The Holocaust in Romania during World War II

Throughout the war, Roosevelt backs the transfer of "Joint” and US funds to Joint and WEJ contacts in Europe to assist Jews anywhere even if the funds fall into enemy hands or pad their bank accounts. What also follows the cash to Europe is Roosevelt's Riot Act -- his assurance to all pro-German and pro-Nazi governments and their leaders in the specific countries of Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, France, Slovakia, and Croatia that American air power and bombing raids on their cities and industrial complexes will be matched by other threats of retribution and war crime trials after the war for those who do not protect their Jews. These threats begin to have an immediate effect on the powers-that-be inside of Romania.

The dictator of Romania, Ion Antonescu, embarks early on in the war on a plan he calls Romanianization -- a calculated scheme to deliberately rid his nation of over a half million Jews. During this period, he ships hundreds of thousands of his Jews to Transnistria where many are slaughtered. However, stiff opposition to his policies emerge, primarily led by Antonescu's deputy prime minister, Mihai Antonescu, and a powerful coterie of his friends and pro-Allied associates which include the young King Michael and his family.

With the intervention of Pope Pius XII and the Vatican through his papal nuncio in Bucharest and with the onset of American air power, Roosevelt's Riot Act, and the news of Hitler's defeat at Stalingrad, Ion Antonescu vacillates and capitulates to the opposition. He brings a halt to the deportation of Romanian Jewry to Poland and agrees to transport the Jews who still remain alive in Transnistria back to Romania proper.

Leo V. Kanawada, Jr.

The Holocaust Diaries: Book IV

Saviors of the JustBy Leo V. Kanawada, Jr.

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2010 Leo V. Kanawada, Jr.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4520-5792-7

Chapter One

SUNDAY, AUGUST 20, 1944 BUCHAREST, ROMANIA 6:00 P.M., DINNER AT CASA NOAU

I told Grigore that he didn't have to be so cautious. He could drive a bit faster. After all, no gendarmerie would dare stop me nor arrest me, and what's more, I wanted to get to the residence at least in time for the appetizer.

"The Queen Mother frowns on those who are not punctual, you know," I nagged.

Grigore ignored me. Tonight, it was Casa Noau, rather than the Palace, that was our destination.

King Michael and his mother, Queen Helena, called this unpretentious, stucco villa their home. It was situated on a small and unobtrusive plot of high ground, adjacent to their Bucharest Palace, well-protected from the curiosity seekers and well within the expansive confines of this historical treasure located in our city's center.

From the front windows, one could see across a short piece of lawn toward the back entrance of the Palace through which any visitor would have to exit. Vehicles were always parked in the massive front courtyard of the Palace, a mere 200 feet from the main gate and main thoroughfare of Bucharest – the Calea Victoriei.

As on most warm evenings during the summer months, the tree-lined sidewalks that ran parallel to the Calea Victoriei were bustling with a steady stream of people. Most, of course, were oblivious to the activity within the building across from the Palace. It contained the Ministry of the Interior as well as Ion's elite contingent of bodyguards, the Sigurantza, and the cruelest element of all, Germany's Gestapo.

Next to one of the side entrances of the Palace, a row of buildings – which were commandeered by the German military when they first arrived here in 1940 – housed thousands of troops. Any disturbance on the Palace grounds or even the firing of a single gunshot would instantly bring hundreds of soldiers and police racing up and over and through the protective, iron fencing. Needless to say, as we turned off of Calea Victoriei and approached the sentries of the royal bodyguard who manned the main entrance gate, we met little resistance. They waved us on to the courtyard.

"Let's hope this treatment continues even after the Allies arrive here," offered Grigore, "whether they be American, British, or – God forbid – Russian."

I said nothing. I knew that the Russian army was now in high gear. The drive toward our beloved capital was on, and in a week or so or earlier, their lead vehicles would probably be pulling into this same Palace courtyard and no doubt would be parking in the same place where we were now parked. As soon as we exited our automobile and locked the doors, a familiar voice rang out.

"Mihai – Grigore. Little Antonescu. It's just me. Come, come. Come over here. Come this way." Our teenage monarch, King Michael, was frantically waving to us. "Hurry. Momma is anxious to begin."

We were all anxious and determined to begin, especially at this moment in time. And especially today. Every aspect of our coup attempt to remove our Romanian dictator from power, our Ion Antonescu, had to be discussed. Our plan had to be flawless.

All of the members of The Bloc agreed to gather after dinner in our basement planning room here at Casa Noau to review and digest all of the contents of my briefcase. Every document, every report, every recorded atrocity linked to Ion.

Ion's head was going to roll, that was certain, and so too the nightmare of his days in office, which tragically began but a few short years ago when –

Chapter Two

OCTOBER 2, 1942 BUCHAREST, ROMANIA RADU LECCA'S APARTMENT

Her moaning always intensified when she was on top. "Oh," she purred. The friction produced at this angle was just right.

"Oh – uh – umm – ooooo! Oh, Rad! Don't move. Don't move." Maria slithered and gyrated and rode him. She'd do it for hours if he'd let her.

When the phone rang, she begged him not to answer. It was late – 2:45 A.M. – and she had no intention of allowing this moment to flitter away.

"Who, now?" she growled.

"Could be Ion. You know – your husband? Shush."

She rolled off of him and pulled the covers over her head.

Lecca let it ring several more times before answering it – and then only did so as if he were cruelly snatched from a deep sleep. "Uh, uh, yes? What is –"

"Radu? It's Ion."

"Oh, Ion."

Maria's head popped out from under the sheets.

"What time is it?" Radu slapped his hand tightly over her lips and mouthed the words, "It's Ion."

She nodded nonchalantly, and as she moved her head up and down, she gently proceeded to kiss the palm of his hand and lick his fingers. When she began to suck on his thumb, Radu quickly covered her mouth again. "Is everything –"

"Yes," replied Ion. "Just finished a late night session with Fildermann and friends. Even Cassulo was here with them. You were right, my good man. The Jews are panicking, as you predicted, and they are knocking on my door, bearing gifts. They're convinced that a healthy bribe will cause me to change my mind and stop the deportation of their people. And of course, I encouraged such thinking on their part every chance I got."

Lecca sat up and propped himself against his pillows, his hand still squeezing Maria's cheeks and lips together. "I knew they'd come out of their holes sooner or later so as not to be deported. Are they offering cash? Billions of lei? Millions of US dollars?"

He was now having a real difficult time fending her off. Maria continued her antics. She pushed herself up against Lecca and leaned her head on his shoulder. Slowly and seductively, she drew her right leg across his thighs and began to grind and rotate her knee into his groin.

"Damnit!" Lecca whispered. "Shush!"

"What?" said Ion.

"Uh, nothing, Ion. I was just –" With his hip, he shoved Maria away from him and quickly changed his train of thought. "Uh, do they think that they can make it worth our while?"

"Just a hundred million lei so far."

"They'll have to do better than that, Ion. When I return from Berlin, their days'll be numbered. Hitler will demand that their asses be shipped up to –"

"They're serious, Rad. Believe me. At this very moment, they're scraping the bottom of every barrel they can find in Transylvania. This can turn out to be a very lucrative year for us – for you and me and my Maria."

"Possibly we can squeeze a few hundred million more lei out of them before we deport them. You should arrange it, Ion. Set the date and time for them to drop off the cash payment just before we have to squeeze every last one of them into their own private boxcar for their journey to all points northward. To Lublin in Poland and beyond."

"You have a devious, devilish mind, Mister Lecca. See me before you leave for the airport."

"I will."

"And say goodnight."

"Yes, I most certainly – "

"And goodnight to you, too. Sleep well."

Slowly, Lecca dropped his hand from Maria's face and growled at her, "He knows you're here, doesn't he?"

Chapter Three

OCTOBER 11, 1942 BUCHAREST, ROMANIA 9:00 A.M., ION ANTONESCU'S OFFICE

Andrea Cassulo, Pius's papal nuncio here in Romania, and I pulled into Ion's compound at about 8:45 A.M. As we entered his office, Ion rose to greet us. He looked beat, but nevertheless was polite and cordial.

As he shook our hands, Ion said, "I've had but a few hours of sleep and even less of my normal breakfast meal. I cut back, as you suggested, Mihai. Please forgive me, therefore, if I should slumber off into lethargy-land now and again while you're here."

Although we both shared the same last name, I religiously referred to him as Ion or Marshal, but never dictator or generalissimo, and he always called me by my first name, Mihai. And you wouldn't be wrong if you said that the overture to Dicken's Tale of Two Cities described us to a tee. No doubt about it. The 'best and the worst' fitted me perfectly, I can vouch for that.

A real Jekyll and Hyde I've been – a wolf in sheep's clothing, a – no, maybe more of a sheep in wolves' clothing, now that I come to think of it.

Ion, though, was a man of exceptional military skill. During World War I, he was responsible for most of the planning of our army's resistance to the Germans. Later, he served as a military attaché in London and, like me, acquired a deep affection for Great Britain. Up to the time of his resignation in March of 1938, Ion served King Carol and Romania as its Minister of War.

It was on September 6, 1940, as prime minister that Ion forced King Carol II to abdicate. He announced that Romania now had a new king, Michael I, the eighteen-year-old son of Carol, playing the necessary symbolic role.

We had just lost the territories of Bessarabia and Bukovina to the Russians and North Transylvania to the Hungarians, so someone had to take the blame. Carol, with his mistress in tow, made a quick exit to Switzerland, leaving his wife and son, our new teenage king, behind.

I washed my hands of the whole matter and didn't get drawn into it. As a matter of fact, it only took me a few more months to hastily don a new chapeau – and to don it pretty damn quick.

I tilted and slightly bent over backwards just before Hitler did his own about-face and slashed into the Soviet Union in June of last year and just before Ion met with the little bastard. Ion pledged fifteen divisions of our finest young soldiers to accompany the Wehrmacht as it plunged further into Russia and further into the Ukraine and began its own rapacious sweep toward the Caspian oil deposits.

Even though I occupied the number two slot in our government – serving as deputy premier and as vice president of the Council of Ministers, in addition to my primary duties as Romanian foreign minister – I emphatically made up my mind to bolt from the Reich last January when Manfred von Killinger, one of Ribbentrop's favorite generals, arrived in Bucharest to replace the German foreign minister's man at their embassy.

This new ambassador from Deutschland brought with him 170,000 German troops, 75,000 of which descended upon Ploiesti, our prized oil producing region north of Bucharest. The Luftwaffe troops numbered 75,000 and manned 250 planes, and Killinger bellowed in unison with Ion and his new pal in Berlin with the cry, "throw the foreigners out!"

So out went the British, the Americans, and the French engineers – out went their influence and their presence. And in came the torture rooms for these Allied oil men, in came a new crop of German technicians consolidating and nationalizing the refineries and staffing new boards of directors with friendly Romanian politicans and lawyers. And even more significant, in came a time to exploit and rob and ruin and slaughter our Jews.

Last fall, Ion instituted measures to allow our government to expropriate Jewish agricultural property and gradually, mind you, dismiss Jews who were engaged in private commerce and industry. He labeled it, 'Romanianization'.

Jews, over the years in Romania, flourished in trading and banking, in the legal professions and in medicine. About one million Jews lived in Romania. In Bucharest alone, one-third of all lawyers were Jewish, two-thirds of all commercial employees were Jews, and of the 35 billion lei invested in building construction, 29 billion was Jewish money. In Romania as a whole, of the 1,000 limited companies, Jews controlled 65 percent of the capital and 85 percent of the management of the companies. Of the 1370 industrial concerns, Jews controlled 971, and of the 5,300 million lei invested in these concerns, the Jews controlled 3,700.

King Carol, before he relinquished his power to Ion, always professed that the Jews who lived in Romania before World War I should forever remain untouched. Ion agreed, but nevertheless wanted the economic dispossession and the physical removal of the Jews to proceed on course – a slow, gradual, lawful course for the most part – particularly for the Jews in Old Romania. After all, with his new friends – the Germans – he did need an efficient, well-oiled Romanian economy in place in order to support the war effort against the Russians.

And likewise, he hoped, that by siding with the German war machine, he'd regain Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina and later acquire Transnistria and Odessa from a defeated and demoralized Soviet Union, and eventually get back Transylvania from our neighbors to the north.

However, the Jews of Transylvania and the Hungarian Jews and the Russian Jews, who stayed in Romania after the Russo-Polish War, and the Jews of Berlin – these Jews, who lived in Bessarabia and in the north of Moldavia and Bukovina – it was these Jews who Ion despised, who he labeled as dangerous and an anti-cultural element.

"I am not sorry about what happens to them, since they cause so much damage to our country," he said. And unfortunately, when the opportunitypresenteditself–anditdidatthistime–itwasthiselement of Romanian Jewry that he hoped to ship to Russia and all the way – he liked to say – "back beyond the Urals." And shamefully and with much remorse, I must admit that, for this brief moment in time, so did I.

You see, at this moment in Romania, this "middle class" – this "Jewish bourgeoisie" – presented a problem to the newly-flourishing Romanian, aristocratic peasantry. Their sons wanted the jobs held by the Jews. Similar situations, we knew, also existed throughout Europe.

This young, Romanian "bourgeoisie" had studied medicine, law and engineering, math and economics, and so on and resented, hotly resented, the Jews who held these positions in our towns and cities. And I must say, I understood their frustration and even some of their rants of hostility and acts of protest.

However, when my old school mate and chum, Wilhelm Fildermann, literally threw a thirty-eight page memo just recently onto Ion's desk regarding our Jews, that moved me and caused me to inform The Bloc that "I'm in – I'm yours." I remember Wilhelm bellowing –

* * *

"Transnistria is a disaster waiting to becomea tragedy." Fildermann's veins were bulging now from his neck and his forehead.

"About 750,000 Jews lived in Romania, Ion, as of last year. The third largest Jewish population in Europe. Over 300,000 live here in the Bucharest and Moldavia and Walachia area of Old Romania alone – here in the Regat. And another 275,000 Jews in the Bessarabia and North Bukovina region.

"Since then, you've transported and transplanted my people from one hell hole to another," Wilhelm blared. He was now clinging to the edge of his chair, seemingly ready to pounce on the Marshal's desk and devour the first extremity that he could reach on Antonescu's body.

"Now wait just one goddamn –" Ion never liked Fildermann, but he tolerated him – sometimes.

Ion had not only committed most of our seasoned troops, some 500,000 strong, to the German military and its Russian campaign, but had also unleashed an uncontrolled and diabolical rampage – led unfortunately by our own police and our own soldiers and our own people – against the Jews living in our northern provinces of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina.

There, along the Bessarabian border, Jewish blood was drawn for the first time, unmercifully spilled into the gutters and onto the streets of our little, northern city along the Prut River – the capital of Moldavia – our city of Jassy.

Ion preferred that Wilhelm stick to his written petitions and letters and position papers and just drop them off. He'd read them when the spirit moved him. This habit of coming to his office, he concluded, would have to stop. In fact, it was about time that Fildermann himself be relegated to the back shelf.

"The camps in Transnistria are no different for my people from the camps and ghettos you procured for them here. No food. Starvation is rampant. They're naked. They're freezing. They're running around in rags. They've sold everything that they've ever owned. What in heaven's name are you doing to them?"

With his patience wearing thin, Ion barked, "Now you just listen to me for one –"

Fildermann was not deterred. "Read these leaflets. Read these reports." He threw them on Antonescu's desk. The Marshal ignored them.

"You come into this camp," Fildermann tapped his finger several times on one of the leaflets, "one comes into this camp on two feet and, if you don't end your life there, you'll leave on four feet only. That's out of the mouth of Isopescu, one of your benevolent camp commanders." Antonescu was seething and ready to explode.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Holocaust Diaries: Book IVby Leo V. Kanawada, Jr. Copyright © 2010 by Leo V. Kanawada, Jr.. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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