Holocaust in Romania - Corvinus Library - Hungarian History

uins of their houses, and not one of them was allowed to return for fouryears.In Bucharest, Jewish physicians who had offered their services to care forthe injured were beaten and tortured by their Christian colleagues.In Ploesti, the county head or dered the round ing up of all able-bodiedJews, from manual la bor ers to rep re sen ta tives of the in tel li gen tsia, andforced them to carry out the stren u ous task of clear ing the debris. Jew ishhands were forced to de mol ish al most all of the synagogues and a largefrac tion of Jewish cultural institutions. Ter ror was used to paralyze any at -tempt at re sis tance: the same county head turned a blind eye to the ar rest ofsixty Jews by the Iron Guard Chief of Po lice in the syn a gogue during ser -vice. They were tor tured bar bar i cally for two weeks. The vic tims of theIron Guard night of revenge were selected from these Jews. While in Jilavathe nation’s high-ranking dig ni tar ies who ei ther spoke out or rose upagainst the madness of the Iron Guards were be ing slaugh tered, in Ploestieleven randomly selected Jews (headed by the com mu nity rabbi) were shotdead; their corpses were thrown into ditches along roads near the town.On that night Iron Guard hatred fused the pain of the Jews with the painof the entire coun try. On the wooden floor of the Gendarme Legion build -ing in Prahova —along side Rabbi Filderman and Smuil Smilovici , thepret zel ven dor—Nicolae Iorga , the apos tle of Ro ma nian cul ture, and in di -rectly that of anti-Semitic in tol er ance, also lost his life.Alongside the threats, beatings, torture and murders aimed at intimidatingthe Jewish population, mass looting campaigns were initiated. Followingthe above-mentioned sporadic and minor acts of theft, and similar eventsin Aiud , Orastie and Turnu Severin, a large scale attack was launched. OnNovember 16, after all Jewish religious and cultural institutions had beenviolently occupied, Iron Guard members in Brasov dragged a large numberof Jewish merchants out of their shops, and demanded that they signcontracts of sale handing over Jewish businesses to “the Iron GuardMovement” or its members. All those who refused to sign were tortureduntil they did so.This extremely swift campaign was almost a complete success. Within fivedays almost eighty per cent of Jewish businesses found their way into thehands of looters. The economic organization of the Saxons, the “ Deutche70