neglect
Stalinist anti-religion propaganda or the several antisemitic purges it
inspired: Zionism had always been attacked, and religion was generally
seen as an offense to Marxist ideology. After 1936, with the preferment
of Russian nationality in the Soviet Union, anti-Jewish attitudes could
prevail more. Soviet policy towards Jewish independence was
double-sided, supporting some of its aspects while also trying to
eliminate its religious and social basis.
Dumitru’s main chapter analyzes the differing behavior of civilians in
Bessarabia and those in Transnistria during the three years of Romanian
occupation from 1941 to 1944. For this research her sources are mostly
collections of interviews with surviving Jews in Yad Vashem and the
Wash-ington Museum of the Holocaust, as well as her own interviews. From
these voices, she clearly dif-ferentiates the treatment in Bessarabia
and Transnistria.
The author acknowledges some methodological problems regarding the
thesis and corroboration of it, as the survivors cannot speak for those
who had different experiences and died. She also recog-nizes the
dictatorial character of the Soviet state and explicitly does not intend
to eulogize the Sovi-et Union of the interwar period. Rather, Dumitru
describes what the interviews reveal and explains her findings on a
socio-behavioral level: Soviet “affirmative action” policies seem to
have disposed people to humane behavior towards oppressed Jews. The
range of such examples is narrow, com-pared to the whole extent of
atrocities against Jews in Eastern Europe during World War II, but it is
big enough for Dumitru to investigate its differences from the
Bessarabian samples. Another prob-lem arises from the constructed
context of historical developments in Russia and Romania and the
research on the hypothesis: whereas the history of Jews in Russia and
Romania is mostly presented as findings of historiography, the arguments
for her hypothesis rely mostly on the interviews, there-by attaching
heavy weight to oral history.
What can be concluded from the book? Certainly not a clear, firm
affirmation or rejection of Du-mitru’s theory and its subsequent
rationale. But Dumitru’s multifaceted, detailed description of the still
under-researched events in Bessarabia and Transnistria is based on many
previously untapped sources. Her attempts to corroborate the hypothesis
have unearthed a lot of facts about Jewish histo-ry in the region. The
book is thus a pioneering comparative work that furthers research on a
hitherto neglected part of the Shoah.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it
through the network, at:
http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/.
Citation: Markus Bauer. Review of Dumitru, Diana, The State,
Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of
Romania and the Soviet Union. H-Soz-u-Kult, H-Net Reviews. December, 1969.
URL:
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=50884
[Jim Wald]
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Received on 2019-07-27 07:42:31