Călărași: A Small Community and the Last Stop of the Iași Death Train

Călărași, a town on the Borcea branch of the Danube, was home to a small Jewish community of Sephardim and Ashkenazim. In summer 1941 it became the last stop of the first “death train” from Iași: about eleven hundred survivors were held in a camp there for some two months. The Jewish cemetery, with a monument raised by the community, is today the only place in the town that remembers them.

A small community on the Danube

According to the Hebrew University’s Center for Jewish Art, which documented the town on an expedition in January 2019, Sephardim and Ashkenazim settled in Călărași in 1843 and shared a single synagogue, which has not survived. In 1930 about three hundred Jews lived in the town, and most left after the Second World War. Călărași lies in Romania’s Old Kingdom, and in the Antonescu years its Jews went through what most Jews of Wallachia did: antisemitic legislation, dispossession and forced labour, but no ghetto and no deportation.

June–July 1941: the death train

On 29 June 1941 came the Iași pogrom, with which the destruction of Romanian Jewry began. According to Yad Vashem, about 13,000 Jews were murdered in the city and on the two “death trains” that left it. The first train left Iași station in the early hours of 30 June, according to a JewishGen database based on the Iași community’s lists, carrying about 2,500 Jews crammed into sealed freight cars. More than 1,400 died on the way. It travelled for about a week over some five hundred kilometres and reached Călărași on 6 July 1941.

According to the historian Adrian Cioflâncă, 1,111 people were still alive on arrival, 69 of them dying. The second death train from Iași went to Podu Iloaiei, where a similar camp was set up.

“The Călărași camp”

Cioflâncă, who studied the site in his article “The Forgotten Camp of Călărași” (2019), explains that “the camp” was the name of an institution, not of a single place. The main site was a barracks of the 23rd Infantry Regiment, a cross-shaped building that has now largely collapsed. Also used for detention were the school in the Măgureni district, two synagogues on Sfântul Nicolae street, the Finți warehouses on a canal bank, and the local hospital.

The prisoners, many of them naked or half-dressed, slept on concrete and suffered hunger and thirst. Some were put to forced labour at the port and in army workshops, and many were humiliated and beaten. Dysentery was the main cause of death; for 25 of the dead a physician established the cause, among them septicaemia, heart failure and cerebral haemorrhage. According to official figures, 80 had died by 28 July and 98 by 23 August; an archival list gives 153 names, and survivors spoke of about two hundred. About forty of the sickest died shortly after being moved to the Măgureni school, five or six a day.

Help from Bucharest

According to Cioflâncă, the local authorities in Călărași were less hostile than those in Iași, and with money sent from Bucharest conditions were improved. Iancu Abramovici, a representative of the Federation of Unions of Jewish Communities, brought clothing and medicine, and Fred Șaraga later brought further aid. The local community leader, Samuel Schor, dealt with the authorities. Thanks to the Federation’s intervention, some prisoners were moved to better quarters.

At the end of August 1941 it was decided to return the survivors to Iași. About 556 arrived there on 30 August and about 455 on 4 September. According to Yad Vashem, they were freed after two months of detention in the camps of Călărași and Podu Iloaiei.

A memory lost and found

According to Cioflâncă, the community raised a monument in the Jewish cemetery of Călărași, and a photograph from 1950 already shows its plaque missing. The inventory of the Federation’s archive includes a file from 1950–1952 on the Giurgiu and Călărași cemeteries and a commemorative plaque. In 1978–1979 at least some of the victims were secretly exhumed from the mass graves and reburied in a cemetery in Holon. As of 2019, Cioflâncă wrote, “no public sign in Călărași recalls the tragedy of the Jews of Iași who died there.”

Visiting

• The cemetery: Strada Oborului 3, Călărași, according to the Federation’s cemetery list (2007). According to the Center for Jewish Art, it lies beside a Muslim cemetery and near a large Christian one, and holds about a hundred tombstones from the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. The monument raised by the community stands here.
• The barracks: Cioflâncă describes the site as “unwelcoming and dangerous”. Do not enter it.
• Arrangements: no hours published. The cemetery belongs to the Jewish Community of Bucharest, Strada Sfânta Vineri 9–11, according to the Federation; contact it in advance.
• Nearby: Bucharest; Constanța; Brăila.