“Remember” in the Heart of Bucharest: The Memorial Where Romania Owned Its Holocaust

For six decades, official Romania told the story of the Second World War without its Jews and without its Roma. On 8 October 2009, on a square in central Bucharest, a memorial was dedicated that the state itself built to acknowledge what it had done. It grew directly out of one historical report, which is worth knowing before you stand beneath its 17-metre column.

The Report the State Commissioned: The Wiesel Commission

In October 2003 Romania’s president, Ion Iliescu, set up an International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, chaired by the Nobel Peace laureate Elie Wiesel, a native of Sighet in northern Transylvania. Its members were historians and public figures from Romania, the United States, Israel, France and Germany, and it was supported by Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. On 11 November 2004 its final report was presented to Iliescu in Bucharest.

Its conclusions were unequivocal. According to the report, the Romanian authorities were responsible for the deaths of 280,000 to 380,000 Jews in Romania and in the territories under its control, and of more than 11,000 Roma. To these must be added some 135,000 Jews from Northern Transylvania, then under Hungarian rule, who were deported from there to Auschwitz. Iliescu accepted the report and said the nation bore responsibility for the acts of its wartime leaders. On the commission’s recommendation, 9 October was made the national Holocaust Remembrance Day (Government Decision 672 of 2004), and the Ministry of Culture launched the memorial project.

Bucharest, Iași, Transnistria: Three Different Chapters

The memorial commemorates a broad history, and its parts should be kept distinct. The Bucharest pogrom broke out on 21 January 1941, during the revolt of the Iron Guard (the Legionnaires) against Ion Antonescu’s regime, and lasted three days. Jews were seized from synagogues and from the streets, some according to lists drawn up in advance, and murdered in the municipal slaughterhouse and in the Jilava forest outside the city. More than 120 Jews were killed (Yad Vashem gives 127), and 1,274 shops, flats and workshops were looted or wrecked.

The Iași pogrom at the end of June 1941, days after the invasion of the Soviet Union, was on a different scale altogether. Soldiers, police and civilians murdered Jews in the streets, and thousands were crammed into “death trains” that crawled for days in the summer heat towards Călărași and Podu Iloaiei. Estimates of the death toll differ: the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum speaks of at least 4,000 murdered in the city itself, while the figure cited in the Wiesel report, including the victims of the trains, is 13,266 or more. The Iași pogrom has its own article in this magazine.

The third and largest chapter is the deportation to Transnistria, the region between the Dniester and the Bug under Romanian rule from 1941 to 1944. From the autumn of 1941 most of the surviving Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina were deported there. Remembrance Day, 9 October, marks the start of the deportations from the towns of southern Bukovina in 1941. According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 150,000 to 250,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews were murdered or died in Transnistria, from disease, hunger and cold, and in mass shootings such as the Bogdanovka massacre of December 1941. Most of the Jews of Bucharest and the Old Kingdom were not deported, but they suffered forced labour, confiscations and dismissals.

Where the Interior Ministry Stood

The location carries meaning. According to contemporary press reports and the European Memorial Museums portal, the memorial was built on the square facing the former Interior Ministry building, from which Antonescu-era orders for the persecution of Jews and Roma were issued. The Ministry of Culture held a competition in 2006, and that year President Traian Băsescu laid the cornerstone. Planning and permits dragged on: the zoning plan was approved in June 2008 and the building permit issued only in February 2009. The budget, according to a 2008 report, was about five million euros.

The memorial was dedicated on 8 October 2009, the eve of Remembrance Day. According to Memorial Museums, all three presidents who had served since the fall of communism attended. Survivors and Romania’s Chief Rabbi, Menachem Hacohen, also took part. It was Romania’s first national memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.

Peter Jacobi: An Artist Comes Back from Germany

The ensemble was designed by the sculptor Peter Jacobi, an artist of Transylvanian origin, born in Romania in 1935, who spent many years working in Germany near Pforzheim. Some of its ideas were not conceived for Bucharest. According to an interview he gave in 2008, the Star of David sculpture had been made some fifteen years earlier and shown at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin and in France. The design of the central building also drew on a proposal that had won a Berlin competition for a memorial to the victims of Nazi persecution almost three decades before.

Five Sculptures and a Room of Light

The ensemble covers 2,894 square metres. At its centre is a cubic concrete building, partly sunk below ground level. Visitors enter it by going down, and according to Jacobi the form recalls the cellars in which many Jews were forced to live and work during the Holocaust. Inside, daylight falls from the ceiling onto metal plates engraved with the names of victims. The outer walls carry texts on the history of the Holocaust in Romania. Along the sides of the building stand desecrated tombstones brought from destroyed Jewish cemeteries in Odessa and Bucharest.

Five sculptures stand around the building:

• The Column of Memory: a cast-iron column 17 metres high, about one and a half metres across, weighing about 18 tonnes. According to visitor guides, each of its sides bears one Hebrew letter, and together the letters spell zakhor, “remember.”
• Via Dolorosa: “the way of suffering.” According to the design description, the memorial includes a ground relief recalling the deportations in cattle cars.
• The Roma Wheel: a wheel of Corten steel in memory of the deported Roma.
• The Star of David: a three-dimensional, “estranged” Star of David in memory of the Jewish victims.
• The Epitaph: its name means an inscription on a tomb. We found no authoritative description of its symbolism.

The Roma Wheel: Victims Forgotten Twice

The Bucharest memorial explicitly commemorates the murder of the Roma alongside that of the Jews, in the same space. In 1942–1943 many Roma families were deported to Transnistria. According to the Wiesel report, of some 25,000 Roma sent there, about 11,000 died. For decades this chapter was all but absent from official memory. The wheel, a symbol of wandering and the emblem on the Romani flag, sets their suffering beside that of the Jews without blurring the differences between their fates.

Visiting

The memorial stands at the junction of Anghel Saligny, Mihai Vodă, Ion Brezoianu and Lipscani streets, not far from Bucharest City Hall and the Dâmbovița embankment. The sculptures stand in open space. We found no officially published opening hours for the central hall, so check in advance with the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, which is responsible for the site.

• This is a place of remembrance: take time to read the texts on the walls and the names inside the hall.
• For more historical background, continue to the Holocaust exhibition at the Great Synagogue (see our article on the synagogue) and to the Museum of the History of the Jews in Romania.
• On 9 October, the national Remembrance Day, official ceremonies are held at the memorial with state and community leaders.