Survivors and relatives of Holocaust victims in Romania have commemorated, together with the Romanian authorities, the eightieth anniversary of the Iasi pogrom, in which more than 13.000 Jews were massacred or suffocated to death in cattle trains.
The central event of the anniversary took place in the Jewish cemetery of Iasi, in the northeast of Romania, where the authorities laid wreaths of flowers and two rabbis offered prayers in memory of those murdered.
"The images, the documents and even the testimonies of the survivors do not do justice to what really happened during those days in this city," declared the president of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania, Silviu Vexler, at the ceremony.
This evidence of what happened – Vexler continued – “cannot express the suffering and terror that all these people went through.”
HONORABLE CITIZENS
Among those attending was Michael Cernea, an American citizen born in Iasi who survived the pogrom with his parents and little brother. Relatives of victims have traveled to Iasi from Israel to honor their dead.
The Iase City Council has announced that it will declare Cernea, along with four other survivors, an honorary citizen of the city.
THE POGROME MUSEUM
The commemorative events also include the inauguration of the Iasi Pogrom Museum, which will open its doors in the former Police headquarters, where thousands of Jews were gathered by the authorities and shot or beaten to death by Romanian gendarmes.
After escaping alive from the courtyard of the Police compound, thousands of Jews were taken to the train station and crammed into cattle trains with the gates closed and the cracks sealed with wooden planks, as documented by the Elie Wiesel Institute in Bucharest.
THE TRAINS OF DEATH
Hundreds died by suffocation while begging for a drop of water from inside those trains, which were traveling at low speed and had become a hell under the harsh sun of the Romanian summer.
Survivors of this "Auschwitz on rails", as some of those who left the trains alive have referred to this unprecedented form of mass murder, reported that the floor of the carriages was covered with manure and lime to further increase the temperature.
Many others were beaten to death by the guards and their own neighbors in the city streets. Photographs from the time show sidewalks full of corpses.
ROMANIAN COMPLICITY WITH ADOLF HITLER
The pogrom spread over three days of terror for the more than 40.000 Jews of Iasi, a city in the Romanian region of Moldova in which they had become the majority.
The massacre, carried out by Romanian police, military and civilians, had been ordered by the Romanian authorities to coincide with Operation Barbarossa, the name that Adolf Hitler's regime gave to its invasion of the Soviet Union, in which he participated and had a role. The Romania of pro-Nazi Marshal Ion Antonescu, an ally of the Nazis, stood out.
The Romanian authorities then justified the pogrom and other similar crimes in that the population of Jewish origin supported the Bolshevik enemy.
Before World War II, more than 800.000 Jews lived within Romania's borders. Half of them were murdered in the Holocaust.
Fewer than 10.000 Jews currently live in Romania. EFE