The History of the Holocaust in Romania

Published by the University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, and Yad Vashem, Jerusalem

Based on an unparalleled and exhaustive collection of original Jewish accounts and sources not available until the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu in the late 1980s, Jean Ancel provides a detailed analysis of the path of antisemitism that led to the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust in Romania.

The Romanians, and other nations inside and outside the Balkans, related differently to “their Jews” and “other Jews,” that is, those living in districts annexed to Romania after the First World War and in areas occupied and annexed to the Romanian military administration after the Soviet invasion in June 1941. The Jews of the Regat, the core Romanian principality, suffered pogroms, decrees, and degradation, but on the whole they survived the Holocaust.

Contradicting long-held assumptions, Ancel shows that Romanians were largely responsible for murdering their Jewish community—one of the largest in Europe before the war—and although its survival rate was the highest in Europe, the survival rate in areas where Jews were liquidated was one of the lowest.