Holocaust in Romania - Corvinus Library - Hungarian History

Part 2. The Pogrom in IasiHistorical ReviewDuring the first week of the war started by Nazi Ger many and its al liesagainst the Un ion of the Soviet So cial ist Re pub lics, the most hor ri fy ingpogrom in the recent his tory of mankind was committed in Romania. Thelarge number of vic tims, the barbaric meth ods of tor ture and killing, theim mea sur able rob bery and de struc tion, the active par tic i pa tion in the po -grom in Iasi of ev ery representative of the ad min is tra tive au thor i ties en -trusted with the pro tec tion of cit i zens’ lives and prop erty on a lo cal level,sig nify the cul mi na tion of those evil ef forts which had been poisoning theminds of Romanians for three quarters of a cen tury; on a uni ver sal level, itopened his tory’s most tragic chapter. It served as the sign giv ing thego-ahead for bloodbaths not only in Antonescu’s Iron Guard dom i natedRo ma nia but through out Nazi, fascist Eu rope, which was to claim six mil -lion Jewish lives in the fol low ing three years.By 1941 the Teutonic extermination of Jews had not yet begun. The plansfor crematoriums and gas chambers were only rough sketches in the mostinhumane minds ever to appear on the face of the earth. Therefore, Iasi ,the horrifying symbol of persecution, robbery and bloodbaths has noequivalent; Odessa, Golta , Katyn , Kiev, Maidanek , Auschwitz, Belsen , etc.could be listed as comparisons, but Iasi preceded these by months or evenyears. If we were to look for parallels of sorts in the past we would have toturn back a large number of pages in the history books: we would have totake a giant leap back in time.The roots of the po grom in Iasi lie deep be neath the rot ting sys tem of Ro -ma nian pseudo-de moc racy. This was not an outbreak of iso lated passions,nei ther was it some sort of mo men tary lapse of reason. It did not comeabout through autogenesis in the beastly depths of some criminally dis -posed be ings. It did not start on “that Sunday”, June 29, 1941; nor did itstart three days earlier, when the first mur ders were committed; not onJune 22, when the war broke out; nor on Sep tem ber 6—one year ear -lier—when Ion Antonescu and his Iron Guard came to power, not even on79